Chapter Twenty
Leland
I turned my face away from the dust storm caused by the helicopter lowering to the landing pad. My pulse raced and my thoughts raced faster.
“I can’t take off and disappear without calling Richard,” I insisted for what I was sure was the hundredth time since Wilcox informed me I would be leaving for The Farm ASAP and phoning home wasn’t a possibility.
“No time, Lee.” His hand closed on my arm.
“Richard’s a fed. Isn’t the smarter move to let me call him with a garbage line to explain my sudden disappearance than leaving him to think and wonder?”
“He won’t think. He won’t wonder. Jena’s taking care of Special Agent Meyers.”
Alarmed, because after this day nothing that happened in spook world would surprise me, I shook out of his grasp. “What do you mean taking care of?”
He rolled his eyes to let me know he thought how I asked that was overly dramatic. “Jena has your phone. She’s already texted him that you’ve left for California—family emergency—and she’ll continue to reply via text until you’ve completed field agent training.”
I still didn’t understand the hurried pace of this. Fuck, I didn’t even understand why I hadn’t washed out after the testing and mental fitness evaluation. Worse, I hadn’t learned a single useful thing from Wilcox regarding my father. Or any insight as to why the CIA wanted me. Clearly, they did for some reason, and it was beyond that Jena Garret recommended me. I was being granted first-class airline passenger treatment by a government agency during employment processing.
Odd.
Very odd.
It should have told me to get the hell out of there. When things before you don’t make sense, run the other way. A useful motto I should have embraced more often. And here I was on a fool’s errand, chasing something and not sure I knew what.
Fuck, maybe it was just the thrill. From the moment I’d arrived at Langley, my body had been wired, every nerve awake and buzzing, the way it only ever was in the throes of great sex.
Who knew there were things that could get a man going as much as sex? Not even poker with the Gargoyle gave me a rush like this, and I’d won a small fortune from him.
When the helicopter door opened and the steps pulled down, Wilcox trotted across the field toward it, climbed in, and obediently I followed, settling in the seat facing him as indicated.
“Where is The Farm?” I asked, buckling myself in.
“It’s a short hop. Williamsburg.”
My brows hitched. All this to get a recruit to a destination one hundred fifty miles away. It was no longer a surprise that the government couldn’t balance a budget. It was a surprise that the top-priority treatment continued onward for Leland.
“What happens once I get there?”
“The hardest days of your life. You don’t leave until you master everything. Training in weapons, hand-to-hand combat. The art of covert operations. Field simulations. By the time you leave you’ll be a highly trained asset, property of the US government.”
Oh, really. I think not.
Weapons: never touched one.
Hand-to-hand combat: only experience in that fit in the sexual cubby with Richard.
Covert operations—hmm, that could be interesting. I’d lived a lie my entire life. Maybe I could teach the CIA a few things.
Field simulations? If it was anything like field stimulation that one would be a winning experience.
Fuck.
I ordered myself to stop making jokes in my head. There was nothing funny about my current situation, and even my glib mind couldn’t block the pressing awareness that my life somehow had changed forever with the advent of Wilcox into my universe.
“Are you ever going to tell me why me and why the urgency?” I asked.
Wilcox crossed his arms. “All in good time, Lee. You’ll get everything you need to know on a need-to-know basis. You won’t leave without a thorough understanding why you, what we want, and the urgency. The only thing you need to focus on now is that once we touch down at The Farm everything is a lie, nothing is as it seems. Remember that, you’ll come through this with flying colors and your answers will be waiting.”
Everything is a lie?
Nothing is as it seems?
It took work to refrain from the temptation of saying it aloud—Cakewalk; it’s like my relationship with Richard—and patted myself on the back that at least the fast quips no longer slipped from my lips.
The helicopter began its ascent, and I gave up trying to worm answers out of Wilcox. At least for the moment.
We soared above Virginia in the setting sun, making the fast flight to Williamsburg.
Over the next thirty days, I was put through a grueling schedule that tested my mind, body, and sanity. Up every day at 0430, in nonstop trainee mode until 2400. Only to start again the next day. Never a break. And always Wilcox and an army of trainers in my face.
I was taught how to read the tells when a person lied, and what my tells were when I lied and how to neutralize them. The fine art of mental warfare, refining the natural gift for fucking with people I’d been born with. How to be proficient in a variety of weapons and how to kill a man with my bare hands.
My body grew fit and strong unlike ever before. An endless stream of field operation simulations turned my quick, sharp mind into a razor and lightning quick microprocessor. I was being reshaped into a finely tuned asset for the government of the United States.
For the first time in my life, I was granted access to and full disclosure of every aspect of my father’s business, Jensen Global Enterprises, as well as the intricacies of my father’s sale of illegal arms through his many layers of shell companies and how he laundered money for criminals across the globe.
The pace at The Farm prevented my thoughts from wandering to Richard or to even consider fully what I was doing to my life by working my ass off to become a member of the CIA.
Fuck, I was rich.
Fuck, I was a Princeton grad.
Fuck, work and service weren’t words I allowed on my mental whiteboard. Jena had been right. I’d been content in my vain, shallow, and supercilious existence, winning what I could off the Gargoyle and fucking Richard every chance I could get. I’d have probably stayed committed to perfecting that if not for Wilcox coming for me and brilliantly reading what made Leland tick.
Wilcox had honed in without effort on my one vulnerable spot and used my father every day, like a carrot, bit by bit telling me more and sucking me farther down the rabbit hole to my new existence.
That’s why I was recruited: my father and Jensen Global Enterprises. That’s why me. I couldn’t figure out a different reason why they were teaching me the workings of my father’s worldwide empire, and the only question left was why now?
On what I was told would be my final night at The Farm I still didn’t know why Wilcox had come for me when he did. It was near midnight, I was leaving in the morning, and my patience with being led around by Wilcox snapped.
I shoved the high piles of reports across the desk with enough force that they flew into him and onto the floor.
Leaning my angry face to his, I shouted, “Why are you training me to replace my father?”
He pinned me with his eyes. “Because that’s what I do, Leland. I develop field assets and handle them.”
“Fuck you,” I snapped. “I want answers. Now.”
He stood up and lumbered toward the door, knowing I’d follow him. We went outside and across the field to another building I hadn’t been in before. There were two guards posted at the door. The interior was stark and empty, and we proceeded down a long narrow hallway to a locked door.
He waved his key card and it beeped before opening.
My heart jumped into my throat.
Inside was a glass isolation chamber in which a body was lying still on the bed, hooked up to tubes and machines.
My father.
Lifeless.
Pale.
Not dead, but not alive either. I don’t know how I knew that, but I did. And, fuck, no one had told me, not even Wilcox that my dad was here in another building, near death.
I seized Wilcox by his shirt and pinned him to the glass. “How the fuck could you not tell me he was dying?”
His gaze bore into mine. Hidden far back, almost concealed, was a flash of something—emotion perhaps—and then he said blandly, “His brilliant successes will never be known by the country he’s served and his death unheralded except by a star with a date put on the wall at Langley. That’s the life of a NOC, Leland. Your life now.”
“What’s wrong with him?” I asked in anguish.
“Uranium poisoning. It’s why you can’t go in and be with him. He doesn’t have long to live. You need to pull yourself together, Leland. Tomorrow you go to California and step into his shoes at the helm of Jensen Global Enterprises. You’re the NOC who replaces him for your country.”
I shoved him away and sank with my back against the glass until I was sitting on the floor. I’d finally gotten to know the secrets of my father, and it was too late. I’d never have a chance now to know the man. And despite every harsh word I’d ever spoken about Dad, his neglect, and my apathy, I’d loved him.