Chapter 46

“Twenty-six hours before you were supposed to hand off Waleed, I went to Ted Edens and told him what I found,” Chelsea said, her heart racing to beat the band.

“What did Edens say?”

She couldn’t ignore that Dagan had gone as still as a statue carved from polar ice. It was a terrible change from moments before, when he’d been all warm hugs and roving hands. Was this a hint of things to come?

Love conquers all…

His words came back to give her hope. She clung to that hope as the memory of that day came pouring out of her head like that beat-to-shit piñata her father had strung up in a tree for her tenth birthday party…

“This is a stretch, Agent Duvall. Even for you,” Edens said, leaning back in his desk chair and folding his arms over his burly chest. His office smelled like breath mints and stale coffee. Neither scent did anything to soothe Chelsea’s frayed nerves. “You can’t judge a man by his family ties. Especially not over there, where everyone is related to everyone if you go back a generation or two.”

“That may be true. Maybe it’s nothing. A coincidence.”

“That’d be my guess.”

She firmed her jaw. “But shouldn’t we at least alert Agent Zoelner to the connection?”

Edens narrowed his eyes, studying her for a full ten-second count. She had been working for the man for a few years, but she’d never gotten to the point where she could give him her unqualified respect. Edens was too much of a politician for her taste. It was no secret he had big aspirations, wanted to be the next director of the CIA. She couldn’t shake the feeling that sometimes he acted for political reasons instead of strategic ones.

“We’ll let Waleed’s handoff go through first,” he finally said. “We don’t want Agent McShane to start his relationship with Waleed acting squirrelly. Assuming Waleed is legit and this flimsy connection to Mullah Zahed is just that, a flimsy connection, the last thing we need is Waleed getting suspicious or feeling unsafe. If he doesn’t trust Agent McShane, he’ll shut off his information pipeline.”

Chelsea took exception to the word “flimsy.” Yes, Abdul Waleed and Mullah Zahed were very distant relations. But in that part of the world, blood ran true no matter how far apart the branches were on the family tree. “Agent McShane is a professional. I hardly think he’ll give Waleed any cause to doubt—”

“And can you say the same for Agents Walker and Moore? They’re going to be there supplying backup for the handoff. Can you assure me they won’t give themselves away if they suspect Waleed might be playing both sides?”

“I can’t be one hundred percent certain of anything, sir. You know that. But—”

“I’ll make note of your concern, Agent Duvall.” Edens sat forward, placing his forearms on his desk and steepling his fingers. “But I’ve made my decision on this matter, and I expect you to respect it.”

“Sir—”

“Let’s not fall into the Chicken Little trap and proclaim the sky is falling, huh?”

Chelsea gritted her teeth. “Yes, sir.” Turning on her heel, she marched from Edens’s office, back straight, arms stiff, sure that steam poured from her ears.

“As you know,” she told Dagan, coming out of the reverie, “a day later the sky fell.”

The dimness inside the sub didn’t hide Dagan’s sawing jaw or the harsh light in his eyes. “And what did you do then?” he asked.

His hand was no longer on her butt. She was pretty sure he had it fisted against the yoga mat. With reluctance, she pushed off him, settling herself with her back against the cold hull.

Love conquers all…

Did it? She wasn’t so sure.

“I stormed into Edens’s office.” She left out the part about the tears of rage that had burned the back of her throat. When she’d come in to work that day, the first thing she’d heard about was the bombing, and for a moment the whole world, her whole world, had gone dark. Then she’d learned that Dagan was alive, and relief and light had flooded into her. It had quickly been tempered by the fact that while the man she secretly loved had survived, three other valiant agents had not. That fact would haunt her for the rest of her life. “I screamed, ‘I told you!’ at him. Followed that up with ‘I warned you!’”

“What did he do?”

“He just sat there blinking at me, this blank expression on his face. And then he asked me, ‘What do you mean?’”

Once more, the memory of that day nipped at the heels of her mind like a pack of angry dogs.

“Abdul Waleed!” she screamed at her boss.

“Calm yourself, Agent Duvall. You’re being hysterical.”

“Hysterical? Hysterical? Men are dead, sir! Men we might have been able to save, had we warned them!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She was so taken aback that she just stood there blinking at him. And then she suddenly understood. He was covering his own ass. He’d made the call to delay telling the agents about Waleed’s connection to Zahed, and it had come back to bite him.

“I’ll go above your head. I’ll tell the director everything,” she swore.

A terrible look came over Edens’s face then. “And it will be your word against mine, Agent Duvall. I’ll deny everything, and there’s no way for you to prove otherwise. There’s no paper trail, no emails or taped phone conversation. Tell me, do you have mental illness in your family?”

“Wh-what? You can’t do that!” she raged. “You wouldn’t dare!”

“Try me.”

Her mouth hung open for a long moment, a million thoughts racing through her head. “Fine,” she finally ground out, every blood vessel in her body expanding in fury. “It’ll be my word against yours. And maybe you’ll come out the winner in the end. But at least I will have cast doubt on you. With my credentials, I can find a job like that.” She snapped her fingers. “But you’ll never make it up to the big chair.”

She turned to leave, determined to march into the director’s office—or at least make an appointment with his secretary. As a lowly counterterrorism analyst, she didn’t have the clout to just barge in on the man unannounced.

“Will you?” Edens asked before she could open his office door.

She swung back. “Will I what?”

“Find a job?” His smile was vicious. “Even with your credentials, I would think finding a new position would be difficult after I contact any would-be employers and tell them you’re unstable and given to flights of fancy, always looking for ways to run the good names of your superiors through the mud.”

Once again, her mouth hung open. Her heartbeat sounded loud in her ears.

“Go back to your desk, Chelsea.” He no longer afforded her the courtesy of calling her “Agent Duvall.”

“And I went,” Chelsea told Dagan. “To my utter shame, I went. I knew he would make good on his promise. And I needed a job. I still need my job. Mom and I are still in so much debt, and the house…” The words had poured out of her. When the dam had finally burst, there had been no holding back. But now, self-loathing made her hesitate. “I didn’t think Edens would get you fired. I don’t know what I thought he would do, but it wasn’t that. And then that day you came back…”

Dagan spoke, and the timbre of his voice was horrible. “The day the director of the CIA accused me of becoming complacent, the day he told me that no other agent would ever trust me or work with me again. The day he said he was left with no choice but to terminate my contract.”

“Edens must have poisoned the well for you. I think he was scared that if you hung around, I would tell you the truth. And I wanted to tell you then and there,” she swore. She never knew that anguish could tie one’s stomach in knots. “I tried to tell you. But I-I was terrified of losing my job. Terrified of what it would mean for my mother and her happiness and her dreams and memories if I did. And there was no undoing what had been done. I just thought—”

“Edens died six months ago, Chels.”

“Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

“Why didn’t you tell me then? When your job was finally safe?”

“Because you were working for BKI. You’d moved on. You’d gotten over it. You seemed happy. Avan was happy. I didn’t think bringing up all that pain from the past was worth it. And I was so ashamed of having kept quiet for so long, Dagan.”

“So then why the fuck are you telling me now?”

The submarine popped and groaned around them. They were changing depth. A sense of desperation grabbed hold of her. “Because…” She shook her head, searching his face, hoping to find some flicker of understanding. But there was nothing. “Because I can’t start a relationship with you if there is this big, bad secret between us.”

For long moments, he remained quiet, unmoving. When she couldn’t take it anymore, she demanded, “Say something, Dagan. Please.”

Only his lips moved when he asked, “What do you want me to say?”

“Say you forgive me for choosing my mother’s home and memories and life’s love all those years ago. Say you’re not going to let this come between us. Say that love conquers all.” Her tone was pleading, begging. She didn’t care. When it came to this, when it came to him, she had no pride left.

He said none of that. What he said was, “I’m sorry.”

Those two words might as well have been a death knell.