He knocked on the door and then waited. Everything was still quiet inside. Tucker brought his fist back to the door, but it opened before he could knock. A familiar face stared back at him. A sullen face.

“Where have you been?” Jasper said, before shoving some kind of pastry in his mouth.

“My room. What the hell is that?”

“Breakfast,” Jasper mumbled around his pastry, his mouth full.

“Jet lag?”

“Big time.”

Tucker walked into the double-bed hotel room. Tansy sat in front of a laptop. “Working already?” Tucker asked him.

“No.” Tansy kept his eyes on the screen. “Sports highlights. Can’t get anything here.”

“They’ve got football,” Tucker said.

“The wrong kind.”

“And cricket.”

“The wrong kind of baseball.”

“Alright,” Tucker said. “So I guess we’re off to a slow start.”

“African time,” Jasper said, scrunching up a plastic wrapper and throwing it in the trash by Tansy’s table. He flopped down on the bed. “The real question, right now, is how the hell did you get your own room?”

Tansy finally looked up. “No, the real question is why the hell are we sharing one?” He seemed to be sincerely annoyed at his coworker, despite them only having shared the room for an hour. “I don’t get it,” he said. “You’d think Jackson could spring for three separate rooms. We’ve got the budget to fly around the world a hundred times and back again, yet here we are like sardines.”

“Maybe the hotel was over-booked,” Tucker said. “Or maybe I got the single, because I’m the only one here who’s single. Makes sense, right?”

Tansy said, “Only if you can somehow convince a girl to come home with you. Until then, it’s a wasted resource.”

“And hookers don’t count,” Jasper added.

“Does that mean you were still a virgin until last year?” Tucker said, chuckling. A pillow flew his way.

“So like I was saying,” Jasper said, sitting up on bed, “you’re late to our first briefing.”

“African time.” Tucker looked around the small room, his coworkers’ things still mostly packed. The clothes they wore were still rumpled from the flight, their eye sockets extra dark and deep. Tucker had been in South Africa since yesterday and felt only slightly fresher. He figured he should play nice. He sat in the chair in front of grumpy Tansy, who’d turned back to his sports.

“Tansy,” Jasper said. “You ready?”

“No, but yeah.” He closed the lid and smiled at Tucker. “You excited, Kid? You made it to the big time.”

“We’re all excited to be here,” Jasper said. “It’s a great opportunity. A chance to make the world a whole lot safer.”

Tucker wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic. He hadn’t heard a pep talk like that in fifteen years. However, they were dealing with 250 tons of enriched uranium—the ingredient for enough nuclear bombs to take out the six largest cities of the world. For now it was safely in the hands of the South African government. But it was an outgoing government.

“Got some news since our flight,” Jasper said. “The new government has increased their surveillance of the uranium. They know something’s up.”

The incoming party was hawkish and right-leaning, and their stance on the uranium had been very clear: they intended to reverse the decision of letting the United States take ownership of the dangerous material. Even though the country’s nuclear program had been shut down for decades, they considered it a national disgrace to give away their uranium. Washington considered it an emergency. A race against the clock. If that kind of highly sought-after material fell into the wrong hands . . .

“We’ll also have to pull some camera tricks,” Jasper said.

“That’s fine,” Tansy said. “But you don’t think we’ll have to engage with anyone, right?”

“Hell no,” Jasper said.

Tucker added, “Unless they engage with us first.”

Jasper was shaking his head. “If there’s any shooting, it’ll be an international relations nightmare. But Jackson expects no need for engagement. The only reason we’re going armed is for terrorists, the chance we get hijacked during the exchange. That’s the main reason why we’re here in the first place.”

“ISIS and Al-Qaeda are having a little turf war in Africa,” Tansy said. “Bloods and the Crips.”

“The ideologies,” Jasper said, “are definitely spreading through the continent.”

Tansy opened his laptop. “Okay, so we got surveillance cameras to mess with, security systems, what else?”

“It’s pretty old stuff,” Jasper said.

“I’ve been at this for decades.”

“They’ll show you when you get down there.” Jasper checked his watch. “Which should be in about four hours. Will any of you try sleeping?”

“I’m just staying on Eastern Standard,” Tansy said. “We’re only here five days and our ops are all early morning.”

It was how Tucker had been doing it, too. No need to try shifting his sleep patterns and getting fucked up and sleepy at the wrong times.

Jasper switched to talking about the kinds of people they’d be working with, but he stopped when there was a knock at the door. He furrowed his brow, looking at Tansy and Tucker. “No one else knows we’re here.”

“Think we’ll have to engage?” Tansy said with a shit-eating grin.

“Maybe it’s the maid,” Tucker said.

Tansy grinned. “It’s pretty late. Maybe it’s Tucker’s call girl coming to look for him.”

“Alright, shut up.” Jasper had made his way to the door, opening it. He blocked Tucker’s view of the guest, but it was clear, even from behind, that Jasper was smiling. He spread his arms wide as another set of arms wrapped around his back. At the doorway, the two men hugged and laughed. When they both walked into the room, Tucker could see a resemblance on their faces. And a resemblance in their reddish hair.

“Kyle,” Jasper said. “How’s the oil field?”

“Good. Lots of politics, but I can just tune it out and work. Grunt work, sometimes.”

“Not grunt pay, though.” Jasper looked to Tucker and Tansy. “You guys know my brother, right?”

Tucker knew two things about Kyle. One: He’d recently moved to Angola to work with a Saudi oil company—a position Jasper had earned him after protecting a sick Saudi Prince through a hospital terrorist attack. Two: He’d been caught up in the same military scandal that had plagued most of the original DARC Ops guys. Different op, same corrupt commander sending him to train a group of rebels to assassinate an American in Syria. Kyle didn’t know about the American part. That was the little detail which gave a bunch of people life sentences when the mission had been interrupted—all thanks to DARC Ops avenging what had happened to them. The first time around, their time, they hadn’t been so fortunate.

“I thought we were meeting for dinner,” Jasper said.

Although Kyle had seemed happy enough meeting his brother for the first time in a year, there was clearly something bugging the guy. His smiles didn’t last. He looked worried.

“What’s going on?” Jasper asked. “Should we take a walk?”

“I’ve got some really strange news for you guys,” Kyle said. “I’m not sure what to . . . what to do about it.”

“What is it?”

“You know how I moved the wife and kids to Luanda?”

“Yeah,” Jasper said, motioning for Kyle to take a seat.

“Luanda’s nicer. And a shit-ton safer. It’s actually one of the most expensive cities in Africa.”

“What about it?”

“I got a phone call . . . Well, my wife got a phone call from someone. Said they knew me from Syria.”

Jasper frowned, crossing his arms across his chest. “That doesn’t sound good.”

“I know, right?”

“Who was it?”

“And then she calls me in Soyo. I have no idea how she found our numbers.”

“Who?” Jasper’s eyes sharpened, staring at his brother.

“She says she’s a CIA agent and that she was almost whacked by the team I was training.”

A loud silence filled the room.

“You know what I mean, right?” Kyle said.

Jasper’s shoulders dropped. “How could I not?”

“Excuse me,” Tansy interjected. “But that’s pretty fucked up.”

“Trust me, I know.”

“But what does she want?” Jasper asked.

“I have no idea.”

“Maybe she wants to get even,” Tansy said.

Jasper turned his head and squinted at Tansy.

“All I’ve been able to figure out,” Kyle said, “is that she somehow traveled from Syria to Angola. I have no idea why. Maybe to find me? But why me? What’s the point?”

“She’s been on the run,” Jasper said. “Probably afraid to come back to the US after what happened to her.”

“It’s been over two years,” Kyle said. “Jesus Christ.”

Jasper said, “But who are we talking about? What’s her name? We all watched the news about it.”

“Her name’s Macy Chandler.”

Tucker couldn’t help himself from bolting straight up out of his chair. His face felt numb. His jaw. He felt it falling away and leaving his mouth gaped open. Through an open mouth and dry lips he said, “I knew it.”

“You know what?” Tansy said. “You know her?”

“I know a Macy Chandler,” he said. “Well, I did. Back in St. Louis. We were both cops.”

Kyle said, “You know her?”

“I know a Macy Chandler. And I know she worked overseas in the intelligence community. There were rumors she’d got caught up in something. But that was it, though. I never knew she was part of that whole . . . clusterfuck.”

A large rock settled in Tucker’s gut. Could it really be his Macy, his old friend—burned by the CIA and being chased across the world? For three years, she’d been essentially exiled from home. Who knows what kind of condition she’d been in. Her mental state . . . How the hell did she get to Angola? And why?

“I need to see her,” Tucker said.

Jasper said, “Wait, wait. Let’s not get—”

“No, I have to.”

“And we have a mission.”

“I’ll leave after the briefing,” Tucker said. Images of a younger Macy ran through his head. Macy, the woman with the pretty smile, the woman he was once stupid enough to reject. “No, I’ll leave tonight. I’ll leave right now.”

“Slow down,” Jasper said. “You need to talk to Jackson first.”

“When he finds out that it was one of the Syrian agents . . .”

“He still won’t be okay with you leaving half-cocked.”

“I’ll come right back with her.”

“And then what?”

It didn’t matter to Tucker. He needed to see her.

“What if it’s not the Macy you know?”

“Then whoever it is still needs our help,” Tucker said.

Kyle was nodding. “I think it’s why she’s in Angola.”

“Jasper,” Tansy said. “Think about what happened with us in Tripoli, those people we got killed. God, I think about them every day.” Tansy swallowed hard. Tucker wasn’t used to seeing him so serious. Emotional, even. “I think about what it would be like to help them,” Tansy said. “Wouldn’t you want to help someone like that?”

Jasper was looking down.

“I’ll talk to Jackson,” Tucker said.

Jasper took a deep breath. “Okay.”