She found him hunched over his laptop, the nerdiest yet cockiest of the DARC Ops men, Tansy. The hacker. She’d first heard about him from Tucker’s explanation of how he’d found her in Luanda. Tansy, the man behind the hotel searches and the cell tower hacks. If anyone had ordered the hack on her phone, it was him. Or at the very least, it would be him who would be analyzing everything that she once thought was private.

“Reading anything interesting?” she said.

Tansy swiveled around in his office chair, torso first then followed by his legs until he was facing her square on. He didn’t say anything.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

He was still frozen, but then finally thawed with a cool shrug. “Don’t you have some work to do somewhere?”

“Oh,” she said. “Right, of course.”

He gave her an odd look before swiveling back around in his chair.

“Of course you would know all about that.”

Tansy’s head cocked to the side for an instant, then he looked back to work, to his screen, his fingers typing away.

“Of course you would know every single thing about me,” Macy said, sitting on top of the desk behind him. “Who I talk to, how I talk to them. My schedule, my day-to-day operations.”

Tansy finally stopped typing.

“I’m actually interested in your life,” she said.

“My life?”

“Your name. Tansy. What’s that, some kind of weird family tradition?”

Tansy shook his head and went back to typing.

“What the hell kind of name is that? Tansy? Sounds kind of like pansy.”

He shook his head again.

“No? You don’t like that? You don’t like Pansy?”

Tansy barked into his monitor, “Can I help you with anything? I mean, are you here for a purpose?”

“I’m just trying to learn everything I can about a new coworker.”

He stopped typing, sighed, and then reached into his pocket and pulled something out.

“I’m just a curious girl,” she said, watching him turn to face her again. He held out his hand to her. Inside it was a smart phone.

“There,” he said. “Take it.”

She looked at the phone, and then him. His expression was serious, almost sad. She really had nothing personal against him, and he was probably a pretty busy man. Though he still probably knew everything there was to know about her now.

“Go ahead,” Tansy said, still waving his phone at her. “If you’re so curious about me. Go ahead and take it. Read it, copy it. Whatever.”

“I don’t want that.”

“What do you want, then?”

She thought about the question. What did she really want? At first, it was just to be able to vent. Maybe yell a little bit, make whoever was behind her breach of privacy feel like crap. She didn’t want to do that to someone else, no matter how necessary it was.

“Do you trust me?” she said.

“I don’t even know you.” He put the phone back into his pocket. “No one does.”

“Tucker knows me.”

“And he trusts you. I hope you don’t think otherwise because of what happened. Sometimes in this business, you have to do things that you hate.”

Macy knew all about that. The CIA had had no shortage of such tasks for her. “Yeah,” she said quietly.

“If it makes you feel any better, we did the same thing with all of Tucker’s data.”

“Okay,” Macy said. “So are you finished with mine?”

“Yep.”

“Then it would make me feel better if you destroyed everything.”

“No problem.”

“While I watch.”

Tansy laughed. “No problem.”

Macy watched as he pulled up her file on his laptop screen. “Here it is,” he said. “How do you want me to destroy it? Or do you want to do it yourself?”

“No, I trust your means.” She finally smiled. “But I’ll just watch you, though.”

While he destroyed her file, which consisted of the most anti-climactic and dreary task of typing commands into a black and white text screen, something changed inside her. Like a pressure valve opening up and venting, she felt lighter, looser. If anything, she might have even felt a little sorry for Tucker. The poor guy was stuck in a spot. She understood his orders, and the necessity to follow them. She’d come across many confusing and mixed orders in her time in the CIA, and especially with the St. Louis police. She’d done her fair share of questionable things there regarding Tucker, too. Things she still couldn’t forgive herself for.

So how could she ever think he would?

“Hey,” Tansy said. “You catching this? You know what this means?”

“Yeah.” She watched him type in the commands that would permanently erase all traces of her and her files. The parts that she wasn’t sure about, she relied on something foreign to her: trust.

Was she really trusting these men?

“Almost done,” Tansy said, still working, still erasing.

It felt weird, thinking of perhaps slowing down, sticking around for a while. But what would her future here be? There wasn’t very much in the way of intimate, sensitive secrets on that phone. They didn’t know too much of anything, really. It was just the invasion of her privacy, the idea of it, that she disliked so much.

“It’s just standard protocol,” Tansy said with a sigh. “It’s harsh and extreme, and it sucks for both parties. Trust me. But it happens to everyone. I searched Tucker’s myself when he was on his own probationary period.”

“So can you spill the beans about him?”

He shook his head.

“Fine,” she said.

Tansy, with zero trace of sarcasm in his voice, said, “We take this kind of thing pretty seriously.”

“Alright. So now that I’ve been ‘vetted,’ does this mean I’m part of the team?”

“Yeah,” he said. “For the next week, at least.”

Would she go through with it? Would she suck up her pride and be part of the team for a week?

Aside from the discomfort of the last few hours, which if she let herself admit it, probably was entirely necessary from their point of view, the men of DARC Ops had been good to her. Tucker, especially—despite what he’d done with her phone. And that wasn’t even counting that they’d had a big part in saving her life back in the very beginning. Her life had totally sucked the last few years, but even she could admit that she would have taken that over a death sentence.

“What do you say?” Tansy asked. “Do you hate us enough to not take us up on the free trip to the United States?”

A smile formed across her lips. “Will I get an actual room, or will I be stuck in a shipping container?”

He shrugged. “You can be stuck here in Johannesburg if you want.”

She nodded toward the screen. “Let’s finish up on these files, then? I’ve got work to do.”