Braden sat back in his chair, tapping a pen against his mouth as he thought about the parking ticket. Everyone else had already gone home, the office slowly cast in shadows as the lights went out one by one.

The ticket didn’t prove anything. Not until he got the report back from Rueben, and maybe not even then. Still, it was unsettling. Why would one of the agents have a parking ticket in their pocket during a raid? Some of his colleagues were assholes, but none of them were sloppy.

And if it wasn’t one of the agents, that meant it had been carried in by one of the perps before he fell dead. If that was the case, one of the dead men who was on Kalashnik’s payroll had been across the street from FBI headquarters just two days earlier.

The thought made him deeply uneasy. He could only think of one reason that Kalashnik’s men would hang around Headquarters, and that was a meeting with an FBI contact.

And that meant a dirty agent on the case.

It would explain some things: why the boss sent two flunkies to pick up an empty container for one. If they had been no-shows, it would have set off alarms within the strike team. Because there was only one way Kalashnik could have been onto the raid, and that was if someone had warned him.

Braden replayed the scene in his mind, working backwards from the moment the shooting began. The first shot had come from Bravo. The perps had been reaching for their guns, which nullified Alvarez’s orders to get them alive; no agent was expected to forfeit his own life if he could save it. Someone from Bravo had fired, but it hadn’t stopped either of the men from raising their guns. After that the chorus of gunfire was deafening. Both men had dropped to the ground seconds later.

Braden was still seeing the scene in his mind when the elevator dinged down the hall. He instinctively put his hand on his weapon as footsteps came toward him. He removed it a few seconds later when Rueben rounded the corner, his face shining with sweat from the effort of moving his considerable girth through the halls of the building.

“Done already?” Braden asked.

“You said you needed it,” Rueben said, crossing the room and handing him a plastic evidence bag.

Braden looked at the parking ticket through the plastic. “What’s the word?”

“Only two sets of prints,” Rueben said. “One belonging to one of the guys in the morgue, the other unidentifiable.”

“Unidentifiable because it’s a bad print?” Braden asked. “Or because there wasn't a match.”

“Not a match.”

Braden nodded, exhaustion seeping through his veins. It meant he would have to take it to Alvarez. Would have to make his case for the possibility that there was a dirty agent on the case. Alvarez wouldn’t want to hear it, especially so soon after his promotion to SAC. The Agency was a family of sorts. You might not like everybody on your team, but you damn sure had their back when the chips were down.

This would be a problem. Alvarez would either make excuses or look at him like he was a rat even while telling him he did the right thing. Word would get out to the rest of the team. If he was right and there was a dirty agent on the job, that person would use his training in Psychology Ops to turn the rest of the team against Braden. They wouldn’t be a family for long after that.

He thought of Nora. What would she think? Would she think he was a rat too?

No. He knew her better than that. Her family had been involved in law enforcement for three generations. Her respect for the law was absolute. Her principles ironclad. She would back him.

But she might be the only one, and it would put her in a bad spot with the rest of the team.

He didn’t realize he’d sighed aloud until Rueben spoke.

“You okay, man?”

Braden’s nod was slow. “I’m good.”

But he wasn’t. He was sick of this shit. Sick of pretending to play for the good guys when the good guys were either too tied up in bureaucratic red tape to do their job or were eroding the system from the inside. It’s not like this agent would be the first one to turn dirty.

“You need anything else before I leave?” Rueben asked.

“I’m all set. Thanks for staying late.”

Rueben reached out to clasp his hand. “Anytime, man.”

He ambled for the door and disappeared into the hall.

Braden let his eyes travel the empty office. He’d spent countless hours of his life here. It had been the first place that felt like home since he’d been a teenager. Princeton had never been a good fit. He’d toughed it out because that’s what people in his family did, but he'd never been happy with his nose in the books. The military had been a different kind of disconnect; he’d been deployed so many times that he hadn’t had time to feel at home anywhere but inside the metal confines of a Humvee or a tent. But here… here was a place that had made him feel grounded. Made him feel useful.

It was where he and Nora had started their post-academy life.

But it didn’t feel like home anymore, and if he was honest, it hadn’t for a long time. He’d been assigned to so many special projects over the past couple of years — most of them having to do with the takedown of an organized crime empire known as the Syndicate and the fallout from its demise — that he hadn’t spent much time in the office. He’d even been assigned as a liaison to Homeland Security on a couple cases.

He’d left all of them feeling like he hadn’t changed a thing. Maybe he’d gotten a bad guy or two off the street, but there were always bigger and badder ones behind them. He’d almost started to sympathize with the friends he’d made at the Syndicate. Most people would call them criminals. Hell, they were criminals. He wasn’t kidding himself about that.

But he’d started to wonder if they were just more honest about taking out the trash. It was a thought that had occurred to him more than once — the idea that there might be another way to make a difference.

A real difference.

In the past, he’d pushed the thought away. It was traitorous to both the Bureau and the men he’d fought alongside in the military.

But he was surprised to find it was still there: a backup plan he’d never intended to keep in his pocket. And suddenly it seemed like the only thing to do. To move the needle in the real world — and to start his housekeeping with the Bureau.

He picked up his phone and dialed, waited for someone to answer the private line, in spite of the fact that it was three hours later in New York.

“I wish I could say I’m surprised.” The voice on the other end of the line was dry, with a hint of humor that had become familiar to Braden.

“Nico,” he said. “Remember that contact you told me about in La Jolla?”