“What are we doing here again?”

Sofia was amazed that Richie didn’t have every detail about why they were flying back to the States.

Fred Smith opened his mouth and Sofia glared at him until he shut it. He’d taken the men away and told them something that had changed every one of them. The unflappable Kyle had turned grim. Richie—who was always a little clingy—was glued to Melissa’s side. Chad’s fierce silence made him appear truly dangerous despite his Iowa farm boy looks.

And Duane hadn’t met her eyes once since they’d been awoken at dawn and shoved onto this plane. The unmarked Gulfstream business jet was covering the ground from Panama to Washington State in a little over six hours and they were getting close.

“ECHELON,” Sofia explained, “was partly based here in central Washington—out in the Yakima Training Center at a location called the Yakima Research Station.”

She, of course knew about it from her time at the Activity.

“ECHELON was part of the Five Eyes agreement set up in 1941. Us, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada created a cooperative, intelligence-sharing service during World War II. Full access to shared intel, no matter who got what. It was run on our side by FBI, CIA, NSA, and a couple of others,” that she wasn’t authorized to mention because their identities hadn’t been made public by the thief-turned-traitor Snowden.

“Yakima? What did they do here?”

“Gathering signal intelligence from Soviet satellites mostly.”

“Let me guess,” Richie might be the one geeking out, but everyone was listening closely, even Duane who had sat a row back across the aisle by Chad rather than with her. “You’re speaking in past tense. That implies that it has been shut down because Soviet intel is no longer on the satellites, it’s all cyber and Dark Web games now.”

She nodded. That and they’d consolidated the intel gathering at a new, vastly more capable facility in Colorado at the Air Force Space Command. It was rapidly becoming the nation’s Number Two intelligence agency headquarters after Fort Belvoir, Virginia where The Activity was based among more than a dozen others.

“So what are we doing here?” Carla asked suddenly over-loudly as the engine roar eased down.

Sofia’s ears popped as the cabin pressure changed and they began their descent.

“Well!” Richie jumped in before Sofia could speak. Clearly he now had the missing pieces he’d needed. “They may have shut down the Yakima station for ECHELON—you all remember that scene in the second Jason Bourne movie when Landy calls for an ECHELON package to observe Bourn? So cool! Don’t know how I forgot that. And when—”

“Richie,” Melissa called on him to focus.

“Right,” then he plowed his way back to the topic at hand. “But the facilities are still there. Did you know that Venezuela has just two satellites in orbit? The new one is for land, agriculture, mapping—that sort of thing. Max resolution is over two meters and it’s in a fast and low orbit, so it’s no good for following people. But their first satellite, the Simón Bolívar, is up in geosynchronous orbit and totally belongs to SEBIN. It’s a hot signals intelligence gathering machine that the Chinese put up there for them. Supposed to be as secure as hell. This means that we’ve cracked it and can hear all of—”

“We didn’t crack it,” Sofia hated to burst Richie’s balloon.

And sure enough, he looked like a little kid holding an empty string.

She glanced at Melissa, who patted Richie’s arm in sympathy.

“Their codes are still secure,” Sofia repeated. “But Yakima is listening and it has also become the center for most of our intel on SEBIN.”

That appeared to placate him some.

Melissa was apparently attached to Richie’s sweetness—which would never work for her. Sofia wanted… She turned to Duane and caught him watching her. At least he had the decency to not look away immediately. But after a few seconds, he did turn toward the window and look out at the approaching landscape.

Sofia didn’t want…anything—though Duane had been working down the path to convince her that maybe she did.

And then Smith had done something to him.

All Duane could see every time he looked at Sofia was what happened to women in screwed up, ultra-macho, horridly repressive regimes like Venezuela. Smith had laid out for them just what horrors it took to be a Tier 3 human trafficking country. Then he’d started breaking down the known abuses by SEBIN.

Nothing about the mission.

Nothing about when the team was inserting, where or what their mission might be.

Way too much about what was happening to the civilians and protestors. At first it had seemed like he was laying it on too thick. Then Duane had started looking at the reports and wondered if Fred Smith wasn’t treating the guys just a little bit kindly.

Way too easy to imagine Sofia there. And how much value such a beautiful woman would have to a trafficker. He wanted to shoo her home, back to whatever safe, quiet corner of the country she never talked about—not drag her out into the field where—

It wouldn’t be right to lock Sofia away somewhere secure, even if she’d let him. But that didn’t stop him from wanting to try.

“Dude?” he whispered to Chad after Sofia had turned once more to face the front of the plane.

“Yeah, bro?”

“Any of this making sense to you?” There were pieces on the move here. Big ones. Ones the SOG had been willing to stage a battle on a cruise ship for. But none of them were fitting together.

“Shit. Why ask me? You need to ask Richie or your girlfriend—they’re the thinkers on this team. I’m like you, just along for the ride.”

That was one of the things about Chad.

He was always low-key, always had your back. Steadiest guy you’d ever met. And up until now Duane had been comfortable in that role himself. Just along for the ride. Glad to take down the bad guys and have a cold one at the end of the day. There was a reason that neither of them was a leader.

Kyle was the natural leader, keeping all of their rampant personalities focused on the same track. Carla was the driver—the force behind all their butts that shoved them ahead at full tilt. Richie and his girlfriend—

“Wait!” He nudged Chad who was pretending to sleep even as the airplane’s wheels squealed on the runway. “What did you call Sofia earlier? My what?”

“Fuck, you’re being slow. Not like you, bro. Not like you at all.” Chad didn’t even bother to open his eyes.

Sofia had changed him. A couple goddamn kisses and his brain was warped somehow.

He watched her profile as she chatted with Melissa.

What had she done to him?

He’d been happy just being a Unit operator. And the team he’d landed on had some serious grit—so damn good he was always amazed that he was part of it.

But Sofia Forteza called up something deeper in him. Reminded him why he’d walked away from his life to join up in the first place. Made him want to know, understand, be involved at a new level.

Then he thought about what Smith had been telling them and he decided that maybe just being along for the ride wasn’t a bad thing.