1 Chapter 1

1

Watching the blinking green dot on the screen reminded me of Jay Gatsby staring forlornly at Daisy’s dock light night after night, finding some comfort in its existence even if he couldn’t see his beloved’s face. I sighed and pushed away the thought—Jake wasn’t Daisy and I definitely wasn’t Gatsby. For the past three weeks, there was no communication, no updates, and technically no reason to worry, but anxiety had me crawling out of my skin. Something was different about this mission. Something had been different about Jake the night he accepted the assignment. Something I couldn’t put my finger on. A coldness. A distance.

I only had the tracker, and it became the center of my attention. I neglected other assignments, delayed important paperwork, ignored emails because I didn’t want to miss a single moment of his actions. I needed to know where he was going and how long he stayed there. The hard numbers provided a level of comfort, but not much. Not as much as I needed.

I resisted the temptation to activate his earpiece. The mission was deep cover and Jake was chosen specifically because everybody at Langley had complete trust in him. He was their Golden Boy. A perfect record. People around the office resented me, thinking I’d been given the cushiest assignment in the department, and nobody appreciated how difficult it was to keep the Golden Boy alive and in one piece. Jake was the ideal agent. His conditioning was perfect, his strength unmatched, his intelligence unwavering. He never spared a second thought to the implications of his work, and he executed his targets with brutal efficiency.

Tonight would be the final night of radio silence. Jake had followed his script perfectly, completed every step of the plan flawlessly, and now he was perfectly positioned to complete the assignment. Another assassination, another notch in his belt. He didn’t ask any details about his target, but he never did. Maybe he didn’t like to know. Maybe he didn’t need to know. He always calmly accepted the dossier, studied it with blank green eyes, then nodded his understanding. His face never betrayed a single emotion.

Except this time.

This time when I handed over the dossier, Jake barely glanced at it. When I explained the mission, he barely acknowledged it. When I explained that radio silence would be necessary for the duration, I saw something flutter in his eyes. Some flare of emotion I never saw within him before. Then he was gone, and I was left unsettled and alone.

I restlessly tapped my desk, anxiously checking the clock. Jake didn’t have a time limit, but every second I waited for his signal scraped across my nerves. He wasn’t my first agent, but I often wondered if he would be my last. I couldn’t imagine working with anybody else. I would never willingly leave the assignment, which meant only his death was likely to separate us, and the thought of his death always felt like a punch to the gut.

When did I become so attached to him? How had I let myself get emotionally compromised by an agent? Granted, Jake wasn’t like any other agent I ever knew. A perfect physical specimen, he moved through the world as silently as a shadow, his sharp eyes absorbing every detail as his mind imprinted every image. The Agency had invested thousands of dollars into his training and God knew how much his upgrades cost them. It was impossible to know where the training ended and the man began. The joke around the office was that he was RoboCop, a cyborg and not a man. But I knew better. Somewhere inside of him was a man unlike any other.

The green light flashed, then died.

“What the—?”

I tapped on the screen and it responded, but the light didn’t return. I immediately activated his ear piece.

“Agent Hondo, come in. Come in, Agent Hondo.”

An alert message popped up. Connection lost; please re-establish connection. Please contact system administrator if unable to re-establish connection

I picked up my phone and dialed nine. It rang only once before the system admin picked up. “Rollins here.”

“I just lost Hondo.”

“I’ll get him.”

I heard Rollins type furiously, pause, then type again. Another long pause and somehow I could hear Rollins’ frown.

“It says the connection can’t be established.”

“What does that mean?”

“It likely means his tracker is busted.”

My stomach dropped like a stone. These trackers were not easy to break. They were designed to withstand an extreme amount of punishment, and even to continue to record after the agent expired.

“Busted? Could he have turned it off?”

Rollins snorted. “Those things don’t exactly have an off-switch.”

Which means he likely removed it himself.