Read Girl of Lies for Free Online

of the most explosive, on a personal and international level.
    It haunted him. He unlocked his desk and slid the top drawer open, taking out the file marked with seals labeled CONFIDENTIAL and EYES ONLY. He opened the file.
    As always, it was the photos that caught him first. The bodies, laying where they’d fallen, twisted, bloated.
    Many of them had been children.
    He closed the file. He wouldn’t find any answers in there tonight, any more than he did ten years ago or twenty years ago.
    Thirty years since the photos had been taken. Thirty years.
    He sighed then slid the folder back into his locked drawer. In the morning, he would instruct O’Leary to increase the surveillance on everyone related to the Wakhan file. But for now, he needed to get some sleep.
    That, of course, was when the phone rang. Not his personal phone. The official phone.
    He lifted it to his ear. “This is the Chief,” he said.
    “O’Leary, sir.”
    “What is it?”
    “Wakhan file, sir. It’s heating up.”
    “Tell me.”
    “Andrea Thompson was abducted on arrival at Baltimore Washington airport.”
    George-Phillip stood up, suddenly, his chair rolling back on its casters.
    “What?” he cried.
    “That’s right, sir. We didn’t have any assets on the scene, unfortunately. She was able to overpower her abductors, though. Both of them are dead, and she’s en route to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.”
    “How serious were her injuries? Any idea who they were?”
    “Not serious, sir, and we’ve got a lead on one from the surveillance video. This one’s getting massive attention from the Yanks though, so I’ve not put anyone too close to the investigation. One of the kidnappers looks like Tariq Koury. Saudi born, he’s been around ISI and CIA and a bunch of other three letter agencies for decades.”
    “Three letter agencies… like SIS?”
    “He did a couple jobs for us in the early 90s. Nothing since then that I can tell. He works for the highest bidder… not reliable. But he’s a killer. He spent most of the last five years working for Blackwater.”
    George-Phillip shook his head. “And a sixteen-year-old girl escaped from him?”
    “Not just escaped. As best as I can find out, she killed him. I’ll get more info as soon as I can.”
    “We need to know who hired him, O’Leary.”
    “Working on it, sir.”
    “Put some serious assets on it. I want to know who was behind the abduction, O’Leary.”
    They hung up, and he stared out the window. George-Phillip thought about what he knew of Andrea Thompson, which amounted to virtually nothing. The idea that a sixteen year old girl had fought—and killed—two trained intelligence agents simply defied credibility. But then, nothing about this case, from the very beginning, had made sense. Especially not the contents of the file, which he didn’t need to have open to see its contents. The twisted and darkened bodies. They haunted his every thought.

3. Bear. April 28. 6:30 pm
    It was long past six o’clock when John “Bear” Wyden closed the briefing folder and walked it down the hall to the Classified Materials Officer, who signed for the documents and gave Bear a receipt. Temporarily, Bear occupied a desk on the sixth floor at Main State. For the last three years, he’d been assigned as the deputy Regional Security Officer in Pakistan for the Diplomatic Security Service. An insanely challenging job, where he’d supervised dozens of agents in one of the largest and most strategic field offices.
    In two weeks he’d be taking over as an assistant deputy at the FBI’s National Joint Terrorism Task Force. Bear was forty-three years old, with dark hair starting to turn grey. But he was fit, weighing in at little more than the one hundred eighty pounds he’d carried the day he entered Diplomatic Security twenty years ago. Back then he’d been called Bear because of the thick hair covering his arms, legs and chest, a fact which had embarrassed him for years.
    For now,