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him.
    He’d joined the
Army because he wanted to make a difference, to do something that would have
made Julie proud, and now here he was, leading a team of the most elite
counterterrorist shooters in the world, saving lives by taking out the bad guys
before they could kill innocents.
    Making
a difference.
    The uniform was
home. He preferred being on alert status, whether forward positioned as they
had been for the last four months, or standing by in the on-deck circle at Fort
Bragg, waiting for the shit to hit the fan somewhere.
    Yet somehow, this
time he’d actually been looking forward to going back to the States, and he
wasn’t the only one.
    Casey Bellows had
seen his newborn son only via webcam. Mark Adams, the old man of the team at
thirty-eight, was just two years shy of his twenty, and he had already received
approval for transfer to a non-deployable headquarters unit. Even the Boss,
Rainer, had made no secret of his plan to leave active duty and start up his
own private security firm.
    They’d had a good run,
but maybe it was time to cash out and enjoy their success, not risk it all on
one more throw of the dice.
    Stow it, Sigler , he admonished himself. This is what you signed up for .
    Sigler focused on
Klein.
    “Sasha can explain
it better,” Klein continued, with a gesture to the woman. Then he hastily
added, “Sorry, I skipped the intros. Jack, Danno, this is Sasha Therion . We brought her in to consult on this…”
    He paused, as if expecting the woman to
engage with the conversation, but she continued to gaze at her computer screen,
seemingly hypnotized.
    Sigler felt compelled to speak, if only to
end the awkward silence. “Brought her in? I thought your new boss put the
kibosh on outsourcing.”
    It was no secret that Domenick Boucher, the
new director of the CIA, under orders from the President, had put an end to the
former administration’s practice of outsourcing the detainment, rendition and
interrogation of suspected terrorists. It was partly as a way to restore
accountability to the relevant agencies and partly to stop the hemorrhage of
taxpayer dollars into what some journalists had taken to calling the
‘terror-industrialist complex.’ The President had made other changes too, some
public and some under the radar, to streamline the nation’s intelligence-gathering
apparatus and repair the lingering damage to America’s public image following
too many incidents of abuse, brutality and torture—oft times with official
sanction.
    The President, a former Army Ranger, was by
no means soft on national security issues, but he did have what one primary
opponent had disparagingly called ‘an obsolete sense of integrity.’ Old-fashioned maybe, but not obsolete. Evidently the
American people had liked the idea of a leader with integrity.
    Klein shook his head. “This is different.
But, I should let Sasha explain.”
    When she failed to pick up the cue a second
time, the CIA man laid a hand gently on her forearm, and as if speaking to a
young child, he said: “Sasha, why don’t you tell the men about your work?”
    The woman looked up suddenly, the spell
broken. She glanced around the table as if just realizing that she wasn’t
alone. “Uh, I do the math.”
    Sigler stifled a laugh, but he noticed that
Parker was now sitting up a little straighter. Daniel Parker, a self-confessed
science geek, was the antithesis of most African-American stereotypes: a man
who would count it a greater honor debating astrophysics with Neil deGrasse
Tyson than playing one-on-one with Allen Iverson…though if push came to shove,
he would probably acquit himself equally well in either situation.
    “Sasha is, among other things, a
cryptanalyst,” explained Klein. “We might have stopped outsourcing the dirty
work, but we can’t afford to keep people with her talents on the payroll.”
    Sigler connected the dots. “So we found some
kind of coded message.”
    Klein pursed his lips. “Not
exactly.”
    “This