Pandora's grave

Gideon pulled off his shirt, glancing in the mirror as he did so. A tired, worn face lined with worry stared back at him. The face of a man old before his time. He sighed and reached for the razor.

At that moment a knock came at the door, startling him. “One moment,” he answered, pulling his shirt back over his head.

He yanked open the bathroom door. “What’s going on?” he demanded, irritated at the interruption. A female corporal from Communications was standing before him.

“I’m sorry,” he began, embarrassed by his outburst.

She didn’t seem to notice, handing him a clipboard. “This arrived over the wire, lieutenant. You have to sign for it.”

He took it from her, noticing the Mossad crest at the top of the cover sheet. What did they want?

8:03 A.M. Eastern Time

CIA Headquarters

Langley, Virginia

“I understand, Scott, I do understand. But tell Sorenson I want that satellite coverage ASAP-as Kranemeyer requested. Keep on him. Goodbye.” Director Lay hung up the phone, sighing heavily as he did so. The NRO still wasn’t providing the real-time sat coverage that had been requested. Their regional KH-13 was apparently tied up covering one of the interminable uprisings in Indonesia.

Lay slammed his fist against the solid oak of his desk. To blazes with Indonesia! His teams weren’t there, weren’t headed into harms’ way in that godforsaken part of the globe. They were going to Iran. And something was giving him a bad feeling about all this. There was something wrong.

He had become DCIA six years before with a clear mission from Hancock’s predecessor. Transform the Agency. And, as much as was possible, he had done so. He had successfully lobbied the Hill to increase the budget for human intelligence and special operations by over fifty percent, started running operations the like of which hadn’t been done for forty years. And there were people in this town that didn’t like that. They didn’t like it one bit. Which was why he had to be careful.

He rose from his chair, going over to the window, his hands in his pockets as he gazed out over the city. From his office he could see the Washington monument, the tall granite obelisk that towered over the city, stone glistening in the autumn sun.

They couldn’t understand, it seemed no one could anymore. The price of freedom. The sacrifices necessary to obtain it. Sacrifice. The politicos that inhabited the swamp inside the Beltway defined sacrifice as the necessity of leaving their Washington lifestyle and heading back to their home districts every few years to campaign.

Sacrifice. With a weary sigh, Lay sank back into his chair, reaching for a photograph on his desk. The face of a woman in her mid-twenties smiled back at him, a baby cradled in her arms.

He’d had a family once upon a time, but that was where the resemblance to a fairy tale started and stopped.

Trisha. His wife and their baby girl, Carol. The Cold War had been in its death throes when he’d joined the Agency, running agents between Moscow and Havana, working through the immigrant communities of Miami. Back in those halcyon days when religious zealotry had barely crossed the CIA’s radar. He’d had to leave them both in Washington when he moved south pursuing his career-Agency protocol that his family be insulated from danger.

Patriotism? Or blind ambition? The nights he’d spent in search of an answer to that question. Trisha had left him when their girl was four, citing emotional abandonment in the divorce papers that he found on his desk upon his return, papers already three months old by the time he got them.

That was twenty-six years ago, and all hope of reconciliation had died along with Trisha when she had succumbed to a long battle with lymphoma at the age of forty-eight.

His fingers moved to the second photo and a tender smile touched his lips. In all those years, he had never seen his daughter. Her mother had taken back her maiden name and legally changed Carol’s name as well, moving to the opposite end of the country to live with her parents. Buried in his work, he’d convinced himself that it was for the best, that he never could have become the father she needed. But the desire never left him, to know, to answer the aching question. What had become of her?

And then a twenty-eight-year-old young woman had shown up on Langley’s doorstep two years ago, armed with a tech degree from MIT and the ruthless instincts of a computer hacker. He nearly hadn’t recognized her at first. Until he saw her mother in her eyes…

Lay sighed, turning his attention back to the phone and the President. There were sacrifices he regretted…

5:39 P.M. Tehran Time

The base camp