“Flying home to Atlanta to celebrate with my parents,” she replies.
I wish her safe travels, she tells me she’s pleased with my efforts, and then we say farewell until Monday when we’ll see each other again. If I’m lucky, and she truly feels I am making good progress, maybe she’ll release me from her care and back to full duty next week.
Until then, I do have another job to do. Even if it’s not exciting fieldwork, I am enjoying the project I’m doing with Anna.
I make my way to her office, stopping at August Greenfield’s desk to chat for a few minutes. He’s a recent transplant from the Vegas office whom I met a few days ago. Nice guy, although he’s in a bit of a weird situation being married to a woman who was in WITSEC but came out by her own choice. They have a son who just had a stem cell transplant to treat leukemia, but he seems to be doing well. I like the guy, and I hope to get to know him better.
I find Anna in her office at her desk, working on her computer. She has a binder open, glancing from its contents to her screen.
Rapping lightly on the doorjamb, I ask, “Working on the database?”
Her head pops up, and she gives me a warm, welcoming smile. Same one I’ve received all this week we’ve been working together. I have to say it’s the kind of smile that puts me in a great mood.
“Nah… organizing a proposal for Kynan, which he’s going to submit to some congressional committee that will make Jameson a ‘preferred’ contractor for the government to use,” she replies.
I step in, then take a seat in one of her two guest chairs opposite her desk. “But isn’t Jameson already sort of preferred? I mean… Kynan and Cruce being personal friends of the president and all?”
“You make a fine point,” she teases as she closes the binder. “And yes, in theory, the president does prefer to use us for any work the government needs. But in this instance, I think it’s more of a designation that speeds up assignments of work to us without some of the initial vetting that has to happen.”
“Makes sense,” I reply, then nod to the large stack of folders on the floor. “That our work for today?”
“Yup,” she replies. “I decided we would start chronologically, but work in reverse order on the freshest cases we’ve concluded.”
Monday and Tuesday of this week, Anna and I sorted all the files in the boxes I had carted down from the fourth floor to her office. We then pulled them out and separated them by date, spending the rest of the time learning the database in which we’d be entering the information. Dozer had made it so the order of the fields was customizable, then left it to Anna and me to organize it in a way that made input of the data easiest.
Today, we’re ready to start entering the information.
“Want to grab the top one?” she asks, tapping away on her keyboard and presumably pulling up the database.
Theoretically, the most recent case Jameson had was my rescue in Syria, but that folder wasn’t in the box because it’s probably still being debriefed with the government. Kynan has been working with his liaisons in the Defense Intelligence and Central Intelligence agencies to apprise them of how our mission went down and to account for the dead guards they’d left behind. Apparently, Jameson had been sidelined—intentionally told by the United States to stay out of my search-and-rescue efforts given the tensions in the Syrian region.
Kynan, of course, had ignored them. Had it not been for a very ridiculous amount of money he offered for information on my whereabouts, and the balls to ignore mandates by the government, and came in with guns blazing to secure my release, I’d still be stuck there. I’m forever grateful, and I figure he’s shifting around a lot of heat that’s coming down on him right now. I wonder if that will affect his proposal to become a preferred contractor?
The file in my hands reads, “Code Name: Hacker,” on the tab.
Frowning, I say aloud, “Code Name: Hacker?”
Anna grins. “I sort of named all the cases to keep them straight in my mind. That’s actually a case Bebe was involved in to take down a Russian mobster slash black-hat hacker in New York last month.”
“No kidding,” I murmur. Opening the file, I start flipping through the pages. I haven’t had a chance to see Bebe since my return. Actually, I hadn’t known her all that well before I left for Syria. Hell, I hadn’t known any of these people well, but I do know Bebe is essential to this company’s operations because she’s a certified tech genius. Apparently, while I was being held prisoner, Kynan had a state-of-the-art research and development lab built on one of the subterranean levels. Cage had told me it was pretty high tech. People aren’t allowed down there without an escort, and only two people have keys—Bebe and Dozer.