1
Halo
I’d been on this assignment since March. Eight months of this shit. Stuck in some small-ass town on the Oregon Coast, surveilling a woman who made watching grass grow seem interesting.
In contrast, last Thanksgiving, I wasn’t sure I’d make it out of Somalia alive. My partner, Tackle, and I were undercover as journalists when we were kidnapped by a band of pirates.
It didn’t take the team the CIA sent in long to rescue us, but I didn’t make it home in time to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family. When I hit US soil a couple of days after, though, I seriously thought about kneeling down and kissing the ground.
Those were the extremes of the line of work I was in. Either I was in danger of losing my life, or I was bored out of my mind.
“You can head home,” Griffin “Striker” Ellis said when I called him to give him an update on the woman he was paying me to keep an eye on—Aine McNamara.
Striker had been the lead on the team that rescued Tackle and me, and while none of us worked for the CIA anymore, it didn’t change the fact I owed the man my life. When he asked me to keep tabs on the woman he’d recently ended a relationship with, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.
Said woman had been kidnapped in August of last year, a couple of months before I was in Somalia. I knew Striker still felt responsible for making sure she was safe. I didn’t understand why they’d broken up in the first place, since they both seemed like they still cared for each other. That part wasn’t any of my business, though.
“I’m sure you want to spend Thanksgiving with your family.”
Did I? Barring any other option, I suppose so.
“By the way, I heard that K19 is getting ready to make you an offer.”
Bingo! I’d been hoping they would since the day I left the CIA. I’d almost given up, deciding that if I didn’t hear from them by January, I’d start looking at other firms that handled covert operations.
Striker wasn’t just the lead on my rescue; he’d also been my boss back when we were both with the agency. When he left their employ, I did too. In hindsight, my departure may have been premature, but you had to know who had your back in this line of work and who didn’t.
Outside of Striker, there were only a handful of men and women I trusted, and not a single one still worked for the government in an official capacity. In fact, the majority of them were now part of a black ops and intelligence firm called K19 Security Solutions, the one Striker had just said was getting ready to make me an offer.
“What about Tackle?” I asked.
“Him too.”
Landry “Tackle” Sorenson was more than my partner on the op in Somalia; he and I had been best friends since high school when my family returned to America after living in England for most of my childhood.
Tackle and I attended the same college, University of Virginia, and went on to accept jobs with the CIA after we graduated. While it was common for a place like the Central Intelligence Agency to assign code names, my friend and I already had them—nicknames anyway—that to our surprise, they’d agreed to allow us to use.
We’d come up with them after a day of playing touch football when things went a little too far. It wouldn’t be difficult for anyone to figure out that Landry had tackled me or that I ended up with a cervical dislocation requiring I wear a neck halo for six weeks.
While Landry and his parents felt like absolute shit about it, I wasn’t angry nor were my mom and dad. Accidents happened, they’d said. I think they were just relieved that the injury hadn’t been worse. It didn’t bother them at all when I couldn’t play football the next year, and while I acted like I was disappointed, I’d admitted to Tackle that I didn’t really care.
The day I told him I planned to resign from the CIA and freelance for K19, he said he would too.
“Where are you?” I asked when my friend answered my call.
“On my way to Boston.”