He only hoped that warmth remained after she heard what he had to say.
CHAPTER 18
TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA
NOREEN Ahmed eyed the trembling device with a hatred more suited for an angry rattlesnake than a vibrating cell. In what she regarded as a minor miracle, the buzzing phone hadn’t awakened her sleeping husband. When they’d first married ten years ago, Brian would stir if their cat padded across the room.
Today, he slept like the dead.
Working twenty-four-hour shifts as a surgical resident could do that.
Swiping the phone from her nightstand, Noreen eased from her bed, holding the still-pulsating device against her chest. Her legs screamed and her shoulders and arms throbbed, but she managed to hobble across the hardwood floor without making a peep. Her FBI physical fitness test was less than a month away, and she was doubling down on her daily workouts to ensure she was ready.
In a regulation that only made sense to a government bureaucrat, there were no age gates to the FBI’s entrance exam. This meant that, at thirty-five, Noreen was expected to achieve the same standards as someone a decade her junior. Rather than dwell on the insanity of this policy, Noreen simply trained harder. In her experience, government regulations rarely made sense.
And Noreen had plenty of experience.
Only after softly closing the door behind her did Noreen consult the screen on her vibrating phone. The number was unlisted, but she recognized the prefix. For a long moment, she thought about not answering. She was on leave, after all.
Terminal leave.
Then, she thumbed the green button.
“Hello?”
“Noreen Ahmed?”
“Who’s this?” Noreen said.
Though she had a pretty good idea where the call had originated, the voice was unfamiliar. Even more important, she was on vacation and her employment with her current employer ended in three weeks. She felt little need to be polite. In the lexicon of her soon-to-be-former profession, Noreen was bulletproof.
“This is Deputy Director Mike Nash.”
Or perhaps not.
Though the camera on her cell was taped over, Noreen still felt strange talking to a seventh-floor executive while wearing just a black tank top and the skimpy sleep shorts Brian loved. Resisting the urge to grab a sweatshirt from the laundry basket resting on the floor, she padded over to the couch and took a seat next to the orange cat that had been her companion since college.
Tigs was ten pounds overweight, blind in one eye, and hard of hearing, but she seemed to understand Noreen on an empathetic level. No sooner had Noreen crossed her brown legs than Tigs moved into her lap and began to purr.
“Yes, sir,” Noreen said, with a look at the bedroom door. “What can I do for you?”
Her benign response still felt like a betrayal.
She’d promised Brian.
Promised.
“I know you’re on leave, but I’d like you to please come in,” Nash said. “It’s urgent.”
Noreen’s gaze traveled from the accusing bedroom door to the framed picture resting on the end table. She and Brian just after he’d proposed. Then as now, their opposing complexions complemented each other. His alabaster face pressed against her nutmeg cheek. A boy who could trace his heritage back to County Antrim in Northern Ireland had married a girl whose parents hailed from central Pakistan.
Only in America.
The wedding had been a compromise of sorts. A mixture of Muslim and Catholic traditions that had mollified their prospective mothers-in-law while satisfying neither. Noreen had always thought that the biggest threat to their marriage would come from interfamily strife spawned by their very different backgrounds.
She’d been wrong.
“I don’t think so,” Noreen said.
Tigs vibrated like a tuning fork as she purred her agreement.
“What’s that?” Nash said.
“I’m not coming in,” Noreen said. “Sir.”
She’d paused before adding the honorific, almost not uttering the word. But that wouldn’t have been right. Regardless of how things had turned out, the state of her marriage could not be laid solely at her employer’s feet. She and Brian were adults responsible for their own choices.
“I see,” Nash said.
Noreen expected the conversation to end.
It did not.
“Noreen, can I ask you a question?”
Noreen paused again, trying to spot the trap behind the words.
Mike Nash had served his country in combat as a Marine before transitioning to the Agency as a paramilitary officer. According to the national news, he’d single-handedly stopped an attack on the counterterrorism center. Even though some of the details of what happened that day hadn’t been disclosed, Noreen had no doubt that Nash was a hero. The voice on the phone didn’t belong to a run-of-the-mill seventh-floor bureaucrat. Noreen might be disillusioned with the CIA and pissed off at what the long hours and frequent deployments had done to her marriage, but she had no cause to make Nash the target of her frustration.
