Read Online Act of Terror by Marc Cameron - Free Book Online Page B

make her feel worse in the long run.
    In the end, she settled for a scalding shower. She stood under the water for a long time, leaning against the tile with both hands, hoping the heat would beat the memories of the day out of her body. She finally realized she really felt bad for not feeling bad enough and turned off the water.
    The night was warm for Maryland in late September and she left her hair wet, hoping it would help her sleep a little cooler. She brushed her teeth, happy to feel clean again, and slipped into her favorite pair of stretchy yellow terrycloth sleeping shorts. She found a white tank top wadded up at the base of her dresser, sniffed it, and pronounced it clean enough to wear to bed. Collapsing back against the pillow, she flipped out the lamp ... and stared up at the darkness, wide-eyed.
    Memories of the day whirled inside her head like a cyclone. Gathering witness statements and after-action reports for the joint investigative team from the CIA and the FBI had taken hours after the last shot had been fired.
    When she’d completed her reports, a trio of CIA shrinks had summoned her to a stark, white room to gauge her level of emotional and physical trauma. With just over seven years on the job, she’d never been involved in a shooting. It came as a shock to her interrogators that she wasn’t more bothered by it. It was a surprise to her as well, but the men she’d shot had deserved to die. They had been killing the very people she’d signed on to protect, so she’d killed them. It was that simple. She would never brag about it, but she would do it again if faced with the same circumstances—and then move on with her life. The Agency shrinks had looked at her sideways when she explained the way she felt, but in the end, they signed off, pronouncing her sane as anyone else at the CIA.
    One doc in particular, an older, Freudian-looking man with a twitchy right eye, appeared to be genuinely disappointed she was not pulling her hair out and running off screaming into the woods.
    The grilling had ended shortly before 7 P.M. Her supervisor sent her home on three days’ paid administrative leave—standard operating procedure after a shooting. She’d not even made it to her car before he called her cell to tell her to come in and put on a clean shirt. She’d been summoned to the White House.
    Ronnie’s job at the CIA made her no stranger to important political figures, and she’d become extremely hard to impress. But a personal meeting with the president, where he sat, legs crossed and smiling, to offer her coffee and tell her how much he needed her help? That was so very different from watching him walk down the marble halls at Langley.
    Now, locked awake in the darkness, she flipped on the light and kicked the down comforter off her feet. Even for a girl raised in the Caribbean, the evening was much too warm. She sighed, beating her head against the pillow. If her father could see her now, he’d roll over in his regulation communist grave.
    As a child in Havana she’d grown up immersed in a hodgepodge of cultures. Her father, a math professor from Smolensk, had known the importance of English and made certain his only daughter was fluent in that along with the tongues of her parents. Three languages, he said, gave her a good base from which to begin—
    â€œSomeone who speaks three languages, milaya ,” he would coax, using her pet name, “is said to be trilingual . And what do you call someone who speaks only one language?”
    â€œAn American.” She would giggle at his little joke and he would tickle her as good fathers were supposed to do.
    After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian support for Cuba had faded, pressing their family into near starvation. Her idealistic parents had been brokenhearted at governmental indifference toward those who had worked so hard to support the cause. They died within weeks of each other and