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Authors: Christopher Farnsworth
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CIA pulled in the past four decades. His résumé read like the Agency’s greatest hits.
Yale degree. Recruited right out of college.
Clandestine service. Attached to various domestic agencies. Again, classified. No big surprise, since the Agency wasn’t supposed to operate on U.S. soil. Locations: Los Angeles, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Miami, with trips back to Langley.
Laos. Probably one of the Agency’s advisers to the Hmong fighters, although there was something about Graves being assigned to a different tribe in the highlands on the Vietnam border, the T’Chok.
Thailand, from 1975 to 1980. Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early’80s, followed by Honduras, just in time for the Nicaraguan civil war to heat up.
After that, he simply disappeared from the official records. Crosschecking other government files, Zach found a few other entries. A blurry photograph from a Contra staging base in Honduras. A buried LAPD report from an officer who swore there were CIA men moving drugs in South Central. A reference in a classified section of the first draft of a Senate report on international money laundering. Then, for almost a decade, nothing.
Then 9/11 hit, and the Graves alias began appearing on the NOC list again. Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Uganda.
Around 2003, there was an official waiver and notice of separation from the CIA. Graves was free to pursue a career outside of government. That was about the same time Archer/Andrews began receiving government contracts. Graves began starring in slick corporate brochures that hinted at much more than they actually said.
The weird part: Graves’s age was never mentioned anywhere. Zach tried to do the math in his head, but it didn’t add up. If Graves was twenty-one in 1960, at the start of his career, he was at least seventy-one now. And while he was well preserved, Zach could tell he was human. There was no way he should still be operating, unless he was some kind of real-life mix of Nick Fury and every character Clint Eastwood had ever played.
One other weird thing nagged at Zach. Aside from the work history, there was nothing personal. Usually, Zach could assemble a pretty decent model of a person from this much information. But Graves remained a flat collection of facts. There was no depth to him.
Zach wasn’t a complete idiot. There was a very good chance that Archer/Andrews was itself a front for the Shadow Company, that Graves was involved, or one of his underlings, or maybe someone else inside the firm entirely.
But if that were the case, why would Prador be working with him? Prador could be a prick, true, but he was utterly loyal to the Prez, always had been. And Zach, in all the time he’d watched him, would never have imagined Prador doing something truly evil. It would be like an Eagle Scout selling secrets to the North Koreans.
Maybe this related to the leak in the White House that nearly killed him. Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe it was something else entirely.
Zach felt a headache coming on. He hated all this double-triple-crossing stuff. And, as Cade had said back at the Reliquary, it didn’t matter much. If they were going to do this job, they were stuck with Graves.
Zach scanned the files again, looking for anything he might have missed until his vision blurred.
Finally he switched off the laptop and turned out his overhead light. He couldn’t get a handle on the guy. It was like trying to grab smoke.
Might as well get some sleep, Zach decided. After all, Cade would have plenty of face time with the man soon enough.
ZACH COULDN’T SLEEP. He tried to watch TV, but nothing was appealing. He couldn’t watch reality shows because seeing people pretend to have a life made him even more aware of the lack of his own. Horror movies bored him now; once you’ve seen the real thing, even the best special effects look hopelessly cheesy. And that was all his five hundred channels seemed to offer.
He thought about it, put on his
Yale degree. Recruited right out of college.
Clandestine service. Attached to various domestic agencies. Again, classified. No big surprise, since the Agency wasn’t supposed to operate on U.S. soil. Locations: Los Angeles, New Orleans, Las Vegas, Miami, with trips back to Langley.
Laos. Probably one of the Agency’s advisers to the Hmong fighters, although there was something about Graves being assigned to a different tribe in the highlands on the Vietnam border, the T’Chok.
Thailand, from 1975 to 1980. Afghanistan and Pakistan in the early’80s, followed by Honduras, just in time for the Nicaraguan civil war to heat up.
After that, he simply disappeared from the official records. Crosschecking other government files, Zach found a few other entries. A blurry photograph from a Contra staging base in Honduras. A buried LAPD report from an officer who swore there were CIA men moving drugs in South Central. A reference in a classified section of the first draft of a Senate report on international money laundering. Then, for almost a decade, nothing.
Then 9/11 hit, and the Graves alias began appearing on the NOC list again. Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Nigeria, Uganda.
Around 2003, there was an official waiver and notice of separation from the CIA. Graves was free to pursue a career outside of government. That was about the same time Archer/Andrews began receiving government contracts. Graves began starring in slick corporate brochures that hinted at much more than they actually said.
The weird part: Graves’s age was never mentioned anywhere. Zach tried to do the math in his head, but it didn’t add up. If Graves was twenty-one in 1960, at the start of his career, he was at least seventy-one now. And while he was well preserved, Zach could tell he was human. There was no way he should still be operating, unless he was some kind of real-life mix of Nick Fury and every character Clint Eastwood had ever played.
One other weird thing nagged at Zach. Aside from the work history, there was nothing personal. Usually, Zach could assemble a pretty decent model of a person from this much information. But Graves remained a flat collection of facts. There was no depth to him.
Zach wasn’t a complete idiot. There was a very good chance that Archer/Andrews was itself a front for the Shadow Company, that Graves was involved, or one of his underlings, or maybe someone else inside the firm entirely.
But if that were the case, why would Prador be working with him? Prador could be a prick, true, but he was utterly loyal to the Prez, always had been. And Zach, in all the time he’d watched him, would never have imagined Prador doing something truly evil. It would be like an Eagle Scout selling secrets to the North Koreans.
Maybe this related to the leak in the White House that nearly killed him. Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe it was something else entirely.
Zach felt a headache coming on. He hated all this double-triple-crossing stuff. And, as Cade had said back at the Reliquary, it didn’t matter much. If they were going to do this job, they were stuck with Graves.
Zach scanned the files again, looking for anything he might have missed until his vision blurred.
Finally he switched off the laptop and turned out his overhead light. He couldn’t get a handle on the guy. It was like trying to grab smoke.
Might as well get some sleep, Zach decided. After all, Cade would have plenty of face time with the man soon enough.
ZACH COULDN’T SLEEP. He tried to watch TV, but nothing was appealing. He couldn’t watch reality shows because seeing people pretend to have a life made him even more aware of the lack of his own. Horror movies bored him now; once you’ve seen the real thing, even the best special effects look hopelessly cheesy. And that was all his five hundred channels seemed to offer.
He thought about it, put on his
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