Hey all. So, I'm back after a long and very much unplanned hiatus. Computer troubles had me down for awhile. But now I am back with a vengeance and am going to try my best to start whipping out some more chapters quickly. So, if you had been following the story and wondered what the hell happened (a few of you messaged me): I'm sorry. I'm back. I'm going to try and make it worth your wait. Picking up right where we left off with the last chapter. I hope you enjoy. Any feedback/critique is always welcome and appreciated.
"I don't understand," Shirer said, clearly baffled. "I gave you what we had on Easter. You were supposed to memorize the document and destroy…"
"I did," Emily assured him. "But I'm assuming what you gave me was a summary. I need more. Specifically I need to know about any involvement he had in Northern Ireland."
"Northern Ireland? What the hell?"
"Clyde and Sean McCallister want the JTF to essentially drop everything to chase down an ex-IRA captain."
"You have to be joking," Shirer insisted. Emily wasn't at all surprised to hear his displeasure. She knew the CIA would consider this operation a huge waste of resources unless there was something more to it.
"I'm not. Clyde and Sean both insist this guy is now in the illegal arms sales and in bed with everyone form Al-Qaeda to Chechnya."
"But you don't believe them?" Shirer pressed.
"I don't know," Emily conceded. "They're insistent, but they haven't shown us any of the intelligence yet. I do know that something's wrong with Clyde. He's personally invested in this case. He won't hear any dissent. It's not like him."
"What are you thinking?"
"Best guess? Either he was stationed up there and saw something that stuck with him, or he lost family to the IRA."
"I'll see what we can find."
"Thanks," Emily said. "I know I can't overrule him on taking this case, and for all I know it's legitimate, but I just want the full picture of what we're dealing with."
"Completely understandable. And we might not be able to overrule him, but the Agency can absolutely pull you from the task force if we think you're being used or risked for no good reason."
"I don't think it's to that point yet, but I appreciate whatever you can find."
"Definitely," Shirer agreed. "I'll be in touch as soon as I have something for you. Don't hesitate to contact me if you need anything else."
"I won't. Thanks Shirer."
As Emily ended the call, Jeremy and Tsia looked at her expectantly.
"Well? Do your people have anything?" Jeremy asked.
"They're looking," Emily answered.
"In the meantime should we actually take a look at these," Tsia said, holding up her file. Emily and Jeremy reluctantly agreed. Emily was feeling none too enthused about the case, and the contents of the file did little to assuage her. Almost everything in the file was hearsay from unidentified confidential sources in the field. The Northern Irish police had kept some halfway decent notes about Doyle's alleged IRA activity, but there wasn't much in the way of a smoking gun. The evidence of his post-IRA career was lacking even more. There were heavily redacted testimonials stating that Ian Doyle had been involved in weapons transactions on behalf of "Valhalla" in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Iraq, Libya, and, interestingly North Korea, apparently selling weapons to a fledgling dissident group challenging the dictatorship there.
"Busy guy," Emily mused.
If, in fact, any of it was actually true. Emily thought it probably was, but there was little hard evidence to back up the cryptic informant statements, other than a couple of grainy photos taken in Iraq of somebody who might be Doyle and the fact Doyle had a lot of unexplained income apparently dispersed in various off-shore accounts throughout the Caribbean. All things considered, it was maybe enough to arrest Doyle for tax evasion, perhaps providing material support to terrorism. But Emily wasn't sure there was even enough in the file for a conviction, unless the confidential informants planned on testifying, which she very seriously doubted. There certainly wasn't enough to flip a guy like Doyle in interrogation, not if he was as tough and committed as Clyde and Sean seemed to think.
"This is shit," Jeremy remarked, flinging his file down on the table. Apparently he'd finished reading just after Emily. Tsia was still making her way through the last few pages.
"Not much to go on," Emily agreed.
"So what are we supposed to do now?" Tsia asked, flipping her copy shut.
"It's late," Emily remarked, glancing at her watch. As useless as the file was, reading it had still dragged into the early evening hours. "I vote we go home, come back and go through the details with a fine tooth comb tomorrow. I don't think those two are coming out any time soon anyway," Emil nodded towards Clyde's office. Sean and Clyde had now been in there for hours without so much as coming out for a coffee or a restroom break.
"Don't need to tell me twice," Jeremy remarked. "I'll give you two a lift since Clyde brought you directly from the airport."
Normally, Emily would insist on taking a cab or riding the metro home, rather than serve as the awkward third wheel to Jeremy and Tsia, but she was too tired to protest. Thankfully, the two showed restraint, merely chatting casually and making sure to include Emily. Whether this was out of politeness or because Jeremy and Tsia were naïve enough to think the rest of the team hadn't caught on to their budding romance, Emily neither knew nor particularly cared. Though she couldn't help but note that Jeremy dropped her off first, even though she knew for a fact that Tsia was living closer to the office.
Thanking Jeremy for the ride and waiving off his offer to carry her things, Emily dragged her messenger bag and overnight luggage through the front door of the townhouse and dropped them immediately in the entry way. She'd deal with unpacking in the morning. In the kitchen, she pulled the cork from a half-finished bottle of Merlot and poured a generous portion, intending to kill a few hours in front of the TV before settling in for an early bedtime. Her body had other ideas. Less than five minutes after she settled onto the couch, she began to doze off.
An high-pitched ring startled her out of her half-sleep. Jumping at the noise, she knocked the wine glass from the table and it shattered on the living room floor, sending a pool of purple red liquid flooding in all directions.
"Dammit," she swore. At least the floor was wood.
Momentarily ignoring the spreading mess, she grappled for the phone that had caused the whole calamity.
"Prentiss," she answered, not quite successfully concealing her grumpiness.
"It's Shirer," came the polished voice on the other end. "You alright Agent Prentiss?"
"Yes, sorry," she said, collecting herself. "Just dozed off. It's been a long couple of day." She omitted the tidbit about shattering a glass of alcohol on the floor of an Agency-owned house. An Assistant Station Chief didn't particularly need to know that information.
"I've had some of our people go through everything we have on Easter."
"And?"
"I'm afraid I don't have anything for you. We have pretty good inside intelligence on Easter's past exploits. He never served in Northern Ireland. We can't even tell that he's ever been there."
"What about family?"
"Nothing there. Father was a barrister, mother a school teacher. Both still alive. He's an only child. Grandparents died in old age of natural causes. Aunts, uncles, and cousins all still alive and well."
"He was just acting so weird," Emily sighed. She'd been so sure that the case was personal for Clyde, that something had him so fixed on Doyle and Valhalla. Maybe he just really had that much of a hangup about the IRA. Or maybe Emily had just flat misread the situation.
"I'm sorry I wasted your time."
"Never apologize to me for trusting your instincts," Shirer said. "It's not a problem at all. Are you sure you're still good with this assignment."
"Yes, yes. Definitely."
"Alright. You know how to reach me if you need me. And again, please don't hesitate."
"Thanks Shirer."
"Get some sleep, Agent Prentiss."
Emily didn't need telling twice. She took just enough time to haphazardly mop up the Merlot and clear the floor of glass shards before heading for a much-needed full night of sleep.
…
A night of sleeping in her own bed, or at least what was currently passing as her own bed, had the desired effect. Emily awoke the next morning feeling more refreshed than she had in days, at least until her bare foot met the sticky morass of spilled wine she'd apparently failed to clean up all that well.
"Nice going, Emily" she lightly reprimanding her past self.
After doing a much more thorough job of cleaning the previous night's mess, she put on a pot of coffee and clicked on the small TV set on her kitchen counter. Wrapping her fleece house coat more tightly around her shoulders to fend off the morning chill creeping through the poorly insulated windows, Emily passively took in the first few stories on the BBC world news, barely absorbing the anchors' dry recitations about European Union meetings and upcoming elections. Her ears perked when the broadcast transitioned to updates on the Iraq War. Emily had a few CIA friends deployed with the coalition forces, and anxiously followed the events there daily. Today in particular, what she saw made her blood turn cold.
"More information coming in this morning about the suicide bombing that rocked a police recruiting drive near Baghdad," the anchorwoman said seriously, putting on a sufficiently grave mask to deliver the news. "The BBC can now confirm that the bombing killed 12, including nine Iraqi civilians and three American soldiers. Coalition authorities have now identified the perpetrator as a resident of Europe. This man, Youssef Faris, a French national…."
Emily didn't even bother to hear the end of the sentence. As soon as the man's picture appeared on the screen, she made a mad dash up the stairs to her bedroom, changed into the first suitable set of work clothes she could find, and made a mad dash out the door. It was a small miracle she wasn't pulled over as she sped through the streets of Brussels toward the office.
Pulling up to the first open parking spot she could find, Emily half-ran down the sidewalk towards the building. For the first time, she noticed she hadn't even managed to put her shirt on properly – the mis-buttoned blouse hung awkwardly from her shoulders. Normally particular about appearing professional, Emily really didn't care that she looked like crap. Nobody on the street was paying much attention anyway – she blended in nicely with some of the disheveled academics from the university further down the street. The JTF team, on the other hand, noticed something was wrong the moment Emily walked into the office.
"Emily, what's wrong?" Tsia asked, immediately upon seeing Emily streak into the door and begin shuffling hurriedly through one of the two stacks of filed piled on her desk.
Emily ignored her. She could explain in a minute. Right now, she had to know. About a third of the way through the pile, she found what she was looking for: a thin manila file marked "Youssef Faris – France – Prefecture de police de Paris."
Ripping open the file to the first page, Emily saw the picture from the news staring back at her. Taunting her. Just below, the damning note in her own handwriting: "Threat level negligible. Cessation of surveillance recommended. –EP"
"Goddammit!" Emily yelled, flinging the file to the floor in disgust. She could feel the read heat of rage and frustration rising to her face.
"What in the bloody hell is going on?" Clyde demanded, rushing out form his office.
Emily couldn't answer. Staring stonefaced at the floor, she was unable to speak. Incapacitated by a level of guilt and self-loathing she hadn't felt since she was a confused, unhappy teenager half a lifetime ago.
"Emily," Clyde demanded again, but less brusquely, "what's going on?"
"That….that…bastard," she finally managed, "killed 12 people in Baghdad yesterday. And I let him."
Clyde picked the file up off the floor and examined it, frowning.
"This is the police recruitment drive bomber?" Clyde asked.
"You knew?" Emily demanded.
"I heard about the bombing on the news, but didn't think anything of it. Honestly I probably would have never noticed that the file was here."
"I had it open on my desk four days ago," Emily rued. "I could have stopped it."
"Emily, there are, what, maybe 20 documents in there?" Jeremy observed helpfully, nodding to the file in Clyde's hand. "You could not have possibly deduced anything from that."
"There had to be something," Emily muttered, half to herself and half to Jeremy. She tried to recall the details of the file from memory, but she was drawing a blank. She reached to retrieve the file from Clyde, who pulled it away from her grasp.
"We can discuss this in my office," Clyde said.
"I don't want to discuss it, I want to see the file."
"Well, that's not going to happen. I would, however, like to talk to you in my office. If I need to make that an order, then it's an order. Office. Now please."
Emily was thoroughly nonplussed, but it didn't look like she had much of a choice. Biting her lip hard to stop herself from saying something she might regret, she followed Clyde into his office.
"Sit," Clyde gestured, shutting the door behind them.
"I'd rather sta…"
"Sit." He insisted. It wasn't an invitation. She relented and settled into the plush leather opposite Clyde's desk.
"Can I see the file?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't even need to look at it to know that Jeremy was probably right," Clyde answered. "It's almost certain couldn't have predicted anything based on a file this thin."
"You don't know that."
"Let's say for the sake of argument that you're right," Clyde said, humoring her in spite of his clearly thinning patience. "There's something in that file that telegraphs this guy being a terrorist. Even an imminent threat. Then what? You got this file four or five days ago. Best case scenario, you call French police right away. He's still already in Iraq at that point."
"Again, you don't know that," Emily said, frustrated by Clyde's certainty. "There's a chance."
Clyde sighed resignedly. "I was afraid of this."
"What?" Emily asked, taken aback.
"I was afraid this might happen," Clyde explained. "When I was asked to help assemble the right people for this task force – and it is a very good team – I had reservations about each and every one of you. Tsia was inexperienced in the field. Jeremy can be obsessed with status. Sean is infamous in the British intelligence community for his drinking. Do you know what my biggest reservation was about you?"
"Tell me." Emily knew she was about to get her answer no matter what she said.
"Over six years in foreign intelligence work, and as far as I can tell, you've never failed."
"I don't follow," Emily protested. "I've seen things go wrong. I've seen people die," she said, conjuring some unpleasant old memories of South America she'd all but suppressed.
"I'm not saying you haven't seen unpleasantries," Clyde clarified. "I'm saying you haven't had everything go to shit and it be your fault."
"And that's a bad thing?"
"In all of my years in this line of work, I've found you need one ability more than any other. More than intelligence, more than bravery – you have to be able to live with a little bit of blood on your hands. Because in this line of work, the odds are stacked against us. Terrorists, war criminals – they only have to succeed once. Unless we're right 100% of the time, people die. And we'll never be right 100% of the time, but you have to stick your chin up and go back to work or even more people will die."
"So you're saying I have to forgive myself."
"I didn't say anything about forgiveness, darling. That doesn't interest me. I just need to know you can live with it and move on. Because Youssef Faris is in a thousand pieces now, but Ian Doyle is still out there, and I can't tolerate a distracted agent getting in the way of bringing him down."
At the mere mention of Doyle's name Emily saw the flicker of a manic glint back in Clyde's steely gaze. Emily felt her suspicions of the previous day reignited. There was something about this case for him. Her curiosity about Clyde and Doyle was almost starting to match the intensity of her guilt over the morning's news.
"Go home. Take the day to think about things," Clyde insisted. "But when you're ready to put this behind you and come back, I need your full attention on the Valhalla case."
"I can do it now," Emily insisted.
"You can't even put your shirt on right," he remarked, absentmindedly picking a piece of lint off of his own black polo.
"I was just in a hurry," she said acidly. "And I'm not fixing it in front of you."
"Fair enough," Clyde said. "I'm going to go see if Sean has decided to drag his drunk arse in yet, and if he's here the rest of us are going to start conferencing on Doyle. Take a few minutes to get yourself together and join us if you're ready. But I'm telling you right now, if I notice your full attention not on this case, I'm sending you home."
"Fine, I'll be there."
After Clyde left, Emily re-buttoned her shirt properly and pushed the messy curtains of her black hair behind her ears and out of her face. She paused for a moment to gather her thoughts. Clyde might be a blunt instrument at times, but he wasn't wrong. Awful as she felt, she was just going to have to move on from it. At least while she was on the clock. She'd do it the same way she got over every other thing that made her miserable – put it in a box in her head and do her best to forget it.
About five minutes after Clyde had left her alone in his office, Emily emerged, slightly more put together, and joined the others in the conference room. Sean must have come in at some point, because she distinctly heard the Scotsman's voice in the din as she entered.
"Joining us?" Clyde asked.
"Yep," Emily said, defiantly, taking a seat next to Tsia. "What'd I miss?"
"Your esteemed colleagues all seem to be of the opinion that there isn't enough information available to build an effective profile of Ian Doyle," Clyde said, clearly disappointed, though he didn't seem entirely surprised. Emily surmised that he'd probably already tried to build a profile himself before turning it over to her and the others, hoping for better insight.
"Which leaves us with one option – infiltration," Sean observed wisely. "Which is never easy even in theory, and will be even harder in practice in this case. Doyle keeps a tight circle of confidants. Occasionally employs mercenary types or makes brief alliances, but everybody even remotely close to the center of his operations is an old IRA vet going back at least 20 years with Doyle. We aren't going to get close that route."
"What about family?"
"Brother in prison for drug running. Appears not to have had a relationship with Doyle in years. Elderly mother, who he provides for, but from afar. Father dead. Nobody we can get close to who would know anything."
"I take it no spouse or children?" Jeremy asked, frowning thoughtfully.
"No," Clyde confirmed.
"That itself might be something we can use to our advantage," Tsia observed.
"What do you mean?" Clyde pressed.
"He's a man, at the bare minimum he has urges. May even want to love somebody. What if we found a female undercover operative and went at him that way?"
"It might be worth exploring, though I don't know if I like our chances of getting someone in a close enough relationship with him," Sean said. "Interpol has done some reconnaissance on his personal life, and let's just say he doesn't seem the commitment type. There are several that we know of. I think we may have pictures of known former partners on here, let me see." Sean added, fidgeting with the laptop connected to the conference room's projector screen. After a few clicks, pictures of at least 20 different women filled the screen. At least at first glance, to Emily it felt like looking into 20 small mirrors.
Jeremy let out a low whistle. "Busy man" he remarked, sounding almost impressed despite himself. Emily could feel Tsia lodging a kick at him under the table.
"He certainly has a type," Clyde observed.
"Yeah," Emily said, feeling she might as well acknowledge the elephant in the room. "They all look like me."
That's where we'll leave it off for now. Things are starting to get going! Stay tuned, if you're so inclined!