Ghosts That Haunt—7

Her godfather had once told Mariah about sending her father back to the Institute for mandatory training. Major Clack had needed her father there to understand and deal with a problem. Her father was sending her for actual training. She was part of an advanced class, and she found the work surprisingly easy.

Unfortunately, the second they saw her name, the instructors shot her an appraising look. For some, there seemed to be a moment's suspicion, but with others, there was dismissal. At least one of them softballed her, apparently certain her father had sent her to check up on him, so he wanted to curry favor for a good report. Two others were absolute bastards to her, but the rest treated her no differently than they did any of the other operatives there for training.

Her name didn't earn her any friends, either, especially since she had arrived two days after her course started. Some of her classmates who knew the name and knew she was the director general's daughter seemed to assume she did well through favoritism. As she always did, she performed well, studied hard, and passed the exams, usually at the top of the class. There were several operatives she knew who weren't hostile, but that was little comfort. There was one, though, a Mick Faraday, who apparently wished to simply torment her.

Faraday was good but arrogant—not that unusual in an operative with his background, she knew. He had trained as a sniper in the Army and ran one of ISI's tactical teams. He was there with hopes of joining the anti-terrorist team. Mariah knew that the operative who graduated first from training courses got his or her choice of assignment. Faraday seemed convinced Mariah was after the anti-terrorist slot, which, she supposed, might explain his animosity toward her. She entertained it one night, thought about what it could mean to her career, but then she thought about what else it would mean. She didn't want to live out of a suitcase, didn't want to pick up and fly to God knew where at a moment's notice. She wasn't interested in continually moving from place to place, never in one spot for longer than a few days or weeks. Honestly, she wasn't sure she wanted to stay with ISI. She thought about John, about the miscarriage, and then she thought about what she might like to do with her future.

Because she came up with no answers, she opened the text on her desk and settled in to study applied tactical theory in an urban environment.

Mariah felt battered and bruised when she returned to her dormitory room a few days later. She had good reason to feel that way, she reflected, because she was bruised, badly in a few places. She hated the hand-to-hand training. It had never been her forte. She was so much smaller than the other operatives—even many of the women—with whom she trained that it had often been easy to defeat her. They all had a longer reach; most outweighed her. She thought about the things John had taught her when she first went to Los Angeles, but many of those maneuvers were not allowed. She knew she should be able to overcome her size by fair means, but she hadn't. Her instructor told her she was overthinking it, but despite knowing he was right, it didn't help when she was up against an opponent on the mat.

And then she faced Faraday.

It started badly. He sent her to the floor all too easily, and it was only when he had reached down to help her up and softly hissed, "Daddy can't save you here, can he?" that she rallied. His hissed taunt pissed her off, and all the dirty tricks John had taught her came out when the next round began. In part, she took her anger at John out on Faraday, but mostly she simply saw red over the other man's statement that she was favored because of the circumstances of her birth. When she finished, she stood over Faraday, panting hard, her nose bloodied, her body bruised, and he lay unconscious on the mat. As the mist of rage cleared, she realized the trainer hadn't stopped her—and should have. She had a moment where she thought maybe she had been given a bit of favoritism after all.

Sergeant Hal Colson, their combat instructor, quickly disabused her of that. He stepped next to Mariah and turned to face her classmates. "Adderly just demonstrated one of the axioms of a field agent: do whatever you must to be the one who walks away. On the other hand, Adderly," and he turned to give her a raised brow and frown, "we generally don't use those tactics in training. I have to penalize your score for your improvisation." Colson dismissed everyone but her.

When two of Faraday's friends had taken him to see a medic and the others had left the gym, Colson crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall. "You've learned a lot since the last time I saw you here," he told her with a grin. "Dalhousie and I told you then you had to get over the fact that your opponents are bigger than you are. How'd you finally manage that?"

Mariah swiped at the blood oozing from her nose. "My latest field supervisor was six-four and a couple of hundred pounds of muscle. He wouldn't stop a training session until I could take him down."

Colson's grin broadened. "I heard you were working with the Americans."

She shrugged but didn't confirm.

"I recognized a couple of those maneuvers you took Faraday down with," he said, but she still didn't respond. "What did he say to you, by the way?"

She almost told him, but then she changed her mind and remained silent.

"Hit the showers," he told her, and then called, "Well done," as she walked away.

Now, in her room, it occurred to her that she might simply have made things more difficult with Faraday because of what she had done in the gym. She sighed. Perhaps, like John, staying calm wasn't what made her function. She had simply lost it when Faraday said what he did. A part of her acknowledged she'd done really well as a result. A part of her acknowledged her response was unreasonable.

She felt restless. Despite her efforts to wind down, Mariah remained on edge, so a little after ten she made her way to the pub on the Institute's grounds. She had been tempted to go earlier, but she waited until she knew most of the trainees would have cleared out. When she entered, several conversations stopped and then started again, quieter. She ignored that and made her way to the bar. The bartender gave her a bit of a smile and set a neat bourbon in front of her. She dug in her pocket, but he waved her money away. "Sergeant Colson said the first one was on him for smacking down Faraday," the man said softly. He leaned over the bar to say even more quietly, "The second one's on me." She blushed and wished she hadn't come out after all.

Mariah nursed her drink, stared at the neon LaBatt's sign behind the bar, and wondered where she would go when her training was over. Beckman had said she would return to Los Angeles, but Mariah suspected she'd be told her services were no longer needed. She further suspected that just as when she graduated as a new recruit, even if she finished at the top of the class, she wouldn't have her choice of ISI assignments. As she mused on her future, someone slid onto the bar stool next to hers.

She liked Dan Thompson. They'd gone through the Institute together the first time, and he had gone to foreign affairs afterward. She nodded at him when he said hello. "There are quite a few of us who enjoyed seeing you take Faraday down," he said quietly, and Mariah began to notice that no one seemed to want to be overheard saying so. That was okay with her. Frankly, she would just as soon no one said anything about it.

Lifting her glass, she said, "Talk about something else."

Even as she sipped her whiskey, it occurred to her that she had just given a John response. To her relief, Thompson did as she asked. As a result, she passed a pleasant hour and a half before she decided to get back to studying. She dropped enough money on the bar to cover her second drink, and Thompson walked her back to the dorm.

She had several more run-ins with Faraday. The hostility escalated, and after he dislocated her shoulder in another hand-to-hand combat class, Colson privately told her he wanted to move her to another group. Mariah knew that let Faraday win, and she told him so. After they argued, she pointed out that in the field an operative didn't get to avoid unpleasantness, so he reluctantly let her stay where she was. She did, however, double and triple check everything when Faraday was involved. There would be no training "accident" if she could help it.

As they came to the end of the training course, Mariah and Dan Thompson wound up number one and number two respectively. Faraday was less than one-one-thousandth of a point behind them. Mariah and Thompson were tapped as team leaders for the final training mission. Mariah would head a tactical team, and Thompson would head a negotiating team for a hostage scenario. Sergeant Colson had looked at the two of them when he told them and the class that ISI had insisted, mainly because of Mariah's involvement and complaints that she was receiving marks because of who she was, on having an outside evaluator brought in. Mariah was relieved, but Thompson was pissed off. She assumed they would bring someone in from the RCMP or CSIS, so she wasn't concerned. They each took their mission packets and went to study them and prepare.

"Faraday," Thompson said as they made their way to the dorm. She shot him a confused look. "He's the one who made the complaints.

Mariah figured that was a pretty safe bet, so she said nothing.

"Is this why you've spent most of your career in ICOM?"

She considered not answering. "Not exactly," she said, and she was glad they had arrived at their floor. She told him she'd see him the next day and let herself in her room. She knew the stakes were even higher for her the following afternoon. If she passed, there would be no more questions about her competence when someone outside ISI evaluated her. If she didn't, then she would never escape the notion that she had had her way smoothed for her by her godfather and her father.

Not that her path had been very smooth parked in the biggest backwater ISI had when all she had ever wanted was field operative status.

Her phone rang near midnight, and she picked it up, recognizing her father's ringtone. She probably shouldn't talk to him, she reflected, but she answered anyway. He asked how she was doing, and she told him fine. He asked how the course was going, and she told him fine. He snorted and said, "You're not very responsive, Mariah."

"I have the final exam tomorrow, Dad. We shouldn't be talking to each other at all."

"They told me you've taken a lot of flak for being who you are."

She sighed. "I don't think we should talk about this."

"I talked to Diane Beckman," he told her. "You're to report back to Los Angeles as soon as you're released from the Institute. I'll pick you up, and we can have dinner before you get on the plane."

"You know, Dad," she said, "I seem to remember something about the top graduate getting to choose his or her assignment."

"Under normal circumstances, that would be true," he agreed, "but even if you hang on to the top slot, you already have an assignment."

Mariah was torn. "What if I don't want to go back?"

He didn't answer her question, instead, he told her he would see her the next day and hung up.

There was a missed call from a number she didn't recognize on her phone. She ignored it, shut the phone off, and concentrated on planning for the exercise the next day.

Mariah wouldn't have confessed it in a million years, but part of what she loved about the job was the rush, the adrenaline coursing through her when she was armed and on the hunt. She felt a small grin tug at her mouth. This was what John loved so much about his own job, she knew, and why the Los Angeles assignment had chafed.

She had been seriously pissed off when her father recalled her for mandatory training. Mostly it had been uncertainty and a contrary and simultaneous certainty that she was being sent away. While the training was required for the job, she was still coping with the fallout from Gray Laurance and from the miscarriage. She had to admit, though, that her father had been right to drag her out of Los Angeles and make her come home. It felt good to be home—even if it was only temporary—good to be in a place where every move wasn't watched, every word wasn't listened to. It felt good not to have to go to the Buy More. Most of all, it felt good not to have the constant reminders of John.

That hadn't stopped her from using him as the excuse for why she needed several weeks off from the Buy More or from putting the photograph she had asked Ellie for on her dresser in her Ottawa loft before she left for the Institute. She liked the photograph of her and John on the beach. They looked like they were in love, though Mariah had no illusions about how John felt about her. She hadn't heard from him other than that one, brief phone call. After she lost the baby, her father had once more offered to find him for her. She nearly told him to do so, but then she stopped. John had called the last time because her father had found him, but he hadn't said much of anything to her. It had been a duty call and nothing more. She wanted the next time she heard from him—assuming there was a next time—to be because he actually wanted to talk to her.

Then there was the e-mail. She had told no one but Ben about the message John had sent her. In part, that was because she hadn't seen it until after she lost the baby, and she wasn't talking to anyone much. By then, the need to talk to John was gone. The message itself had begun innocuously. He claimed to have left her a note, a note she had never found, though she supposed the team who had stripped his things from the apartment could have taken it. The only thing wrong with that was that John's things had remained in place for a week before Beckman had them removed. He also claimed Beckman had said she would tell Mariah he had to leave, but the other woman had done no such thing—at least not in any kind of timely manner and not until Mariah asked questions the General could no longer ignore. She wasn't sure she believed him, but John had never, to the best of her knowledge, lied to her.

It was the second part of the message, though, that had made her cry. John had written that he missed her. He had never said anything like that to her before. Admittedly, other than her time in Chicago and brief absences on his part for the NSA, they had not spent much time apart since she had arrived in California. She had missed him as well, more so at night when she was used to having him to herself.

By the time she saw the e-mail, her need to talk to him was gone. She would never tell him, she had decided, that she had been pregnant. He would probably be happier never knowing. If he ever learned the truth, she wondered if he would blame her for the pregnancy, if he might think she had gotten pregnant on purpose. It was in part because of that insecurity that she hadn't responded to the e-mail. She justified it by his admission that he didn't check the account often, but the truth was that she was afraid the relative anonymity of e-mail would lead her to write something she shouldn't, something that would betray how she felt about him, something that would guarantee she never saw him again.

"Hey, Adderly," Thompson said as he joined her.

She finished fastening the closures on her vest and nodded. She picked up her handgun, dropped the clip to check that it was loaded and that it was loaded with the simulated ammunition they would use in place of bullets, snapped the clip back, and put the gun in the holster attached to her hip. "You're ready to take the negotiation, right?" she asked.

He nodded and began pulling on his own vest. Mariah picked up her assault rifle and inspected it. She went through the additional dummy ammunition she'd been given, checked to make sure she couldn't really kill anyone. Since the accidental death of an operative during a training mission while she was in college, ISI had had an incredible paranoia about never using live ammo during training missions.

"This should be a cakewalk," Thompson said, which made Mariah grimace as she loaded the pack she would take to the site. She was not the superstitious type, but his comment sent a shiver ghosting down her spine. If there was one thing she had learned from her few short years in this business, it was that the real thing was rarely easy, and training missions had slowly begun to change to add the element of surprise one could face in the actual field. ISI's trainers had developed a reputation for ingeniously and unpredictably skewed opponents in the scenarios they trained with. There was no longer any such thing as a by-the-book play for these things, and she well knew it. She gave a slight smile as she scooped up her helmet. Several months with the Intersect had taught her to appreciate that those curveballs made it all much more like the real world.

Mariah waited on Thompson. They walked together to the room where they would receive their last-minute instructions before they were taken to the training ground. "I heard some hotshot Yank's been pegged as the evaluator," her companion said as they strode down the hallway.

For a moment, Mariah thought of John, but she knew he couldn't be the one. "Wonder what burnout the Americans sent," she snorted.

Thompson grinned and shrugged. "Didn't catch a name. Dubinsky apparently knows him, said he's a big fucker." He held the door for her. Mariah knew it was the last courtesy she'd get once they were in the room and started. "Meet up at O'Malley's afterward?" he asked as they took their seats.

Her father had told her he was taking her to dinner, but she supposed she could spare time for a drink before they left. She'd have to return to the dorm and pack, after all, before leaving. Her father wouldn't begrudge her a drink with her classmates, so she gave Thompson a grin and asked, "You buying?"

He chuckled. "First round's on you, Adderly."

"Yeah, right," she snorted. "You'll pack the place with your buddies, and my pockets aren't that deep."

"And here I heard you were loaded."

They shut up then, took their seats, and listened to their instructor. They'd all been there for over a month running through exercises, taking refresher courses, and, in a few cases, courses on new techniques that had come along since they had last come in for training. Mariah had to admit she owed John for her exceptional performance. She'd learned a lot from him, and she shut her brain off when it went to the personal things she had learned from him.

The exercise scenario was relatively simple: extremists had taken over a strip mall and held hostages. She and Thompson and their teams would have to work together to clear the mall, rescue the hostages and take the terrorists. Mariah had her doubts that they would ever really see such action in Canada, but the world was getting weirder, so who knew? She was handed a package containing her specific orders and the communications channels they were to use. She was also given blueprints of the mall and schematics for the electrical and heating and cooling systems, complete with maps of the ductwork. Part of Mariah thought that was cheating since she would have had to find a way to get those on her own if this were real world. She was given her communications equipment, and she strapped the battery pack and switched her mike on.

- X -

Casey sighed and settled in. He put the headset on, so he could hear the teams talk to one another. He scanned the monitors, noted the placement of cameras. He rapidly read through the scenario once more—terrorists with hostages in a strip mall. There would be two teams, one of them a tactical team, working together. He skimmed the evaluation rubric. It wasn't much different than what he was used to, but this time he'd be the asshole telling them what they did wrong.

V. H. joined him in the command post. He nodded at Casey and took the other seat. "Ready?" At Casey's own nod, he told them to begin when they were ready.

The first thing Casey noticed was the chatter. They talked too much, and too much of it wasn't about the job in front of them. He made some notes and continued to listen. His pen stopped mid-word when he heard a familiar voice say, "Can the talk." He shot a look at the man still seated beside him. V. H. ignored him, kept his eyes glued to the monitors. Casey turned to them himself, looked for her. He found her in full tactical gear signaling members of her team to go in the back of one of the stores. He momentarily thought they should have gone in both ways, but the front was glass, and they would have been spotted. If this were real, those inside could panic, think they were the next victims. Panic was never a good thing in such situations.

Riah announced the all clear after she had the agents playing shop assistants and customers escorted out the back and away. She directed the clearing of all the shops except the one where the hostages and terrorists were. It was efficiently done, even if an operative named Faraday apparently couldn't keep his mouth shut. Faraday was on the roof opposite the strip mall. She had two other team members who kept engaging the sniper, and despite Riah telling them to shut up, they ignored her. The chatter became about her, in fact.

Casey closed his eyes a second when they made the first serious mistake—and it wasn't, thankfully, Riah's. She made the right call, but two of the team decided they knew better and disobeyed a direct order. She sent them to the back before sending another two up top, through the ceiling. She asked for a position report, and then she placed four other operatives, two on each side, outside the front where they could swing around and cover. The two she sent to the back didn't go to the double doors in the loading area as she'd instructed but instead decided to go to the roof. He made rapid notes. He'd remember their names, though: Parker and Sontag.

She called for a visual on the terrorists from the snipers on the roof opposite, but Faraday talked over them. Even Casey could hear how pissed off she was when she told Faraday she would stand him down and send up a replacement if he didn't shut the hell up. The man argued. She carried through on her threat. She repeated her request for the visual, but they couldn't tell her much. The terrorists had moved the hostages to the back. Her team in the ceiling ran a camera through a vent and got her a report. The terrorists were standing, but the hostages were lying flat on the floor.

Riah let the negotiators do their work and held her team in place. Her team got audio in. When she was told to stand by to go in, she asked again for a perimeter check and then a position check. The two up top lied. As a result, Riah was unaware there was a clear escape route unguarded. Casey was irritated on her behalf even as he acknowledged she was at fault for not making sure her orders had been followed. When the go order came, she asked for one last visual check from the cameras. There had been no change in the positions of the terrorists or the hostages, so she sent her team in.

Casey watched, shook his head. Predictably, the terrorists returned fire, and when they realized no one came in the back, they escaped. The trainers called a halt and took a count: if it had been real, the team killed one terrorist, but the other five escaped. Riah lost two of her team and one hostage who stood up.

Through the monitors, he watched Riah walk out of the store front and motion for her team's snipers to come down from the roof opposite. She unbuckled her helmet and removed it before she snapped the strap closed again and slid it over the butt of her holstered sidearm so the helmet dangled on her hip. Her dark blonde hair was in a braid down her back, and he noticed it wasn't quite as long as it had been. He listened as she reamed out her two errant operatives, smiled slightly as he scribbled his observations. She then tersely pointed out her team's other errors before she moved into making sure each member of her team knew what she thought he or she had done well. Casey was intrigued by that. He was used to the reverse of that—the team leader or a trainer mentioning a general well done and then launching into extended error-finding. When she wound down, she told them to check their weapons and hit the showers.

The lead negotiator approached her, and she waited for him. She slung the strap of her rifle over her shoulder and began to strip off the gloves she'd worn, tucked them into her belt. They compared notes on what had happened, and Casey listened to a pretty succinct but accurate evaluation from the two of them. Casey gritted his teeth when he watched the negotiator reach out and stroke a hand up her arm to her shoulder and ask Riah, "Still on for O'Malley's?" and when she agreed, the man said, "Remember, first round's on you. Wear something sexy." She laughed, and Casey wondered if the pen would break before his fingers did where they gripped it. When the other operative moved away, she turned and scanned the roofline. "Okay, Faraday," she said, "Get down here."

She started to undo her bulletproof vest. When the other operative didn't appear, she cocked her head but remained standing alone in the middle of the street on the training ground. "This week, Faraday," she snapped out, pulling off her vest. Casey snorted, amused.

- X -

One of her dad's friends had once told Mariah you never heard the shot that killed you.

As she hit the pavement, Mariah had three seemingly simultaneous thoughts: he'd been wrong, it hurt like a sonofabitch, and she would never see John again because she was about to die.

She could feel the blood, could feel it pump out, and as the heat of the pavement scorched her cheek, she tried to calm down so it would pump out slower.

As things started to go black around the edges, she thought that at least she wouldn't have to listen to the inevitable dressing down for having taken her vest off.