Stephenie Meyer owns Twilight. I'm borrowing her characters, dressing them up in MARPAT, and giving them some guns. BilliCullen and Scooterstale are making sure they're ready for inspection.

June 13
Undisclosed Location
Somewhere in the Middle East

"Did you find anything?"

Bent over a pile of quarter-inch wide shreds of paper, Corporal Jasper Whitlock frowned and shook his head. "Just a bunch of old cash receipts from a coffee house and some kind of local bâzâr." With a quick flick of his wrist, he motioned over to the other side of the room where Emmett stood sentry by the open window. There beside the staff sergeant on top of a beat up foldout table sat a hammered brass wastebasket – an ugly old thing straight out of a long-gone era. Its patina was splotchy and dark from years and use, nothing that strange considering their locale, but the telltale coating of char around the bent metal lip told a different story.

"That's where the real intell is… what's left of it anyway," Jasper went on as he held up a strip of paper to the light. Finding nothing but another long column of rial symbols, he tossed it aside to claim another. "There's what looks like two ticket stubs left on top of the ash. Can't read the dates or the names, though. These fuckers were smart enough to burn their tracks."

With a quick dip of his chin, Edward crossed the room, stealing a hard glance at the trailing scientist just before reaching the table. Quiet and focused on the floor as she tiptoed her way through the maze of debris, fear was a dark storm in the woman's eyes, washing her too-soft, too-fine face in a wet sheen of stress-induced sweat. Tucked under her teeth, her bottom lip was as white as the rest of her complexion, and by her sides, her gloved fists looked like tight little hammers covered in suede. Edward cursed under his breath. Regardless of her good intentions, shooting, or weapons expertise, Dr. Isabella Swan was every bit the lamb cut loose in the middle of the ruthless savannah that he'd named her to be.

But then again, it wasn't like he could blame the woman, Edward thought as he wiped the dust and grime off his face with his sleeve. Her whispered words from mere moments ago – terrifying in both their potential and their shaky delivery – still ricocheted inside his own skull. Only an idiot wouldn't be shaking right now. So when the big man by the window shifted his rifle and cocked a curious brow at their approach, Edward just shook his head and mouthed a silent, "Give her a minute." Then, as he loosened his chinstrap, to Jasper, he asked, "Can you at least get the airline off those stubs?"

The younger man shrugged and chucked the rest of the shredded papers into an empty cardboard box before following the captain over to the table. "It's hard to tell without being able to read the lettering, but there's an artsy-looking bird of some sort in the corner. So I'm guessing Mahan or Caspian. Both would have regular flights through Tehran."

"Did you pull up the flight schedules already?"

"Yes, sir."

"You alright, Doc?" Emmett asked, eying the green tint of Bella's downturned face as the two other Marines continued their speculations. When she looked up, half-dazed, like she wasn't entirely sure where she was, he reached into one of his chest pouches and tossed her a blister pack that rattled with a dozen small white squares. "Strong, and it tastes like shit, but it'll cut through some of the stink so you don't want to hurl all the time."

Catching the pack out of reflex more than intent, Bella grimaced because it wasn't the smell that made her want to vomit. At least not now. Nonetheless, she nodded a wordless thanks, gave herself a hard shake, and popped two of the squares. When she bit down on the no-name pieces of gum, a sudden rush of menthol flooded her mouth, burned through her respiratory system, and made her eyes water, almost as though she'd just swallowed one of the mothballs her grandmother used to toss up into the attic. But the staff sergeant was right. The pungent fire cut right through the stench of death and decay, and more importantly, it cleared her mind enough that the circling images of Riley's whiteboard – and all that it meant – came to a screeching halt and brought the room back into sharp focus.

"It's Mahan," Edward muttered as he tilted the bin toward the incoming light from the window and carefully lifted the edge of one of the blackened stubs with the tip of a slender, black metal pen. "And that… that might be a 'v' and an 'i'. But you're right," he spat, "can't see shit."

Jasper peered into the brass basket, mimicking his commander's harsh scowl. "If we can manage to get a few of these scraps back to the Humvee without breaking them into a thousand goddamned pieces…" His head tilted. "I might have something that'll help us see the leftover ink. Maybe. We can try… Sometimes glycol can swell…"

"You need sub-750 nanometers…" Bella interjected, speaking without really thinking, and then trailing off mid-sentence when the two men abruptly swung around to face her. The captain's brow arched high, hiding beneath the low rim of his helmet, as he glanced over to the corporal. Instead of rebuking her for the interruption like she expected, when she didn't continue, he quietly urged her on, "Go ahead, Doctor. We're listening."

Shoving a string of damp hair back up under her own helmet, Bella took a deep breath that called attention to every bit of the weight she wasn't used to wearing. Like Emmett's hellfire gum, the pressure of the armor was grounding, centering her in the here and now rather than in the possibilities of what lay ahead. She inhaled again, deeper, sucking down a lungful of menthol-flavored death, and then slowly walked over to the table to take a closer look at what was left of the burned papers. Not much at all – a scant inch and a half of sooty cellulose, and with edges so thin they'd turn to dust if breathed on wrong – but maybe. "Do you think you can fish them out?"

Edward nodded once – a quick, succinct movement of someone accustomed to making important decisions with very little time to debate. "If you think you can do something, we'll certainly try."

Bella looked from the captain to the corporal, and then back to the captain again, whose bright gemstone irises now studied her as carefully as she'd studied the stubs. "When I was in graduate school…" she explained, waving a haphazard hand. "I took a couple of elective physics courses. In one, we studied optics and we spent some time on reflectography, labs included." Bella paused and began digging through one of the deeper pouches by her hip. "Sometimes what you can't see in the visible spectrum, in other words, with the naked eye… like a painting underneath another painting, for example… you can see if you can capture the image using different wavelengths of light…"

"Like infrared," Jasper piped in, right as Bella produced her night vision goggles. When she nodded in surprise, he flashed her a sudden, out of place, and almost excited-looking grin that reminded her all too well how Riley used to happily pounce on their discoveries, regardless of the risk or ramifications. "Damn, that's a good idea, Doc," he said, immediately yanking off his gloves. "I hadn't even thought about that. We've even got thermal on these, too. Between the two and a little unauthorized tuning, I bet we'll see something."

"You think it'll work?" Edward asked.

Chewing the inside of her cheek, Bella shrugged. "I'm not sure of anything, to be honest, but in theory, maybe. It's worth a shot at least…"

Palm over his mouth, gray eyes intent and focused on the table before them, Jasper thought for a long moment before plucking Bella's goggles out of her hand. "Agree," he finally said as he began efficiently stripping off the attached helmet bracket. "The absorption range of the ink ought to be different enough from the left over paper underneath it, and the soot on top is pretty much all carbon so it'll definitely be in a different region. We should see three distinct image layers." He flicked on the goggles and fiddled with two of the knobs until a high-frequency ascending whine kicked on. "It may take a little trial and error, and I may wind up wrecking the circuitry, but we should be able to get enough absorption contrast to see something." Crinkling his nose and motioning toward the basket, he added, "Either way, it's a much better option than trying to carry this shit with us and me dumping a bunch of antifreeze on it to see if the paper'll swell."

Out here in the middle of the desert, in an abandoned, bloodied bolthole where her colleague had been tucked away and tortured for his knowledge, and surrounded by a group of battle-hardened Marines, the corporal's answer wasn't what Bella expected to hear at all. "How–"

The corporal shot the scientist another split-second grin, whipped out his leatherman, and then shoved the tip of the collapsible screwdriver into one of the slots on her goggles. The hard plastic casing split with a loud crack!, revealing a complex circuit board and a series of tiny tubes. "I was an EE before I enlisted." He winked. "UT-Austin."

Slowly shaking her head, as if that were a perfectly reasonable and expected response, Bella tucked her middle and ring fingers under her thumb and muttered under her breath, "Hook 'em Horns."

Before Jasper could bark out a laugh, Edward cut in, short, to the point, and all business. "Alright. Jazz, you and Dr. Swan, see what you can find. Wreck whatever you need to, but do it quick. I don't want us here any longer than we have to be. Ten minutes, max, and then we move. Clear?"

"Yes, sir."

"Where's Blondie?"

Emmett answered first, pointing toward the stairs behind them. "Upstairs."

As the captain spun toward the back of the room, Bella caught him by the elbow. "Do you still have your flashlight?"

For whatever reason, he didn't reply at first. Instead, like before when they'd stood on the tarmac in the middle of the Negev, the two just stared until after a moment, Bella's fingers gave an involuntary squeeze, pressing into the hard, sinewy muscle of Edward's forearm and startling them both. She swallowed as her hand fell away. "That little dim one from this morning?" she mumbled. "We might need an artificial light source and that LED is pale and almost white in color." Not looking away, finding what in her expression she didn't know, Edward nodded – another one of those short, succinct movements of his – and before she could blink, a small cylinder of cool steel found her palm. A second later, flashlight in hand, Bella watched Edward's long stride eat up the room before taking the stairs two at a time and disappearing above.

She didn't turn away until a quiet, "You ready to try this, Doc?" came from her right.

Upstairs, unconsciously rubbing his arm where five fingerprints of warmth still lingered, Edward followed the sounds of cursing and slamming drawers down a long, narrow hall lined with crooked pictures of a family years-since evacuated. Like the downstairs rooms, the concrete floor up here was covered in trash and debris, but it was darker, with even fewer working bulbs on the walls and the ceilings. Inside the rooms, little more than slivers of late afternoon sunlight peeked around the edges of the window coverings to light the spaces, just enough to make out the handful of thin, single-sized mattresses in the corners. He counted upwards of twenty, and that was just this location.

Silent, out of habit more than anything, Edward didn't stop until he reached the last door on the left, what had once served as a child's bedroom. Faded cartoon characters decorated the walls – a yellow lion, a pale blue bear.

"Anything?" Rosalie muttered as she squatted down low to rummage through the bottom drawer of a small cream-colored bureau positioned against the far wall. She spared the captain a quick, cursory glance before tossing a wad of old baby clothes into an already-heaping pile.

Not surprised that the gunnery sergeant had detected him, nor at her terse address, Edward pulled out a compact, black satellite phone and began quickly typing. "Worse than we thought," he finally answered.

Standing, the gunny gave a loud huff of aggravation. "How much worse?"

When Edward looked up from the screen, what greeted him was a pair of ice blue eyes, cool, measuring, and now fully trained on him from across the room. "About as worse as it can get."

"Mother. Fuck."

"That about sums it up," he said, grimacing.

Abandoning the bureau and the rest of the room, Rosalie walked over and leaned against the doorframe. "Fully functional?" she asked as she crossed her arms and settled into an uncannily still position that Edward recognized immediately. From years of observation, he'd concluded that the vast majority of people, military and non, gave away their fear or anxiety through nervous agitation and uncontrolled movements. But Rosalie Hale wasn't the majority of people. When a rare something made her nervous, she didn't move at all. She just looked pissed off, and right now, from what Edward could see, she was angry enough to spit fire.

"Probably." Edward's grimace hardened as his fingers flew through the last few lines to the General. "Dr. Swan found what she thinks was Dr. Biers' last bit of work. Thinks he tried to stall them as long as he could."

Nails digging through her blouse into the tops of her arms, Rosalie swore again and glowered at a dark charcoal-colored scuffmark on the bottom half of the doorframe. "And we didn't get to him fast enough, right?"

Edward shook his head, hit the send button on the short report, and then tucked the phone back into his pocket – right next to the slim burgundy case containing three as yet untested XR-5 antidote injectors. When his fingers brushed over the case, he couldn't stop the eerie thought that said that the good doctor's Friday night skunk work might just prove necessary after all.

"Goddamned CIA."

"Pretty much." Edward shifted opposite, copying Rosalie's pose but against the wall at the end of the hall where he could face her and anything coming. His gaze automatically skipped down the long passageway, stopping at each open doorway, as he listened to the muffled voices of the two Marines and the scientist below. Individual words were impossible to discern through the echo and dense flooring, but from the timbre of their conversation, it sounded like they were making progress. Hopefully, they were. After a second, Edward scratched his chin and blew out a long, slow breath through pinched lips. "Dr. Swan says she thinks Biers got it stable enough to mount on a warhead."

The gunnery sergeant didn't even flinch. "Then we assume that's what they have."

"That's the best case," Edward replied.

"Worst?"

"Worst, that it's not one but several, and they're already auctioning."

"Or aiming…" Rosalie finished with a growl, her fist clenching inside the crook of the opposite elbow. "Do we have any leads? 'Cause I didn't find shit up here."

The captain stared down the dark hall, his features hard, as grim as death itself. It was an expression Rosalie had seen more times than she could count, and none of those times had been good ones. "Not much," he said after a second, his voice as hard as his features. "Jazz and the Doc are working on some old burned up papers, trying to see if they can figure out any of the names or dates…" Edward shoved his hands in his pockets and dropped his gaze to the floor, tracing a jagged crack in the concrete. "But fuck knows if they'll find anything. Hoping the General'll come through with some news from Langley. I'll call up El'azar when we get back to the vehicles and see if he can dig up anything else, too." He paused, brows furrowed, and when he spoke again, there was an edge of finely honed anger in his voice, something beyond his normal, no-nonsense tone. And that made Rosalie blink because that kind of emotion wasn't something she was used to hearing from their commander, at least not in the field. "Between you and me? Rose, this is a fucking mess."

"No shit." Shrugging a pair of tense shoulders as though this were any other operation on any other given day, Rosalie pushed off the doorframe and sighed. "But it is what it is." A long minute passed, and then without any other cue than the subtle tells developed from years of working side by side, the two began to walk in unison toward the stairs. Before they reached the end of the hall, putting on a faint smirk that had no business being worn – now of all times – Rosalie bumped Edward's arm and asked, "So, she's pretty smart, huh?"

Edward's lips tugged up at the corners into the barest hint of an involuntary smile at the gunny's unexpected query. More so, at the grudging respect he heard buried in her smartass tone. "Seems that way," he said slowly, that earlier glimpse of anger now strangely – or not so strangely, Rosalie thought – absent.

With an undisguised roll of her eyes, she slung her shotgun around and behind her back. "Whatever. I can't believe you gave her your sidearm." She spat and shot the captain a pointed glare. "If she shoots me or dislocates her shoulder or some other stupid shit like that, it's on your ass. You know that, right?"

"I do."

"Good. Just wanted to make sure you hadn't lost your mind."

That barely-there tight-lipped smile widened. "She shoots better than Em."

Rolling her eyes again, this time with an accompanying noise somewhere between a scoff and a laugh, Rosalie started down the stairs. Without looking back, she called out, "Who doesn't?"

Edward chuckled as he followed her down, but before he even hit the bottom step, his head twisted around to survey the room, instinctively checking each point of entry. Now at the opposite window from the table, Emmett scanned the horizon through a pair of rangefinder binoculars, muttering under his breath.

"What is it?"

Shoulders bunching, the big man frowned, but he didn't pull away from the lenses. Instead, with a grumbled curse, he toggled one of the switches and hit the ranging button on top. "Maybe nothing. Maybe dust… Maybe a herd of fuckin' camels. Hard to tell out here."

"You call Tink?"

"Not yet," Emmett muttered. "'Bout to, though. I want to see if she can do another sweep of that canyon before we move out. I don't like that those asshat amateurs are so close."

Nodding, Edward moved to the center of the room and motioned over to Rosalie. "Blondie, do a final check out back, will ya?" Already heading in that direction, with a quick, efficient inclination of her chin, she shouldered her shotgun and slipped down the hall toward the backdoor. When she disappeared around the corner, silent as a church mouse, the captain turned back to Emmett and asked, "Where's Jazz?"

"Here," Jasper answered. When Edward swung around, he caught a pair of dusty boots edging backward and out from under an old tarp that had been doubled up and draped over a couple of chairs – a makeshift tent of sorts – in the back corner. It was the darkest area in the room, and the gray-brown coloring of the tarp blended against the similar color of the concrete walls so well that he almost missed the second pair of boots, unmoving and peeking out from beneath the tarp, their smaller soles just visible.

Jasper emerged and stood, quickly swiping dirt from his knees, and then he blinked a handful of times against the brighter space before gesturing to the tent. "Wasn't dark enough out here so we had to make it night." A slow, sly grin spread across the younger man's face. "But, Captain, the Doc was right... Fucked her goggles all up, just like I was afraid we'd have to do, but it worked. Better than I guessed it would."

A small amount of the tension in Edward's spine uncoiled. Walking over to the impromptu darkroom, he asked them both, "What'd you find?"

From under the tarp came a muffled voice, the words muttered fast and tinged with the same excitement all over the corporal's new perma-grin. "They arrived a few weeks ago, three of them, not two, we think. Can't tell 100% because of where the stubs were torn, but one of them arrived either the thirteenth or the fifteenth of May. The other two," Bella went on, rustling the tarp when she waved her hand without thinking. "I think it says the twenty eighth of April. Could be the twenty sixth, but we found another partially recoverable travel document underneath the stubs that seems to support the twenty eighth. And that would agree with the timing of Riley's disappearance."

"And it was Mahan," Jasper added. "Definitely. Even got the flight numbers, so we can get the spooks to cross check the dates. Might even hack the security cameras for images."

"Names?"

Bella's head popped out from under the tarp, and she tilted her head straight up to look at the captain. Smudges of dirt colored her cheeks and twin rivulets of sweat ran down her temples, not exactly the image of an ivory tower scientist in a pristine white lab coat. But from the brace of her jaw and creases at the corners of her eyes, Edward could almost taste the twinge of annoyance at his interruption. The fear from before was long-gone, too, replaced with a kind of focused drive that told him that the person he was seeing right now was who she actually was. "Last names only, and one's just a partial," she rattled off, stopping to chew her lip. She made a face, spitting out the grit that'd found its way there, and then made an even more sour face once she realized what she'd just done.

"What were they?" he asked, almost smiling again.

Bella blew wet hair away from her face. "The document, we couldn't tell. But the stub from May, the person went by something or other James. The other stub – the one from late April – had what looked like a last name of Victor. Or something like that. That one was female, though."

Edward's forehead folded. "How do you know that?"

Unbalanced and awkward from the bulk of her vest, Bella slowly crawled out from the tent, stood, and then scrubbed the sweat from her face, doing nothing but spreading those dark smudges until her bone-white complexion turned gray. "It was stamped through a different security line. Jasper said the symbols in the stamp were all feminine."

Still by the window, but facing inside, Emmett shoved the binoculars into his pack and crossed his arms over his massive chest. "What the hell would a wo– "

Before he could finish, a sudden burst of static shrieked through their headsets.

"Captain?!" The lieutenant's voice was high, tight, and even louder than usual. Without asking, Edward knew exactly what was coming next, and so did the other two Marines in the room. Stances instantly shifted, rifle positions changed, and all three men eyeballed the open desert through the window.

"Go ahead, Tink."

"Just thought I'd let you know I'm taking fire." Emmett's eyes flew to Edward's, as another burst of static pulsed through the headsets. This time, a series of three hollow-sounding thumps – RPGs from the sound of them, and far too close to Alice's helo for comfort – followed.

"Fuck," Edward muttered right as Rosalie appeared from the rear and immediately took position opposite Emmett and Jasper at the second window. Into his mic, he said, "You asking me permission?"

Over the rhythmic wop-wop-wop of the rotor blades, a barrage of machine gun fire from her chin-mounted .50 answered. A second later, a missile launched, the loud shushing sound of a hellfire air-to-ground lighting off. There was a long pause, and then a jarring boom that vibrated the walls echoed in the distance. Alice growled a triumphant, "More like forgiveness!"

Shoulders shaking, Emmett chuckled into his mic. "Ooh rah!"

"Details, Lieutenant," Edward barked, as he began to simultaneously issue rapid-fire silent commands. At nothing more than a pointed look and minute nod, Jasper bolted up the stairs, and then after a series of quick hand gestures – a language Bella couldn't follow – the two sergeants began moving with purposeful intent. Rosalie dropped to a knee and began sifting through her drop pouches, producing grenades and multiple magazines, each pre-loaded with more than a dozen shells. "What's your position?" Edward asked, one fist balled tight at his hip.

There was another ear-splitting round of machine gun fire before Alice responded. "Stupid assholes… 13 klicks to your southeast. Just circled back to check the canyon again. When I got there, they started lobbing all kinds of shit. Got half a dozen still on the ground and keeping me busy, but, Captain, there's three coming your way."

"Visible artillery?"

"Light armor only, but one of 'em has that scorpion symbol on its hood. I don't know where he came from. Wasn't there in the canyon when we came in."

Edward glanced over to Rosalie. "Fine. See any individuals?"

"No faces, but the guy with the scorpion is wearing dark fatigues, and he looks like some kind of warlord. Just a couple people per vehicle, though – maybe seven or eight – and they're all carrying AKs."

"How long?" Edward asked, as he checked his watch before reaching into his pocket for the satellite phone.

As Alice answered, frozen in place, Bella's gaze cut over to Emmett as he began rapidly snapping together a second rifle, this one bigger than the one he'd carried to breach the building. It was meaner, too, and belt-fed. Using the wide cement sill and a black tripod attached to the barrel, he aimed the weapon toward the southeast side of the building. He dug into his pack and pulled out a long, tinkling strip of shiny brass cartridges.

"They're booking it, Captain… Five minutes… at most. You saw going in it's open desert, too. Don't see how you can get back to the Humvees without them spotting you. Want me to ditch these fuckers here and take 'em out?"

Edward looked down at his phone and to the blinking LED in the corner. He tapped the screen, bringing up a single-line response from the General to the report and request he'd sent while upstairs:

Carte blanche. Do whatever you have to do.

In less than the span of a single breath, Edward's eyes, near black in the low ambient light, lapped the room, briefly pausing at each Marine before training themselves to the now ashen, slack-jawed expression on Bella's face. He thought for less than second, his features again focused and hard – calculating – and then he replied, "No, let 'em come."

.

.

.

Notes:

Glossary:

AK – or AK-47, or Kalashnikov, is a selective-fire assault rifle originally developed by the USSR. It fires a 7.62x38mm M43/M67 round. The weapon is now manufactured in multiple countries and is widely used around the world, by military and non-military groups.

Bâzâr – transliterated Farsi (language spoken in Iran) for bazaar, which is like a market, or place where goods can be bought and sold.

Belt-fed – for larger automatic weapons, which in the case of Emmett's M240B General Purpose Machine Gun that fires a 7.62x51mm NATO cartridge, ammunition is often fed to the weapon via a belt instead of a magazine. It basically allowed the operator to fire anywhere from 100 to 200 rounds between loadings.

EE – short for Electrical Engineer

Infrared – a region of the electromagnetic spectrum, situated between the visible light range (what our eyes can see) and microwave in terms of wavelength. Without going into a lot of detail, the wavelength and frequency of a given wave determine if the electromagnetic energy can pass through a given media (absorption). For example, x-rays (another region in the spectrum) can pass though your skin and muscle layers, whereas plain old visible light waves from a flashlight cannot. Human eyes can't see infrared or near-infrared light waves, but in technology such as that used in night vision equipment/goggles (NVG) or in thermal imaging, they can be converted into the visible range. NVG essentially shift photons into electrons, which are amplified and multiplied through various physical or chemical means, and are then re-converted, but into waves in the visible range. Basically NVG use available infrared or near-infrared light sources to augment ambient light, and are thus able to increase human eye capability when there's little/no natural visible light.

Infrared reflectography – or IRR, is a real technique that utilizes infrared waves and is frequently used in art history to determine if there are paintings beneath other paintings. The technique employs a specially designed camera, which sends infrared light waves toward the target painting and then "takes a picture" of what bounces back. The various paints, inks, and other substances will either absorb or reflect the waves at different rates and intensities. The resulting "picture" is an almost 3-dimensional-looking gray on gray rendering of all the layers, including what's hidden. It's pretty slick.

[Note: But… while reflectography and night vision both employ infrared light waves in some way, they are not the same technology at all. In other words, don't bother taking your night vision goggles to the art gallery or to a forensics laboratory, lol. The stuff in the chapter above is me just playing around and making up some physics cause it's fun.]

Mahan – Mahan Air (as well as Caspian Airlines) is a real airline headquartered in Tehran, Iran. It offers domestic service as well as international, primarily within the Middle East and Asia. Interestingly enough, in 2011, there was an alleged plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, which was uncovered in an operation the FBI termed "Operation Red Coalition". Mahan Air was named as a financial and material supporter of the militant group behind the plot.

Rangefinder – is a device, much like a pair of binoculars, but with the added feature of laser technology for measuring distance to an object in the field of sight.

Rial – Iranian currency

Sidearm – a pistol, or specifically the recently contracted .45 caliber M45 Close Quarter Battle Pistol (CQBP), which is the USMC variant of the Colt 1911 Rail Gun, which will be not a complete replacement of, but rather an upgrade to the currently used M-45 MEUSOC .45 caliber sidearm, which is also based on the 1911 design.

Skunk works – is a term commonly used by scientists and engineers to describe research/work done "off the books" or in a way outside of the normal protocols.

Spook – nickname for a spy, agent, or operative, from any intelligence agency (CIA, FBI, etc.)