his eyes and decided to cut to the chase. “What are the odds that you and I would both be passing through Frankfurt?”
Nasiri smiled. “I needed to see you.”
“So this isn’t fate, then?” she replied, pursing her lips in a disappointed pout.
“Unfortunately, no,” he said, his buoyant, casual demeanor gone. His tone now was more professional, almost urgent. “May we speak someplace more discreet?” he continued. “I’ve reserved one of the private conference rooms for us.”
“What’s going on, Nafi?”
“Please,” he said, standing.
“I was going to get something to eat before my flight.”
“There’s already food in the room.”
Ryan had no idea what this was about, but he had definitely piqued her curiosity. “Well, seeing as how you’ve gone to so much trouble, how could a lady say no?”
Gathering up their belongings, the pair made their way toward the conference room. Once inside, Nasiri closed the drapes as Ryan perused the assortment of appetizers that had been laid out. She prepared a plate of food and, after looking at the available beverages, poured herself a glass of mineral water. Wine was out of the question. She liked Nasiri, but she wasn’t going to let her guard down around him. On the airplane back home, she could have a couple of glasses of wine if she wanted. Right now she intended to be all business.
After sitting down, she placed her napkin in her lap and had just taken a bite of smoked duck when Nasiri took the chair across from her and, apropos of nothing, asked, “Is Jordan next on your list?”
She had no idea what he was talking about. Swallowing her food, she said, “Excuse me?”
“Is Jordan next?”
“I don’t understand. Next for what?”
“C’mon, Lydia,” Nasiri replied. “We know each other well enough; we’ve seen some very bad things together. We shouldn’t play games.”
“Nafi, no one is playing games here. You need to be specific with me. What are you talking about?”
Reaching down, he removed a folder from his briefcase and slid it across the conference table. “These pictures were taken three days ago.”
Now he really had piqued her interest. Moving her plate aside, she drew the folder to her and flipped it open. The exhalation of breath that escaped her lips, as well the word shit upon seeing the first of the photos, was both unintentional and unprofessional.
“I guess we don’t need to argue whether or not those are former teammates.”
They were in fact old teammates of hers. They had been part of a covert program that specialized in orchestrating social, political, and organizational instability abroad. Their primary expertise was in the Muslim world. In addition to developing elaborate plots designed to create chaos inside organizations like Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Al-Shabaab, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, they had also been active in the rendering of terrorists to disavowed black sites under the continuation of America’s supposedly discontinued extraordinary rendition program.
In the program, code-named “Eclipse,” the CIA team had broken every rule in the book. And the more rules they broke, the more successes they racked up. It was a self-perpetuating cycle that had turned the team into success addicts—and like real addicts, they kept searching for bigger and bigger highs by going after bigger targets and launching more audacious operations. In the team members’ minds, they could do no wrong.
The funny thing about believing you can do no wrong is that you quickly begin doing nothing but wrong. It had started with small infractions as standards slipped, such as getting sloppy with reporting or sneaking alcohol along on ops. From there it grew into misappropriating Agency assets like Black Hawk helicopters for bighorn sheep hunts in the Hindu Kush, all the way to some members of the coed team developing off-limits personal relationships and sleeping with each other.
These were men and women whose reputations on the covert side of the intelligence community were quickly outstripping their actual abilities. They were the CIA’s golden children, a mixture of analysts and gunslingers, who had not only started believing their own press releases, but in the deadly fog of the global war on terror had begun to see themselves as almost immortal. They were careening toward a cliff with no one to pump the brakes. That was precisely when fate stepped in.
Without the knowledge of the Italian government, they had attempted to snatch a high-ranking Al-Qaeda member off the streets of Rome and a shootout had erupted. Associates of the terrorist had opened fire, killing five Italian citizens, two of them police officers. It