He’d gathered that. “When? Where?”
“It started back when we were all kids.” She rubbed a hand over the back of her neck, looking wearier than he’d ever seen her. “I told you I was orphaned when I was young. I had no family to take me in so I was put into foster care. When I was twelve I moved in with a woman and her husband. She was really nice, put me in private school and really looked after me well.” Her eyes met his, the slight pause making him brace for whatever was coming next. “But it turned out she wasn’t just a regular foster mom. She was a recruiter for a secret CIA program called the Valkyrie Project.”
He frowned. “What the hell’s that?” He had Top Security Clearance and he’d never heard of it. Sounded like something out of a freaking sci-fi TV series.
“They recruited orphaned girls who showed the right aptitudes for certain desirable skills they could hone and funneled us into the program without us realizing it. They measured our abilities on various things like problem solving, reaction time, critical thinking skills, and gave us individualized programs that played to our strengths. The more…technical stuff came later, during and after college. We’ve all got the same basic training but then we all moved on to become specialists in our own fields.” She shrugged, like it was no big deal, when it was anything but. “Georgia and I were trained primarily as snipers. Some of us were trained to kill by more up close and personal means. Others are elite hackers or experts at seducing information from targets before killing them. Some are a combination of all that.”
What. The. Actual. Fuck. A secret program full of deadly female assassins, sanctioned by the U.S. government? Briar’s expression told him she was dead serious and everything she’d said certainly explained a lot.
“By the time I hit college I was an expert marksman, trained by guys like you. My instructors were former Marines, SEALs, Delta. I guess you could say they kind of reprogrammed us. Since it all started when we were young, it was easier to condition us. I was hired by the CIA straight out of college—not that there was ever any doubt I’d go elsewhere, since they’d been grooming me for it since twelve—and did my first solo op at twenty-two.”
Matt absorbed all that, staring at her like he’d never seen her before. And he hadn’t, he realized. Not the real her.
This was one hell of an eye-opener. He didn’t know what to think or what to make of it, but he believed every word of the story.
She sighed and rubbed at her jaw. “I know. It’s a lot to take in.”
Yeah. And he wasn’t a man who was easily surprised, yet he was momentarily at a loss for words. “The tats,” he said after a moment. “They’re a symbol or something?” They held significant meaning to those who had them, that much was clear.
“Yes. We all got them when we graduated college.” She turned to the side and pulled the waistband of her sweats down to reveal a tattoo about the size of a silver dollar on her left hip. It showed what appeared to be a black crow with a sword held in its talons and Valkyrja written inside a stylized scroll under it.
“Valkyrie,” he murmured.
Briar nodded. “It means ‘chooser of the slain’ in Old Norse. Legend holds that the Valkyries sometimes disguised themselves as ravens.”
A fitting name for a group of female assassins. “How many of you are there?”
She shrugged. “When I was in the project it was in a test phase. I don’t know if it’s still operating, but during my time there were fourteen of us.”
Holy shit. This was unreal. Matt rubbed a hand over his face and blew out a breath before facing her once more. They were in this together now. It was time for her to come clean before anything else she’d been hiding got them both killed. “What else don’t I know about you that I need to?”
She thought about it for a moment. “I’m fluent in Spanish and Arabic, with a working knowledge of Urdu and Pashto. And I have a bachelor’s degree in political science.”
Of course she did.
Matt shook his head at her in wonder. But even though she was the most fascinating and complex woman he’d ever met, they had one hell of a problem on their hands. “Georgia’s right. If you’ve been disavowed, teams will be searching for you, if not already, then as soon as they realize you’re not dead. We can’t stay here.” Risking a call to the outside world, even to one of his guys, might lead whoever was tracking her right to them. Anyone skilled in SIGINT could trace them.
But he didn’t see any other way around it. Maybe he could call one of his guys and get a feel for what the situation was. He could call Tuck from a burner phone, then ditch it.