Termination Orders(15)

But then, in the coming weeks, Morgan began to notice things. Things like an unfamiliar car parked near his house. Or odd phone calls in the middle of the night, when there was nothing but a ominous silence on the other end. Or, even, strangers in public places who bumped into him deliberately and whispered menacingly, “We’re watching you.”

Morgan tried to call Plante, to get them to stop, but all he got was the bureaucratic runaround. His calls were never transferred to Plante, and he was reduced to yelling at powerless underlings. The harassment eventually stopped, but it had left a lot of bad blood between himself and the Agency. Since then, he had all but completely cut ties with Plante and everyone else in the CIA’s hierarchy.

There was one exception to that silence. Morgan had left certain items in a personal locker at headquarters during his days as a wet contractor in Black Ops, items he wanted to get back. He didn’t return for them right after his resignation, partly out of pride but mostly out of fear of calling attention to the locker’s contents: incriminating records and documents that he should have destroyed long ago, and some that never should have existed at all. Among them was a diary of everything he had ever done in the service of the CIA, with dates and detailed accounts of his every Black Ops mission: a little black book filled with the Agency’s dirty little secrets. He had thought of it as his insurance policy, in case things ever got really bad. The situation soured before he could collect them, and so there they had remained.

Years had passed by the time he decided to retrieve the stash in his locker. He had called the National Clandestine Service—formerly known as the Directorate of Operations—to find that Plante was still there. He scheduled an appointment, but they never met. When he arrived, Morgan had been told that Plante was in a meeting. He was left waiting until some desk flunky told him there was no record of any Code Name Cobra ever working at the CIA. He had lost his temper, made a scene, and burned his bridges with the Agency. As far as he was concerned, at the time, he was done, for good.

And yet here he was again, being escorted through security by Plante himself. He first walked through a bulky metal arch much thicker than any metal detector. He hadn’t been asked to remove anything from his pockets. They then took digital prints of all his fingers, a head shot, and scanned his retinas.

“What, you’re not going to ask me to take off my clothes?” he said sarcastically.

“No need,” said Plante, pointing at the scanner he had just passed. “That machine has already revealed everything and more. If you were trying to sneak in here with a bomb up your ass, we’d know. Hell, if you were trying to sneak in here with a straight pin up there, we’d know.”

Morgan signed a pile of nondisclosure agreements and was issued a visitor ID and admitted into the building. Plante escorted him down a long, sparse, antiseptic hallway, where he passed busy, professional-looking people who had that familiar intensity of CIA employees. Plante stopped in front of a door and swiped his employee ID through the key-card reader. The door unlocked with a buzz and a click, and Plante led him into a small conference room.

“I’m going to have to leave you here for a few minutes, Cobra. I’ll trust you to behave.” Plante walked out, and the door clicked shut behind him. Morgan figured he might as well sit down. He took the chair opposite the door and looked around the room. At the far end was a chalkboard-size computer screen. The table was sleek and functional, the chairs comfortable enough. Behind him, the metallic-blue windows offered a view of the woods that separated the Agency headquarters from the Potomac.

It was an unremarkable room, especially after he’d seen what they had deeper in this building. Behind layers and layers of security, people rushed past one another in hallways abuzz with activity, briefing rooms that had the latest technology, bunkers and safe rooms that could hide the entire staff in case of emergency, a thousand operations going on at any given moment. And then there was the Ops Center, the nerve center of the whole facility, with more monitors than NASA’s Mission Control, with live feeds from every surveillance satellite available. There was far more here than met the eye, beyond this sleepy office environment.

Morgan had been in the room for a few minutes when the door clicked and swung open again. But instead of Plante, the person who came in was a stocky, baby-faced, freckled man with light red hair who didn’t look a day over eighteen, even though Morgan knew he must be at least thirty by now. His name was Grant Lowry, a computer prodigy who worked as an analyst for the Clandestine Service.