Cold Shot by Mark Henshaw Read Free Book Online Page A

teased.
    “I have some thoughts, but I thought you might like a chance to look things over.”
    That’s generous. It was also unusual, for Jon anyway. Jonathan didn’t like letting a puzzle lie unsolved and he was stubborn and socially distant, so these kinds of gestures were as close as he ever came to admitting any affection for her, and they were rare. Kyra checked her watch. She couldn’t get to Langley until well after midnight at the soonest. “I’ll head out first thing after my range test,” she said.
    “Get here by lunch.” Jonathan disconnected.
    Kyra set the phone back down. Well, she thought. That calls for something a bit stronger .
    She tapped the counter. “I’ll take a Coke.”
    •    •    •
    The rising sunlight was cutting through the river fog when Kyra decided it was time to leave. Then she stood there another ten minutes anyway. Jonathan could wait that long. If he complained, she would blame the delay on traffic. Route 95 north was always an iffy proposition and the Washington Beltway was forever a tangled mess. It would be a lie but the view here was worth a sullied conscience.
    Kyra sat on a fat granite boulder on the shoreline, no coat, enjoying the morning air. She did love the Farm. It was very much like home, Scottsville, which sat farther inland along a Virginia river like this one. This would be a fine place to end a career, teaching a new generation of case officers their trade. But that would be years away if ever.
    She looked east along the trail and found the spot she was looking for. It was overgrown now with cattails and marsh grasses. Pioneer had sat there a year ago the day after she had exfiltrated him from China. He had lived here for three months after so they could debrief him and set up his new life. She had seen despair in the man’s eyes that afternoon, the first time he had realized the full price he would finally pay for treason. To never go home again . . . she couldn’t imagine it. Kyra had sat down beside him that afternoon for an hour, saying nothing because she spoke no Mandarin and he spoke almost no English. It occurred to her that this place, which felt so much like home to her, must have felt like an alien world to him.
    The day they moved him out, she’d driven him to the airfield. He’d learned a little more English by then and was able to offer a broken farewell. They loaded him on the plane and she watched as it took off into a cloudless sky and disappeared. Now she wondered where he was. She knew the Clandestine Service wouldn’t tell her anything. Pioneer was no longer an Agency asset but his case was compartmentalized as heavily now as it ever had been.
    Kyra heard movement in the brush behind her and she turned. A family of white-tailed deer, unafraid of humans, was grazing near her truck, which she’d parked on the paved one-lane trail that doubled as a bike path along the shoreline.
    Time to go, she thought, and this time she forced herself to move. Kyra trudged up to her Ford Ranger and crawled in. The deer looked up when she started the engine but didn’t run.
    She drove out to the main road and it took five minutes to reach the main gate. Kyra rolled down her window and passed her badge to the guard at the shack.
    “You coming back?” he asked.
    “Not today,” she said.
    He filed her badge away in a box to be recycled. “Have a safe drive.”
    Kyra nodded and pulled out onto the highway and pushed the truck ten miles over the limit.
    CIA Headquarters
    The traffic had mostly stayed out of Kyra’s way but the Agency parking lots hadn’t been so cooperative. A failed twenty-minute search for something better left her parked by the Mail Inspection Facility and had given her more than a quarter-mile walk to enter headquarters.
    Kyra navigated the crowd by the cafeteria, then finally bypassed it altogether through a stairwell by the library that opened into the 2G corridor. Kyra plodded down the empty hallway, swiped her