Fires of War by Jim DeFelice, Larry Bond Read Free Book Online

shoulders, and moved reasonably well on the dance floor. Not as good as Ferguson had but almost.
     
    Thera found herself debating whether she should take him to bed. She decided not to, but later, back in her room listening to her roommate’s snores, she fantasized about the Portuguese scientist, wondering what his arms would have felt like around her, imagining his finger brushing her breast.
     
    Sex was an accepted part of spycraft if you were a guy. Someone like Ferg probably had sex all the time when working undercover.
     
    Not that she knew that for a fact.
     
    Things were somewhat more ambiguous for women. Someone like Slott would certainly not approve . . . Then again he wouldn’t ask, as long as you provided the results.
     
    Evora wasn’t interesting enough to keep her attention, and Thera started visualizing herself retrieving the tags from the site. She began seeing guards everywhere, watching her.
     
    Her mind began to race, unable to stop the permutations of fear multiplying in her brain.
     
    They’d seen her, filmed her already, were waiting to spring it on her tomorrow.
     
    Norkelus knew she was lying about the cigarettes.
     
    She’d be caught in North Korea. She’d be tortured and locked away forever.
     
    Thera tossed and turned in her bed, the sheets and covers wrapped around her, squeezing sweat from her pores. And then the phone was ringing with their wakeup call, and it was time to get up.
     
    ~ * ~
     

10
     
    THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
     
    With the president and some of his key advisors away, the West Wing of the White House where Corrine had her office was relatively quiet. This meant fewer interruptions for Corrine, and by four o’clock she was actually caught up on her work or at least as caught up as she ever was. She called over to The Cube to check on the First Team’s Korean operation.
     
    “This is Lauren,” said Lauren DiCapri, the on-duty mission coordinator. “Who’s this?”
     
    The phone system in The Cube would have already identified Corrine, but she told her anyway. “So what’s going on?”
     
    “Nothing. We’re good.”
     
    There was a strong note of resentment in Lauren’s voice; she belonged to the camp that resented Corrine as an outsider and impediment to their jobs.
     
    It was a big camp, and included Ferguson and CIA Deputy Director of Operations Daniel Slott. The arrangement itself was part of the problem. The lines of authority were somewhat hazy and had been so even before Corrine’s arrival. The CIA people who worked with Special Demands answered to Slott for administrative purposes and had to work with him on mission details. The Special Operations people assigned to the First Team— like Rankin and Guns—had two masters, the military and Special Demands, while the Special Forces detachment and its assorted support units had their own colonel, Charles Van Buren.
     
    Until Corrine’s appointment as the president’s conscience —McCarthy’s term for her job as his designated representative—Special Demands had basically been run by Ferguson, who, after getting a directive from Slott, worked things out on his own.
     
    Or so it appeared. Corrine had had a devilish time figuring out exactly how the chain of command really did run, and her efforts to insert more oversight, while they had had some impact, probably hadn’t changed things all that much. Ferguson and his people still had incredible leeway once given a mission.
     
    She didn’t want to second-guess them, much less hamstring them, but she did want them to stay within the bounds set by the president. Finding the right balance was incredibly difficult, especially when the people she was supposed to supervise resented her.
     
    “Thera’s still in South Korea?” Corrine asked.
     
    “Yes,” said Lauren tersely
     
    “Well, let me know if anything comes up.”
     
    “Absolutely.”
     
    “I’m not the enemy,” snapped Corrine. But it was too late; Lauren had