I divided the room’s four walls into where the agents were originally from. Most were either from the States, the UK, and either France or Germany, which I lumped together. The fourth wall became “everyone else.” It wasn’t necessary for me to sort them by where they’d died. With few exceptions, it was either in Hong Kong or mainland China.
Was I obsessed? Sure. Especially after another instance—in Beijing—where agents I was working with were gunned down and the entire mission burned.
Each person whose likeness hung on my walls could’ve been me. Particularly given I’d come so close on not one but two occasions.
It was what had made me start paying attention. The deaths I’d witnessed had nothing to do with our mission, as far as I could tell. It seemed almost random, but everything else about it, including the agency’s reaction, didn’t.
There had to be a connection, and before I faced the same fate as so many others, I had to find out what it was.
Tonight wouldn’t be the first time Cope stopped by my place for a beer. We didn’t make a habit of it; there were weeks we couldn’t stand the sight of each other. I didn’t have any siblings, and neither did he, so I couldn’t say I felt the same way about him as I would a brother. But maybe.
He held up a six-pack when I opened the door and waved him in.
“Thanks for stopping by.”
Cope pulled one bottle out of the carrier and was about to open it, but set it on the table. “What’s going on?”
I walked over, opened the beer, and handed it to him. “Have a drink.”
He took a swig. “This isn’t going to be a ‘shoot the shit and avoid talking about anything to do with the job’ night, is it?”
I chugged the beer I’d poured into a glass and shook my head. “There’s something I need to show you.”
“I don’t like the sound of this.”
“You’re going to like it even less when you see it.”
He sighed in that asshole-y, condescending way he did that pissed me the fuck off. “Irish—”
“Shut up, Cope. Whatever you’re about to say, I guarantee you’ll regret it. In fact, I’d advise you to just keep your mouth zipped until I explain.”
As Cope had said that fateful day when he was assigned to me—or vice versa—the thing about a handler and one of his agents is that it’s all about trust. As much as Cope could make me crazy, at the end of every single day, I trusted him and he trusted me.
I opened another beer for myself, and he did the same. “Come with me.” I turned the handle on the door that always remained closed and took a deep breath.
“Irish? What the fuck—”
“Sit down.”
He sat, opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. I sat too and kept quiet as I watched him scan the room. His expression changed as he realized what was written beneath the images were dates of death.
“Paxon—”
I held up my hand. I wasn’t ready to speak and didn’t want him to, either. Whenever I entered this room, I forced myself to take several moments of still and reverent silence.
When I was a kid, I went to a Holocaust museum on a school field trip. Our entire class, usually boisterous, was solemn as we studied the images and realized what they represented. This was the same. Each image was a life lost. Worse, it was a name forgotten by those who should’ve honored their memory.
Before standing, I took a deep breath. I walked over to the first wall.
Cope stood too and walked closer. He pointed to the three images above the names. “These are the guys who died on your mission,” he said.
“That’s right. Peter Samuels, Albert Baker, and Eric Berg. All died in the line of duty two years ago in Hong Kong.”
Cope slowly walked around the room, scanning images, reading the notes I’d written about each one. When he got to the fourth wall, he turned to me. “How many?”
“Number fifty died last week.”
“Jesus. Fifty,” he repeated under his breath. “Why haven’t you shown me this before?”
I had no answer. I didn’t know why I chose to now. Until he arrived, I had no intention of doing so. Maybe it was the tally reaching a milestone number that made it too hard to bear on my own anymore. Maybe I wanted someone besides me to know. To remember. And maybe, if I met the same fate they had, I wanted Cope to find out why. Why had more agents died in the last three years than in the twenty prior combined?
5
Irish
Washington, DC
Six Years Ago
It had been three years since Cope and I began the mission we undertook with no authority or funding, both of us knowing our careers as well as our lives were on the line if anyone found out about it.
Thus far, every theory we contrived led nowhere. If it weren’t for the sheer number of deaths that couldn’t be explained or attributed to anything, it would be easy to think it a tragic coincidence. Except I couldn’t do that. Agents I’d worked with directly had been gunned down in front of me. I was convinced their deaths had nothing to do with the op we were on, and yet nothing about them was random.
The only apparent link was that three sets of murders I’d witnessed took place either in Beijing or Hong Kong. Two were close calls for me too. One, I was at a safe distance away, but the end result was still the same—agents were dead and no one had any idea why.
Without any other leads, the Chinese became the center of our investigation. Given relations between our two countries were strained even more than with Russia, it wouldn’t be a stretch of anyone’s imagination to believe either communist nation was behind the
