'Our success rested on taking the people in that house alive, not dead. You and your other team members have to execute the primary mission and handle any other friction that comes up, regardless of what it is or how incomplete your data is.'
Cody stopped at the window and clasped his hands behind his back. 'I read your file, including your psych profile, before I agreed to take you on.' He continued despite David's surprised look. 'Unlike the armed forces, directors allow Midnight Team leaders more flexibility in assembling our units. I don't believe you're a cowboy — your actions in Afghanistan and your plan to stop those shooters in the park tell me that. And yet you jeopardized not only yourself, but your entire team by pursuing unknown hostiles against orders. So how do I reconcile that — do I have a very good operative in my squad who is prone to only occasional lapses in judgment?'
'Sir, you have an operative who will do whatever is required to get the job done…' David could have left it at that. It would probably have satisfied his leader. But he didn't want to leave anything in the air between them, even if that meant he would be reassigned. 'Even if that means reinterpreting the directives of the mission at times.'
'Or my orders?' Cody asked.
'Sir, at the time I responded in what I felt was the appropriate manner for the situation. I chose to follow the hostile team myself because — because I would not order another team member to do something that I wouldn't do myself.'
Cody turned on his heel and came right up to David's face. 'Is that the real reason you went off hotdogging by yourself? Or do you think you're just that much better than the rest of us? That you don't need a team to accomplish a mission?'
'Sir, I do not believe that. I rely on my other team members as much as I know they rely on me to get the job done.'
'Do you, now? I wish I could believe that. But I don't know if I can. I'm sure your other teammates are thinking the same thing. For these units to be successful, each member has to know — without a shadow of doubt — that when they're going into a room, the person on their left will terminate every hostile on their left, and the person on their right will terminate every hostile on their right, without fail or deviation from their proper course of action. When doubt creeps in about a member, everything changes. They look at you differently, they act and react differently, and those different reactions — the ones that aren't in their training — are what gets hostages, them or you killed. In our line of work, there can be no hesitation, no doubt about any of us, especially about each other. If there is, then that member has to leave the team. I can't make it any clearer than that.'
David had not moved an inch during his leader's words. 'Sir, I understand.'
Cody pulled back a bit. 'If we weren't still on duty, I would have ordered you to stand down already. As it is, replacing you now with another team member increases the chances for more friction during the operation, so you're staying for now. When you have the chance, I'd advise you to give some serious thought to what you're doing here and whether this is right for you. That's all.'
'Thank you, sir.' David resisted the urge to salute, but instead walked to the door and opened it.
'David?'
He paused, half expecting Cody to change his mind and deactivate him. He turned back. 'Sir?'
'For what it's worth, I think this is the right place for you. I just don't know if you believe that. Think about it — and that is an order.'
David nodded. 'Thank you, sir.' He walked out into the living room slowly, aware of, but not meeting, the stares of the other team members.
'Hey, you all right?' Tara asked, ignoring the dark looks of the other two men.
'Hmm? Yeah, fine, thanks. I just — I'm gonna head out to the garage.'
It was a lame answer, but the only reasonable one he could give. David walked down the short hallway, now fully aware of their stares boring into his back, and hating every second of it. Stepping into the single-car garage, he closed the door and leaned against it.
What am I doing here? At that moment, he felt trapped — by his situation, by the team, by the room itself. Normally David would have handled things by going for a long run, the mindless, repetitive exercise clearing his brain of everything else and allowing him to attack the problem with a clear head. But they had to stay put, ready to move out on a moment's notice. And that was the real problem.
David knew that Cody had done what he needed to do — address the breach in the team's operating procedure as soon as possible. However, their meeting had also intensified David's already growing feeling of doubt in himself, and he knew that could be even more crippling to a spec-ops member. Once he started doubting himself, the fear of screwing up, of putting another team member's life in jeopardy through his actions, could balloon until he became paralyzed into inaction, not wanting to do anything because it might hurt someone.
That's the risk that we live with every single time we go out, he admonished himself. Taking a deep breath to try to clear his head, David immediately realized his mistake. Although they had wrapped the body of the dead hostile, the enclosed space still smelled of him, still stank of blood and shit, even over the bleach cleanser the techs had used to destroy any evidence of his being there in the first place. The combination of odors was nauseating. He walked over to where the corpse had been placed and squatted down, seeing the lifeless form in his mind's eye as if it were still lying there, wrapped in the sheet they had stripped off the bed.
What if that wasn't a hostile lying there? What if it was one of my own? And what if he died because of my mistake? Those were the questions that David couldn't answer to his satisfaction as he stared at the empty concrete, seeing a sudden, terrible vision of his team members lying in front of him, their sightless eyes accusing him of the worst crime of all — failing them.
8
Kate stood on a raised platform at the end of a large room, amid what looked like barely contained chaos. A half-dozen men and women swirled around her, analyzing data on wirelessly networked laptop computers, the low mutter of conversations providing a steady backdrop of noise in the space. On the opposite wall, a huge monitor showed the progress in the case on several different windows — a shot of the house on Wyvil Road, various views of the streets around the area as seen through the London city cameras and even a shot of their forensic team in London as it examined the recovered body.
All of it was real, yet in a sense none of it was real, for Kate was viewing the entire scene through a pair of virtual-reality glasses and attached headset, which enabled her to move about the room simply by looking at where she wanted to go. If she wanted a screen brought closer to her, she merely had to stare at its upper two corners, and it would automatically magnify for her. She could instantly see what any one person currently on duty was working on, or bring up all of their screens at once in front of her. Using the sensitive microphone that curved down her smooth jawline, she could instruct and guide the men and women who risked their lives on a daily basis to keep the rest of the world safe, dictate after-ops reports to an autotranscriber, coordinate meetings between directors and operatives around the world and basically keep tabs on any mission she chose to follow.
And that was often the hard part, choosing which ones were the most vital. Room 59 operations were going on in every corner of the world, as befitting its mandate. Some operations were easily handled by personnel below her. Intelligence-gathering, or even the extraction of a double agent, if planned properly, often happened with her knowing only two things: when it had started and when it was finished. Blown ops, however, like the Wyvil Road incident, always garnered her immediate attention. Although she had every bit of confidence in the people under her, Kate fully agreed with the maxim of No Plan Survives Contact With The Enemy. She had simply updated it. Her maxim was No Plan Survives Implementation Intact, despite all of their efforts to the contrary.
At the moment, she was reviewing the Midnight Team's first-person videos of the operation. Another feature of the MASC units all members wore was that everything they saw was transmitted back to Room 59's virtual headquarters, where it could be reviewed for after-action reports, as well as future training simulations. There was nothing like using the real thing to test operatives to see how they would fare. We'll definitely have to run this one, although I'm a bit concerned as to how these guys got past our operative and the team's surveillance in the first place, she thought.
Using the glasses, she could fast-forward or rewind the action, zoom in on anything the team member saw
