Severance Package

I am.

Once Stuart was dead, it was too late to search for Ethan. The operation had begun.

This had radically altered Girlfriend’s operational plan. She’d been saving Stuart and Ethan for later. In fact, she’d ranked the direct reports, from hardest to kill to easiest:

Murphy

Felton

Goins

Wise

Kurtwood

McCrane

DeBroux

Murphy had been the real worry. Miss your opportunity with this guy and watch out. Girlfriend would have spent the rest of the morning running throughout the office, ducking and hiding, fighting for her life. And, most likely, would have lost.

McCoy should know.

So killing Murphy instantly was a necessity. Girlfriend had to lay the groundwork for weeks to pull off that kind of surprise. And she did.

Not only that, but she’d pulled off a daring move that strained credibility when it was first pitched:

I will shoot him and paralyze him. Not kill him.

And right before the end, I will interrogate him.

He will tell me everything.

The last part remained to be seen, but as far as McCoy could tell, Murphy was paralyzed, and not yet dead. Props to Girlfriend.

And at that moment, Girlfriend’s prospects seemed bright, despite the McCrane and Goins snafus.

Girlfriend immediately proceeded to Amy Felton, and carried out her neutralization as planned.

McCoy liked that one a lot.

Tip to employees everywhere: Never tell your boss you’re afraid of heights. Especially if he’s the kind of guy who’ll write it down on a performance review.

But then came the problem: Ethan was missing. He was supposed to be next. In fact, the whole thing with Amy Felton depended on Ethan being next.

Big bad Ethan was sweet on Amy.

Aw.

Ethan Hawkins Goins, former Special Forces, had carried out some of the grisliest and most creative executions of Afghan warlords in the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom. His skill under extreme duress had brought him to the attention of CI-6. A loner by nature, he happily joined, using Murphy, Knox as a cover between operations. Ethan was a fierce warrior. Physically, Girlfriend was no match for him.

The thing was, Amy Felton looked a lot like the high school girlfriend who’d dumped Ethan’s butt senior year, right before going off to Ivy League school in Rhode Island. McCoy even had someone in research dig up a yearbook; the resemblance was striking.

What was funny about the nonaffair—painstaking surveillance had revealed that Ethan and Amy had never kissed, let alone done the deed—was that both assumed such an affair would be against the “rules.” As if an agency that didn’t officially exist could have a policy on employees dating each other?

Such a situation, however, could be seen as a source of weakness.

Girlfriend, too, had glommed this from one of David Murphy’s performance reviews.

The way to break through Ethan’s defenses, Girlfriend reasoned, was to show him his beloved hanging upside down, thirty-six stories above the sidewalk.

Stun, then kill.

Then finish off Felton.

With Ethan gone, though, weakened by the sarin blast in the fire tower, dispatched by Girlfriend in a spectacularly uncreative fashion—did anyone snap necks anymore?—that plan was gone.

Girlfriend, though, was clearly trying to salvage what she could of the plan. Maybe she wanted to show off Ethan’s limp body to Amy, right before she killed her. Maybe she thought that would count for something.

McCoy leaned back in his chair, thinking about that.

Would it?

Ania reached the south fire tower landing on thirty-six on the verge of collapse. Then she remembered: the sarin bomb.

Oh, the work never ends.

She had not planned on going near the sarin bombs. They were Murphy’s idea of fun, not hers.

And she thought her plans would circumvent the need to deal with them.

Not so.

Ania dropped Ethan’s corpse on the landing and flipped open a compartment on her wrist bracelet and removed a tiny pair of spring-loaded scissors. She’d found them in a freebie corporate gift—a Swiss Army “card,” slim enough to fit in a wallet, but illegal to carry on airplanes—that had arrived at Murphy, Knox. It had been intended for Murphy; she kept it for herself. It came loaded with miniature versions of useful, simple tools. Toothpick. Nail file. Pen. Scissors. Her bracelets were full of ordinary tools like these. They tended to be the best.

It was difficult to see the device from her perspective. Ania rarely thought her height was a problem—until situations like these. There were no stepladders, no boxes. She had to improvise.

Ethan, from shoulder to hip, would be just about the right height.

She dragged him across the landing, propped him against the metal door, then leaped onto his shoulders. There was the slightest moment of adjustment, of balancing. Then she stood tall. Perfectly poised. Ethan’s shoulders felt bony beneath her feet.

For a moment, she imagined Ethan’s corpse coming to life, grabbing her by the ankles, and flinging her body down to the concrete steps. Then he’d be on her, teeth gnashing at the flesh of her throat, breath hot, and eyes closed.

Even as a child, Ania suffered from an overactive imagination. It was what she possessed instead of toys. Now, she reassured herself: Ethan would not be waking up. She had snapped his neck cleanly. Thoroughly.

Focus on the task at hand, Ania.

She gave the device a proper examination. It seemed fairly simple: wires running to a power source, another to a sensor on the door, and a few others probably meant as decoys.

But there, on a yellow wire, David Murphy’s perverted sense of humor manifested itself. Printed on the side of the wire: CUT ME.

Murphy delighted in mind games. His performance reviews were just one outlet. Every casual encounter in the office turned into a psychological battle in miniature. Murphy’s tools were the cruelest of all: questions designed to both raise your defense and open a weakness simultaneously, forcing you to defend a position or statement while sowing the seeds of doubt in your brain. Over the course of the past few months, Ania had detected a pattern:

There was no pattern.

The correct answer was, almost without fail, the most obvious one. And the ones that weren’t obvious actually revealed themselves to be obvious later, with a little hindsight.

You went scrambling around, trying to outrun him, outthink him, and usually the right answer was your gut instinct, the first answer on your lips. The one he tricked you out of.

Ania wondered if the same would be true with these wires. Was the CUT ME a note to himself? Or did he expect someone to make it out here and try to disable the device, and knew that a message like CUT ME would drive that person mad?

Thirty-five hundred miles away, McCoy turned his attention to the other monitor. The one showing the increasingly weird scene in the conference room. Where Nichole Wise was torturing her boss by shooting his fingers off, one at a time.