“We ready?” King asked, pulling Jude from his thoughts.
Vivi nodded. “Let’s do this.” Rook’s wife cleared her throat and pushed her glasses up her nose. “Nina Lassiter is very much alive, according to my facial recognition software.”
“Lots of people we thought were dead are showing up alive,” Rook mused, tossing Ella a look.
“There are a lot of threads here, Rook. It’s why we’re meeting. We need to work up an angle, figure it all out, and determine what our next move is,” King reminded him, motioning for Vivi to continue.
Chase tapped the table. “Not to overstate the obvious or repeat what Rook said, but we’ve got Ella and Madoc, both of whom we suspected were dead. And now we’ve got Nina?”
“Best way to hide is to die,” Knight said from his point at the end of the table. He’d know, Jude mused, because he’d hidden his presence after the failed mission in the Hindu Kush with Dresden and Rook.
“Truth,” Harrison Black chimed in. “It’s why MI6 demands irrefutable proof through a body and matching DNA before they’ll accept the death of one of their agents.”
There’s a story there, Jude knew. Black had left MI6 amid scandal. He had fit right into Endgame.
“I can only speculate as to her reasoning. I’ve done everything I can to determine how she’s hidden from us and what happened when she disappeared, supposedly dying of poisoning. I’m working on it, but I’m only one person. Allie is doing what she can, tapping some of her resources, but it’s hard because King has put an information blackout on Endgame. He doesn’t want anyone knowing what we have and where we’re heading.” Vivi pulled up a video feed on the screen that hung from the ceiling. “Here’s Nina buying the ticket in Provo, and here she is disembarking in Anchorage. I have no idea where she went from there. Surveillance video shows her leaving the airport on foot, and I’ve lost her trail.”
“Why Alaska?” Jude asked suddenly, something scraping at his memory.
“She’s changed,” Ella said softly. “Thinner, leaner, and her hair is longer. Nina hated long hair.”
“Wig?” Vivi asked.
“No, I think it’s hers,” Ella answered, running her index finger along her lower lip.
Jude noticed that the bruises from Dresden’s blows were gone. Ella glanced over at him, seeming to read his mind because she licked her lower lip. Jude’s heart turned over in his chest.
This woman. She’d changed him.
King cleared his throat and gave Jude a look. Jude smiled and engaged in the conversation again. “I gotta ask again, why Alaska?”
“Nina had no family. She was like me when she joined the Agency…from the foster system. I think she was originally from Vermont. She graduated from MIT, went to school with you, right, Vivi?” Ella asked.
Vivi nodded. “She was a year behind me.”
“She never mentioned Alaska to me, and when we talked about her past, it was pretty cut and dried. She had no one,” Ella told the team.
“Did she have a man?” King asked.
Jude felt something click in his mind.
“She was a loner. If she had dates, I never knew about them. When we weren’t on ops, she was at the condo we shared in DC. You know what though? The last few weeks before Beirut, Nina had been dressing up, using makeup and such. I just remembered that. I was going to ask her if she’d met someone but, well…Beirut,” Ella finished in a near-whisper.
Jude reached for her hand again and squeezed. He remembered Nina as a behind-the-scenes analyst who backed up her team from base. She was almost as good as Vivi and Ella with information analysis and computer programming. The difference between Vivi, Ella, and Nina was that Nina had trained with Rangers at Fort Benning in Georgia. She’d gone through Ranger training and graduated top of her class. She’d been a soldier through and through. Jude didn’t remember ever thinking of Nina as anything other than one of them. He’d never seen her as a woman.
“She’s either in Alaska, or she used that as a jumping point. Thing is, she used the card, and that just smells to me,” King murmured. “Why would she use a card that she had to know would ping with us?”
“Maybe she thought we would have shut that card down?” Rook offered.
Vivi shook her head. “No, she knows how we operate. She knows we never close cards unless we have proof they’re compromised. It’s how I was trained to keep track of rogues for the Agency. Someone gets burned, they go to ground, but they are trained to have three cards memorized. The Agency refuses to leave one of their agents, even a burned one, without resources to survive. They always hope they can retract the agent and determine what happened. Anyway, once an agent goes rogue or gets burned, those cards are put into a special system that monitors activity so that when they ping, we can track the agent. Nina knew this.”
“That means she did it on purpose,” Allie said, confirming what Jude had been thinking.
King nodded. “Why? She didn’t look hurried or scared on those videos.”
“Desperate people don’t always look desperate,” Ella reminded them. “And Nina was really good at hiding what she was feeling. We were friends—I think out of necessity and convenience rather than because we were so much alike—but I didn’t know much about her. Hell, I’m just now realizing I hardly knew her at all. Just basics.”
“She was good,” Vivi said. “And now she’s in play. I’ve heard talk about a rogue agent with information for sale.”
“No way,” Ella said, slapping her hand on the wooden table in front of them. “She’s not a traitor.”
Jude winced. He’d once called Ella that. Hell, they all had when they thought she’d been the one to betray their spec ops for that Beirut mission. “There’s something we’re missing.”
Black snorted.
