To his right, Agent Gil Norris sat casually, blowing on and sipping his coffee. “Maybe they have. Maybe we all have, but can you imagine a quicker way to snag an enemy’s attention?”
“Snag their attention?” August pointed at the fluttering paperwork. “Have you even read this?”
“Of course.” Gil nodded. “Every word of it.”
“And did any of those words strike you in the same manner they’re striking me?”
“I don’t know, August. Tell me how they’re striking you, and I’ll do my best to answer.”
August sighed. “They strike me as being unorthodox at best. Outlandish and downright twisted at worst.”
Gil rested the cup against his lips before going in for a follow-up sip. “You forgot barbaric. Come on, man. What haven’t we done since the onset that couldn’t in some way be defined by any of those adjectives? To me, it looks as though HQ has finally realized our efforts at diplomacy haven’t done shit to get our point across. Sure took them long enough.”
“Right. And that ineffectiveness demands this level of escalation?” August griped his interrogative.
“It would appear so.” Gil’s lips met his cup. The coffee burned, but he didn’t mind it.
August turned away, resting his elbow on the door, his chin on his bent wrist. “I never thought I’d see the day.”
Gil peered over. “See what day? When all this finally got real and we stopped fucking around?”
“The day when I felt so inclined to burn my orders, give all this crap up, and tell the bureaucrats and pencil pushers at HQ to go to hell.”
Gil chuckled uproariously. “Yeah, sure. I hear you. For what it’s worth, neither did I. And that’s in your case, not mine.”
“So I take it you’re fine with this?”
“Sure. I don’t have a choice—I don’t get to make that call, August,” Gil said. “Orders are orders. And my feelings on the matter are secondary, if not fully irrelevant. Yours should be one and the same, Special Agent in Charge, Mr. task force leader, sir.”
August sighed exhaustedly. “How the hell did we get here? During the start-up phases, the Shenandoah campaign in its entirety was designated a recovery effort. We were to secure the region, relocate evacuees, provide sanctuary and support, rebuild, resettle, reposition and replicate. Security is essential and takes precedence during any mass crisis; that goes without saying. I was of the impression that’s why I was assigned here…found out differently when they allocated me to the damned Annex. And now, I’ve somehow become a foot soldier, a mercenary executing the king’s dirty deeds, up to and including domestic terror campaigns.”
“August,” Gil began, securing his coffee in the cup holder, “you need to slow down, take a step back, reevaluate all this, and most of all, chill out. You’re making this gig into something it’s not. This…it’s just a job, brother. It’s what we do; it’s what we’ve always done.”
August chuckled. “How many times have I heard that line before, Gil? Just doing my job. How many lives, innocent or otherwise, have been ruined under the guise of someone like you or me doing his damned job?”
Silence fell between the two where only the murmur of the SUV’s engine could be heard. After a moment, August reached for the papers and returned them to the folder from which they’d been removed.
Gil studied him. “I need you to be straight with me. Are you going along with this? Or are you planning to buck the system? Kick back against authority for the first time ever in your star-studded career? I’d like to know something before we go about our day…you’re not exactly giving me a warm and fuzzy feeling.”
August thought a moment. “I don’t know, Gil.” He sighed again. “I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve given orders and taken them. I’ve never been insubordinate, and I don’t tolerate insubordination. I respect authority and the chain of command…it’s in my blood. I’ll follow my orders and adhere to the terms of this recent…addendum, but I’m doing so under protest. I won’t do it without making my objections known.”
“You sure you want to go down that road, knowing how it could be interpreted in our current setting? They could charge you with high treason, hang you from the tallest tree with the shortest rope.” Gil retrieved his coffee. “What are you going to do? Go straight to Seth Bates and file a formal written complaint? What makes you think he’ll give a shit?”
“Fuck Seth Bates.” August sneered. “He isn’t the king’s hand anymore. He screwed up one too many times, and Bronson booted him from the castle. Now he’s running the ham-fisted equivalent of mobile janitorial missions. He’s recovered some contraband, brought in a few new detainees, hoping it would help him regain Bronson’s good graces, but it hasn’t worked. That emasculate shit stain is a lame duck. Lucky to be alive, if you ask me.”
“Tell me how you really feel about him,” Gil joked. “Sorry, guess I overlooked how privy you were to upper-tier insider intel.” A pause. “I guess that leaves the big cheese himself. You think Bronson will give a shit?”
August got a nasty feeling in the pit of his stomach at the mention of the regional commander’s name. If he ever were to pay Bronson a visit, he’d be lodging a great deal more than a formal complaint over the recent addendum to his orders. “I’ve met him…spoken face-to-face with him before. He’s got a bit of a God complex, but he seems reasonable. I think Solve for X was his creation initially. I could see it in his eyes when he handed it off to me. He looked delighted but nervous, like an inventor presenting a product to an investor, or one of those contestants on that Shark Tank show.”
“Ha! I remember that one!”
August remained on topic. “But this addendum…it’s something else. It’s…beyond him.”
“Beyond? What,
