This is not the time or the place, whispered a small voice in the back of his mind.
His shoulders slumped and he blew out a long, controlled breath. He clenched his jaw muscles multiple times, taking a second controlled breath, just like his instructors at the Q-Course had taught him.
“Yes, sir,” he said finally, barely moving his lips. “Perfectly clear.”
“Good.” Pennington sat back in his chair, obviously relieved the confrontation was over. He rifled through the papers on his desk, found a business card, and held it up. “Now, you’ll be required to talk to an agency psychologist at some point during your downtime. Make the call and set up the appointment as soon as possible. It’ll go much worse for you with the review board if you haven’t done at least that.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. A shrink? What the hell do I need to talk to a shrink for?”
Pennington waved the card in the air between them. “Agency policy, not my call. And you don’t have a choice. Not if you want to keep your job.”
Connor snatched the card out of Pennington’s hand and shoved it in his pocket without looking at it. “Fantastic.”
Chapter Eleven
“Son of a bitch!” Connor slammed his car door shut, then slapped the steering wheel hard with his palm. Pain shot up his arm. He grimaced, shaking out the throbbing in his fingers.
“Son of a bitch,” he repeated, though with much less vigor. “Stupid bureaucratic bullshit.”
For the life of him, he couldn’t understand what Pennington was thinking. What any of the higher-ups were thinking, for that matter. How in the hell could anyone in a post-9/11 world simply dismiss the information he’d uncovered? It didn’t make sense at all.
This was the exact reason he‘d left the military. For the most part, Special Forces Command didn’t have to deal with the strangling red tape of the normal military, but still, he’d seen his fair share of missions shut down because of hurt feelings and salty tears. And more often than not, the prices for those decisions were paid by the men he fought with every day.
The thought of some political hack sipping wine and eating dinner at some exclusive dinner club while his friends lost their lives because of their bad decisions—or indecision—made his blood boil. And now it was happening all over again.
He spotted Christina jogging up to the car, and he rolled down the window. She leaned on the window frame with her forearms, talking between breaths.
“What the hell, Connor? We all just found out. What the hell is Pennington thinking?”
“Who says he was thinking at all?” Connor said. “He’s never been an operator. He’s just a management lackey, a messenger for the people who really make the decisions. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a total asshole, but I know it’s not all him.”
“Son of a bitch can’t even stand up for his own people, even though you totally uncovered some serious stuff? That’s nice.”
Connor shrugged and put both hands on the steering wheel. “It is what it is, and it’s probably only going to get worse. If the media gets ahold of this, there’ll be a shitstorm—and the agency will be at the center of it.”
“It’s not right,” Christina said. “I backed you up, you know. I heard the whole incident over the phone, and I put it in my report that I heard you give the guy every chance in the world. They should be backing you up, too. It’s not your fault. You didn’t ask the guy to try to kill you.”
Connor’s eyes widened with surprise at hearing she’d heard the whole thing and filed an affidavit. The anger bubbled up hotter in his stomach. Even with a witness of sorts speaking on his behalf, he was still in jeopardy of losing his job.
“Right and wrong don’t play into it,” he said. “It’s all politics, plain and simple. Listen, I don’t want you to worry about me. There’s much bigger things at stake here. We need to track down Hakimi. If he really does have that bomb, we need to stop him before he gets in position to use it. Chris, we can’t let him into the country. We can’t.”
She shook her head, her long blond hair waving. “Pennington’s already reassigned us. Shifted the Hakimi thing to IFA.”
“He didn’t want the heat, so he dumped it.” Connor grimaced. “What a bastard.”
Intelligence and Foreign Affairs didn’t have the infrastructure in place to investigate this kind of operation—at least, not with the strength and ferocity that it called for. They needed agents on the ground; they needed to bring in Homeland Security and the bureau, create a task force to find Hakimi and stop him. Instead, by transferring the investigation to IFA, Pennington had effectively killed any chance of a serious investigation.
“I hear you got some extra vacation days out of the deal.”
“Yeah.” Connor held up air quotes. “Mandatory decompression time for any agent-involved shooting.”
“What a crock. He was trying to kill you.”
“I know it, and you know it. The dead guy knows it.”
“What a spineless son of a bitch. Someone needs to punch him in the face.”
“That very thing has crossed my mind.”
“This is BS. His job is to look after the agents under him, to support them—not throw them under the bus when it becomes politically expedient.”
“Welcome to the big leagues,” Connor said.
“It’s still messed up. So, what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.” It was partially true. “The one lead we have I can’t follow, and now they’ve tied our hands by shipping the whole damn thing out of our area. Damn it!” He slapped the steering wheel again. “What the hell is it about actually acting on good intelligence that shuts people down? I don’t understand it. Everyone wants their stuff wrapped up tight
