Patriot by M.A. Rothman (summer reading list TXT) 📗

Connor sat in silence, not believing what he’d just heard. His mind raced with possibilities, none of which he particularly liked. The most obvious was that the agency had been hacked, which meant very real national security issues. The CIA, even more so than its sister organizations, prided itself on its ability to keep secrets. That was the entire game at the CIA. Keep secrets. They did it better than anyone else in the world, sometimes to their own detriment. The fact that this operation—the most important operation Connor had been involved with—was known outside the walls of Langley troubled him on numerous levels.

“How the hell—” Connor stopped himself before he could say anything else.

Thompson’s smile seemed genuine, and he patted the air as if sensing Connor’s anxiety. “It’s not what you’re thinking. We’re not the enemy here. You have to trust me on this.”

Connor’s mind drifted back to his gun. “You guys better start saying words that make sense or this is going to end badly for all of us.”

“Okay, listen,” Thompson said. “Like I said before, we don’t work for the government. Not directly. The organization we work for is off the books. We’re so far off the books that our name doesn’t appear on any government document, regardless of compartment or classification level. No one knows who we are, no one cares who we are, and no one ever sees what we do.” He cracked a smile. “Have you ever watched that movie Men in Black?”

The sniper turned, chuckled, and shook his head before turning back toward the front.

“You mean the flick about a secret agency tasked with fighting aliens. That movie?”

“Exactly,” Thompson said. “Well, we don’t fight aliens, but just think of our little organization as being the one who does the right thing when all the bureaucratic nonsense prevents others from doing it.”

Connor laughed nervously, mostly at how ludicrous this guy sounded, but partially because he wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure Thompson wasn’t telling the truth. “You’ve got to be kidding me, right? I mean, come on, this is like a Candid Camera thing, right? Someone put you guys up to this to mess with me?”

“We’re deadly serious, Mr. Sloane. And everything I’ve told you is the truth.”

“I have a hard time believing that.”

“Do you though?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you have a hard time believing it?”

Connor frowned. “I’m pretty sure I just said that.”

“We’ve told you that we know about Hakimi, we know about the nuclear bomb, hell, we know about how you got detention for kissing Melanie Kolifrath in your ninth-grade social studies class. Do you think we’d come to you with any of that if we weren’t deadly serious? We didn’t just see you in the parking lot and think to ourselves, ‘Hm, he looks like he’s in the CIA, let’s tell him a bunch of classified information that we shouldn’t even know and see how he reacts.’ We’re one-hundred-percent real, and we think we can help you with some of your… problems.”

“My problems?”

“The problems you were getting ready to spill to the unscrupulous Miss Cooper from the Washington Herald,” Richards said, glancing over his shoulder.

Chapter Fifteen

Twenty minutes later, after crossing the Potomac River, the car slowed, and Richards pulled to the curb. They were in Georgetown, one of the older sections of DC, and had stopped in front of a row of stores. Connor purposefully refrained from coming near these areas because of the crowds of tourists.

Richards shut the car off, and they all got out. Henderson carried the navy-blue bundle like an umbrella.

Connor raised an eyebrow at Thompson. “What are we doing, shopping?”

The man smiled, sliding on his sunglasses. “In a manner of speaking… yes.” He waved for Connor to follow. “Come on.”

Connor followed the men down the sidewalk, ignoring the signs advertising discounts and exclusives, instead focusing on his surroundings. They’d already gotten the drop on him once; he wasn’t going to let it happen again.

They stopped in front of an old wooden door. A sign above the door featured a faded profile of a rooster on the left, and the head of a longhorn bull on the right.

“The Rooster and Bull?” Connor said, the corner of his mouth turning up in a half-sardonic smile. “Come on. Cock and Bull—is this some kind of joke?”

Thompson shook his head. “I didn’t pick the name, trust me.”

Richards held the door open and motioned for others to enter. “If Thompson named it, it’d probably be called the Ben and Jerry’s.”

The place was like any other dive bar. Dimly lit, several empty tables and booths, a handful of people sitting at the bar, and a gray-haired man behind the counter toweling a glass dry. None of them seemed the least bit interested in the four men who’d just stepped in.

“So, what, we’re going to talk national security in a dive bar?”

“Dive bar?” Richards said. “This is a classy place.”

“You definitely need to get out more,” said Connor.

As Thompson led them through the tables, he nodded at the bartender, who returned the gesture without so much as a “Hi, can I get you a beer?” Thompson continued into a hallway at the back of the bar, which turned a corner and dead-ended at two restroom doors. He pushed open the door to the men’s room and motioned the others inside.

Connor stopped short, more than a little bit confused. “What the hell is this? I’m not into that kind of thing if you were wondering.”

Thompson rolled his eyes and jerked his head toward the bathroom. “Come on, you’ll see.”

Three closed stalls and two urinals took up the left side of the room. An “Out of Order” sign was taped to the last stall door. At the far end, just past the sinks, a white-haired man sat on a stool, dressed in tan slacks and a plaid button-down shirt. He nodded at Thompson, then looked over his John Lennon–styled spectacles at Connor, as if sizing him up for a fight.

“This the