Page 51 of Red Line

To this day, the extended family didn’t know about his parents’ CIA service, and even for Nomad, it had been a guess, a source of curiosity.

After spending a decade with the Green Berets, Nomad had been asked to consider joining Delta Force because of his unique background as a kid growing up with parents in the StateDepartment, moving every year or two, picking up not just the languages but also the mannerisms, the etiquette nuances, and high cultural intelligence.

He could blend.

He was a nomad.

Of course, his parents had also taught their sons spy skills. They’d treated it like a series of games to learn new cities as they moved about. When the CIA was providing the new Delta Force members training in spy craft, Nomad already knew how to do handoffs, how to change appearance and disappear into a crowd, how to work with dead drops, to follow a rabbit—the name for a person you were tracking—to set up a safe house, the hows and whys, and wheres of caches. All of it. None of it was new.

In training, Nomad was so good at it that they looked into his background.

And Nomad knew precisely when that happened because his parents had shown up.

Their visit was an in-person plea that Nomad keep the family secret quiet. They just went for a sail and made sure that he wasn’t wondering and therefore digging and asking questions.

It was all good. He had been eighteen when he’d made peace with all that. The affirmation was appreciated, though.

Wasthatwhat Hasan wanted him to reveal?

“You know Vienna?” Hasan asked. “You speak German?” Hasan already knew that if he’d read Nomad’s folder.

“I speak German. My father worked at the Viennese Embassy for a time. If you gave me an address, I’d need a GPS to get there. It’s been almost twenty years.”

“And you have social skills?”

“What does that mean?” Nomad hadn’t been asked these kinds of questions before. It had always been, “Go here. Accomplish this.”

“Dancing skills, and by that I specifically mean ballroom dancing skills, the waltz at the very least.” Hasan glared through the camera at Nomad. “Delta Force and ballroom don’t usually pair together.”

“Yes, sir. I’m comfortable with all of that.”

“Okay,” Hasan spoke to someone off camera. “I think this is our guy. He has the right look if he were in white tie and tails. Do you have his measurements? Good. Get everything ordered. Correct car. Correct hotel. The works. And with the car, you must remember his height, yes?” Hasan turned back to the camera.

“Sir?”

“Solo mission. It’s going to take some creativity on your part. There’s a woman, her name is Elena Savas. She’s supposed to attend a ball in Vienna this Saturday, and we want you there with eyes on her.”

There had been the mention of Poole, keeping a tight circle, and now a woman named Elena …

Poole was most likely still in a brig under the Mediterranean Sea.

Not everyone was trained to withstand interrogation.

It wasn’t easy.

Nomad learned this the hard way in SERE school. Survival being the goal—escape was the best of all worlds. But when necessary, they knew how to resist, which could be an external resistance or an internal one. And they’d been trained to escape.

There was no escaping a submarine.

Obviously, Poole had given something up.

“Yes, sir.”

Hasan drummed his fingers on the table. It had the quality not of impatience but of anxiety to get the job done. The sense that he wanted boots on the ground. And he wanted them to be aggressive. “Poole is a traitor. We have a limited understanding of his actions and their implications. Right now, we recognize that there are people out of the Iraqi attack who are staging to go over our southern border to mole into our communities and to affect some large-scale act of terror. We want to know their end goal and net them before they burrow into some hole where we can’t find them anymore.”

“Yes, sir. Do you know Poole’s motivation for his involvement?”

“It looks like he was a bored soldier with a high-security clearance that an attractive woman developed for intelligence. And a car that he wanted to buy.”

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