Page 4 of The Truths that Deceive

Even if it does keep me away from the wedding.

“She’s been naughty in Big Daddy’s ever-seeing eye.” Enver shrugs. “She’s an adult.”

“It’s soft fucking kidnapping.”

“She’s computer intel, a hacker. Calista dropped off the face of the planet because she knows she’s a target.” He pauses, reaches over, and swipes to the next page on the iPad.

I follow the words on the page. It’s boring shit about her background. Calista “Hendrix” Price. Younger brother, Henry Xavier, is in the hands of Big Da—the CIA.

“Under close protection” is their code for “watched and a prisoner at a moment’s notice.”

I look back at Enver. “If you’re trying to tell me Calista’s all soft and basement bound, I’m not going to believe you. Daddy trains well and you fucking know it.”

Last sighting was in Berlin.

“She’s young and she’s never been in the field. There’s a difference, Smith, between desk job and field agent, and you know it.”

“So she’s wet behind the ears, dropped off the planet, and Daddy can’t find her?” I shake my head. “Not buying it.”

“No one’s asking you to. Just to bring her in. All you have to do,” he says, reaching into his satchel and sliding a black leather folder that’ll have a backstory and passports, or my name isn’t Johannes Schmidt Jaeger, “is tell her she needs to report in at home and you’re taking her.”

“Why me?”

“Your blueblood Patrician mother had a hard-on for an American-born German man, Herr Jaeger. Live her fucking dream for her.”

“My mother was not—” I stop. There’s no point playing inthat pool with him. The point he’s making is that I should go in because I’ve got a German name even though I’m very much American. I keep reading the brief. “Just bring her in, any means necessary to gain her cooperation?”

Then I flick to the last photo of the girl. Pink, blue, and purple-streaked ice-silver hair pinned up, showing an undercut.

Big eyes like looking into a stormy ocean. Gray and turbulent.

And with that soft mouth and stubborn chin, she’s pretty, ridiculously so.

She also looks about fifteen here.

And yeah, it’s not like she’s an active field agent. She sits behind a desk for the CIA. So how fucking hard could it be to find her and bring her in?

I’ve got contacts in Germany, both in the Bundesnachrichtendienst federal intelligence service, also known as BND, and outside the agency.

I look at him. “When?”

He puts a burner down and on it is a first-class red-eye to Berlin.

“Tonight.”

Chapter 2

Calista

The techno beat makes my bones thrum and thump in time.

Someone’s out to get me. Call me paranoid, but I know the signs and I need to gather intel. As much as I can, before it’s too late.

I move through the darkened coffeehouse and club. The place is old, leftover from before the wall came down decades earlier. It’s cheap and fits with a punk and artist drug vibe with the feels of a speakeasy.

It’s a perfect place for someone like me.

Someone who’s trying to avoid Uncle Sam’s reach but wants to stay close to where I worked.

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