Page 5 of The Truths that Deceive

Wants?

No.

Needs to.

Getting out of Germany’s only half the battle. I need to get the hell out of Europe and back to the States, all without being flagged.

And I’m not sure howto do it.

First things first. If I can find Johnny, the field agent I’ve been handling, things will take a turn for the better. But I have a sinking feeling that if he does turn up somewhere, he won’t be alive to tell the story.

That familiar queasiness hits, rocking my stomach and sending burning bile up the back of my throat, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth.

Is he dead?

Gone underground?

Working for someone else as a double agent?

I don’t know. All I know is he stopped communicating and I waited too long to report it. There were reasons, like my own agenda and the fact that he asked me to hold off so he could look into Bolivia.

Now panic beats in my veins.

What I need is time I don’t have to look into Bolivia myself, to find my own contacts there, to poke into chatter on the dark web, to listen for any clues about where the hell Johnny might have ended up.

And my own agenda?

I get a soda from the bar and snake my way to the back, past the people in clusters who are high past their eyeballs and swaying to the beat of electronica, past the others hunkered down at tables with their computers and phones.

The corner table’s dark, close to an exit just past the restrooms that leads out to anotherStraße, or street. It’s a good vantage point because I can also see who comes into the place. I’m not an idiot. The CIA or one of their sneakier subsidiaries will have people out looking for me. My time’s borrowed and currently riding on a ticking bomb.

I put my personal computer down on the battered wooden table and open the lid, using the hot spot from the burnerphone in my pocket. If I so much as touched my CIA-issued computer, they’d have me pinned in a hot second.

Every now and then I glance past my laptop screen, sipping from my glass. Sure, relying on my training should be enough. I should be able to read the room and people from my periphery.

But the information I have scrapes at my brain to the point where there are so many potential threats, I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thwart them all.

Johnny thought the Iranians might be using Bolivia as a base of operations. Poor countries often take big chunks of money without looking too closely at where it’s coming from. The fact that he’s disappeared makes me wonder if he was onto something, something the Bolivians wanted to cover up.

And now I’m also sitting on information someone high up in the CIA wants. I squeeze the glass in my hand, my lips pressing tightly together.

I went deeper than I should, poked into things far above my clearance level, and now…

Well, with what I’ve got, I’m not sure who I can trust.

This new weapon is… scary. In the wrong hands, it’ll get buried deeper than the corpse they’ll turn me into if I reveal it to the wrong person.

I take a deep breath before tapping into the dark web in an attempt to gather information on CIA, and other international intelligence agencies such as Britain’s MI6, Germany’s BND, Russia’s FSB and SVR, and other government agencies, big and small.

I don’t get any hits.

Yet.

If someone from any of those agencies is actively looking for me, it’s classified, even beyond my reach.

But the niggle in my hacker brain keeps catching on a groupof names, and landing on something in the illegal chatter and murk of the Obsidian Knights—whatever they are. That name’s so slippery, I can’t find anything beyond the odd mention.

I’d quickly dismiss something like the Obsidian Knights as just a code name, which it probably is, except for one thing that catches my attention.

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