Page 2 of Into the Gray Zone

Exasperated, I threw the handful of receipts on the desk and said, “You told me this would take ten minutes! It’s been two hours. I’ll never find all the paper you want from that long ago.”

Jennifer gave me her disapproving teacher look and said, “It would have taken only ten minutes if you had some sort of filing system. How come all my receipts are filed neatly, but when I ask you foryourreceipts, you’re digging through duffel bags and rucksacks?”

Wearing a ballcap with a blond ponytail coming out the back, she looked like she was about to go surfing instead of analyzing our accounts. Seated behind a computer with a spreadsheet displayed, she was trying to match up our claimed deductible expenditures with the proof they were actually true.

It was time for our quarterly update to our accountant for corporate taxes, and I hated this paperwork bullshit. Which is why Jennifer did it all. She was now asking for rental car receipts, clothing purchases, ferry tickets, and other items to match up to the spreadsheet. Receipts that I’d supposedly saved but now had no idea where I’d stored them. It was ridiculous. Why wouldn’t the U.S. government just assume I was telling the truth?

I said, “Look, this is all I have. This is it. If we’re missing a taxi receipt, then we’re just missing a taxi receipt. Nobody’s going to check.”

She said, “Until they do. We can’t risk that.”

Which, as much as I hated to admit it, was absolutely true. Our company was called Grolier Recover Services, and as far as the overt U.S. government knew, it was an above-board business that specialized in facilitating archeological work around the world. Unfortunately, that wasn’t exactly accurate.

I waved my arm at a rifle case holding a custom AR 10 chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor, saying, “If I don’t get on the road, I’ll lose the shooting lane to some prima donna with an eight-thousand-dollar bolt gun trying to figure out if the brass casing he’s using affects the flight of the bullet. Let me go. Please.”

She said, “Speaking of that, I’m not sure we should claim the range membership as a deduction. I mean, that’s going to cause questions.”

“Questions? For what? That’s literally how we make money. You do the egghead stuff, and I do the Neanderthal stuff. People hire us because we keep them alive, and shooting this gun is what does that.”

Our company was a little unique in that we didn’t do the digging for the artifacts, we basically sold the shovels. In the world of archeological relics, it turns out that the majority of the digs around the earth were in areas that were less than hospitable, with most being in regions wracked by strife. So if you wanted to go dig up some bones somewhere, you needed someone to facilitate it, which is where we came in.

Jennifer used her degree in anthropology to convince them we understood what they wanted to do, and I used my degree in killing bad guys to keep them safe. We facilitated such things as government permits in the country in question, logistics for the dig, and then provided security on site. Which is where my guns came into play.

Jennifer said, “Yeah, I get that, and you get that, but I’m not sure the IRS will understand. If they start to question, we’re in trouble.”

She had a point. The truth of the matter was our business was all a sham. We actually did real archeological facilitation, to a certain extent, but only to give us cover for what we really did—putting some national security threat’s head on a spike.

Since much of the unrecovered archeological stuff around the world was in what could charitably be called ungoverned space, meaning that it held a lot of bad guys, we leveraged my company to eliminate national security threats. Grolier allowed us to penetrate as eggheads instead of commandos wearing camo swooping in on helicopters, giving the United States plausible deniability for any fallout.

All of my “employees” were apex predators, drawn from the most elite units of the Department of Defense and the CIA, and most of our real work was directed by the National Command Authority of the United States. Which is to say, most of my business was paid by good ol’ Uncle Sam, under the rubric of something called Project Prometheus.

Our unit was so classified we never even utter the assigned code name, instead simply calling the umbrella organization the Taskforce, but being that deep in the black had its own problems—namely, paying our taxes like a real company, which is what Jennifer was trying to do. It sounds insane, but if some guy in the IRS started digging, he might find something we didn’t want him to. You’d think we could just tell him to back off and swagger back to the bar, but that wasn’t how it worked. We needed to be legit—even to our own government—and I’d given that task to Jennifer.

Jennifer said, “Yeah, I can plausibly claim the range time, but I can’t claim the guns. You buy them like candy. How am I going to sell that? The IRS is going to ask why you need so many—especially since we never take them with us. We always use Taskforce stuff.”

“They don’t know that. I mean, we need guns to do the job. That’s why I buy them.”

She squinted at me and said, “We might have more guns than the Taskforce itself. If I didn’t know better, I’d believe you thought they wore out after a single use. I mean, what’s up with the gun you’re going to shoot today? We have three long-range precision rifles, and you bought a fourth? How am I going to sell that?”

A little miffed, I said, “Technology marches forward. This is a precise tool. I need to see if it stands up to what they say it does. I’m not driving a Model T today either.”

“Right. You need to see if it works. Which is why you paid a bunch of money to some guy from your old unit to build it.”

“Hey, if he builds them better, and it works, he’ll be building the ones we use on operations. The Taskforce will buy them. I can’t help it if he knows what he’s doing.”

She scoffed and said, “I’ll claim the range fees, but I’m not claiming that new gun.”

Honestly, I didn’t care. We were making a pretty good living, as we had to do at least three honest trips for every one we did for the government, and I wasn’t looking to own a Porsche. I was happy where we were, the satisfaction of the job meaning more than the money. Well, that and I’d rather have a new precision rifle than a Porsche.

I said, “Okay, keep it off, but if you do, we’re leaving money on the table.”

Exasperated, Jennifer waved her hand and said, “Go shooting. It’ll be easier for me without you here.”

I smiled, hearing exactly what I wanted to. All I had to do was be obstinate for a little bit, and then she’d let me go. I leaned in and kissed her on the lips, saying, “You’re doing God’s work.”

She smacked me on the top of the head and said, “Yeah, yeah, right.Don’t think I don’t understand what just happened. If the IRS cracks us open, you’ll be the one asking Wolffe for help. Not me.”

George Wolffe was the commander of the Taskforce, and a good man. A paramilitary officer in the CIA, he’d been running and gunning his entire life, and he was one of the men who’d designed Project Prometheus when it was formed. Now he was in charge of the entire shooting match. If I needed to call in a chit because of some IRS audit, I’d do so, and he’d help, but I didn’t think that was going to happen.

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