Chapter One

Red

An old-fashioned incandescent bulb swung naked overhead. Its dim light drew fuzzy shadows on the blue-tiled walls. Johnna Red leaned over the sink to scrutinize her appearance past the spider web cracks edging the bathroom mirror.

She looked as shitty as she felt.

Her olive skin had a greasy cast that was oddly gray as if she'd mixed ashes into fat and polished her face. Turning her head this way and then that, Red concluded that blush or lip stain would make her ghastly pallor that much more obvious. Mascara would call attention to her glassy, feverish eyes.

Would her appearance frighten her asset?

Probably.

She wished she could delay their meeting, giving herself a day—or two … maybe three—in bed, recovering. But this was the day Moussa was driving from the capital to his next meeting. Passing through Tal Afaya, he could stop for lunch without raising suspicions about his doings.

He'd said it had to be today, whispering into his phone, "This needs your government's immediate attention, I would think. Yes, I think this very much."

Skittish, anxious Moussa was a pencil-pushing yes-man who made no decisions and was of no consequence in the grand scheme.

Not to his organization, anyway.

He worked for a major import-export company. Their international dealings came with a veneer of respectability, but credible sources indicated that they dabbled in disruptive activities. Possibly, they were getting bolder and had turned to funding terrorism.

That was what Red aimed to discover.

In Moussa's role at the company, sitting in the same office suite as the owner, jumping to his boss's every demand, he was a shadow that garnered little thought or attention beyond his scrambling efforts to appease.

Keeping the coffee and tea hot and flowing as politicians and government officials stepped through the carved wooden doors—to sit, visit, and accept their side money—meant essential conversations could be overheard.

Yes, to the CIA, a shadow like Moussa could be gold.

Red had been developing him for months, and luckily, she'd found two points where she could leverage him—he wanted money to ease his daily life, and he wanted his son to go to an American university to become a doctor—that meant at least a decade of school so at least a decade of intelligence gathering if Moussa proved helpful.

Since Moussa had just agreed to become Red's asset, they hadn't gotten to the point in their relationship where she could train him in the dos and don'ts of his role—how to know what kind of information was useful, how to gather it without tipping his hand, and how to pass it along to her without pulling attention their way.

Regardless, Moussa had reached out, saying he had something, and it was significant. Something that she would want to pay him a great deal of money to know.

What would make Moussa act out of character like this?

Should she have her guard up?

Red turned on the faucet, letting the tepid water run until it was no longer rusty. Cupping her fingers, Red leaned down to splash her face.

Gliding damp hands over her head, she pressed the frizz of black hair that had escaped her ponytail back into place. Then, she reached for a towel to pat herself dry.

This towel had been white at some point in its life cycle. But the hotel paid the rural women to do the laundry in the river, and now the fibers had taken on a faint terracotta cast.

The roughness of the line-dried fabric felt nice in this instance. It seemed to scrub a bit of color into her cheeks. Red buried her face in the towel and drew in a deep breath, filling her nostrils with the scent of sunshine and goat shit. That combination was inescapable even here in the town center.

Did Moussa actually know what kind of information was worth paying for?

Maybe.

He was an educated man. Just … kind of spineless. Or so she'd thought before his phone call.

Yes, his voice on the phone quivered, but it wasn't nerves. It had been excitement.

She glanced at her watch and then ripped open a packet of electrolytes, pouring them into a bottle of room-temperature water. With the top in place, she shook it until the crystals dissolved. That effort exhausted her. She tipped another round of antibiotics into her palm and clapped her hand to her mouth, tossing the white, chalky pill toward the back of her throat, then washed it down with the salty concoction that was supposed to make her feel like a human again.

She popped another anti-diarrheal from its bubble wrap and tucked it into her hip pocket, just in case. So far, the last round of meds was holding, and Red tried to convince herself that she was turning a corner.

After long years in the field, Red had learned a lot of tricks to stave off the travelers' intestinal shit-shows. By reflex, she popped GI-tract-coating pills before every meal. But sometimes she hit bad luck. Her job with the CIA's Color Code, after all, was to befriend anyone who could further her understanding of threats to America. And friends accepted invitations to camps, eating the offered meals, even those that were iffy.

So iffy that her prep pills weren't up to the job.

Her friends were fine.

But Red, even after years in the area, hadn't built resistance to all the local microbes.

Tenacious buggers.

Red reached for her backpack, reassured herself that the banknotes were in place, and pulled the strings tight. If Moussa brought valuable intel, she'd exchange this with a matching black bag that Red had given Moussa the last time they had spoken.

If he remembered to bring it along.

Wrapping a scarf over her hair, draping it in such a way that it would obscure the contours of her face, Red left her room, locked the door, then tested it twice before pocketing the key. She was staying on the second floor, at the rear of the hotel, and could go out a back door at the bottom of the stairs where no one would clock her movements.

Red trudged down the worn stairs. No, thi s wasn't the nicest of hotels.

She was paying for two beautiful rooms in the modern-styled hotel just up the street that housed diplomats, passing military brass, world journalists, and contractors as they moved through this border town near the Syrian crossing. And that was where Red had scheduled her asset meeting. But for safety's sake, Red elected to stay down the road. Here, with the cracked walls, the rusty water, and the lumpy bed. The toilet worked. That was appreciated. Greatly appreciated.

Red recalled how one time she and her informant needed to escape through the countryside on foot. They were both very ill but still needed to follow protocol. So they urinated off the trail and packed out all their solid waste. There had been a single trash bag, and she was the one who carried it. That had been a challenge in ways imaginable and unimaginable. Yeah, that had been bad.

Red wanted to push that story out of her mind.

Memories were like earworms, a melody that played over and over no matter how much she wished it would stop.

The best thing to do was focus on her immediate mission.

Stepping outside, moving around the building and onto the front walkway, the midday sun was a cudgel as she walked the three blocks towards the relief of air conditioning that she'd find in the international hotel.

What was Moussa about to deliver to her?

Hopefully, it was as good as he thought it was.

Something was ramping up. Red could smell it past that ubiquitous sunshine and goat shit. This was a sizzle of expectation like a fatty steak on the grill, making people salivate. There was a greediness for some outcome. After so many years in the field, Red could taste when an attack was in the planning stages. It was bitter on the sides of her tongue.

Who was making the plans? Where was the money coming from?

As a member of the CIA Color Code, it was her job to find the wallet that would spread wide to pay for the impact.

Stop the money, freeze the attack.

Without funding, it was all just fantasy.

With funding, it was an atrocity.

Would this Moussa meeting be consequential to saving innocent lives, or would this turn out to be a nothing burger?