Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 145091 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 484(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145091 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 725(@200wpm)___ 580(@250wpm)___ 484(@300wpm)
“What does she do?”
He stiffened again, holding both glasses.
She knew when she’d tread too far. “You do not have to answer that.”
He moved toward her, but his shoulders were still up. “I’m wondering if you know what happened and you’re pretending you don’t.”
She could understand that. They worked in an industry of secrets and manipulations. “I didn’t even know you were with the Agency until you showed up here. You didn’t mention a sister when we met in Poland. I don’t know. I keep my eyes on my father’s missions. I’m not trying to move up, Drake. I’m planning on getting out, so you should assume that I know nothing.”
“Getting out?”
“I want to go to college and have a life that has nothing to do with state’s secrets. I kind of want to teach. I don’t know. I want to explore my options, but I can’t do that until I finish this op.”
“I’m struggling to understand how you get out.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know too much. How do they let you out?”
“I don’t know too much. I know very little outside of my father’s work. You know I wasn’t always with him, right? I was born in America. My mom was a tourist my dad hooked up with. They weren’t some great love story or anything. He knew I existed, but he didn’t have anything to do with me until I was seven and my mom died. I didn’t have any other family, and I went into the foster care system. Then one night my dad showed up and he took me away.” She could still remember him standing in the doorway of her foster mom’s ramshackle house. There had been three other kids there, and every day had felt like torment. He’d shown up, and she should have been terrified of the massive, scarred man, but he’d gotten to one knee and looked her in the eyes and explained that he was her father and he would take care of her now.
“That would have been around the time he defected, right?”
She shook her head. “He’d been in the States for a year at that point. I’ve been told he’d planned to contact my mom after he settled in. I didn’t realize he’d sent her money the whole time.”
“Did he defect for you?” Drake asked.
“My father rabidly hated the Kremlin. Not in the beginning, of course. He was a soldier who became one of SVR’s top spies, but he saw the corruption and how it hurt people. He had a friend who was an analyst. He tried to call out some corrupt officials and they wiped out his family. That was when he left.”
Drake nodded as though the story didn’t surprise him at all. “Why didn’t he contact you before?”
“He was settling in. You know they didn’t trust him for the longest time. They kept eyes on him for years. Even after he came and got me, I remember handlers being around. Sometimes they babysat me while he was on an op.”
“My father didn’t do the same kinds of ops as yours,” Drake replied. “He wasn’t a James Bond type. He mostly traveled with my mother and met with people the Agency wanted information from. These were all people who worked for highly placed politicians. Mom would be working some diplomatic angle with the president of the country while my dad was getting dirt on the same politician from the man’s assistant or his private chef. My mom worked in the State Department for many years before she ran for office.”
“I know there are a lot of spies who work for embassies. That is definitely not what my dad does. The crazier, more death-defying the mission, the happier he is,” she explained. It was nice to talk to someone who understood what it was like to be raised by a spy. “So your mom still doesn’t know?”
He shook his head. “Nope. I don’t know if she ever even suspected. My mother is focused on her job. I’m not saying she wasn’t a good mom. She was, but she was very much a child of her upbringing. She had a nanny most of the time. She divorced her first husband because he cheated on her. I think one of the things she liked about my father was how willing he was to travel with her, to put her career first. She didn’t question it. She reveled in it. She liked that he was willing to take me and my sister with him, and he was our primary caretaker. She liked that he took control of those parts of our family life so much that she didn’t question it when he replaced the nanny she’d hired with an Agency employee who worked as his assistant for years.”
They had such weird lives. “So you were ten when you found out. You said he started your training then? How do you train a ten-year-old?”