True Faith and Allegiance

22

Bartosz “Midas” Jankowski and Adara Sherman met for the first time at five a.m. in the underground parking garage of the Hendley Associates building, on the corner of North Fairfax Street and Princess Street, in Alexandria, Virginia.

John Clark introduced the two new operational trainees to each other, and when Chavez, Caruso, and Ryan Junior pulled into their respective parking spaces and climbed out, all dressed for a morning run, he introduced Midas to the other members of the team.

Five minutes later, all of them, Clark included, were running along the Mount Vernon Trail, a jogging and bike path that followed the western bank of the Potomac River. They kept an easy pace and did five leisurely miles together, chatting away for the duration, although John Clark grew silent for the last mile, partially because running five miles at his age was some work, but mostly because he wanted to listen in to the others and get some early impressions about how they all jelled.

It was clear to Clark that the conversation was a little stilted, but he knew this had nothing to do with how well Adara and Midas would fit in with the crew. No, early the previous morning the three Campus operatives had returned from Jakarta, and they were all still sickened by the fallout of their mission there.

Jack was the worst of the three. He was quiet today, save for speaking when spoken to, and Clark knew at any other time he would have been the most hospitable and welcoming person in the building on a new employee’s first day.

Clark knew he’d have to watch Jack carefully, do what he could to help him process his guilt, and make sure the death of the CIA officer in Minsk didn’t hamper Jack’s ability to continue to do his job.

Back at the office at sunup, Midas pulled his gear bag out of the back of his pickup and followed the others inside, where he was shown to a locker room to shower and change for the day.

Jack, Dom, and Ding showered as well, then went to breakfast at a nearby coffee shop before heading into work. Adara showered in the women’s locker room of the gym, then went straight up to the third-floor conference room, where she knew coffee, fruit, and cereal would be waiting.

When she got there, Midas had already finished his first cup of coffee and was pouring himself a second.

Adara said, “Uh-oh. Hope the fact it took me longer to get ready than you doesn’t make me look too high-maintenance.”

Midas stirred in some milk and laughed. “Not at all. My ex-wife would have taken exactly five hundred percent the time it took you to get ready for the day after a five-mile run. I’m a drip-dry kinda guy myself, so I don’t fault you running a brush through your hair before coming up.”

Adara got her breakfast and then Clark came in the room, himself showered and ready for the day. “Midas, I’ve got to explain something about this morning.”

“It’s okay, Mr. C. I’ve been places where nobody liked me before. The guys will warm up to me when I prove myself.”

“It’s not you. Twenty-four hours ago they returned from an operation. Doubt you’ll ever have need-to-know on the specifics, but let’s just say that while the guys did everything exactly right, the fallout from their mission had some very, very negative second-order effects. No fault of anyone at The Campus, but the operators are going to be a little quiet for a couple of days. Jack, especially.”

Midas nodded. “Understood. I’ve had a few days like that myself.”

Adara knew about what had happened, and she was used to Dom getting a little melancholy when things went wrong. Added to that was the fact Adara was now being trained as an operator, and she knew she had to give Dom some extra space and understanding.

She imagined that wasn’t going to be too much of a problem, considering the fact she had a full plate for the next several weeks.

Clark spent forty-five minutes going over his plan for six weeks of instruction with his two new trainees, and at eight o’clock sharp, Gerry Hendley came into the conference room to meet Midas. The four of them talked about the history of Hendley Associates and its special relationship with the government for a while, until Gerry excused himself and Clark officially began his training.

In order to work at The Campus, one had to understand how The Campus worked, as well as the operation of Hendley Associates, the cover company that Midas was now an employee of.

Clark spent the morning moving Midas and Adara from meeting to meeting throughout the building, first introducing them to the investing and analytical team on the Hendley “white side” as well as the analysts, computer hackers, equipment purchasers, logistics experts, et cetera, who worked on the Campus “black side.” Adara had worked here for years, but she was not on a first-name basis with everyone in the building. Some of this had to do with the fact that fully fifty percent of her work life took place on board the Gulfstream or else at a tiny office they kept at the airport fixed-base operator, formerly at Baltimore BWI Airport, but recently relocated to Reagan National, just ten minutes’ drive north of Hendley Associates in Arlington.

There were just over eighty employees working here in the building today, and Clark took Midas and Adara around to meet most all of them.

The next part of the process was as educational to Adara as it was to Midas. Clark went down the somewhat complicated list of just exactly who around the intelligence community was aware of the sub rosa intelligence work done at The Campus. From the director of national intelligence to the attorney general and, of course, the President of the United States, it was a list with some lofty names, although it remained a relatively short list. The off-the-books organization had been employed on more than a dozen special assignments in the past several years, so many people had come in contact with operators of The Campus, but Gerry Hendley and his executive staff had gone to great pains to keep the exposure small and the affiliations murky.

Midas knew this from his own experience a couple of years earlier. He had been an officer in a highly secretive military unit operating in a battle zone who was then introduced to a group of men and told he couldn’t be read in on just who, exactly, they worked for. He’d found it odd at the time, but now that he was on the other side of the coin, it was comforting to know there were just enough people around the government who ran interference for The Campus that he knew he could expect some semiofficial cover during his operations.

In the late afternoon Clark took his team down to the two-lane firing range on level B3, just below the parking garage. Over the next few hours they trained on the MP5 submachine gun, the M4 rifle, and the SIG Sauer MPX, the new sub gun the team had been testing to see if it was worthy of replacing the H&K UMP kept hidden as a close-quarters defensive weapon in the Gulfstream.

Adara actually had more time behind the SIG MPX than Midas. Delta used the H&K MP7 PDW (personal defense weapon), as their short-barreled weapon of choice, while The Campus had been testing the new SIG for the past few months.

Still, Midas and Adara shot identical groups.

Adara was never going to be the shooter Midas was, but a small, mobile unit like The Campus was in need of overlapping expertise. She had more medical training, more logistics training, and a wider understanding of worldwide aviation. She was a pilot, where Midas was not, although they both had significant boating experience.

There would be places Adara could go where Midas would stick out, and the inverse was just as true.

Clark was happy to see that Midas didn’t have any qualms about training alongside a female. He could think back to a time in his own military career where he would have found it incredibly odd, to the point of distraction, to run and gun with a woman, but that was a long time ago. Adara had become something of a daughter figure to him in the past five years, and he realized he had to keep aware of his own professionalism so he wouldn’t take it easy on her during the training program.

After working into evening at the range, they took an hour off for dinner at a local barbecue shop, then they drove to an outdoor range in Springfield for night fire training. They donned night-vision equipment and used rifles equipment with night-vision-capable holographic weapons sights, and they cleared rooms in the four-room shoot house there.

Again, Adara acquitted herself well, and Midas shot, moved, and communicated like he’d been, just months earlier, a high-ranking Delta Force officer.

That is to say, this stuff was ingrained in Midas’s DNA by now.

Adara was bone-tired when John Clark called his last cease-fire of the day, shortly after eleven p.m.

Clark said, “You both did good today. But today was the easy day. Tomorrow things get harder, and harder still the day after.”

Adara imagined this was true, and she imagined John would say the same thing every day for the next six weeks.