Chaucer asked, “Harold, do you know where you are?”

  Harold looked around. “It looks like debrief, but it’s not. You fucked up, buddy. You should’ve let me go when you had the chance.”

  “Why is that, Harold?”

  “Because the people I work for? They play for keeps.”

  Suddenly, a gunshot rang out. Chaucer spun, trying to discover how someone had snuck into the box. But no one did. Instead, there was a small hole in the mirror leading to the blind.

  Chaucer glanced back down at his subject and saw there was a hole in his forehead, where a bullet had neatly entered.

  Chaucer ducked just in the nick of time as several more shots rang out. They were coming from the blind for certain, splintering the mirrored glass between the rooms.

  Then two more shots rang out, neither of which impacted the mirror. The shots echoed in their finality.

  The next thing Chaucer heard was Jefferson.

  “Clear! Chaucer, you alive?”

  “Yeah.”

  Chaucer went to check on his subject, but he died the moment the bullet penetrated.

  He rushed out of the box, and into the blind to see what the hell had just happened.

  The first thing he saw was McCoy, dead on the floor.

  The second thing he saw was Guerra, wide-eyed and freaked out.

  Then Jefferson, standing over a body, eyes searching, trying to piece an impossible puzzle together.

  Then Chaucer’s eyes went to the body at Jefferson’s feet. It was Park—the twenty-year veteran of the U.S. Navy. The captain of the boat.

  Park still had his service pistol in his hand, planted under his chin.

  The man had killed their detainee—and then taken his own life.

  Jefferson looked as if he had seen a ghost.

  The good thing about submariners is that they have redundancy. Everybody on a sub learns everybody else’s job, just in case. As such, the sub reassigned several positions and continued on its journey. But losing the captain was an obvious blow to the crew.

  Over the next six hours, Chaucer interviewed with the crew. Though they seemed informal, the interviews were decidedly not. The results of his interrogations were conclusive. Not a single man under Park’s command had the slightest idea why Captain Park did what he did. None of them knew a single dark or distressing fact about the man. He was a Boy Scout, literally and figuratively.

  Chaucer briefed Jefferson and Guerra on the tender as it brought them all out to the yacht that had brought Chaucer there. Neither Jefferson nor Guerra had much to say. They may not have been in shock from a medical perspective, but they were shaken to their core.

  Back on board the yacht, Jefferson’s men had hot coffee waiting for them. Chaucer asked for tea and was presented with hot water and a box of Celestial Seasonings. Chaucer drank the water.

  As the three of them sat in the galley, Chaucer realized that if he was going to get any further, he was going to have to interrogate them too.

  “How long have you had that black site?”

  Jefferson replied, “Five years.”

  “And how long has Park captained that boat?”

  This time, Jefferson didn’t answer, lost in space.

  Guerra answered for him, softly, as if speaking ill of the dead. “Five years.”

  Chaucer let that sink in. At first, he thought—or at least hoped—that this was somehow isolated. That somebody slipped a replacement captain onto the black site in order to plug a leak they expected was going to burst.

  But this wasn’t that.

  This wasn’t that at all.

  Chaucer said, “Well vetted, I assume.”

  Guerra shot Chaucer a look of derision. “Psych profilers crawled up his ass with a microscope and set up a base camp for a month. Yeah. Vetted. Just like Jackson.”

  Jefferson nodded. “Just like Jackson.”

  Jefferson looked up, meeting Chaucer’s eyes. “Flying completely blind here—not expecting answers—but I’d very much like to hear your impressions.”

  “We’re looking at something new. That’s obvious. Something that renders our traditional security measures useless.”

  Jefferson shot back, “Yeah, but what? Surgery? Implant? Who is the man I’ve eaten a hundred meals with on that boat?”

  Chaucer said, “You’re going to want to autopsy them with a fine-toothed comb. You’re going to want to look for laparoscopic surgery marks—the new ones agency doctors have been working with. Pretty much microscopic. You’re going to want to take their brains apart with a fine-toothed comb. Take a really good look at their endocrine systems.”

  Guerra asked, “So you think it’s medical?”

  Chaucer thought for a long moment, then said, “These people were tampered with. The questions are when, how, and who for. But no—if I had to guess, I’m not sure medical is going to show anything.”

  Chaucer felt the thought return to him. The one he was avoiding. The one he thought the moment Jackson Reynolds ‘became’ Harold Jones. He said, “I’m sure you’re all aware of a man named Po?”

  Both of them nodded, neither meeting his eyes as they did. They knew about Chaucer’s eight years in hell.

  Chaucer continued, “For about three years, he experimented with what he called ‘overlays.’ He would break me and build me up anew. New personalities. New attitudes. New legends. Everything.”

  Guerra asked, “Did it work?”

  Chaucer said, “It did. But Po barely cared about that. He was very clear about it—he wasn’t doing it for results. He was just doing it to see if he could. He wanted to show the world how fragile we are, in his hands.”

  Guerra thought for a long moment, sipped her coffee, and said, “Well, somebody out there wanted a hell of a lot more than to know if they could do it.”

  “This is a new kind of espionage,” Jefferson said, “and right now, we’re flying completely blind.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Not much was said for the rest of the journey. Jefferson retired to a cabin and wasn’t seen until they had docked. As Chaucer got up to gather his things, Jefferson appeared and put a hand on his shoulder. “I want to extend your contract.”

  Chaucer didn’t understand. “You’ve got somebody else to interrogate?”

  “Would it do anything? Shy of basically torturing everyone in my organization, would you know anything? We’re starting from zero, and the closest thing to what we saw is what you experienced in the DPRK. I need your insights as an investigator, not an interrogator. I want you to work this case.”

  “You don’t even know if this has any connection to Po.”

  Jefferson shrugged. “You think it does. That’s enough for me.”

  Chaucer thought about it for a long moment. An investigation. Chaucer 3.0 did not solely want to be an interrogator. He wanted to integrate, as the psychology texts said, different parts of his previous life, including his time as an agent. This would be the perfect opportunity to explore that.

  But if this new threat was linked to Po, the calculation grew more fraught. On the one hand, he was sticking his toes into waters he had spent over a decade trying to escape. On the other, not a night went by when he didn’t see Po’s face. His PTSD was tamed, but never cured.

  If this investigation led to Po…

  Chaucer didn’t allow himself to finish that thought. He didn’t even know how he would finish it, and he preferred it that way. “Okay. I agree. You can’t afford me on an hourly, so we’ll work out a rate.”

  Jefferson didn’t smile. He didn’t frown. He gave, at best, a half-nod—acknowledging a piece falling into place, a piece necessary for the investigation at hand.

  There was a car ride to a heliport, a chopper ride to a private airport, and a private jet to Reagan. Two cars were waiting for them at Reagan: one to take Jefferson to an undisclosed location, and one for Chaucer and Guerra.

  Chaucer and Guerra got in the back of the Suburban and sat in silence for a long moment. Chaucer breathed in the alchemical mix of new leather and new-car smell. He glanced over at Guerra, seeing a hundred different micro-signs of a woman in pain.

  “How long did you know McCoy?”

  “Five years.”

  “Close?”

  Guerra sighed. “Look, Chaucer? Jefferson told me we’d be working together, but I’m really not ready for an interrogation.”

  Chaucer shook his head. “Wasn’t an interrogation. I was offering input…” He didn’t finish his sentence. He let Guerra have her time in silence.

  Guerra grabbed the bottle of water waiting for them in the back and gulped it down. When she glanced over at Chaucer, she saw his owl eyes fixed on her. She frowned. Chaucer could see this was going to be hard for her.

  The SUV didn’t take them to Langley. It didn’t take them to Fort Meade, to the Pentagon, or to any other expected location. Instead, it took them to a mountain an hour and a half southwest of the city.

  Chaucer wondered why they didn’t just fly into Dulles. Reagan was notoriously crowded, and Dulles had to be closer to this mountain. He wondered if their plans had changed mid-flight, or if Jefferson was already playing chess with an unknown enemy.

  The SUV pulled into a large mall and into the basement parking structure. The driver parked it, and a moment later he was out of the SUV and into the red F-150 truck parked in the next spot. Chaucer looked to Guerra, who said, “Security protocol. Vehicle change.”

  Chaucer got into the rear of the extended cab, and Guerra followed. A moment later, they were back on the road.

  Chaucer took in the truck. It’s shiny chrome and gaudy red paint job. “Red?”

  Guerra nodded. “Who in our profession would look twice at this vehicle?”

  Chaucer couldn’t help but agree. It was good SECOPS.

  Less than ten minutes later, the truck pulled up to the base of the mountain, where an unfinished housing development stood. There were a couple of finished homes, low and nearest to the gatehouse leading into what looked like it was going to be a fairly nice middle-class community.

  The sign on the front of the gatehouse told him otherwise. It was a legal notice, showing that excessive radon had been detected in the ground and that the development was halted and its disposition was in the courts.

  Chaucer didn’t know what to make of it. He looked up the hill and saw a few dozen homes, all in various states of construction. He saw another truck or two, with construction workers ripping out wiring, etc. What they were doing here, Chaucer did not know.

  The guard who stepped out of the gatehouse to check them in had a cheerful smile on his face.

  Chaucer smirked. That’s your first mistake. Guys manning these posts are minimum wage. No smiling necessary.

  He noted the man’s build, the economy of action in his movement, and the Sig at his side. He noted the gate looked like any other gate, but was in fact reinforced against vehicular attack.

  The guard spoke to the driver for a second, then lifted the gate and let them through.

  “Where are we?” asked Chaucer.

  “Praxis,” replied Guerra.

  “Praxis? That’s what you call yourselves?”

  “We don’t actually have a name, but that’s a pain in the ass so we had to come up with something and somehow Praxis just stuck.”

  Chaucer considered the name. “Greek for ‘practice.’ Means applying knowledge in a targeted way. I like it.”

  The truck pulled up to what looked like a model home and entered the garage. Once the garage door closed behind them, the floor in front of them lowered, creating a ramp to an unseen level. The truck driver pulled the vehicle into a huge garage facility that extended deep into the mountain.

  Chaucer was impressed. Whoever Praxis was, they were not fooling around.

  The truck pulled up to a circle by a larger entrance to the underground facility. Guerra hopped out and held the door for Chaucer. Chaucer got out, but his eyes roamed everywhere.

  Guerra said, “Inside the mountain was supposed to be a Continuity of Government bunker, but they ran into a problem. Radon.”

  “Should I stop breathing?”

  “We solved that problem before we moved in. Now we’ve got a bunch of derelict surface structures tagged for radon, all of which are entrances to Praxis.”

  Chaucer smiled. “Not bad. Not bad at all. I suppose if you have an organization with no public face, this is exactly what you’d want.”

  Guerra led him inside. The double glass doors to the white marble lobby had no lock on them. There were no ID scans here, but cameras were everywhere. Whether watchers or AI, the building knew exactly who was everywhere and whether or not they should be. No need for keycards with this arrangement.

  Guerra said, “Welcome to Wonderland, Alice.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Chaucer estimated they walked close to five hundred yards deeper into the mountain, along several corridors. If this had been a bunker fifty years ago, it showed no signs of it now. The hallways they traversed could easily be in any government building in Washington.

  Then Guerra stopped. The door she opened read simply: 301.

  Of course it did, thought Chaucer. Anyone who doesn’t know what’s in 301 doesn’t need to know what’s in 301.

  Inside 301 was a bustling office. It looked like someone had lifted the analysts’ offices out of Langley and deposited them here, with a few key differences.

  This huge open space had conference rooms in the corners, but a central meeting area in the middle. At the CIA, the analysts would never be allowed to sit communally or share intel like this. Whatever the plan was at Praxis, they had a different theory of organization.

  Popping up to greet them was an African American man, maybe thirty years old. He wore a crisp tie and jacket and a white dress shirt that looked as though he had pressed it himself that morning. Everything about him screamed precision, but not fashion.

  Chaucer would bet a hundred dollars that his bed at home had hospital corners.

  He made a beeline for Guerra. “This is… Is this… It’s him. You’re him. I, I got you a—the thing you sit at. Desk. Don’t know why I forgot that. Got you a desk.”

  Guerra rolled her eyes. “Chaucer, this is Jeffrey Coombs.”

  Coombs kept right on with his train of thought, “Would you… I occasionally have anxiety. Would it be possible for you to not look in my direction for one minute so I can tell you the things I need to tell you without completely freaking out?”

  Chaucer laughed out loud and turned his head away. “I’m not the boogeyman. It’s gonna be okay.”

  Coombs nodded a little too aggressively. “Oh, I know. I know. I…I actually was the one who put together our file on you. I looked into everything…”

  For just a moment, Coombs had to compose himself. “...I know about your recent, um, breakthrough? I’m the one who cleared you for field duty.”

  Chaucer glanced at Guerra. Guerra closed her eyes. Coombs had spoken out of school. “Field duty, huh?”

  Guerra responded, “Cool your jets. We’re not the CIA, NSA, or any other three-letter organization. You’re cleared to work with us here at Praxis, and nothing more.”

  Chaucer said, “Well, that segues perfectly into my next question. What exactly is the Praxis?”

  Guerra started to answer, but Chaucer interrupted. “And I would like him to answer.”

  Guerra was about to object, but Coombs reached out his hand for Chaucer’s. “I’m from Providence, Rhode Island, originally. But that doesn’t matter. Don’t know why I said that. Praxis is an adjunct intelligence operation. We work to further the long-term interests of the United States of America, specifically by identifying global threats that don’t show up on any of the usual matrices. But we do not work at the behest of the Director of the CIA, the National Security Advisor, the Joint Chiefs, or the President.”

  Chaucer glanced at them both. He was waiting for the punchline.

  “But who do you answer to?”

  Guerra took this one. “We answer to Jefferson.”

  Chaucer pressed on. “But who does Jefferson answer to?”

  “Near as we can figure,” said Guerra, “Jefferson answers to Jefferson.”

  Chaucer couldn’t believe it. “Bullshit.”

  Coombs nodded. “I mean, of course it has to be bullshit on some levels, because our funding comes out of the black-budget pool. But it would seem that what we do tends to be things that no one wants to know about. Not in the dark and dastardly sense—more in the sense that we’re looking long term. In oversight, they want to justify budgets on a quarter-by-quarter basis. That’s just not how we operate.”

  Guerra continued, “Jefferson convinced the powers that be that we needed someone out there with a longer-term perspective. And then he convinced them it was him. And then he set about finding assets already on the books that we would commandeer for cheap.”

  “Like decommissioned attack subs and COG bunkers.”

  Coombs replied, “You get it.” He turned to Guerra. “See. I told you he’d get it.”

  Chaucer said, “All right. We’ll put a pin in this for now. But at some point, somebody’s going to have to tell me who the hell Jefferson is. For now, what’s our plan regarding the events of the last twenty-four hours?”

  Coombs jumped in. “Well, we’re still really just collating. We think we can account for Park for ninety-seven percent of his minutes on Earth for the last three years so far. Back farther than that is getting a little spottier, but we’re working on that. Reynolds isn’t military, so he’s tougher, but we’ve still got about seventy-five percent of his whereabouts going back three years.”

  Chaucer said, “What do you mean, seventy-five percent?”

  Guerra answered, “We’re going through these men’s lives with a fine-toothed comb. We’re going to account for every minute of their lives over the last ten years, and we’re going to find the commonalities. Hopefully, somewhere in there will be the answer to what happened with these men.”