Page 26 of Code Name: Harbor

“Just got tired of government work and the private sector spoke to me.”

Finn stares at me a long moment. “That’s not the whole answer.”

I lift my wineglass in salute to his perceptiveness. “No, it isn’t.”

“Tell me the whole answer.”

I cock my head, wondering why he even cares. But the way he stares back at me, as if the answer matters very much, has me spilling my guts. “I was a senior analyst, running collection on a particular foreign network for about eighteen months. It’s the kind of work where you spend half your time disagreeing with your own conclusions because you can’t tell if what you’re seeing is actually there or if you’ve started to want it to be there.”

He nods as if he understands.

“Anyway, there was an operation coming. It was a direct action with multiple agencies. Our package was the intelligence backbone, which included pattern analysis, target validation, that sort of thing.”

“I don’t really understand what that means, but it sounds like important preparatory work,” he muses.

“It’s all to keep our people safe,” I say grimly. “The day before the op was supposed to go forward, I had a feeling.”

“A gut instinct,” he says softly.

“It wasn’t anything I could point to. There wasn’t a piece of contradicting intel. There wasn’t a data point that flipped the picture. I just looked at the file and felt wrong about it.”

“What did you do?”

“I wrote a memo and flagged my concerns. I recommended a forty-eight-hour delay to look at three specific indicators I wanted to recheck.”

“But…”

“But my supervisor said the flag was insufficient. She wanted hard data, which I didn’t have. Only a gut feeling and three indicators that could or could not be coincidence.”

“They went forward.”

“They went forward and two operatives in the field died.” I glance down into my wine. “I never met either of them. I don’t even know what their faces looked like, but their deaths were on me.”

Finn sets his glass down and to my surprise, leans over and takes my hand. He doesn’t say I’m sorry and I’m grateful, because I’m sorry is what people say when they don’t understand what you’ve just told them. Oh, he might not understand the politics of it, but he clearly understands the repercussions.

“And you left because of that?” he asks, his thumb grazing over the back of my hand in a way that feels too good.

I shake my head. “I stayed four more months, but I just could never find any joy in what I was doing. I mean, a lot of my work was going toward the greater good, but I couldn’t get past that one failure.”

“You didn’t fail, Josie. Your boss did by not taking you seriously.”

“Maybe I should have spoken louder or more insistently,” I counter.

Finn gives my hand a squeeze and releases it. He leans back in his chair, lifts his chin. “Now I get it.”

“Get what?”

“Your zeal to get Voronin. Your drive. You’re not going to fail again.”

I blink at him in surprise, because yes, a lot of what pushes me is what happened at the NSA. I don’t want to fail any human life again.

He doesn’t force me to acknowledge that, though, and instead asks, “And why did you choose Jameson?”

“They recruited me. The owner, Kynan McGrath, knew my father through his work and they were looking for an analyst. It seemed like the right move.”

“And you said yes.”

“I said yes.”