The Shadow Friends

Chapter 1: Ingrid

Ingrid’s life is not supposed to end this way. Lying trapped in a bedroom of an old stone farmhouse in the hills of Provence, she faces the death she never anticipated. She had imagined a peaceful exit years from now, dozing in a rocking chair, or perhaps a triumphant heart attack after a final mountain climb. Instead, she is about to die in a breathtakingly beautiful place, surrounded by lavender fields, beside a wounded young woman bleeding to death on the floor.

Ingrid has locked the door and shoved furniture against it, but those pitiful barriers will not hold for long. The men outside are battering the centuries-old oak, and when they break through, she expects two merciful bullets in the head. That would be a kindness compared to what awaits Sophie. Sophie, only twenty-two, blessed and cursed with the courage of a warrior, trusted the Agency to keep her safe. For weeks, they believed Moscow would never find them in this quiet corner of Provence. They had been careful, secure, content enough to pick flowers and sip coffee in the garden every morning. And yet they have been found.

Their first warning was a curl of dust on the horizon. Ingrid radioed the gatehouse, where her two Agency colleagues, Simon and Gordon, should have cleared any approaching vehicle. No answer. She called Sophie in from the garden, where the young woman looked like a harmless country girl with her straw hat and summer-streaked blond hair, snipping lavender without a care in the world. Now Sophie drops her bundle of stalks and retreats inside. Ingrid bars the door, issues a Mayday to her backup team in the village, and grabs her rifle.

Through the scope, she watches a black SUV roar closer. Five heads inside. She holds her fire because the situation is still unclear. Then four armed men step out, dressed in black, and the situation becomes very clear. She fires, taking down one man. The others scramble for cover and unleash a barrage of return fire that shatters the kitchen window. Ingrid yells for Sophie to go upstairs, but the young woman is sliding down the wall, her face pale and contorted, her blouse already saturated with blood. Ingrid grabs her around the waist, slings the rifle over her shoulder, and drags the deadweight up the narrow staircase. Shrapnel bites into her leg, but her focus remains fixed on Sophie.

There is no escape route. She hauls Sophie into an upstairs bedroom, lays her on the floor, and barricades the door. A blast shakes the house. They have plastic explosives. Ingrid scrambles behind the bed, crouches against the mattress with her rifle aimed at the door. She touches Sophie’s hand, already feeling cold like a corpse. She cannot help her. She can only make them pay.

Voices shout downstairs in Russian. Footsteps thud up the stairs. The men bang against the bedroom door, each blow shaking the dresser. Ingrid, finger on the trigger, thinks of everything she will never live to enjoy: the sunsets, the breaths, the man waiting for her at home, the future they might have had together. All gone. She will keep firing until she has no bullets left. The blast splinters the wood, throws her backward, and slams her head against the wall. For a moment there is nothing but black numbness. Then distant gunfire, shouting, footsteps. Here it ends.

A voice calls her name. Pain stabs her ribs. Pain means she is alive. She opens her eyes to find Rodrigo staring down at her in panic, his black hair powdered with dust, his cheek spattered with another man’s blood. She whispers her only thought: help Sophie. Rodrigo gives a sorrowful shake of his head. Ingrid follows his gaze to Sophie’s body. She remembers the young woman as she truly was: not fragile, but tempered steel. For almost a year, Sophie embedded herself within a nest of violent men, serving their drinks, adorning their yachts, always listening. She was the Trojan horse who gathered the damning information that brought the syndicate down. Ingrid reaches out to the lifeless body. She apologizes.

Rodrigo gently pulls her away. There is nothing to do here. He offers to take her to the village. But Ingrid needs answers. How did they find the safe house? Why was there no warning? Simon and Gordon, both dead. Rodrigo offers to show her. She should not have asked.

Gordon’s body lies outside the stone guardhouse at the edge of the garden, his blood soaking into the soil. A stiletto is implanted in his left orbit, a minimalist weapon of stainless steel engraved with a small circle and dot. A mercifully quick death, at least. Simon’s death was not quick. His gun lies kicked into the corner of the guardhouse room, and the walls are covered with fantails of blood sprayed from his severed carotid artery as he twisted and turned. Simon was the fair-haired kid, twenty-eight years old, happy to have escaped a small town in Texas. Now he will return there in a box.

Ingrid walks outside and takes deep breaths, trying to clear the stench from her lungs. Rodrigo follows. She asks about the attackers. Rodrigo assures her they are all dead, secured and taken care of. She thinks back to the bodies: two on the stairs, one on the kitchen floor, one in the yard where she brought him down. Four bodies. But she remembers the SUV. There were five people inside. Rodrigo dismisses her. She caught the blast from the door, was barely conscious, can she really trust what she saw? She clutches her throbbing head and whispers that she doesn’t know. She just needs to be sure. She owes it to Gordon and Simon, and to Sophie.

Rodrigo wraps his arms around her. They were once lovers, and uneasy familiarity still lives in his embrace. She breaks the silence, thinking of how she ended it a year ago, realizing she was only one in a long line of Rodrigo’s conquests, a fire that would inevitably burn out to ashes. She stares down at Gordon’s body. His son just turned twelve. His wife, Vicky. Rodrigo tells her this is not the time to think about it. She asks him when the time ever is, or if they just shove it all away and forget. He tells her she needs rest. What she needs is to go home.

He agrees. She should fly home, take all the time she needs, and come back when ready. But he asks her not to be gone too long, with a smile. She catches his wrist and gently lowers his hand. There is another reason she needs to go home. When she thought she was dying, she realized what she wants to live for, who she wants to live for. An analyst. The man who loves her. Rodrigo scoffs at the "desk jockey." She tells him that desk jockey loves her in ways Rodrigo never will. Rodrigo argues that she and he have something special, that she will get bored of the analyst eventually, that he has no idea what their world is like. All the analyst has to offer, he says, is dinner and a video. Ingrid replies that sounds pretty damn good. Rodrigo pulls her close and offers a hotel room and champagne. She steps away.

She will write her report tonight, deliver it for the cable, and apply for a transfer. She looks down one last time at Gordon. He will never grow old, but she will, and she does not want to do it alone. She tells Rodrigo goodbye and that she will invite him to the wedding. He calls after her that he will not come. She tells him to suit herself. He says he hates to watch tragedies. Not a tragedy, she tells him, a happy ending. He asks if she is sure. She does not answer. She does not know.

Chapter 2: Ingrid

At the Stone Coast Conference, Dr. Cornell Stamoran stands before nearly four hundred attendees in the Cod Cove Resort ballroom and delivers a grim prophecy. He warns that humanity remains woefully unprepared for the next global catastrophe, predicting another pandemic within two decades. He projects a child’s face grotesquely covered in pustules, and recognizes that many in the room know it as smallpox. He reminds them of the three hundred million people who died from the disease in the twentieth century, and the vaccine line that eradicated it. Then he shows a satellite image of the Koltsovo bioweapons facility in Russia, where intelligence sources claim live smallpox virus is still stored. Stamoran paints a dark picture: if a hostile actor releases the virus, the unvaccinated American population would collapse into mass starvation, looting, and a new dark age. He ends by promising that tomorrow, Dr. Mikhail Maslov, a defector who once worked in that very facility, will detail what an unleashed bioweapons attack might look like.

Ingrid, seated in the emcee’s chair onstage, watches the audience react with murmurs and uneasy shifts. She cannot help smiling at the satellite image because she knows four intelligence veterans sitting in the third row: her husband Lloyd, a retired CIA analyst, and their old friends Maggie Bird, Ben Diamond, and Declan Rose, all of whom trained with her at Camp Peary decades ago. Ben still emanates threat at seventy-four, while Maggie looks like a harmless grandmother, and Declan carries a gentle academic air. They have all retired to this small Maine town, but they have never lost their interest in global affairs.

As Stamoran finishes, Ingrid takes the lectern with her high heels clicking across the stage. She had been pressed into service as replacement emcee just three hours earlier after the original host was rushed to the hospital. Though she has faced far more threatening situations, her pulse races as she thanks the speaker and directs attendees to the cocktail reception in the Birchwood Ballroom. Then she glances at her phone and sighs at the new text messages. As travel coordinator for the conference, she has already spent seventy-two hours dealing with panicked speakers, missed flights, and abandoned briefcases, and the problems keep multiplying. Dr. Borgerson needs a printer, Dr. Patek needs an optometrist, and Dr. Maslov is too ill to join the speakers for dinner.

In the reception ballroom, Ingrid bypasses the no-host bar, desperate for a martini but too buried in messages. Lloyd arrives with her friends, offering her a frosty glass of Boodles gin martini because he asked the bar to stock it. For one dangerous moment she wants to take a sip, but she sets it down: too many messages to deal with. The friends praise her seamless work. Ben asks if she volunteered for this, and Ingrid confesses that her simple task of booking flights and hotels ballooned into being the "travel nanny" and now the last-minute emcee. Declan toasts her, and the others chime in, "All hail Ingrid!" Maggie wryly notes that the reward for hard work is more work. Lloyd groans, begging her not to become a widower again from overwork, and Ingrid says once is quite enough. She tells them she will be relieved when Sunday night comes and it all ends.

But a voice interrupts her. "Hello, Ingrid."

It is hauntingly familiar, a voice she has not heard in years. She turns to find Rodrigo, his black hair now streaked with silver and a neatly trimmed beard on his face. His eyes are still dark and gleaming as obsidian. She whispers his name. He smiles, and she answers his unspoken question with a precise number: twenty-eight years since their last meeting. The specificity betrays how significant the parting was to her. He mentions he has heard about the Stone Coast Conference and wanted to see the quaint little town she settled into.

Lloyd inserts himself into the conversation, offering his hand and his name. Rodrigo introduces himself as someone who once worked with Ingrid. Surrounded by her husband on one side and her former lover on the other, Ingrid is at a loss for words, a rare moment of paralysis. She can feel her friends' attention, especially Maggie's, who recognizes that this is more than a casual reunion. Does Lloyd sense the turmoil threatening to swamp her? She wonders why Rodrigo has to be his charming best.

Rodrigo calls Lloyd the lucky man who landed Ingrid, and says she is exactly as he remembers her. Maggie asks if the two worked together in France. Rodrigo gives her a searching look, weighing how much to reveal, the calculation of people trained in secrets. Ingrid reassures him that these are good friends, and mentions they all met at the Farm. Rodrigo acknowledges the brotherhood, and Maggie corrects him with a note of irritation: "And sisterhood." Rodrigo apologizes.

Lloyd frowns over his spectacles, studying Rodrigo like a rare bird, and asks if he worked with Ingrid in France. Rodrigo looks at Ingrid and asks lightly if she ever told him about it, if he was that forgettable. Ingrid shuts it down firmly: "I don't share operational secrets." She glances at her watch, saying she should get moving. Lloyd notices the ballroom emptying and suggests they head home. But Ingrid says she cannot, she has to see to a few more details. He offers to hang on, and in that moment she knows she has another fire to put out, now forced to juggle two male egos. Rodrigo has not lost his talent for complicating her life.

She makes the only sensible move. She tells Lloyd she will see him at home, and walks away from the group, straight out of the ballroom, out of the situation, without glancing back. The old Ingrid was always good at extricating herself from a tight spot, and the new Ingrid will have to be just as good.

Chapter 4: Ingrid

Ingrid and Rodrigo sit at a corner table in the packed hotel bar, nursing their nightcaps while conference attendees crowd the counter, drink in hand, voices loud. Rodrigo tells her she really hasn’t changed. She laughs and calls him a shameless liar. He insists that aside from the gray hair and ten extra pounds, she’s the same Ingrid: the old gleam in her eye, the wheels in that mind always turning. He lifts his glass in a toast, remembering how their team was never the same after she transferred to Rome.

She deflects. Rome was a better fit, a fresh start. Away from him, he guesses. She loved Italy, and so did Lloyd. That leads him to ask, with a dubious smile, whether it’s all been marital bliss. She calls him skeptical. He calls it the bitter voice of experience. He’s between number three and number four, still looking. She tells him that’s his problem: he never stops looking, and it keeps him from seeing what’s right in front of him. He concedes, saying he should have appreciated what was in front of him, that the other women never meant anything, that he’s matured. She doubts it.

Then he turns serious. He asks if the marital bliss is real, or just a myth. She stares down at her whisky, uneasy about the direction of the conversation, and asks him directly why he is here. He claims it’s an innocent question, that he often wonders what could have been. She says she knows what would have been. He admits it wouldn’t have been boring. She concedes that may be true. He leans in, eyes as black as volcanic glass, and gestures at the lounge, the attendees, the small town itself, asking what she does here in the winter. She jokes about eating moss and hibernating, then explains the truth: Purity is the perfect place for her, a small town with a unique community of retired diplomats and former intelligence types, all cagey about their pasts. That’s how the Stone Coast Conference got its start forty years ago, and now it’s an annual global affairs event with speakers from around the world. She has her husband, and some very good friends.

Rodrigo raises his glass and gives her a dubious smile. Lloyd seems pleasant enough.

She sets down her glass with a thump and cuts through the bullshit: what is he really doing in Purity? He admits he’s also scouting for Argus, the company he founded, named after Argus Panoptes, the giant with a hundred eyes. He explains that after leaving the Agency he tried retirement, golf, mountains, beaches, and was miserably bored, so he jumped back into the private sector, which pays much better. His clients are confidential, but they include large corporations, law firms, and the occasional government agency. The world has changed, he says. The new leadership has turned things upside down and purged good people from the Agency, so experienced, well-connected patriots now work for Argus. They have intelligence collectors in thirty-three countries, with more joining.

He wants a hundred and one eyes. He wants her.

Ingrid already knows what’s coming and lifts her fresh whisky to steady herself. Rodrigo tells her Argus now has an operational wing, because the Agency is paralyzed, everyone afraid to make a move, and when things need to get done unofficially, people turn to Argus. He needs people with deep operational backgrounds, people he trusts and respects. That would be her.

She reminds him she’s retired. So was he, he answers. She’s not bored. That surprises him. He looks at the bar crowd and asks if this is really enough for her, because he knows that mind of hers never stops working. The job would take her all over the world again: London, Geneva, DC, Paris. It’s the same work, but easier, in the gray zone, with no bureaucratic bullshit. Then he asks the question she can’t dodge: doesn’t she miss it?

She answers that the work was for their country. He counters that the country has drastically altered course, and patriotism hardly pays. She asks if he feels good about doing it for the money. He goes quiet, and then he brings up Sophie Benoit.

The name hits her like an old wound. She says she thinks of Sophie, and Gordon, and Simon nearly every day. Rodrigo tells her he never stops thinking about them either. Simon’s widow never remarried. Gordon’s wife Vicky moved on, married a nice fellow from Omaha, had another child, a daughter. He reminds her why they all died: Gordon and Simon for patriotism, Sophie because she had a conscience and tried to do the right thing, tried to bring down the syndicate. All three did the right thing and paid the ultimate price. And what did it get them? A pension, a lifetime of grief. He tells her about Gordon’s son, who never really got over his father’s death, and about Vicky, who demanded to know if Gordon suffered, who was finally allowed to see the autopsy report.

Ingrid remembers that hot, windy day in the valley of lavender, Gordon lying on his back outside a stone guardhouse, blood seeping into the soil, a stiletto buried in his eye. She cups her whisky glass with both hands, as if it can steady her, anchor her. Gordon’s wife and son paid the ultimate price too, Rodrigo says. And what did they get for it? A pension, grief, and a star on the memorial wall.

So patriotism isn’t enough, he argues. There should be tangible rewards. Their skills are worth something in the private sector. He’s offering her a job. And on this particular issue, she’d be perfect. His client is focused on the possibility of biological warfare: which bacterial or viral agents the enemy might use, and how to respond. He wants to meet Dr. Maslov, one of the few scientists who actually worked in a Russian biolab, and he wants Ingrid to put in a good word for him, to assure Maslov he is who he says he is. The Russian defector is probably skittish, looking over his shoulder for Moscow’s umbrella dart. She points out that it’s been eighteen years since Maslov defected, and at some point everyone gets tired of looking over their shoulder.

She asks if that’s all he wants from her. He smiles and says he would like to ask for more, but he doubts Lloyd would approve.

She looks down at her glass and finds she has finished all the whisky. That is the Rodrigo effect, she thinks. He has a way of making her do heedless things, take heedless risks. She tells him she’ll consider it, sets down the empty glass, and says she needs to get some sleep. He asks if that’s it, and she asks what he was expecting. He sighs and says he just wanted to see her again, while he still could. Time is running out for both of them, he tells her, and one of the things he needs to do is see her again.

They stare at each other, and the buzz of the room fades away. For just a moment she is young again, in Paris, coiled around him in bed. Then her cell phone dings with a text message, and the memory evaporates. She is once again sitting in this dim hotel lounge with the man she has always known would never make her happy, the man she was wise enough to walk away from. She reads the message. She has to go, she says. Just a small problem with tomorrow’s schedule. She starts to rise, but he reaches for her hand and asks her to stay. Please.

Another long look passes between them. Another wisp of memory. Paris. A bed. His arms wrapped around her. She pulls away.

“I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Chapter 5: Maggie

Saturday morning, nine o'clock, and the hotel ballroom is nearly full. The audience, packed with retired professionals who spent their careers in the world's trouble spots, has shown up in force for the second day of the catastrophe conference. They could be outside enjoying the crisp autumn weather, but the threat of a coming pandemic is too compelling to skip, and they sit primed for more horror stories.

The panel is already running late. Ben checks his watch: nine ten. Lloyd notes that Ingrid won't be pleased, and sure enough, the woman standing at the lectern looks furious. Dr. Stamoran and Dr. Liu sit ready in their chairs, but the third chair is empty. Dr. Maslov hasn't shown up. Declan wonders where he is, and Lloyd's phone dings with a text from Ingrid: she wants him to fetch the missing panelist, who isn't answering his phone.

Lloyd tries to squeeze past his friends, but Maggie, sitting in the aisle seat, stops him. She'll go. Room 212. She stands and heads out of the ballroom, past the poster emblazoned with THE NEXT GLOBAL CATASTROPHE in alarming red, past the unattended lobby desk, and up the stairs to the second floor.

The hotel is a relic of a grander era, a Victorian retreat with turrets and a wide veranda, once climbed by Rockefellers and Vanderbilts escaping the summer heat of the city. Now it's the Cod Cove Resort, serving guests who want bathrobes and French-milled soaps without the yacht. Maggie walks the second-floor hallway to Room 212, where a Do Not Disturb sign hangs on the doorknob.

She knocks. No answer. She calls out that the panel has already started. Still nothing. She knocks harder. The man is either gone or sleeping too deeply to hear.

The elevator dings, and a housekeeper emerges pushing a cart of towels and toiletries. She's nearly as old as Maggie, already looking weary, perhaps weary of life itself. Maggie flags her down and asks her to check whether the guest is in the room. The woman hesitates; she's not allowed to disturb a guest with a sign on the door. But Maggie pushes, explaining the man is supposed to be presenting right now. She glances at the name tag. Hannah.

Reluctantly, Hannah knocks and calls out "Housekeeping." Silence. She slips the master key card into the lock and takes one step inside before halting and backing out. "Oh my God," she says. "Oh my God."

Maggie pushes past her into the room, where the air stinks of sickness and vomit. On the floor near the foot of the bed lies a man in his undershorts, sprawled on his back, appearing to be in his seventies. Maggie drops to her knees, presses her fingers against his neck, and finds a pulse, faint and rapid, though she can't be sure it isn't her own racing heartbeat she feels. She yells for Hannah to call 911, then shakes the man. Dr. Maslov. Can he hear her?

He isn't breathing. She grabs a corner of the bedsheet, wipes the saliva from his lips, and fights the urge to gag as she presses her mouth over his and blows in three breaths. The pulse is still there, but thready. The ambulance is coming. Does Hannah know CPR? The woman can only stare at Maslov and ask if he's alive. Maggie tells her to go down to the ballroom, find the two doctors on stage, tell them there's a medical emergency. Go.

The housekeeper shakes off her paralysis and runs for the stairs. Maggie bends over and gives Maslov three more breaths. The hospital is only two miles away. She just needs to keep him alive until the ambulance arrives. Three more breaths. She stops registering the foul smell of the room; her only focus is filling his lungs with air. She loses track of time, of how many breaths she's delivered. She hears the wail of an approaching ambulance. Keep going. Keep him alive. The siren screams closer and shuts off. Just a few more minutes.

The elevator dings, the clatter of a stretcher, voices. Then a command: "Stop! Don't go in the room yet!"

Dr. Cornell Stamoran stands in the doorway, arms spread wide to block entry. Behind him, two paramedics look confused. Maggie insists he isn't breathing, that they need to get in here. But Stamoran tells them they need protective gear. Respirators, goggles, gloves. One of the paramedics asks why. Stamoran explains: this patient is a doctor who just flew in from Uganda, where he was treating Ebola patients. He can smell the vomit from here. He has to assume the man is infected.

Maggie stares down at Maslov's sweat-slicked face and remembers that last night, Ingrid mentioned his work in Uganda. Now she thinks about how many breaths she blew into his lungs, how many times she pressed her mouth to his. How many viral particles has she breathed in?

As the paramedics pull on masks and goggles, Maggie backs away from Maslov and starts toward the door. Stamoran stops her. He finds an N95 mask in the paramedics' kit and tosses it to her. Put that on first. A little too late now, she thinks, pulling the straps over her head. Can she leave?

Not yet. They're going to find her a Tyvek suit. Did she perform mouth to mouth? She had to. He wasn't breathing. Then she's been fully exposed.

She watches the paramedics, now garbed in protective gear, crouch over Maslov's body. Quietly she asks Stamoran if he really thinks this is Ebola. It could be just food poisoning, he says. But they can't afford to take a chance. What is she supposed to do now? She needs to go into isolation. For how long? Until they determine it isn't Ebola. And if it is?

He suddenly looks away, as if he doesn't want her to see the truth in his eyes. "Let's cross that bridge when we come to it."