Total pages in book: 160
Estimated words: 149137 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 746(@200wpm)___ 597(@250wpm)___ 497(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 149137 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 746(@200wpm)___ 597(@250wpm)___ 497(@300wpm)
He knew she’d gone in young, but she hadn’t mentioned a sibling. “Kayla had a sister?”
“Oh, yes. One of the nastiest female operatives I ever went up against. I mean that on a couple of levels. Nasty in a good way that would get me in trouble with my wife if she knew I talked about it, and nasty in a way that would likely make my wife high-five her because my Charlie is a chick who doesn’t mind a bit of castration, if you know what I mean. Not that Kun managed it with me, but she did try. When I met Kay, I couldn’t quite believe they were twins because Kayla was like sunshine and her sister was dark. I don’t mind dark, but Jiang Kun was a bottomless pit of it.”
“How did Kayla end up in the States?” He didn’t want to be fascinated by that woman. He wanted the cold he’d felt yesterday, to be able to easily wave this guy off because he didn’t care to know anything more about her.
“She was born when China had the one child rule. Her mother discovered she was having twins and found an underground that helped out women in her condition. She delivered the twins in a small rural hospital where they doctored the records, and then she kept Kun and sent Kay to an orphanage. Again, not something you can truly understand until you’ve held your own kid in your hand. The sacrifice her mother made was incredible.”
“And then Kay was adopted by Fred and Jim and came to California,” he finished. What a miracle for her. Not a miracle. Her mother had made that happen.
“Yes, and then years later, her sister reached out. Kun had been recruited by Chinese intelligence. At a young age, she showed a propensity for moral flexibility, physical prowess, and high intelligence combined with a lack of compassion.”
“She was a sociopath.” All that psych came in handy from time to time.
“Yes, but we don’t tell Kay that,” Taggart said, his voice deep. “She thinks her sister was a victim of circumstance, and for the most part she was. But she was twisted. Whether that happened as a circumstance of birth or what MSS did to her, she became quite good at torture and killing. But Kun was excellent at pretending to be an actual human being. She would have made a fine actress. She took what she knew from her mother and managed to find her sister. She reached out to the Agency, saying she wanted to connect to the sister she’d never met. Naturally, the Agency got right on that. Kun wrote to her, started a conversation, and then went in for the kill.”
There had been two Kaylas. It was hard to imagine. Did she miss her sister? Even though she hadn’t known her, sometimes twins felt the loss as something missing deep inside them. Did Kayla feel incomplete without her twin? “She wanted to come to the US?”
“Oh, yes. And that’s when the Agency came up with the plan,” Taggart explained. “I wasn’t a part of this, but I knew the two men who handled Kayla. I was recruited into the CIA by a man named Ten Smith, but for the majority of my time there both Ten and I worked under John Bishop. Bishop decided to use Kayla to bring Kun in. It was a good plan because Jiang Kun was one of China’s best agents and she had the highest security clearance. She was a gold mine of information and all she wanted was what her sister had—freedom. We got the clearance to bring her in, but we had to do it all quietly. Naturally everything went sideways and Kun was killed. Bishop had a choice. He could lose it all or he could plant his own spy.”
“Kayla.” One minute she’d been ready to meet her sister and the next, she’d been her sister, taking over her life as a spy for the enemy. What kind of courage had that required?
“She went from crying over the body of the sister she barely knew to walking into the mouth of the beast. And she was magnificent. I owe her my life more than once. So understand when I tell you a woman like that doesn’t fuck up for any reason other than the one none of us can avoid. She’s in love with you. You can take that love or you can leave it, but at least acknowledge the fact that she was attempting to do a service for her country, that she never meant to hurt you, that in the face of losing the only thing she really knows now, she chose you.”
“You’re wrong. Don’t romanticize this. She chose the mission,” he argued. “Like I said, she’s a good operative.”