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)
“When Jiang Kun reached out to the Agency and asked about her twin, I quickly realized the opportunity we had. I put her in touch with Kayla. After Kayla had been properly vetted, of course. Tennessee Smith wanted to bring Kun in immediately, to turn her, but the truth is the minute she came over to our side, her usefulness gets cut in half, hell, maybe more.”
“Because if MSS knew she’d defected, they would change everything,” Ezra explained. “They would change their protocols, scrap any plans she knew about. You needed to switch them out so MSS never realized it lost an agent.”
“Yes, and I was under orders to do it in a way that Summers and Smith never knew what had happened. They worried Summers would balk because she wanted to be with her sister. It was the point of it all for her. But she showed a propensity not only for deep loyalty but also for revenge. It was why I had Kun write those letters to her, to build a loyalty to family. All the while, I was turning Kayla into a weapon. She tested off the charts and she spoke perfect Mandarin. It was the kind of setup every spymaster dreams of. And it worked perfectly, right down to Ten Smith taking out an operative the South Koreans had been trying to deal with for years. And no one knew we had Kun. I dealt with Kun and soon discovered she’s a sociopath. Whether it was what the Chinese did to her during training or she was born that way, the woman is bad. She gave us what we needed, but it was obvious to me that she was going to cause trouble. We tried giving her what she said she wanted, a nice American life. She robbed a bank. We couldn’t let her go into the penal system. Too many secrets. I took her with me on a few assignments hoping to…I don’t know…Dexter her or something. She liked killing. I gave her bad guys to kill, but at some point in time she made contact with Hector Morales and set up her business, which included blackmailing famous people.”
Josh felt his stomach turn. “She’s my blackmailer?”
Ezra groaned as Bishop kept poking and prodding him.
“Yes, and she got that intel from Hector, whose organization kept up with their products. From what I can tell, he recognized you from certain private films his people had you make when you were a teen. Stay calm or I’ll put you out myself.” Bishop’s words hit him, but it took a minute for him to truly understand them.
Hector had those terrible tapes because Hector had run the business.
All those years of torture and pain and it had been to line Hector Morales’s pockets. His pain. Hannah’s. The horror everyone he’d grown up with had faced had all been about making one evil man’s life better.
“He has Kayla.” Rage was replaced with pure panic.
Bishop stared at him as though willing him to stay calm. “And I’ll handle it. This is my mess. I made it when I decided to walk away. I thought…hell, I was so in love, I didn’t think at all. I just knew I wanted a better life for myself, for Nell. The Agency would go on, I told myself. And it did. Jiang Kun was given a new handler after my unfortunate demise. Levi Green. I don’t know if she turned him or he was already willing to walk on the bad side, but I believe the two of them have been working with Hector.”
“How do you know this?” Ezra asked.
“I’ve stayed away for years,” Bishop explained. “I hid in plain sight. I enjoyed my life and my town. I was normal for once. A few months ago, someone figured out I wasn’t as dead as I’m supposed to be. That was when one of the cartel’s I took down showed up in my quiet little town. So now the Agency knows and I need to find out how and who’s coming after me next. I have a friend who is very likely the best hacker on the planet. He got me the data I needed and I put the pieces together. I still don’t know who figured out I wasn’t dead and gave me up, but I saw the pattern that emerged with Green and Kun. I started investigating and discovered the Morales connection. When I realized they’d drawn McKay-Taggart into this ‘op’ of theirs and specifically Kayla, I knew what they would do. They want to pull off the same switch I did except in reverse, and it’s all about getting to Hope McDonald’s research projects,” Bishop said. “If they can get one of the men McDonald experimented on, they can either be heroes with the Agency or potentially sell the man to any number of interested parties.”