The Colonel's Mistake by Dan Mayland Page B

the few agents she dared to call directly; the plan was to see if they had any leads on the source of the violence. Then she announced she was going to cut and dye her hair.
    “What time’s your first meeting?”
    “Ten tonight.”
    “Decker and I will follow you, play backup.”
    “Thanks, but my agents expect me to meet them alone.”
    “We’ll be discreet.”
    “I said my agents expect me to meet them alone.”
    With that she went into the bathroom and shut the door.
    After a minute, Mark knocked. Daria cracked the door and he opened it the rest of the way. She was standing in front of the mirror with a pair of scissors in her hand, cutting four inches off her hair and letting the clippings fall into the sink below. The faucet was shut off but a drip was making a sound like a metronome, slowly boring a hole in the base of the sink.
    Mark had read Daria’s 108-page personnel file twice. And she’d reported directly to him for over a year. So he figured he knew her pretty well. An idealistic overachiever who was plenty smart enough to drive herself nuts was how he’d pegged her. She was also a bit of a loner, probably due to the fact that she was half-Iranian by blood and that as a kid she’d been mocked for her ancestry—until she hit puberty that is. After that no one cared where her mother had come from. Instead it was her beauty that set her apart.
    On the flip side, he didn’t think Daria really knew him. For starters, she’d had no access to his personnel file. And as her boss, he’d presented himself as a by-the-books, asexual, analyst-type guywho came to work on time, rarely drank, was scrupulously honest with his operatives, and wholeheartedly believed in whatever mission he was sending her out on. They’d only met in person a couple of times a month, for maybe an hour at a time, so it had been relatively easy to maintain those fictions.
    Now he wondered whether his professional persona was preventing her from telling him everything she knew. Or whether there was something else going on.
    “Did anything happen at the prison that you want to talk about?”
    “No.”
    “
No
nothing happened, or
no
you don’t want to talk about it?”
    “They pushed me around at first, but after you came last night there was no more of that.”
    She clipped off another lock of hair and it fell into the sink.
    “Did you know any of the other ops officers well?”
    He didn’t think she had. In Baku, security concerns had limited the ability of CIA personnel to interact, especially for those operating under nonofficial cover.
    “Well enough.”
    “Is that what’s bothering you?”
    “Isn’t all this bothering you? I mean, the entire station got wiped out. Are you human?”
    He considered her reactions to his questions: she was making eye contact; she wasn’t touching her throat or face; her expressions seemed genuine. But Daria knew the obvious signs of lying as well as he did. The fact that she wasn’t exhibiting any didn’t tell him much.
    “I’m just trying to figure this out, Daria.” Was he just letting Kaufman’s doubts about her get to him? Making something out of nothing?
    Or had he been a complete idiot to have trusted her in the first place?
    Because there had to have been a reason why Jack Campbell, just a few hours before getting shot in the head, had requested that she be his translator.
    They stood there silently, with Mark looking at Daria and Daria looking at herself in the mirror, until Mark said something he hadn’t planned on saying.
    “Listen, Daria, I know the way the system works. It’s easy to get in over your head.” He remembered when they’d first met, how she’d come charging in, twenty-nine years old and all fired up to fight the good fight after being deskbound as a CIA analyst for three years. He’d found her enthusiasm, while naive, to be refreshing. But now he wondered whether that enthusiasm had led her to do something she shouldn’t have. “I’ve been there