Chapter 1 – Chapter 1

"Of course you have a choice."

Silas Collins sat there, assessing what was really going on here and whether everything was down the tubes for him. Yesterday morning he'd been in the Colombian jungle, just "that far" from seizing the daddy of all drug cartel lords, and now he was sitting in front of a desk, facing two suits and overlooking Northern Virginia woodlands, with a stack of photographs sizzling on the desktop between the three of them.

"We've just about got Emilio Delgado," he said, stubbornly. "Two years I've spent on this. I'm only days away from blowing the top off this one. Send me back to Colombia, Ted."

"That isn't one of the choices," Ted Talbot, chief of the South America section, said, the tiredness showing in his voice. They'd been around the bandstand a couple of times on this point.

"Sam Winterberry here has come up with the choice we'd all like you to make, Silas. It will more than save your career. And when you've helped him set up the new unit he's forming, we can have you back. And all will be forgotten—nothing asked, nothing told. I'm not passing judgment, Silas. All I care about is results. I don't want to lose you. Taking Sam's offer is the win-win position for us all at this point."

Silas took another look at the damning photographs.

"And McGrath. Will he have choices too?"

Both Ted and Sam looked uncomfortable.

"Alas no," Ted said. "He doesn't—rather, didn't—have the value that you do—and Sam couldn't say there would have been room for him, really in the new unit."

"That so? Wouldn't have been?" Silas asked.

"Well, I guess you haven't heard," Ted said in a low voice. "Sorry to say that Mike McGrath died this morning. Cleaning his gun. It was a terrible accident."

There was a nervous moment of silence in the room as Silas absorbed this information.

"Is there really any other choice?" Silas eventually asked, his voice hard.

"A detail to Sam's unit is by far and away the best choice, Silas—for all of us. Not least for you."

"When would I have to start?" Silas asked.

"I leave for the Farm this afternoon; it's a three-hour drive down to Williamsburg if we don't meet a lot of traffic on 95 between Springfield and Dumfries," Sam spoke up. "You could go with me—and get started right away. A new recruiting class is coming in for basic today. You could be inserted into this class tomorrow, right from the beginning."

After he'd left Ted's office and was sitting, waiting for Winterberry to be ready to leave, Silas thought back on McGrath. He'd been the moody tape—and had been the one who came on to Silas—and Silas had never known him to be careless with his guns. There were just too many choices in what to think about this. And as for the choices that had been given Silas, he didn't really like any of them.