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and most sensitive tasks, the darkest of black ops: kidnapping, sabotage, assassination. Bravo agents were multilingual, highly intelligent, adaptable, and resourceful. They were also fully deniable. They traveled plausibly under the passports of various nations, performing missions that often required them to remain undercover for weeks.
    The program’s name was never officially explained, but the dry inside joke was that Bravo—the military’s phonetic “B”—actually stood for “buried.” It could refer to a team’s operational status, so deep undercover that it disappeared. But for an unsuccessful cell, “buried” was literally the outcome. No rescue was forthcoming if Bravo agents were exposed and captured. From the U.S. government, a compromised Bravo agent could expect only disavowal.
    When a Bravo cell went undercover, it was cut offfrom outside aid, its members totally dependent on one another. A mistake by any one of them usually meant torture and death for all. The arrangement demanded absolute trust and loyalty within the team. The directors of the program studied individual trainees for about a year before matching them to prospective teams for a second year of training as a group. These assignments were tentative, and the trainers often tinkered with team rosters, seeking the elusive personal chemistry that was essential to a cell in the field.
    But from the first day they met as a group, nobody tinkered with the team of Bouchard, Favor, Stickney, and Mendonza. Their collective strength as a team—their
rightness
—was obvious to all who observed them.
    After a year together in training, completing a series of increasingly difficult mock assignments, they received their first actual mission. This was a noteworthy event. In more than twenty years, Bravo trainers had sent only eighteen teams out into the world on their missions of deception and mayhem and death. From that day forward, the team of Bouchard, Favor, Stickney, and Mendonza would forever be known among themselves, and to their few handlers and superiors, as Bravo One Nine.
    After he put the photo back on Arielle’s desk, Favor went into his office and shut the door.
    Something was wrong with him. Arielle could sense it.
    He had been acting oddly for about a week anda half, preoccupied and distant. It was totally out of character. In the sixteen years that she had known him, Favor was always fully engaged, always completely in the moment. Always.
    And now this unreal exchange as he held the photo in his hands.
The shit that keeps you awake at night if you dwell on it.
He had never before spoken this way about his time with One Nine.
    Two hours passed, and Favor didn’t come out.
    The office building had once been a lodge, the main residence of a luxury vacation compound. Favor had bought the property six years earlier and converted the lodge to an informal office building, the headquarters of his private investment holding company. The company had five full-time employees, of whom Arielle was by far the most important. It was a minuscule staff relative to the company’s revenues, which for the previous twelve months totaled nearly thirty million dollars.
    Ray Favor was a very rich man.
    His career as an investor had begun ten years earlier, when the members of Bravo One Nine resigned after five years of service, a consensus decision.
    Favor was then thirty-four years old. He had a modest inheritance and some savings from unspent salary that had accumulated during his time undercover. He also owned a quarter share of $2.6 million in Krugerrands that the cell had acquired and secretly cached several years earlier, during one of their missions. It was money that no living soul would ever miss. Covert operations occasionally createdsuch opportunities. When they disbanded, the stash of gold became a severance bonus for the four members of One Nine, none of whom had ever known any employer besides the U.S. government.
    Favor used part of the