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was
her face however, framed in a cascade of long and straight black hair that
arrested Sigler’s attention. Her almond-shaped eyes, the irises brown with
flecks of gold, hinted at some recent Asian ancestry, as did her high
cheekbones, but her face was longer, with a prominent forehead and a strong
jaw.
    “Hel-lo,” murmured Parker, slipping into the
Lair behind Sigler.
    Command Sergeant Major Pettit, Cipher
element’s senior non-commissioned officer, directed a scathing look at the
young operator, but no one else at the table seemed to notice, least of all the
woman, whose attention was fixed on the screen of her laptop computer.
    Klein rose and extended a hand to Sigler. “Jack, good to see you.”
    Sigler accepted the firm handclasp, but his
reply was guarded. “Scott. Why do I have the feeling that you’re about to ruin
my day?”
    Klein’s grin confirmed Sigler’s suspicions,
but the CIA officer withheld further explanation until Sigler and Parker were
settled in at the table. “First, congratulations are in order. The guys you
nabbed last night turned out to be a lot more important that we expected.”
    Sigler felt his apprehension growing; he
could tell where this was headed. The couriers had given up something
actionable—maybe a location for a high value target —and now Cipher element was going to have to postpone their rotation back
to the States to take on one more mission .
    Ordinarily, that
wouldn’t have bothered Sigler. It wasn’t as if he had anyone waiting for him
back home.
    He wasn’t really
sure what ‘home’ was anymore. For the last eleven years of his life, home had
been wherever the Army sent him, and somehow that seemed more real to him than
his childhood home in Richmond, Virginia. His mother still lived there, but he
didn’t visit often. There were too many bad memories at the house on Oak Lane:
memories of his sister Julie who had always been there for him, and of his
father who never had.
    He’d been adrift
back then, a punk, more interested in skating and hanging out with the other
losers in the neighborhood, than in trying to be a good son. He didn’t care
what his mother or his mostly-absent father thought of him, which seemed to
suit them just fine. Julie, however, had refused to give up on him. In her own
gentle but insistent way, she had equipped him to make his own path in life,
encouraging him to find a dream and follow it, just as she had ultimately done.
    When he was
fourteen, Julie had joined the Air Force, intent on becoming one of the
nation’s first female fighter pilots. Two years later, against all odds, she
had succeeded. Then, just a few weeks before she was to wed her high school
sweetheart, while on a cross-training flight in a Navy F-14, she crashed.
Julie’s death had been the final straw for an already strained domestic
situation. Three months later, Sigler’s father left abruptly and didn’t come
back. Shortly thereafter, Jack Sigler left as well, to join the Army.
    Unlike his father,
Sigler wasn’t running away. At first, he’d thought that it was Julie’s death
that had motivated him to enlist, but later he realized that it was really his
memory of her life that was driving him. Military service had given her focus,
a challenge she knew she was capable of meeting and beating, and that was what
he felt he needed. His mother, though heartbroken, had agreed to sign the
waiver that would allow him to enlist at seventeen.
    The rigors of basic
training had shown him what he was capable of accomplishing. His natural
athleticism and agility made him a perfect candidate for specialized
training—Airborne school, the Rangers—but he wasn’t content to simply test his
physical prowess. While serving in the 101 st Airborne, he managed to
earn a college degree, and then he attended Officer Candidate School. Not long
after receiving his commission, he set his sights on a new goal: Special Forces
selection.
    The challenges…the
successes…had transformed