Distant End

DANIEL MERCER IS NOT AN INTELLIGENCE OFFICER. THAT IS WHY THEY CAN USE HIM.

At twenty-five, with a wife and young daughter depending on him, Daniel joins the Air Force and chooses a safe technical trade: encrypted communications. His job is to keep secrets moving. It is not to ask where they go.

Then he restores a failing circuit inside a restricted building at Robins Air Force Base. The voices at the distant end begin asking for him by name. After a courier mission to Colombia ends in gunfire, Daniel returns with a medal in his file and blood he cannot explain at home. The Air Force calls it valor. Somewhere else, it is entered as a qualification.

His next assignment comes with official orders, a Russian passport, and a British escort who knows how little Daniel has been told. In Georgia, an unstable boundary separates those giving the orders from those expected to die for them. Daniel was not chosen for what he knows. He was chosen for what he has shown himself willing to do.

Then an apartment explodes. Gunmen enter the smoke. Buried in the ruins, Daniel raises his pistol and finds that the trigger will not move.

It may be the first useful thing he has failed to do.