been taken sixteen years earlier, on a very hot July afternoon. It showed Arielle and Favor—then twenty-two and twenty-eight years old—with two other men at an outdoor bar, all four of them grinning at the camera and hoisting their drinks high in a boozy salute.
“That was a great day,” Arielle said.
Favor nodded almost imperceptibly as he peered down at the photo in his hands.
“You think about those times?” Favor said.
“I think about the good parts.”
“I would do that if I could,” Favor said. “But it doesn’t work for me. So I try to just leave it alone.”
“We have plenty to be proud of.”
“That’s getting into dangerous ground,” he said. “If you tally the right and the wrong, I’m not sure we come out looking so good.”
“Done is done, Ray. My advice, let go of the bad parts, hang on to what made you feel good.”
He said, “That’s where I run into trouble. Because the really bad stuff, the shit that keeps you awake at night if you dwell on it … I loved it. I mean, I loved it. I was doing what I was born to do. I was a natural.”
Favor gave the photo a last long look and replaced it on the desk. He said, “So you see my problem. The feel-good times, the nightmare scenes—I can’t tell ’em apart. For me they’re one and the same.”
The four in the photo could have been a study group of graduate students relaxing after a successful round of final exams, or longtime friends toasting a wedding engagement. They seemed that familiar together, standing hip against hip, free arms draped over one another’s shoulders. In fact, they had met as a group just the day before and were celebrating their first collective success as clandestine agents in training.
Arielle was second from the left in the photo, standing tall and straight even after three beers. Born and raised in Boston, she was the daughter of a French mathematician and his Senegalese wife. Arielle had dazzling green eyes, a mocha complexion, and a regal profile.
To Arielle’s right was Alex Mendonza, Oahu born, with the typically Hawaiian riot of ancestral blood: Irish, Polynesian, Japanese, Filipino. He was twenty-five years old on that afternoon, squat and thick necked and muscular, with a face like an Olmec head come to life.
To Arielle’s immediate left in the photo was Winston Stickney, the son of Virgin Islanders who had emigrated to Brooklyn. At thirty-one, he was the oldest in the group. A receding hairline added a few more years to his apparent age. He wore glasses with thick black rims and stood in a slightly awkward slouch, and his clothing was exceptionally unstylish, a white shirt over baggy gabardine trousers. It was the look of an ascetic intellectual, and this wasn’t deceiving: he held advanced degrees in engineering and Russian literature. But Stickney was also a warrior, a former U.S. Army Ranger, an expert in high explosives and demolition, a decorated marksman with pistol and rifle.
To Stickney’s left stood Ray Favor. He was an inch over six feet, broad shouldered and trim. His face was taut, with a sharp jaw and angular brow over deep-set eyes. His ruddy complexion and straight black hair were legacies of a Nez Percé grandmother who had married into a family of ranchers in eastern Oregon. Like Stickney, Favor had an impressive military background, with eight years in the U.S. Marines, the last five of them in the USMC Recon battalion. Ray Favor was the most focused person Arielle had ever known, and his intensity was obvious in the photo. Even in celebration, Favor’s eyes had a predatory glint, feral and fierce. He seemed ready to pounce.
After a year of individual preparation, they had been brought together as a group for the first time that weekend to take part in a mock field exercise, and they had performed beyond all expectations. It was a critical moment for their future in the covert Bravo Cell program.
Bravo Cell was a rarity among America’s security and intelligence agencies. It was a secret entity that actually remained secret. Its funds were skimmed from the discretionary budgets of the better-known agencies, allowing Bravo to operate off the official ledgers, invisible to committees and commissions. Beginning in the early 1970s, Bravo sent teams of three to five agents into foreign lands under deep cover to undertake the nation’s riskiest and most sensitive tasks, the darkest of black ops: kidnapping, sabotage, assassination. Bravo agents were multilingual, highly intelligent, adaptable, and