yours has only established your bona fides even more. We didn’t understand why Stephanie Arthur would leave NSA to come to us. Yes, we pay more, but if money was her main enticement, she wouldn’t be working for a GS salary in the first place, would she? Usually there is some other reason when someone on a strong upwards trajectory jumps ship. But you? With you, now we understand completely why you are here and using a legend. I don’t blame you. If the Russkies had a kill order on me, you can be damned sure I’d conceal my true identity.”
“Yes,” Zoya said, but she looked no less concerned. Her eyes darted around the room, as if assassins would rain down on her any second.
“Relax,” Ennis said. “Our relationship with the SVR is not a two-way street. We received information about you, but we provided absolutely no information about you to them. They don’t know you are in Berlin, and they don’t know you are with us. If we hire you, they will never know.”
Zoya nodded, sipped her tea again. Her hand trembled slightly as she did so, rattling the cup against the saucer as she placed it back down. “So . . . despite the fact I used a false identity to secure a position in your firm, you are still considering hiring me. Why?”
“We like to have the confidence that our employees will uphold our company’s mission statement to hold our work in the strictest confidence. We value discretion above all, and that means we value people we trust to be discreet. You can earn trust over time, or you can come to us with some sort of . . . compromise, something that instills in us the immediate faith that you will not leave, you will not tell a tale about us and what we’ve been doing together, that you will remain loyal and reliable.”
“You like to control your employees by having something on them.” The comment was delivered by Zoya without anger or contempt.
Ennis shrugged. “Something like that. You came to us via our white side operation.” He smiled now. “A woman with your skill set, we see you as being more suitable to our black side.”
Zoya raised her eyebrows. “There is a black side to Shrike Group?”
“There is. You aren’t an analyst, Zoya. You are a field operative. As am I. Soon we will have a need for another field operative, and I’d like to have you trained up in advance of this need.”
“I am very interested.”
“Excellent.” He paused several seconds, forcing Zoya to wait on his next statement. She got the impression he enjoyed making her squirm. Finally he said, “I’d like to offer you a contract position in our clandestine division.”
Zoya’s smile had returned. “Then I accept.”
“You will be run outside of Shrike International, a hidden asset. Paid via offshore accounts, given targeting assignments by me and me alone. At the moment we are finishing up the contract of our principal client. There are a couple more weeks of work involving Iranian activities in the EU, and then we will be done with that. We will fold you in immediately, give you an easy surveillance assignment or two, and then, in a few weeks, once we move away from Iran and focus on other intelligence matters, you will be ready to jump in feetfirst.”
“Excellent.”
She did not say what she was thinking, what Ennis must have known she was thinking—that she was being hired into a company for the simple reason that the company could make a single phone call and reveal her identity and her location to men and women intent on killing her unless she did exactly what they told her to do.
Ennis said, “We look forward to a long and fruitful relationship. You’ll start tomorrow.”
With this, Ennis reopened his menu, and Zoya followed suit.
As the two of them perused the lunch offerings, she did not hide her apprehension. She thought of everything that could go wrong, and she felt Ennis’s eyes on her, certain he was picking up little cues about her fear. A quickened pulse throbbing in a vein on her forehead, a slight reddening of her cheeks, the faintest tremor in her hands.
Only when she was certain Ennis’s attention was fully on his menu did she relax a little, tell herself it was going to be all right, and then get her mind back on her mission.
And she did have some reason for her comfort.
So far, at least, everything