Page 12 of Shadow Burn

He set the bag on the table and pulled out the chair opposite her, then thought about it and pulled out the chair next to her instead. She raised an eyebrow.

“We’ll be passing papers back and forth,” he said. “It’ll be more efficient.”

“We will not be passing papers. Vance’s materials don’t leave my hands—it’s my policy. I’ll read aloud what I want you to consider, and you can show me your screen.”

“Then the chair next to you is even more efficient.”

She didn’t have a counterargument that didn’t involve admitting that his sitting so close was a problem for her pulse, not the assignment.

“Before we start,” he said, “we need to settle one thing.”

She set down her coffee. “The NDA?”

“The NDA is ninety percent fine. The final-decision clause isn’t.”

She’d been waiting for this. She folded her hands on the papers. “I told you yesterday what the terms were.”

His hair was still damp from a shower, making it appear even darker. “You did. I’m offering a small revision. Final say stays with you. I’m not asking for veto power. I’m asking for a vote, which you don’t have to take, but I hope you will. I also want the right to lay out my position when I disagree with any of your decisions. You make the call. I just get to be honest with you when I think the call is wrong.”

Her back stiffened. “A vote. What we’re doing here isn’t a democracy.”

“A voice. Your final-decision clause, as drafted, means I sign on to whatever you decide without comment. I’m not okay with that.”

He held his cup, leaning forward slightly, brown eyes steady on her face. He was setting a line that, on examination, she found difficult to call unreasonable.

“Fine,” she said. “You get a voice. The vote isn’t binding.”

“Understood.”

“I’m grateful you didn’t insist on a veto.”

“I thought about it.”

The corner of his mouth moved. He set aside the coffee and pulled a laptop out of his bag. “Let’s get started.”

She established the method: She would work through the boxes she’d already partially cataloged, reading carefully for anything that possibly connected to Cinder, to Vance’s known postings, or to anomalies in the official record. Anything she flagged she would read aloud. He would run searches across whatever digital territories he had access to and tell her what came back, including when nothing did, because absence was its own data.

“I’ll keep my own working file,” she added. “What I share with you stays general unless I specifically read it from a document. There are things in Vance’s record I’m not going to allow into your search bar.”

His fingers flew across the keyboard. “Fair.”

“And I have my internal CIA packet on Vance with me. It’s not for your eyes. It’s for cross-reference on my side only.”

He nodded once. “Your packet, your rules.”

“All right. Up first.” She picked up one of the pages she’d put a sticky note on, “Vance references a mission in Sweden in 1993 when he was stationed there. He went into the field to meet with a potential defector. He doesn’t name the operative who set up the meeting, but does give the defector’s last name, Lundgren. Let’s see if we can determine who this person is.”

“You think the operative could be Cinder?”

“It could be a dozen different people, but following each of these leads might narrow down who. We can look for anyone in that area on that date who might have ties to Vance or Lundgren.”

Within a few minutes, Jasper had found Nouri Lundgren, a Swedish scientist who’d been selling secrets to the Serbs and had gotten himself into hot water. After an extensive search, Jasper identified the contact who’d brought Vance and Lundgren together. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a CIA operative at all—just Lundgren’s sister, who worked for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was trying to save her brother.

Katherine moved on. She read a passage, named a place or a date or a colleague’s name, and he ran it through his databases and search engines. He typed without looking at the keys. He clicked through results without a lot of scrolling, discerning immediately if something was of value or not.

Every time he leaned over to show her something on his screen, the sleeve of his hoodie brushed the edge of her glove. By the end of the first hour, the air around her chair was warm in a way it hadn’t been when she’d been by herself.

Which made her annoyingly aware of him in a way she hadn’t allowed herself to be aware of any man in a long time. His clean, faintly woodsy soap. The shift of his sleeve against his arm when he reached for his coffee. The richness of his eyes when he turned his head to listen.