Page 3 of Wrong Way

The question sat between them for a long moment. Miles looked back toward the window.

"You've been working with Kane's disciples for over a year now," Dr. Mitchell continued. "You've watched person after person commit horrific acts because a man they never met convinced them it was righteous. Elena is gone. Kane escaped the one sentence that was supposed to contain him. You haven't been able to fully grieve any of it because the work never stops long enough to let you. That's an enormous amount of anger to be carrying around."

"I know I'm angry," Miles said.

"How often?"

He didn't answer immediately but he also felt that maybe admitting it would do some good. He shrugged and said, "Nearly all the time.” The admission came out flat. He had not quite said it out loud before, not in those words, and hearing it in his own voice felt different from thinking it.

Dr. Mitchell didn't react with alarm or satisfaction. She remained absolutely professional and carried on. "Thank you for saying that."

"It doesn't mean I'm not in control of it," he said.

"You broke a man's arm after he was disarmed."

"He'd just tried to kill me."

"I know," she said. "I know he had. And I know that context matters. But I need you to hear me on this: the fact that you had a legitimate reason doesn't mean the response was proportionate. Both of those things can coexist, and until you're willing to sit with that, I don't think we're going to make much progress."

Miles stood and started to pace by the window. The rain had eased slightly, dropping from sheets to a steady gray curtain. He could see the parking structure across the street, the wet gleam of the cars inside.

"Gabriel Kane is out there,” he said. “The task force is still operational, which means there are more disciples we haven't identified. I go back to work tomorrow, and it starts again. What you're describing, the kind of deep interior excavation where I sit with my complicated feelings about a potential excessive use of force…I don't know when I'm supposed to do that."

"You're doing it now."

He turned from the window and glared at her but the irritation he wanted to feel simply wasn’t there. "You know what I mean."

"I do," she said. "And I'm not asking you to stop working, or to take yourself off the cases. I'm asking you to stay honest with me about what's happening inside you while you do it. The anger that's there nearly all the time, that's what concerns me. Not any one incident, but what's underneath all of them."

"What do you want from this conversation?" he asked, sitting back down.

"I want you to stop framing it as a question of whether you're coping fine or not coping fine. That's not the right question. The right question is what you're doing with what you're feeling, and whether it's sustainable." She leaned forward slightly. "Are you talking to Agent Stone, or to your director?”

"No. Hayes has enough to deal with. And Vic and I are good, but we're not exactly processing together."

"How are you eating?”

He felt that she was scraping the bottom of the barrel now, but he answered anyway. "Decent?"

"Are you still drinking every night?"

He paused a half-second too long. "A drink or two. Nothing excessive. And not quite every night."

She wrote something down. He had the strong suspicion she noted the pause. He made a note of this himself. Maybe he did need to cut down on the drinking.

When the session ended twenty minutes later, Miles took the elevator down alone and walked to his car through the rain, not hurrying. He got in, sat with the door shut, and looked at the water moving across the windshield without turning the key.

He knew she wasn't wrong, and that was the most frustrating part of it, more frustrating than the questions, more frustrating than the careful language she used to make sure he couldn't dismiss what she was saying. He could counter each specific thing she raised because each specific thing had a specific explanation. But sitting here now, in the gray quiet of the parking structure with the rain outside, he couldn't quite counter the sum of it.

He was angry nearly all of the time. He had said it out loud, and it was true, and he had no particular idea what to do about that. Perhaps the worst thing was that he had hoped the admission would help, but if anything, it had done the opposite.

It had made him even angrier.

CHAPTER TWO

Tim Hahn had been at his desk since 7:30 in the morning and it was now pushing 7:00 in the evening, which meant he had put in eleven and a half hours and had essentially nothing to show for it. He leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling for a moment, then at his monitor.

The task force had been assigned a section of the third floor of the FBI headquarters, a block of cubicles and two shared conference rooms. It had all been converted into a workspace for the joint FBI and Homeland Security operation. On paper, it was an impressively organized response to an unprecedented threat. In practice, it had spent the last two weeks operating like a machine with two different sets of instructions loaded into it at the same time.