Killed in Action - A Spy School Story

Chapter 1: JTTF

J. Edgar Hoover Building

Washington, DC

December 18th, 2017

1800R

Ben POV

If you told me that I was going to end up in the headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on a chilly December evening, I wouldn't know how to react. Because while I'm technically part of the Central Intelligence Agency, so many weird things have happened in my life that a trip to the Bureau wouldn't surprise me at that point.

It didn't even surprise me that Zoe was coming with me, nor the fact that Alexander was picking us up suddenly. What did surprise me was that my father figure was relatively quiet about the circumstances regarding our sudden trip to FBI HQ, continuously deflecting the conversation so well that I completely forgot about the Bureau until we rolled up in front of the J. Edgar Hoover building.

"The heck is this?" Zoe muttered from the back seat as we passed through security and parked in the garage. I could only shrug as Alexander motioned for us to follow him. We walked through a side entrance, avoiding much of the foot traffic in the building, and were escorted by two G-men in suits—thankfully without sunglasses, because that would be a little too cliche.

We arrived at a closed door, with one of our escorts knocking and muttering something to someone on the other side of it. Moments later, the door opened and the G-man stood aside, motioning for us to go in while the other one whispered something into his wrist-mic: "Three packs in the sanctum."

Waiting for us in "the sanctum"—just a conference room without windows—were three people. The first was bald, middle-aged, and unknown to me, though I suspected he was a Bureau man, given his shirt, tie, and formal pants. The second, significantly older person in cargo pants and flannel was Cyrus Hale, a CIA officer and Vietnam veteran that refused to quit or die—people joke that I survived so many crazy things, but they completely gloss over Cyrus's survival. Because the fact of the matter is... well, he's old. Especially when considering his eight-ish years in the Marine Corps and decades of paramilitary operations for the Agency, I'm surprised he's not crippled, paralyzed, or dead.

And the third was none other than my ex-crush and person-with-whom-I-still-didn't-know-my-relationship in a pantsuit: Erica Hale. After everything that went down during our shared time at the CIA's Academy for Espionage, we never progressed forward in terms of a relationship. I was too messed up in the head from Operation Fox Hunt and Erica was... well, Erica, resulting in haywire signals, interpretations, and reactions. It was too much of a will-we-won't-we as she yanked at my chain, so I broke away from her.

Even though we never had a romantic relationship in the first place, it still wasn't easy to let go, but I think I advanced more because of it. I still didn't think I was ready to enter the dating game, but my preparedness was significantly better than it was all those years ago.

But, obviously, that wasn't the matter at hand.

"Ice Queen? The hell is going on here?!" Zoe asked in an absurdly New Yorker fashion, waving her hands as she spoke with her thick New York accent.

"Nice to see you too, Zoe," Erica replied with the corners of her mouth twitching. "CTMC's been working on something. You're in on it."

That piqued my curiosity. Erica had been assigned to the CIA's Counterterrorism Mission Center post-graduation and while I didn't know too much about her work, I did know she and her colleagues had worked with the Department of Defense a couple of times. And while it wasn't out of the blue for her to have worked with the Bureau, I had yet to hear of her doing so. And what were Zoe and I—a couple of junior officers that had yet to graduate from the Academy—doing there?