Page 84 of Talk to Me

“You ready to trust us yet?” Locke asked and I glanced up to find him watching me.

Was I?

“My real name is…”

The words seemed to stick in my throat as though they would choke me. It had been so long since I said my name aloud or even let myself think it. Training yourself to not be yourself took a lot of mental effort.

How strange to think that my name had become something alien to me.

“My name is Fallon Amanda Brady.” Saying it was surreal. More than surreal. Tears burned in my eyes as I shook my head to fight them back. “Sorry, I—I’ve been Patch for the past five years if I’ve been anyone. That’s why when you called me Fallon…”

“It threw you.” The rough sympathy inhabiting Locke’s voice provoked more tears. I rubbed a hand over my face. I’d gotten so used to the bruised feeling that I didn’t really notice until I added pressure. No wonder Doctor Thana seemed so worried about me.

I was a mess.

“Yes,” I said. “More than I expected or could have predicted.” I swallowed, or tried, but all the moisture had fled my mouth.

“Here,” Locke said, twisting off the cap on the water bottle and passing it back to me.

“Thank you.”

I took a long drink. It was pitch dark outside, leaving only a dance of shadows as the city lights flashed over us. I couldn’t see Remy, because he was driving, but Locke’s focus never seemed to wander far from me.

“I was recruited by a cybersecurity arm of the NSA when I was still in college.”

“A?” Locke asked, his brows gathering tighter together. “Not the?”

“No, there are different areas and different focuses. Not everyone knows what everyone else is doing. It’s very compartmentalized.”

“Okay.” He accepted it so simply. But then, why not? Government agencies, especially the more secretive ones didn’t exactly list every department or job title on a website. No matter how transparent they might seem.

Another swallow of water. “I interned for a summer between sophomore and junior years. Then by senior, I was interning full time. I graduated early and with honors. They offered me a position. Also paid off all my student loans.”

The minute they told me they were going to do that, I’d been shocked. My supervisor at the time had merely smiled.

“The lack of incurred debt helped with my security clearances. Made me less malleable to monetary incentives.” How painfully naive I’d been at the time. “I got to work in a field I loved, while also paying off all my debts? It was amazing. I had to move, but I was fine with that. I also couldn’t tell anyone what I did.”

I’d had a cover story to tell my family and friends. Looking back now, I saw all the questions I should have asked. It wasn’t like I accepted it all at face value. No, I’d asked plenty of questions. I just hadn’t asked the right ones. Then I was installed in my new position in a new city, where the only people I knew were the people I worked with.

Isolated.

Dependent.

Buried in work.

“Patch?” Remy’s gentle inquiry pulled me back to the present.

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s been a long time since I thought about any of this. I had top secret security clearance. I worked specifically on securing computer systems at various secure facilities and bases. It was my job to investigate and track any incursions. Particularly those performed by agents of foreign powers. It was a great game of cat and mouse. Sometimes…sometimes I helped out agents in the field when we needed to locate the operatives in question.”

To assassinate them, although occasionally they had been recruited. The latter was far more common than I’d been led to believe. I sighed. So much I hadn’t understood and the only people I could talk to had been others either in charge of our “discretion” or others in the same boat as me.

Looking back now?

“Anyway, I was with the department for almost four years. Eventually, I was tasked with running my own series of operators—a team who could back me up but also did similar tasks. They kept us in groups of five. The people on my team only reported to me. I reported to my supervisor. That supervisor reported upward—everything closely guarded and compartmentalized. A team working one floor up or down might be doing exactly what we were, but we would never know. It was just another form of compartmentalization.”

Not always the most efficient. What happened if we doubled up on work? That wasn’t something I was supposed to be concerned about, according to my supervisor. If two teams were gathering information on the exact same thing, they could serve as a check and a balance because you never knew what the other team was doing.

Absolutely rational. Pragmatic even.