The Tide (Tide Series Book 1) Read Online Free Page B

mouth to protest but stopped. She’d caught Lawson as if he were a child with his hand in the cookie jar. The man routinely faced crises involving everything from scientists taken as hostages to the infiltration of foreign research institutions. Yet his immediate reaction to a single memo had taken him off guard.
    “What’s going on?” Meredith asked.
    “Maybe—”
    “Tell me the goddamned truth.”
    Lawson folded his arms across his broad chest and leaned back in his chair. “You’ve been with the agency for what? Twenty years?”
    Meredith said nothing.
    “You’re intelligent, you’re at the top of your field. We’ve worked closely together for years,” he continued. “Yet you keep certain sensitive topics from me.”
    “Yes, but—”
    “I understand it’s for the safety of our nation, for plausible deniability. All the same, there is information that even I, as your superior, am not privy to.”
    She knew exactly what he was referring to. For many of the missions she oversaw, she was the agency’s sole point of contact with private covert contracting agencies like Dom’s and Jay’s. “We need that kind of separation from the groups I work with. You don’t want to be tied with them when they’re operating in Iran or off the coast of North Korea.”
    “And likewise, you don’t want to be tied to this project.” Lawson leaned across the desk. “I urge you to forget you ever saw this memo. If you were another agent, someone with less significant history at this agency, you’d be terminated immediately.” He folded his reading glasses and slid them back into his pocket.
    “I’ve managed operatives in Syria who dismantled chemical weapons undetected. I’ve contracted a team to sabotage a biological weapons research facility in Iran and got another team to subvert the Kremlin’s research on a genetically engineered bubonic plague.” She huffed. “After everything I’ve done for the agency—everything my operatives have done—you can’t trust me with this?”
    “I’m afraid not.” His expression turned dour, a rare moment of seemingly genuine emotion. “This is an issue I am dealing with. And I know where your intentions and loyalties lie. The project at IBSL would conflict with that. Trust me.”
    Without another word, Meredith got up from her seat. She marched to the office’s exit, knowing the obstinate man wouldn’t let her in on his secret.
    “Meredith.”
    She twisted halfway, an ear turned in his direction but her gaze shifting to the hallway.
    “I’m begging you, forget everything about this. If my people find you’ve been digging into it...I won’t be able to protect you. Trust me, Meredith. Leave this one alone.”
    Meredith left his office in silence.
    The last thing she would do was trust Lawson. Everything he’d said sounded like smooth-talking fabrication to obscure this IBSL project. Meredith wasn’t sure who Lawson might be working with, what covert op teams might be contracted to his “project.” If Meredith had learned anything over her two decades with the agency, it was to trust no one. Especially if it was a close colleague keeping secrets from his most lauded employee.
    She had Jay already on his way and Dom on standby. It never hurt to send them in for a little reconnaissance. She hoped they would find something as innocuous as the lab’s mundane name.
    But as she’d said to Lawson, the ones that seemed the most harmless almost always turned out to be anything but innocent.

-3-
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    Undisclosed Location in the Atlantic Ocean
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    J ay Perry nudged open the steel hatch with his gloved hand. He played the barrel of his suppressed SCAR across the steel counters, stools, and glassware. “What the hell is this?”
    “A science lab?” Corey Luna whispered. Like Jay, he wore black fatigues and night-vision goggles strapped over his head.
    Their footsteps resonated on the grating, and Jay winced with each step.