Chapter 37: Joining the Agency
The screen on Casey's laptop showed a woman in her sixties in a military uniform — sharp posture, reading glasses, the expression of someone who had spent decades making decisions and had long since stopped finding them difficult.
General Diane Beckman. National Security Agency.
Simon had been sitting in the Buy More's home theater showroom for six minutes, long enough to understand that this conversation was not optional.
"Mr. Lewis," Beckman said. "We've been watching your involvement with our operation for the past several weeks. You've been useful, discreet, and resourceful under conditions that would have caused most people to remove themselves from the situation."
Simon waited.
"We'd like to formalize the arrangement," Beckman said.
Simon was quiet for a moment.
"General," he said. "With respect — I may not be the right fit for what you're describing."
"Tell me why."
Simon looked at the screen. At Casey, who was watching him with the flat attention of someone who already knew what Simon was going to say. At Chuck, who was sitting in a corner chair with the expression of someone who had no idea what Simon was going to say.
"My record looks clean," Simon said. "It isn't. I've been involved in illegal street racing since I was fifteen. I've stolen vehicles. And approximately six weeks ago, I participated in an armed robbery of an armored transport." He paused. "The take was three and a half million. I have seven hundred thousand dollars in a bag in my house right now."
Silence.
"Simon," Chuck said.
"Quiet," Casey said.
Beckman looked at Simon through the screen for a moment.
"Mr. Lewis," she said, "I appreciate the candor. And I'll tell you that candor of that kind, delivered voluntarily under these circumstances, is itself evidence of exactly the qualities we're looking for." A pause. "We're aware of the events you're describing."
Simon absorbed this. "You've already run me."
"Thoroughly," Beckman said.
"So this is—"
"An offer," Beckman said. "Not a transaction. We're not offering to overlook your history in exchange for cooperation. We're telling you that your history, in our assessment, reflects a person operating with limited resources and significant external pressures who made pragmatic decisions. The decisions we'd be concerned about — loyalty, judgment, honesty — those are not in the file."
Beside Simon, a voice he hadn't heard before spoke from a second camera angle — a man in civilian clothes, older, with the particular economy of movement that suggested long experience in rooms where words mattered.
"You're smarter than almost anyone we've recruited at your age," the man said. "And considerably more operationally capable. We'd rather have you inside the structure than working adjacent to it."
"And if I say no?" Simon said.
"Then you say no," Beckman said. "We're not running a coercion operation, Mr. Lewis. You've been useful and you've been discreet and we appreciate both. If you decline, you walk out of this room and we go back to the informal arrangement."
Simon looked at her.
He believed her. Which was either accurate judgment or a sign of how good she was. He accepted that he couldn't fully distinguish between those two possibilities, and made his decision anyway.
"I'll need to understand the structure," Simon said. "What I can and can't do. What the boundaries look like. I'm not walking into something undefined."
"Casey will be your handler," Beckman said. "He sets the parameters for each engagement, evaluates your performance, and manages your clearance level as you develop. You won't have access to classified material beyond operational need-to-know. You'll be evaluated over the next six months before any permanent status is considered."
"Pay?"
"Competitive. Adjusted for risk. Significantly more than your current informal rate."
Simon nodded slowly.
"One condition," he said.
Beckman waited.
"There's a situation I need to resolve before I can operate cleanly. A prior obligation that was entered under coercion. I need to handle it my way, on my timeline, and I need the agency to stay out of it unless I specifically ask for support."
"The robbery connection," Beckman said. Not a question.
"Yes."
Beckman looked at Casey.
Casey gave a minimal nod that Simon read as: he can handle it.
"Agreed," Beckman said. "Consider it a field evaluation."
"Then yes," Simon said. "I'm in."
The call ended.
The room was quiet for a moment.
"I have so many questions," Chuck said.
"I know," Simon said.
"You robbed an armored truck."
"Yes."
"And you have seven hundred thousand dollars in your house."
"In the storage closet."
"In the storage closet."
Casey made the sound he made when he'd heard enough of a conversation and wanted it to move forward.
"The immediate priority," Casey said, "is your Doc situation. Which you'll resolve independently — we don't have visibility into it and we're not providing support."
"I know. I said I'd handle it."
"Handle it well," Casey said. "However that looks."
Sarah, who had been quiet through most of the meeting, looked at Simon with the specific expression she used when she was thinking something she wasn't going to say directly. "What's your approach?"
"Make him understand that the cost of keeping me exceeds the value of having me," Simon said. "And make it painful enough that the calculation is obvious."
"That could go several ways."
"Yes," Simon agreed. "I've thought about the ways."
Chuck raised his hand. "Should I be worried about you?"
Simon looked at him.
"Probably not," Simon said. "But I appreciate you asking."
He found Meg outside the Buy More at seven thirty, which was earlier than his shift usually ended and which she'd clearly noticed.
"Something's happening," she said. Not a question.
"I need to take care of something tonight," Simon said. "I'm sorry about the movie."
"Is it dangerous?"
He considered being less than honest. Decided against it.
"Somewhat."
Meg looked at him for a moment with the steady attention she'd been developing since the morning training sessions — clearer, more direct, less inclined to accommodate around the edges of things.
"Come back," she said.
"That's the plan."
She kissed him once, brief and specific. Then stepped back. "Go."
He went.
Casey had texted an address while Simon was wrapping his shift — a property in the hills east of the city, residential, a significant lot with the kind of architectural footprint that suggested money spent on privacy rather than display.
Simon parked a quarter-mile out and sat in the car for twenty minutes, watching the property through binoculars while the evening settled into dark.
Doc's security was thorough. Four visible cameras on the perimeter, two guards on the front approach, two more at the service entrance, at least one additional position he could infer from the lighting pattern but couldn't directly observe.
This was not a man who felt exposed.
Simon filed the layout, identified the gaps, and watched the guard rotation until he understood the timing.
At midnight, he changed into dark fitted clothes in the back seat, checked his equipment — tranq pistol, the grappling tool Casey's people had included in his kit, a small device for localized electrical disruption that he'd never used before but had read the manual for twice — and got out of the car.
He moved along the property's western edge, staying low, avoiding the camera arcs he'd mapped. The terrain was dry California hillside — native scrub, loose soil, the particular quiet of a place that had never been particularly urban even when the city grew around it.
The fence was twelve feet of reinforced aluminum, topped with security wire.
Simon took the grappling tool from his pack — a compact device, spring-loaded, with a folded hook that deployed on contact. He sighted the railing above, made the throw, felt the hook seat.
He tested the line. Held.
He went up the rope with the efficiency of someone for whom this was an extension of normal morning training rather than an exceptional event, swung over the top without touching the wire, and came down on the interior side without sound.
Three seconds total.
He moved along the interior fence line toward the garage wing, where the electrical panel was — according to the layout Casey's people had provided, which Simon had memorized and then destroyed the physical copy of, because leaving documentation was the kind of thing that created problems later.
The garage door was closed. The junction box was on the exterior wall, standard residential configuration.
Simon reached it, studied it for ten seconds, and identified the main breaker.
He opened the panel with the tool Casey had given him — it bypassed the alarm circuit on the panel itself without triggering the sensor.
He looked at his watch.
Waited for the guard rotation to put both rear-door guards at their furthest point from the house.
Then he opened the main breaker.
The property went dark.
Simon moved.
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