“Go,” Finn yelled, pushing Beth deeper into the house.  He pushed her through the back door just as Finch managed to pick up his weapon with his left hand.  Eight shots rung out as he pushed her in front of him through the door.  “Around to the right,” he told her, just half a step behind, stripping the memory card from the recorder he had been carrying in his jacket. 

“Crap that went bad fast,” Beth said, slowing up after sprinting all the way back to the barn with the Land Rover.  When she turned around, Finn was on the ground just outside the door.  A red stain was spreading from his side. 

“Go,” he told her as she rolled him over. 

Beth ignored him, tearing the shirt away from his side where he’d been hit.  

“It’s a clean shot, Finn.  We can fix this,” she told him.  Her limited medical training years ago was being pushed past its limits.  Finn held out his hand.  There was a micro-SD card between his thumb and index finger.  “Take it.  It’s as close to a confession as we can get.”

She took the card from him and jammed it into the pocket of her pants. 

“The passcode on my phone is 0819, the day we kissed.  Look for Alex.”

“I’m going to get you to the hospital.  You’ll be alright.  You have to be.”  She looked around the barn, seeing nothing but what they had brought, along with a few dirty, oily rags and a roll of duct tape.  She ran to her backpack and pulled out a couple of t-shirts.  She took those and the part of his shirt that she’d torn off and fashioned a bandage.  She wrapped duct tape around him and then did her best to leverage him up and into the passenger seat of the old Land Rover. 

She ran back around the driver’s seat and jumped in.  She cranked the engine, but it refused to fire. 

“Button,” he said weakly. 

“Right.”  She slammed her hand into the glow plug button, as if hitting it harder would make it work faster.  She held it for what seemed like forever… as she counted to thirty.  She turned the key again, and the engine sputtered to life. 

She pushed it into gear and pulled out of the barn.  When she looked off toward the rustic cabin and the trail beyond, she saw Finch, his gun held unsteadily in front of him.  She grabbed Finn’s 1911 from his slack grip and fired half a dozen shots as she popped the clutch.  She saw the older man collapse in a heap on the ground as she turned away from him and headed down the two-track as she’d been instructed. 

The drive seemed to take forever.  Pulling the Land Rover into the ambulance lane she looked at him, his skin pale from blood loss.  “I can’t leave you,” she told him.  She remembered seeing a hospital as Marty drove them out a few miles from the meeting point.  After passing the barn with the car, and not even slowing to check for the car inside, she recognized a feed store.  From there she had known the way to the hospital.

She’d been posted through much of Europe, usually with a diplomatic cover involving culture.  As a beautiful woman, she blended well in the social circles she circulated within.  She had surrounded herself with artists and musicians, as well as politicians and business leaders, among others.  Beth was gifted with the ability to speak several languages and picked them up almost effortlessly.  She spent a couple of decades making the rounds from Moscow to London to Berlin and Paris.  Her network was vast and well-connected.  And loyal.  To her. 

She had abruptly exited the field a few years prior and was later reassigned to counterespionage.  Nobody better to hunt the best than the best of ours, and that’s you, she was told.  So, she had leveraged her networks to find the leaks in America’s intelligence community.  At the same time, she had passed along to her superiors valuable intel that still streamed through to her from her many assets. 

“Beth, there are reports about your President’s declining mental condition.  They are circulating all through the Kremlin and beyond,” one of her Russian assets confided in her.  The woman was the lover of a high-ranking Russian government official.  “There are leaked fitness reports.  Apparently, his party knows, and they are working to cover it up, but he is in rapid decline.  The Russian President has already used the knowledge to gain some trade concessions from him.”

When she passed that up the chain, all hell had broken loose.  Within days she was fielding messages from several assets.  A search was on for the person that had leaked that information from Russia.  Another of the official’s lovers had gone missing, and Beth’s asset wanted to try to disappear. 

Someone above her was sending intel back to the Russians, and she didn’t know who.  She had been ordered to give up her source but had refused.  “If I tell you who my source is, that person is as good as dead.  Obviously, there is a leak somewhere on our end.”

The next day, she got word on the down-low that she was going to be picked up by a counter-intel team to be “debriefed” on the identity of her asset.  She knew what that meant.  They would get the name of her source from her.  After that, she would suffer some accidental death or just disappear. 

Old habits die hard, and for a spy that means escape plans, identities, and infrastructure.  When she was in the field, she never trusted the supplied “Plan B.”  Beth always had her own.  She had a couple of identities she had built up over the years, along with properties and bank accounts, passports and even credit cards.

What she lacked was friends.  Or at least friends that were unknown to the agency. 

Every friend she had, every boyfriend, every lover.  College, high school, even middle school.  They knew them all.  Except a few people she’d worked with at an amusement park, and one boy she’d had a crush on that had kissed her exactly one time.  Finn Powers had escaped notice.  She’d seen her own file, and he wasn’t in it.  Just knowing that one item made the risk of finding her own file worth it.

Agency investigators had done dozens of interviews before she was hired.  And Finn Powers had escaped everyone.  She’d never told her friends how much she liked him, and nobody mentioned him to the investigation team.  When she had looked through her file, there were names she barely recognized, but his was absent.  At the time, she hadn’t thought anything about it.  Now, he was her lifeline. 

And now Finn Powers wrote spy thrillers.  Not just any spy thrillers.  There were people in the agency that were sure he had inside contacts leaking methods and storylines to him.  His stories were too real.  Too close.  In fact, close enough that he’d been put under surveillance more than once over the last few years.  They had never managed to find any connections between him and anyone at the agency, though.  Beth kept watch, although she had to do it from a distance. 

If he was ever connected to her, she would be out.  She hadn’t had any contact with him in thirty years, but the coincidence of a former field agent working in counterespionage having an old flame that wrote thrillers that were too close to the truth was one that would result in termination.  Or even punishment.  Lack of evidence wouldn’t protect her.