"HE KILLED EVERY SINGLE one of our men."

Special Agent Alex Vickers kept his eyes on the gray fedora he held between his knees and waited for Bill Brodham's reaction. His hands, long, slender, and dark, worked their way across the hat's felt brim with quiet urgency. He didn't like the way things had been going, and he didn't like what he had to say now. He'd been barely more than a kid when he'd been accepted at the Farm – what, eight years ago now? – fresh out of high school and still living in the inner-city apartment where he'd spent the first eighteen years of his life, crammed in with three younger sisters and an older brother who'd gone on to ride a beautiful chariot straight into Jesus' arms, as his mom had said. Only it hadn't been a chariot, not at all – it had been a hot piece of lead from the 9mm pistol of a rival gang member and there had been nothing beautiful about his last wretched seconds as he tried to breathe with a punctured lung.

Brodham had pinned young Alex Vickers right away for special training, and he'd been under the older man's wing ever since. Was it his fault that even a sheltering wing casts a shadow?

Vickers felt the shadow even now as he sat vigil by Brodham's hospital bed. The room was bathed in a perpetual cloud of ammonia that stung his nostrils each time he inhaled. Every surface gleamed with sterility, from the tile floor to the PVC framing around the ceiling vents, as if death could be scrubbed away with steel wool and Clorox. Getting no reply from Brodham, Vickers stole a glance at the man lying in the bed.

Covered by nothing more than a pale blue hospital gown and a thin white sheet, Agent Brodham looked less like one of the most respected senior agents at the CIA and more like a middle-aged janitor who'd spent a lifetime too close to the donut box in the break room. The flesh of his cheeks sagged just a little more than they used to. Crow's feet etched heiroglyphics under his eyes. The edge of the bedsheet couldn't quite cover the breadth of his rounded midsection.

Brodham was getting old, and Vickers was losing his patience.

"Gerry Fleming?" Brodham broke the silence.

Vickers nodded.

"Tyrone?"

Vickers grunted.

"Aaro–"

"Everybody!" Vickers seethed. "Every last man in the complex! Even offed the prisoners."

"What have we done to find him?" Brodham ignored the outburst. Vickers took it as an affirmation: Brodham was losing his edge, losing his grip on the situation. He outlined the ongoing search while Brodham sipped from a box of orange juice.

"Two dozen agents on the wire. Local PDs across the entire state have been notified to keep a close eye out for any suspicious activity and anyone matching the description of Inmate #4213."

"Photo APB?"

"Fax, email, courier, text, hell, carrier pigeon. There are more pictures of this guy in more departments in New York than Pecos Bill."

"Tell me about the car."

"Slate-blue Infiniti Q50, 2014 make. Belonged to a relatively new tech geek at the site, Travis Dellinger. We have security cam footage from the parking deck showing the fugitive opening the vehicle and starting the ignition. We also have footage taken six hours earlier showing Dellinger arriving at the deck and locking the vehicle."

"Collaborator?" suggested Brodham.

"We've considered the possibility."

"Have you questioned him?"

"We can't."

"He split?"

"He's dead." Vickers rubbed his forehead. "They all are. Every witness on site. Except you." Vickers's eyes narrowed a hair's breadth. Brodham didn't miss it.

"What are you implying, agent?"

"These are the facts: At 0200 hours, July 16, 2014, an unidentified man appeared out of nowhere inside a secure facility. Allowed us to take him into custody. He didn't have a choice, of course," Vickers clarified, "but that's what he said. 'I'll allow it.'

"Owing to your seniority and expertise in psychological interrogation, you were called in to handle the breaking in." Breaking in was an agency term for interrogation. "At 0345, you arrive. Double security measures for unidentified breach, as per protocol.

"From 0400 hours until approximately 1900 hours, you proceeded to interrogate the suspect, allowing for an hour at 1500 to process the suspect and enter him as an inmate."

Vickers's voice was rising slightly. Brodham detected a tone of anger.

"Yes, I'm aware of this," Brodham said. "The point, please."

"In the process of breaking him in," Vickers continued. His voice was growing louder and a trace of his Bronx accent was starting to come through, "a decision was made to file the inmate for indeterminate incarceration on a federal offense of trespassing in a restricted government area and exposure to sensitive information which could hinder the country's efforts to curb the threat of terrorism. Fifteen to twenty years, minimum.

"You said, and these are your words, Special Agent, 'Give me more time. There's something in it.' "

Vickers's tone was approaching accusation. Brodham had heard enough.

"Stick to the facts, Alex. You're here to debrief, not formulate an inquiry."

Vickers didn't seem to hear him. "At approximately 1900 hours, two disguised gunmen entered the facility and proceeded to summarily execute our men in a rescue attempt on a felon who should have been dealt with and shipped away by that point. Twenty-seven, Bill."

"Excuse me?"

"Twenty-seven men. That's how many people were killed in the rescue attempt on Inmate #4213, your 'Petar Tesla,' because you wanted more time to listen to his psychotic delusions." Vickers was shouting now, his face flushed. "Twenty-seven of the agency's best men. I was classmates with seven of them. And that's not even counting the sixteen prisoners we were holding. In my personal opinion, Bill, their blood is on your hands."

"That is enough!" Brodham roared, swinging his feet to the floor and standing. "Now, I know we go back, Vickers, but you will keep your opinions to yourself when addressing a senior agent. Our priority here is to locate and apprehend a dangerous fugitive, and I will not hear your bull theories until the main objective has been completed."

Vickers turned his fedora in his hands and held his silence. He had no ground. Regardless of what had happened, until Brodham retired or was discharged from the CIA, Vickers was forced to treat him as a superior. No matter how old and weak he'd gotten. It was a crock.

As if to prove the point, Brodham clutched his chest in a grimace of pain and slid back onto the hospital bed. He gulped at a glass of water, spilling it on his gown. The wet spot spread and Vickers caught the outline of the surgical pad taped to Brodham's chest.

Brodham regained his breath. "What about the video feed?" he asked.

The secret CIA facility had a closed-circuit camera in every room, corridor, cell, and janitorial closet. Sixty-nine in total, counting the triple cameras at each gatehouse on the way in. Vickers knew: He'd been over each and every one of them multiple times in the past few hours.

"Unreliable," he said slowly.

"What in the hell do you mean unreliable?" Brodham gasped. "That's the best security setup in the entire agency."

Vickers considered. What had he seen? The picture on all of them was crystal clear, no doubt about that. But there had been flickers. Unusual feedback. One of the techies had pointed out the pattern before Vickers had seen it. From the Ground Level gate to S Block in the sub-basement, the cameras had flickered in a sequential line that showed a single path from Point A to Point B. The problem was, there were multiple ways to get between those points, and that's why Vickers hadn't seen it at first.

But once it had been pointed out, there was no denying it. The cameras glitched at the exact time they might have shown someone on a path through the compound. And at the end of the line, Inmate #4213, waving and smiling and wearing all the clothes he'd been born in.

But the naked man who breached their facility seemingly just to get caught wasn't even the particularly weird part.

The weird part came during the escape.

The entry was fairly routine, if macabre. Two men in dark cloaks had walked straight up to the front gate. Before the guard could shout for them to stand down or radio the next checkpoint, they'd shot him down in cold blood. One had entered the guardhouse, opened the gate. Déjà vu at the second gate. Each time, it had happened before a warning could be called in.

Once inside the compound, the two men had moved with almost unearthly patience. They never ran, never ducked for cover, just smoothly and relentlessly and methodically brushed through the facility and dispatched every threat they came across. The cameras had had nothing to dwell on but the wake of carnage. Vickers had never seen such control; neither had the foreign insurgency analyst, who spent half the time running through known military groups around the world. Spetznaz, Al Quaida, ISIS, Chinese, Korean, Israeli. One by one they were all crossed out. Nothing fit.

Upon reaching the interrogation room that held Brodham and his prisoner, however, the previous camera glitches could have been considered normal.

First had been the fact that the prisoner had disappeared. There was no other way to put it. Vickers double and triple checked for field-of-vision issues or technical malfunctions, but the rest of the feed was running smoothly. Everyone else was where they should have been, but the man had simply stopped being there. One second he was sitting cuffed at the table, the next there was just an empty chair and a pair of handcuffs still clattering to the stainless steel surface.

Second, the key-card-access doors throughout the facility had begun malfunctioning at almost the exact same time. There was about a twenty second delay between the time the prisoner had left the video feed and when the first door had swung open. A technician was currently scanning the source code for malware as Vickers debriefed Brodham.

All these facts flashed through Vickers's head as he debated what to tell Brodham. Most of it would sound crazy. He decided to keep it simple.

"There were a few technical issues with the electronic systems in the facility. We're ironing out what happened and we should have a full report in the next few hours."

Brodham eyed him steadily. He knew Vickers was lying, or at least holding back information. Just as he was about to ask for a more detailed explanation, however, a loud chirping filled the room. Vickers dug in his pocket and extracted his phone. Clicked it on and held it to his ear.

"Vickers."

His eyes widened. He listened intently for several seconds, then said curtly, "I'll be there."

He thumbed off the call. Brodham waited.

"They found the car. West of the city. Little housing development called Rosewood Terrace. Two agents are currently en route, I'm heading out to meet them. I'll brief you when I get back."

"Hell with that," Brodham said, swinging out of the bed and pulling the heart monitor clip off his finger. "Get my clothes, I'm coming with you."

Maybe he wasn't as old as he looked, Vickers thought.

"One other thing," Vickers said as Brodham slipped on a pair of slacks. "About the car."

"Mmph," grunted Brodham, pulling a buttoned shirt over his head.

"Someone blew it up. There's a body."

Brodham stopped mid-tuck and regarded Vickers thoughtfully. After a moment, he began putting on his shoes.

Was that the end of it? Brodham felt a twinge of regret. He hadn't told Vickers yet, hadn't told anyone, but he couldn't shake the feeling that the fugitive had saved his life.

Thanks for reading my story! Please VOTE and let me know what you think of it so far, then check out Chapter 11!