EXFIL by Anthony Patton (best book reader txt) 📕

She seemed to be moving at a leisurely pace—a long way to drive for a run, for sure.

After several blocks, I made a judgment call.

The roads wouldn’t allow me to parallel her indefinitely, and she was now approaching a patch of trees a few blocks down the trail, so I parked, donned a baseball cap and sunglasses, and hustled to the slope of a hill with a good view of the trail on either side of the trees.

There was no one approaching from the other direction, north to south, and I calculated it would take Anna about fifteen seconds to appear again on the other side of the patch of trees. To my relief, she did, and continued running without missing a stride. I was relieved as I stood to walk to my car, but my heart raced when I saw Jade Envy exit the patch of trees and walk in the opposite direction. He glanced both ways but never looked back my way.

Then, he walked until he entered a residential area, and was gone.

Confirming that Anna was Jade Envy’s spy was a success, but it had just made my life far more complicated than I was willing to admit. I now understood what I was up against. Anna had probably given him a copy of a video from the night with Judy, but I couldn’t share this information with CIA and FBI because it confirmed that Jade Envy was working against us. He had clearly given me the information about the Pentagon cyberattack during the last meeting to make us believe he was working for us—to bolster his bona fides.

Anna’s semester in China now made sense. Whatever access she lacked, it seemed they hoped to get from me, but it would take a lot more than a sex film to motivate me to betray my country.

TWENTY

At this point, a reasonable man would have accepted the teaching position at West Point and called it a day. But I wasn’t a reasonable man. On the outside chance that I might get promoted to brigadier general, it would take almost a year to pin on the star, so they would have plenty of time to find me a new position commensurate with my rank.

I could turn over Jade Envy to a new handler to be with my family after more than a year of separation. By the time anyone figured out that he wasn’t working for us—at least not in the way we would like to imagine—they wouldn’t blame me because I had been instructed to pitch him too early in the relationship. He’d said yes and had given us information to stop a cyberattack.

I didn’t know why Jade Envy and Anna were working against me, so my only option was to double down and let the game play out a few more moves before making a final decision.

In a worst-case scenario, they would ask me for classified information and I would refuse—end of story. In fact, I would advise them of our plans to arrest Anna and declare Jade Envy persona non grata, which they had to consider a real possibility.

Any admission of guilt for my misdeeds wouldn’t land me in jail, but it would ruin my career. But if by some miracle I were to escape from this unscathed, it would be as if nothing had ever happened. I could just get back to my life with everyone none the wiser.

The long drive to West Point helped me clear my mind and consider my options with greater clarity. I didn’t have the West Point decal on my rental vehicle, but Beth had put me on the access list. Rolling through campus eased my concerns as I reflected on the innocence of my four years here—my desire to make my family proud, my desire to serve my country, and my desire to one day attain the rank of general and lead troops in combat. Many officers ended up jaded later in their careers, after missed promotions and missed opportunities, but this was often delayed by the idealism that had launched their careers after graduation.

The campus seemed smaller and less awe-inspiring than it once had, like going to a childhood park and seeing a small slide that once had seemed like a towering, precipitous drop.

Those were simpler times, for sure, but the atmosphere West Point nurtured to inculcate the next generation of Army officers with Army values had a powerful effect on young minds.

I stopped my car and waited as a platoon of cadets crossed the street in double-time formation with rhythmic steps (left, right, left, right), belting a Jody along the lines of, “I don’t know but I’ve been told.” There was something magical about having a team in step. These fine young cadets would one day make our great nation proud. If I’d had a colonel decal on my windshield, they would have saluted, but it would also have disrupted their rhythm. I preferred to observe them without being recognized.

I arrived after the end of the duty day, at dusk, but didn’t feel like I was coming home, which was why I’d brought flowers and a bottle of wine. I knew Beth and the boys were waiting for me, but I also felt as though I was going to her house.

She was the one assigned here, a great assignment at that. If something were to happen to me, she would continue working and raising our boys without missing a beat.

The man in me felt insecure about the family no longer depending on me the way they used to, but the real worry was that my career was fading into the sunset. I was just another anonymous colonel, whereas Beth had leapfrogged several steps up the pyramid with many years ahead of her. I was excited for her and wanted her to succeed, but I couldn’t help but think that other officers surely must have been