“Great, then it’s settled,” he said, cutting her off and giving her his trademark “Steve Schmidt smile,” which was composed of equal parts judgment and joy. “I’ll let Mark know so you two can get to know each other, he can read you in on everything he’s working on and his contacts inside the Shepherds organization, and then you can start transitioning.”

“Shepherds? I’m not familiar with that term,” she said, screwing up her face at him.

“Yeah, that’s what they call themselves. Trinity is the official cover for their North American operation. Mark will read you in. What you think you know is just tip-of-the-iceberg stuff.”

“Oh, okay . . . ,” she said, feeling even more unsettled than before.

“In the meantime, I want you to take point on getting to the bottom of whatever this thing is you witnessed in Peru. From photographs and everything you told me, it looks like it was a field test of a breakthrough technology in the directed energy weapon arena, and it scares the hell out of me. We’re already investigating four dozen pulsed RF attacks on intelligence officers that took place over the past twelve months. Obviously headaches, disorientation, and nausea are nothing compared to being vaporized, so we need to know if a thread connects both the technology and the potential players. The threat is off the charts.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, Steve, but am I really the best person to be leading a directed energy weapon investigation? I mean, I’m not an engineer or one of those STEM brainiacs,” Gayle said, resuming her squirming in her chair. “I don’t see how I bring the right skill set to this task.”

“You misunderstand—I didn’t mean take point on the entire investigation. I mean take point with the Shepherds as they run theirs. We need to funnel whatever findings they dig up into our wheelhouse. To do that, you’ll need to get with DS&T and the actual STEM brainiacs leading the directed energy weapon team aggregating and evaluating all the reports and data from incidents around the world. But they’re not read into Sierra Seven, so you’re going to have to be careful and very intentional what you report and how you report it.”

“Okay,” she said, still trying to wrap her brain around this whole thing. “What about sharing in the other direction?”

“You mean sharing our findings with the Shepherds?” he said.

“Exactly. This is a give-and-take business we’re in, after all.”

He grinned at her. “It is . . . and as long as you follow the golden rule of intelligence collection, you’ll be fine.”

“And what is the golden rule?”

“It’s quite simple, really—so long as you take more than you give, you’re golden.”

This made her laugh. “I should have seen that coming.”

“Any questions for me before you go pee?” he said, apparently tickled with himself for the rhyme.