Rudd and his team had simply staked out the club for a week, until the major stumbled out a little drunker than usual one night and strayed a little too close to Route 41. Dead on impact with the pickup truck they had stolen a few states over. Rudd’s wife, Jolene, had facilitated both those tragic circumstances, sidling up to the major in the club an hour earlier and plying him with shots of bourbon. She’d even walked him right in front of the speeding truck. For the next few weeks, Jolene had looked her happy self again.

Back in the early days, after they’d settled in the Chattanooga area, Harvey and his wife had done jobs like that several times a year. “Wet work,” as their trainers called it. Mostly lowbrow stuff like the Fort Campbell strip club hit-and-run. No fancy poisons. No sniper rifles. No explosives. Rudimentary “make it look like an accident or a suicide” kind of assignments, with a kidnap and blind delivery job every now and then.

They had traveled as far north as Chicago and as far east as Norfolk for more complicated personnel-intensive jobs, but the vast majority of their work over the past thirty years had gone down a couple of hundred miles from Chattanooga. Atlanta and Nashville, mainly. None of it had fit any easily detectable pattern, and neither of them had given it much thought. They weren’t here to ponder their work. They enjoyed a very comfortable life—with a single condition: obey CONTROL. A simple arrangement that had suited both of them fine. One he had always suspected hadn’t been a coincidence.

When the laptop finished booting, he launched Tor Browser and navigated to a site on the “dark web” created by their handlers exclusively to communicate with the Rudds. Tor Browser’s nearly undefeatable anonymity tool, combined with the use of a deeply buried “dark” website, provided one of the most secure and untraceable ways to pass along detailed mission direction and intelligence. The days of bouncing for hours between dead drops or sweating a live meetup at some grimy countryside café had vanished overnight with Tor’s rise. The irony wasn’t lost on him that Tor had been created by the United States military to protect online intelligence community communications.

After entering the alphanumeric code on the Post-it, followed by his username, into a text box that appeared on the screen, a page containing a single link appeared: OPERATION SUMMARY. He clicked it and read the two-page document line by line—twice.