They went on to receive the highest valor awards in the CIA, the Distinguished Intelligence Cross and the Intelligence Star, and most also found their way onto the agency’s memorial wall, where a gold star represented every agent killed in the line of duty.

Not that the honors did them any good.

Assets didn’t officially exist. The medals they received were awarded in secret ceremonies, posthumously. The agency was required by act of congress to maintain complete deniability in relation to all their activities and that secrecy was pursued to an extreme degree.

If anything went wrong, anything at all, if their identity was compromised in any way, they were immediately disavowed.

And in the group, disavowal didn’t mean you lost your job, your 401k, the gold watch on retirement. The government didn’t leave loose ends.

If an asset was compromised, the group director was authorized by a secret executive order drafted during the Nixon administration to issue a kill order. Only the director knew it, but it was in fact the most common way assets met their end.

They were trained to act alone. Operations were not coordinated with the military or the rest of the CIA. They were not supplied by the military with weapons or equipment. They had to source everything on their own, buying on the open market the way anyone else would. They received no political pre-approval for their actions, and performed them without anyone in the government knowing what they were up to.

Actions were financed from the Pentagon’s black budget, completely classified funds that were made available in numbered offshore bank accounts. It meant assets were often entrusted with hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars of government money that they would never be required to account for. If that ever led to complications with the IRS, the government would not step in to explain where the money had come from, and would not offer any kind of immunity or assistance against charges of tax evasion or money laundering.

The assets had to look out for themselves.

They had to watch their own back.

If anyone from the government ever came for them, it would not be to offer assistance.

The group maintained just four assets, and they were on their own.

Truly.

They were legally required to lead solitary lives. Their familial relations, such as they were, were monitored in minute detail. Part of the selection process was to identify candidates who were unmarried, had no children, and no close living relatives. Their mental well-being was constantly monitored, and the group’s medical program included more psychological and psychiatric assessments than physical evaluations.

The whole thing seemed like a recipe for disaster.

But it worked, and had done since the end of the Cold War when the group was established to deal with the ever-widening range of asymmetric threats faced by the world’s sole remaining superpower.