Page 88 of Spies Don’t Fall for Their Best Friend

“Emerson’s is over there.” I glance toward him. He is still focused on the web filling his screens.

“And this one is mine.” Miles stops beside a desk that is somehow both ordinary and not. There is a keyboard, a monitor, several locked drawers, and a charging dock holding communication equipment. There is also a dark blue mug I gave him for his birthday three years ago that reads I’m not saying I’m Batman. I’m just saying no one has ever seen us in the same room.

I pick it up. “You brought this here?”

“I use it every day.”

“While secretly doing intelligence work.”

“Yes.”

I look at the mug, then at his desk. There are things here that came from me. A pen shaped like a sword from the year we exchanged terrible stocking stuffers. A tiny plastic fox from the University of Maryland bookstore. A photograph of the entire Lancaster family, with me standing at the edge beside Charlie. I have been represented in this room. I simply didn’t know the room existed.

We walk closer to Charlie, and she swivels away from her screens and says, “Hi.” Her expression is cautious in a way I rarely see from her. “I’m sorry I said ‘read you in’ this morning.”

“It was subtle.” She knows it wasn’t. I know it wasn’t.

“I panicked.”

“You also told me not to spiral.”

She grimaces. “I panicked more.”

Charlie’s gaze moves over me, then around the real version of the room, and her cautious expression softens. “It’s weird seeing you here.”

“Good weird or hostile-shed weird?”

“Very good weird.”

I look past her to her wall of screens. “Is this what you actually do?”

“Part of it.”

Her monitors have some kind of privacy filter on them, so I can tell things are on them, but can’t tell quite what. She does turn one to face me, though—it’s a video showing the woman in the camel coat entering a gray sedan.

She gestures toward the equipment around her. “Usually, I’m the one communicating with operatives while they’re in the field. I monitor cameras, building systems, routes, security feeds, and whatever else they need.”

“You open doors remotely.”

“Sometimes.”

“You tell them where to go.”

“Often.”

“You save their lives.”

Charlie’s mouth opens. Then closes. “Sometimes,” she says more quietly. For one disorienting moment, she looks exactly like my roommate and like someone I have never met. This is the woman who sings along to girl-power pop anthems—loudly—every time she showers, and leaves half-finished craft projects on our dining table. It is also the woman Miles trusts to guide him out of buildings where people may be trying to kill him.

I turn when Emerson comes up to Charlie’s station, carrying a tablet. He eyes me, then says, “Director, we have an update on the hangar operation.”

Evelyn considers for a moment. “Give us the sanitized version. Reese is authorized to hear information directly related to what she witnessed, but no identities or source details.”

“The contact channel reactivated,” Emerson says. “Maxwell wasn’t rejected.”

Miles straightens beside me.

Charlie swivels back toward her screens. “What did they send?”