Covert Affairs: Partnership : A Covert Affairs Romance (Book One) Read online

  Covert Affairs: Partnership

  A Covert Affairs M/M Romance (Book One)

  Valerie Vaughn

  Copyright © 2020 Valerie Vaughn

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without writtten permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Warning

  Intended for an 18+ audience only. This book contains material that may be offensive to some and intended for a mature, adult audience. It contains graphic language and adult situations.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Epilogue

  About The Author

  Books In This Series

  Acknowledgement

  One

  It was half a bottle of cheap tequila and three sheets to the wind Syler who decided hacking into the CIA would be a reasonable way to distract himself from being dumped. His rational self, wherever that had fucked off to, would like the record to show that he knew absolutely nothing good happened after two a.m., nor under the influence of alcohol, and especially not mixed with electronics executing questionably legal programs of his own design. Though—

  “You call this security? Honestly? My dead grandmother could do better than this!” Syler sounded decidedly offended on her behalf, continuing his merciless prodding of weak points along the agency’s firewalls.

  He shoved an errant dark curl roughly out of his face as he marked down yet another firewall vulnerability in shorthand that he might just be able to decipher come morning. As he pushed his glasses roughly back up the bridge of his nose, he snorted derisively at the figure he must've made. Hacker chic, complete with overgrown bedhead. He really was such a catch...

  “‘Really, Syler, I’m just concerned that you have no ambition,’” he snarked, slamming aggressively on the return key. “‘I know you’ve only recently finished your doctorate, but I just can’t possibly see myself building a future with someone who doesn’t even have a steady job.’ Oh, if you could see me now, you absolute bastard. I’m making them look like children! Tell me again how I’m not worth sticking around for!”

  The security at the CIA really was atrocious; he was hacking drunk and distracted. He’d have to forward them his notes for their own protection, poor little hapless idiots.

  ‘America’s best needs work,’ he thought, malicious indignation focused entirely on the wrong target. Although, in his defense, present events probably didn’t speak well of their ability to safeguard national secrets.

  He wasn’t particularly interested in the contents of what he was finding so much as how readily he was able to exploit vulnerabilities in search of ever more classified information, all without anyone in the agency mounting an active defense. All the same, he continued taking notes on needed improvements, complete with proposed solutions that likely wouldn’t make sense to his future self’s sober brain much less a stranger.

  “Oh, yes, title things so they’re easy to find, why don’t you? If I cared what you were doing in Russia, this would be fascinating, truly, but I’m too appalled by the knowledge that this was coded by a first year compsci major dropout to really appreciate the finesse I’m sure you’ve reallocated to covert operations!”

  Hitting that truly marvelous point of alcoholic invincibility that dared one to do bold, inherently stupid things all while barely holding onto consciousness, Syler threw his metaphorical hands up (or, rather, redirected them to locating the agency director’s personal inbox) and submitted his findings, complete with a copy of his resume, before disconnecting from the network.

  He stumbled to bed, shucking his pants halfway off as he went. Giving the rest of his clothes up as a bad job, he poured himself face first into the mattress, glasses imprint and consequences be damned.

  ---

  Syler woke up to the sort of blaring headache that defies description and tastes like regret, squinting at his still lit bedside lamp and wondering why his jeans were bunched around one ankle. He blinked one hazel eye fully open, vision foggy and impeded by a hopelessly smudged lens, then shut it again as the room spun.

  Not regret, he corrected, moaning pitifully. Tequila.

  His plans to burrow back into his mattress, and, ideally, tunnel directly to the light-less center of the earth where such mortal concerns as hangovers were rendered irrelevant were utterly derailed by an entirely too cheerful chirp from his phone. He reached for it blindly, knocking the lamp off the table altogether, and managed to pry a single eye open just long enough to register an email notification.

  “I, and I cannot stress this enough, do not give a single flying fuck, damnit.” Accenting his point, he slammed his phone face down on the mattress and returned to his pity party for one.

  His phone, apparently sentient and sent directly from the techno gods to punish him for all of his tequila-soaked sins, chirped yet again. Syler whined, prying himself up by sheer force of misery, and pulled his phone close enough to his face to go cross eyed.

  Subject: Re: You Need Serious Help. Seriously.

  “Mr. Perrin -

  Your interview will begin at 0730.

  V/R,

  J. Boothman

  Director

  Central Intelligence Agency”

  "What.” A statement, not a question.

  Syler blinked, owlish, then shut his eyes and counted to five slowly, before reading it once, twice again.

  “What?”

  The knock at his door came before he could think on his transgressions further.

  Two

  Jeanette Boothman had not maintained her position as Director of the CIA by lacking in creative problem solving skills. Step one–identify the problem.

  “Good morning, Mr. Perrin.” The agents accompanying her as security seemed superfluous in the face of the bedraggled youth who was gawping at her from his half-opened apartment door, all too long limbs and shaggy hair. “I’m Director Boothman. Your interview is scheduled to begin now. Please let me in before we can run behind.”

  “How did you even find me this fast?”

  “Your address was helpfully included in your resume.” She stared meaningfully at his door, unfazed by his general state and lack of manners. He stepped back into the entryway to pull it open further, resigned.

  “So about last night–”

  “Your interview request, yes.” The young man’s apartment was an eclectic nightmare of mismatched furniture, in accordance with the man himself, with the appearance of an explosive having gone off somewhat recently in the vicinity. Electrical components,
technical manuals, and what appeared to be a soldering iron, hopefully powered off, were strung about the entire studio, which was in and of itself dotted with half finished projects. Not even the kitchen counters had been spared—one half-open cupboard contained spare keyboards where a normal individual might keep cereal. A modern day mad scientist’s lair indeed.

  “Interview request might be a stretch, actually–”

  She turned to face him, expression stern. One of her agents shut the door with a resounding thud. “What would you prefer I call your breach of a federal agency, then?”

  He winced, cowed by a woman twice his age and nearly a foot shorter. God, it was like being dressed down by his mother, only in a sharp navy suit, all crisp lines and sensibly severe up-swept hair tinged with silver. “Just a, uh, list of friendly suggestions from a concerned citizen?” He pushed his mop of dark hair back nervously, though it flopped weakly back into his eyes just as quickly, landing with as much conviction as his words.

  Her face remained unimpressed.

  “Look,” he slouched, defeated. “How much trouble am I in?”

  “This is an interview,” she reiterated, “not a trip to the principal's office.” She cleared a seat for herself on the futon, stalwart enough not to test its stability before sitting. “Now, assuming that coffee maker is in working order, brew up a pot so we can get down to business. I’ll take mine black.”

  “Right.” He shuffled backwards into the kitchen, somehow avoiding the tangle of wires peeking from beneath a truly hideous dot-printed rug. “Is it too late to withdraw my application? Because I’m sure you’ve got a great benefits package with a pension and all that, but you’re also wholly terrifying and I’m entirely hung over.”

  None of the other three occupants in the room so much as cracked a grin, the two agents positioned by the front door remaining intimidatingly silent. He set about making the coffee, determining that, in this case, obedience was the better part of valor, particularly when his exit was blocked so thoroughly.

  “Mr. Perrin, you graduated at the bottom of your doctoral program specializing in cyber security eleven months ago, yet your test scores and public projects list indicate an intrinsic lack of academic interest rather than incompetence. Your private projects and reputation within the hacker community, as well as your work on code bounty jobs, are actually quite remarkable.”

  “Erm, thank you?”

  “Double major in mechanical engineering and computer science. Doctorate in cyber security. Strong interest in AI adaptive learning and robotics. Proficient in all notable programming languages. Prolific white hat hacking profile with links to several gray hat hacks of questionable repute upon deeper review. Your advisers note that you are ‘brilliant, but easily bored.’”

  “Do I even need to be here for this?” The siren smell of caffeine brewing was possibly making Syler irreverent again. That, or his not unreasonable hope that this was all a very strange nightmare. Toss up, that.

  “Further,” she continued, “while you have applied for a number of positions and been accepted to many, you have quit or been fired from three successive jobs. You are, presently, unemployed, though you have been accepting a number of freelance jobs far below your skill level.”

  Tell him something he didn’t know already. He poured out two cups, figuring the agents didn’t deserve any on account of blocking his way out, and, also, a lack of clean mugs. He settled hers on the table atop a tower of fairly stable looking technical manuals, unwilling to get closer for a direct hand off, then leaned back against a bookshelf, resigned to whatever happened next.

  “And then last night at 0137 hours, you set your sights on the CIA firewalls.”

  “A little after midnight, actually. I was in there for a while undetected. You should really work on that,” he coughed, headache pulsing brilliantly. “Erm, as a concerned citizen, that is. Really just a suggestion.”

  “Your notes referred to our encryption protocols as ‘ludicrously exploitable,’ and asked if we were currently employing child interns who’d yet to master the code for Hello World.”

  “Well–”

  “Then stated that you dearly hoped we applied more finesse to the organization of covert operations than we did to penetrative attack defense, while also suggesting, sarcastically I hope, that we utilize a less obvious file naming scheme, citing, and I quote, ‘Sneaky Sneak on Sir Putin’ as an example.”

  “...blame the tequila for that inside thought escaping.”

  “I shall.” The Director remained as impassive as she had been throughout, sipping primly on her coffee. He wondered if hangovers were beneath her.

  “So,” Syler reached awkwardly for any segue out of this situation, “besides listening to an in person play-by-play of my most mortifying hackathon, how can I help you?”

  ‘Step one, identify the problem,’ Director Boothman thought, narrowing her eyes at him, considering. ‘And reshape it into an opportunity.’ Syler fidgeted from his place against the bookshelf. “Your notes also included proposed patches, which my operations department head found riveting.”

  “Ah, well, they’re all yours, enjoy!”

  Boothman pursed her lips. “I would much prefer to have the expertise of the man who created the solutions on my staff.”

  “This is feeling less like an interview and more like a dictation, just so you know.”

  The Director let out what, for her, must pass as a resigned sigh. “Mr. Perrin, you have two choices.”

  “Do they happen to be jail time at Guantanamo or working for the CIA forever under pain of death?”

  “Something like that.” She smiled, shark like. “Now, let’s go over all of those wonderful benefits you mentioned earlier.”

  ---

  Eighteen months on, Syler had to admit that he’d hit the lifetime jackpot of drunken disasters. Granted, he was still an alarmingly pale man with riotous curls in desperate need of a trim and a sense of style once described as ‘quirky English professor,’ and the glasses certainly didn’t help with people’s assumption that he was barely legal to drink let alone just turned thirty, but his job? His job was fantastic. His mother, rest her soul, would have been absurdly proud.

  He’d been brought into the Directorate of Operations as a senior staff operations officer soon after completion of his—decidedly abbreviated, thank you Director Boothman—clandestine service trainee program. And no, he would not get over the ludicrous naming scheme, ma’am.

  Admittedly, most of it had been a thoroughly terrifying but succinct course in how not to bungle the handling of national intelligence delivered by one of the Director’s executive staff before he was gleefully poached by the head of the operations department, one Colonel Thompson, to start hands-on training in the form of updating and implementing all of the proposed patches the man had found so riveting, followed by a truly dizzying deep dive into all facets of maintaining the division responsible for covert operations. Cyber security, yes, but also developing technology, data collection, threat analysis, and supporting field agents through their missions.

  It took the better part of a year for Syler to realize the abnormality of the entire situation pointed to his having been hand picked by the aging Colonel to become his second-in-command. Once given the chance to catch his breath and settle in, Syler couldn’t complain. The current Director of Operations, as he himself had eventually explained, came from an older, more physical generation of spy craft, and the future of counterintelligence was undeniably digital. Nearing seventy years of age, he needed a jack-of-all-trades ready to take the helm of his department someday, but a cyber security master was especially paramount, not only to defend that which the CIA maintained but to access that which they needed and lay in the hands of other parties.

  Getting to design the tech—who was Syler kidding, gadgets—used by the paramilitary operations officers, otherwise known as field agents—honestly just call a spy a spy already—was really just the icing on top of the cake.
/>   He swiped his security badge over the entry pad, slipping through the door into the branch main office.

  “Morning, S!” Maria called, senior manager of the night shift looking bright-eyed despite having been up all night monitoring agents. Even her chestnut curls looked unfairly tidy. Syler couldn’t relate to that level of organization.

  “Morning, how’s the situation in Bolivia?” He dropped his messenger bag onto the central command desk, unofficially his for the last few months, disturbing a pile of paperwork as he did. The Colonel preferred the quiet of his workshop office, tucked off on the periphery of the open floor plan room.

  “Stable. Agent Garcia is poised to plant the bugs before the gala tonight. Her target is all too happy to have her attention for the afternoon.” One could always count on wealthy, corrupt men to enjoy the company of a young, attractive woman, particularly when it included an opportunity to peacock in advance of an event held in his honor. Pity for him the woman in question was a senior special agent of a foreign nation.

  “Wonderful. She’s been notified that I’ll be on comms to guide her throughout?”

  “Yup. Latest firewall testing reports are in your box and range notes on the latest bugs are being tabulated now. Should be done in a few hours. Anything else before I head out?” Reyes shouldered her bag, already half-way to the door. Must be nice to have someone to rush home to after work.

  “Is the Colonel in?”

  “Nah, he’s in a meeting with the Director all morning. One of the deep cover agents just returned for debrief apparently. Enjoy being in charge again, boss!” She waved, hair bouncing as she turned and headed out, joining the throng of staff coming and going as day shift took over.

  His life was a spy film and he was, somehow, a spy. For the CIA. ‘No ambition, my ass,’ he thought, logging into the system to review and disseminate the morning’s work load.

  Life was good.