Renegade (2013) by Mel Odom

polite at Langley. He just had to be good at what he did. Losing a team wasn’t a measure of competency.
    The data stream unpacked and showed on the panel, revealing the bloody room where the CIA team had evidently met whatever fate they’d encountered. Blood stained the walls. Two dead men sat slumped on a couch. When the man providing the video turned, a pool of blood was revealed on the floor near the door. Another was just outside the entrance.
    There was no sign of the three faces on Prentiss’s second panel, but the room had been turned into a charnel house.
    Abruptly, the camera turned again, briefly catching the legs of another person in the room as well.
    Prentiss looked up at Carter and mouthed, Relaying.
    Carter nodded and spoke into the mouthpiece. “Are you getting this?”
    “Looking at it now.”
    The camera view suddenly shifted again, lowering to the floor and increasing magnification. It took Carter a moment to figure out what the cameraman was focusing on; then—when he did figure it out—he wished he didn’t know.
    Two human fingers lay under the sofa the dead men sat on. One of them had been severed at the knuckle. The other at the second joint. Both amputated digits showed obvious trauma, not clean cuts.
    Prentiss’s reflection in the panel took on a more somber cast. Her mouth became a hard line. Without a word, she opened the drawer in front of her and slid a hand inside. From the time that he had worked with her, Carter knew she kept a Bible there—a touchstone for faith and family, she’d once told him. After a moment, she took her hand back out and seemed a little more composed.
    On the panel, a man’s hand appeared in front of the camera and scooped up the two amputated fingers.
    Then the camera’s digital upload ceased, clearing the panel so only the serene image of Parachinar’s streets and surrounding snowcapped mountains stood revealed.
    “That’ll do, Carter. Thank you for your assistance.” Stivers hung up before Carter could respond.
    Prentiss looked at Carter as he punched off the phone. “Think those—” she paused—“belonged to one of the missing agents?”
    “Yeah.”
    A shiver passed through Prentiss. “So who took the video?”
    “Probably one of the CIA assets in the area. Somebody like those two Pashtuns who were dead in that room.”
    Prentiss hesitated. “I might be able to blow up some frames of those fingers, maybe pull the friction ridges and search through the system for who they belonged to.”
    Carter shook his head. “The CIA knows who they belong to. We’re out of it, Prentiss. Unless they call us back in. Until then—” he nodded to her desk—“maybe you could say a prayer for those men.”
    “I already have been.”
    “Yeah. Me too. I think they’re going to need it.”

11
    ARMS CROSSED, back against the wall, Pike sat on a hard bench bolted to the cinder-block wall. The cops and frequent visitors called the large community cell “genpop,” short for “general population.” The strong stench of unwashed bodies, vomit, and urine stained the air, but the smells were customary things to Pike. He’d spent plenty of days in places that were a lot worse than the jail he was currently in.
    Two young black men still occasionally glared at Pike from their seats on the floor. Last night had been Friday, and the jail usually spiked in volume on weekend nights. More police were looking for collars in the streets, and more people were out in those streets.
    One of the young guys had an eye that was nearly swollen shut. Pike had given him that when he and his buddy had tried to take Pike’s space on the bench. The fight had been brief, over in seconds, and the jail’s trustee had blown the incident off without writing it up.
    As a result of the fight, the other black men in the cell gave Pike the stink eye too. He didn’t take it personally. Color was one of the first divisive things in lockup. Race made it easy to figure out who “us” and