Free Chronic Fear by Scott Nicholson Page A

he’d always be Byron to her.
    The kind of shit you think about when you’re sitting in a tree. Should’ve just gone with my middle name in the first place.
    But Horace was even worse than Byron, as evidenced by the army captain at the Citadel who’d referred to him as “Horse,” a slightly better nickname than Bee and a little higher up the food chain.
    Luckily, the CIA let him go by his initials and, as a core collector for the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, he was just as happy as B.H. Gundersson, although a couple of times they’d issued him false identities for some domestic work. But all the name games had been a waste of time, because Field Director Harding referred to him as “Gundy.”
    While ostensibly the NCS was charged with coordinating information across all the different intelligence agencies in the post-9/11 U.S., it hadn’t taken Gundersson long to realize the creation of a new agency had simply snicked another wedge out of the pie. Occasionally the juice from one piece leaked over to another, but some top dog always had a fork jammed hard in the center of his particular slice.
    As a patriotic American, he prayed that there would never again come a time when thousands of civilian lives depended on communication between people whose mouths were full of pie.
    But it was a little ironic, in a Bruce Willis–movie kind of way, that the NCS was established for foreign intelligence yet spent a good deal of time snooping on its fellow agencies.
    He looked through the binoculars again, sitting twenty feet up a young maple tree. His view wasn’t quite as interesting as it had been last night, when the couple had given him quite a show through the infrared binos, but it appeared they were finally stirring along with the birds around him.
    Gundersson hadn’t spent the entire night in the tree. He was a targeting officer, not paramilitary. The killers were on covert missions overseas, handling assault weapons and explosives in locales where there weren’t many trees. People like him were usually chained to a desk, poring through e-mails, financial records, and questionable Google habits, but they also made good field workers because no one knew they were field workers.
    Compared to dodging rockets in Islamabad, staking out a couple of reclusive hippies seemed like an easy gig.
    The only thing that bothered Gundersson was why the CIA was wasting time on these guys when al-Qaeda was still Code Red and the next Timothy McVeigh was probably stopping by the feed store for a truckload of fertilizer at that very moment.
    The guy, Roland Doyle, rolled out of bed first and went flopping toward the bathroom and out of Gundersson’s limited view. The woman peeled down the sheets and stretched, and he was disappointed to see her grab a robe from the floor. She stood and Gundersson thought she was headed after hubby, but instead she slipped into the robe and came right to the window.
    Then she looked directly at him and he froze.
    No way. I’m in camo and a hundred feet deep in the woods, and all this April foliage is thick enough to hide an army.
    Then she glanced left and right before pulling the curtains closed.
    Gundersson finally released a breath. They said sixth sense was a bunch of baloney, but in his experience, people often expressed discomfort when they were being observed, even if they didn’t quite understand why. Something just felt different.
    But the house was quiet and still, and the pair was likely in the shower, rinsing off last night’s dirty play with a round of aquatics.
    From his briefing, he’d learned that these two were involved in some sort of secret drug test. Harding, a Desert Storm vet, stressed that it hadn’t been a CIA drug test, like when they’d given hallucinogenic drugs to civilians in the MK-Ultra experiments during the Cold War. Harding made it clear he didn’t like that “wavy gravy shit,” and that Gundersson wasn’t to engage the targets. Somebody way up the