Free Under the Wire: Bad Boys Undercover by Helenkay Dimon

glass-walled office and into the Warehouse situation room. High-end equipment hummed with life and covered table after table. Oversized monitors showing news from around the world and covert camera feeds from hotspot locations hung from the ceiling and lined the walls.
    The space was modern and sleek. Very industrial. The career types who sat in the big building across the fenced-in grounds of Liberty Crossing, the home of the National Counterterrorism Center in Virginia, liked to testify in their secret congressional hearings about the Alliance being an example of true international cooperation between the U.S. and the UK. That was when they weren’t too busy berating her in private for every little thing the Alliance did and every dime spent.
    But the higher-ups liked a big public show, complete with lots of self-congratulations. They also felt qualified to make decisions without ever picking up a weapon or making a life-or-death spot decision in the field.
    Both the Americans and their British counterparts micromanaged to an annoying degree. Tried to plan everything out, as if a national crisis came with the ability to call time-out to regroup. They spent a lot of time designing manuals and talking about protocol. Never mind that the setup of the Alliance outside of the CIA and MI6 meant the team was not hamstrung by the rules the intelligence agencies had to follow. And she would not have been able to convince her men to read operation manuals even if she ordered it, not that she ever would.
    The Alliance could move from country to country with great freedom. She took the heat and played the game so her team could work with her as the only true oversight. Move in and out without being seen. Get the equipment they needed while standing in the middle of a firefight. Skate the very thin line between right and wrong as they assessed how to contain the damage. No one was better at any of that than her team.
    To her, the fancy office space and Marine guards at the entrance gate amounted to pure window dressing. The real beating heart of the Alliance was the team members, and she trusted them to make the hard calls. She directed and ordered, but she listened and made adjustments. Right now most of them were out.
    The place usually bustled with activity, but she’d sent the members of both Bravo and Delta out on mandatory leave. They’d lost one of their own and needed togrieve, even though they fought the idea. Almost every one of them thought that heading straight out on a new assignment and concentrating on doing what they did best was the answer. Part of her agreed. But the higher-ups in the CIA and MI6, the intelligence agencies that trained most of the team members and sometimes supplied backup for missions, argued the point and she conceded.
    There were fears about vigilante frustration and the potential for something catastrophic to happen. Having risen through the ranks of MI6 and set up the Alliance, Tasha had a high tolerance for handling catastrophe. Her team was no different.
    She planned to call them all back in next week, reassemble and get back to work. It wasn’t as if the gun runners and human traffickers and every other terrorist and piece of human garbage out there looking to cause trouble took the month off because Harlan Ross, lifetime British intelligence officer and Alliance administrator, sacrificed his life in exchange for saving a terminal of people at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle Airport and the Alliance team members standing in the room with him. Including her.
    No one outside the Alliance even knew about his sacrifice. And that was the part that ticked her off the most. All those years of service to the Crown, and he wouldn’t receive even a star on a wall like the CIA did for their own. Harlan had been an MI6 officer beforejoining the Alliance and there would be no public appreciation for him because he died after leaving MI6. That was a choice he’d made when he joined the Alliance.
    Harlan