The Asset Read Free

that would never bring her back. But in his heart he felt if he made a difference somehow, she would forgive him for what he’d done and there might be a slight chance he could forgive himself.
    He explored the military at the suggestion of his father, but the idea of killing people indiscriminately in conflicts that serviced political ideologies or protected corporate revenue streams only made him feel worse. The intelligence community was a natural choice for someone with his IQ and work ethic, so he applied to the CIA, thinking a career in the clandestine service might be a way to stop terrorists before they started. But news started coming out about how interagency bickering between the CIA and FBI may have paved the way for the 9/11 terrorists to pull off the worst attack on American soil in history, and Kennedy burned the thick pile of application documents that had taken him weeks to complete.
    One of his friends at school, the son of a senator, landed a job with the newly formed Transportation Security Administration, an organization that piqued Kennedy’s interest. To him, the front lines in the war on terror were at the nation’s airports, and TSA would put him in the trenches. Lockheed Martin recruited and trained the majority of new agents for the TSA at the time and Kennedy used his friend’s connections to get an unpaid internship after graduation. His father was furious that he would shoot so low when he was armed with a degree from one of the most prestigious universities in the country. Kennedy didn’t care. He had no interest in working anywhere else and was committed to doing whatever it took to get on staff. He spent all the money he had saved since he was a kid, supporting himself during his internship andeven completing an elite aviation security training course in Israel. When he came back from Tel Aviv, he had earned a foot in the door.
    By twenty-five, Kennedy was one of Lockheed’s top trainers, a specialist in Behavior Detection, something the Israelis had practiced for years but that was a relatively new field in the United States. In addition to training officers, he also became well versed in screening equipment and learned how to write grants for federal research facilities like Lawrence Livermore to develop new tech. At twenty-seven, he was in such high demand it no longer made sense for him to be a Lockheed employee. He hated corporate culture anyway and it seemed like the more he got promoted, the more they wanted to take him away from his boots on the ground and make him a high-paid desk jockey standing around eating birthday cake on Friday afternoons with the rest of the drones.
    A few weeks before his thirtieth birthday, he became an independent consultant and inked a specialized skills contractor agreement directly with TSA and the Department of Homeland Security. Back then, it was extremely rare for individuals to have direct contracts with DHS and TSA, and this status expanded Kennedy’s reputation in the airport security industry worldwide, winning him contracts with foreign governments.
    As they did every year on Kennedy’s birthday, he and his father had dinner in Los Angeles at Morton’s. Richard was beaming with pride, a very rare condition indeed, but Kennedy thought he looked tired and underweight, a stark contrast to his usual robust self. When he asked Richard about it, his father said he’d had the flu and was on the mend. Six weeks later, Richard was found dead in his home. Unbeknownst to his family and friends, he’d been battling lung cancer for over a year. He had tried to hide that, like he used to try to hide his pack-a-day Marlboro Red habit from Belle and Kennedy. At least with the cigarettes, they could smell the evidence. With this, there was only the stink of death. His own father had not had the decency to allow him to say good-bye, something he was also denied with Belle.
    Kennedy had already been struggling to assimilate