After leaving the SEALs, Camilo Canto had been recruited by the most elite and covert division of the CIA as a Non-Official Cover, or NOC, officer. The Special Activities Center/Special Operations Group (SAC/SOG) conducted highly classified paramilitary and covert ops. Prior to his departure from The Agency, Cam had spent nearly a year in Suriname in the employ of the notorious arms dealer, Dario Sava. Sava's obsession with the now-wife of Bishop Security leader, Nathan Bishop, had brought Cam to his current job.
Nathan Bishop had contacted Cam—who was embedded in Sava's organization as Miguel Ramirez—for information to help protect his wife from the madman. Once Dario Sava was dead, Cam maintained his cover for another year hunting down weapons and intelligence Sava had sold. Cam had intercepted a Javelin en route to Boko Haram in Somalia and recovered stolen research on silencing blade vortex interaction in U.S. helicopters. He had also gathered intelligence on an elusive underworld figure known as The Conductor.
The Conductor.
Cam had firmly believed no such man existed. He was a myth cobbled together by internet trolls, media extremists, and conspiracy theorists. The notion that one man controlled all international black market shipping was, well, it was preposterous. Yet the more Cam moved through the underworld, like Dante exploring the circles of hell, the more he began to notice a pattern. Export methods were too similar, logistics too uniform, procedures too sophisticated for the gunslinger smugglers and ham-handed traffickers he came across. A theory began to form.
Why couldn’t one man consolidate the criminal shipping enterprise? People certainly did it in the legitimate private sector. It was an idea that his superiors had considered and dismissed, but Cam wasn’t so sure.
Telling no one, for fear of being accused of running down rabbit holes, Cam—operating as his cover identity, Miguel Ramirez—began keeping a log of leads, shipping schedules, persons of interest, and financial transactions that pointed to one master puppeteer. After six months, the journal looked like the ravings of a lunatic. Still, he continued to make entries, documenting the tenuous threads that supported his theory.
Then, on a balmy afternoon in February, in the coastal city of Rabat, Morocco, he had captured video of a weapons smuggler he was tracking boarding a yacht. It wasn’t an unusual sight; underworld buyers and sellers met in locations ranging from back alleys to palaces. It was the name of the ship, however, that caught Cam's attention: The Maestro.
The following day, Cam had met with his contact, a fellow NOC officer named Raymond Greene, and to his surprise, Greene had similar suspicions. Cam shared what he knew, including the meeting on The Maestro, and he and Greene agreed they would continue to gather information. They were a long way away from approaching their superiors with anything more than conjecture. After chasing shadows to Marrakech and Ibiza, Cam temporarily abandoned his search for The Conductor.
Three weeks later, Cam had come across a small village burned to the ground by a drug cartel. He had been feeling the crush of this work, and that was the final straw. He had wanted to make a contribution, to help the powerless, but not at the cost of his sanity. He was tired. Tired of espionage. Tired of being so damn alone. Tired of giving his body and his mind and his soul to combat a never-ending stream of violence and corruption. Then and there, amid the smoldering rubble and corpses, he had called Nathan Bishop and accepted his job offer. The Conductor may be real, but someone else could hunt him down.
The moment he had stepped into Nathan Bishop's office in New York, and Nathan had greeted him with an extended hand and a welcome to the team, he knew he had made the correct decision. Everything about the job felt right, most of all, the camaraderie.
Cam and Steady had been on the same SEAL team but in different platoons, so they hadn’t worked together often or had the same deep bond as Steady and Cam's other new coworkers, but they all knew each other; it was a small community. The Teamguys at Bishop Security certainly all knew how he got his nickname, “JJ.” They called him El Jefe de Jodor: the nonsensical Spanish was intended to translate to “the boss of fuck.” He had certainly earned it. At six-one, with a thick head of auburn hair and the striking golden eyes he’d inherited from his father, Cam never suffered from a lack of female attention. The moniker, however, was a burden he was all too happy to shed in civilian life. Like many military nicknames, “JJ” was not something he wanted to explain to his mother.
He continued on the main road away from the beach, over the low bridge to the mainland, and headed to Bishop Security. In his work for the CIA, he had traveled from Amazonian jungles to Mediterranean cartel compounds to East African smuggling outposts. Looking out the window, he took in the marshy South Carolina lowland; this would be his home for the foreseeable future. Cam didn’t think anything had ever looked more beautiful.