Calculated Risk

“Nope. You don’t get any say in what I do with my life or my talent.” And that kills you, doesn’t it? she finished silently.

“What about your father?”

“What about him?” she asked stiffly.

“I think he’d hoped you would return to the world of academia.”

Sabrina shook her head and took another drag on her cigarette. “School was never my thing. That was Dad’s dream. I never wanted any part of it.”

“Does he know what you do?”

She laughed and blew out a stream of smoke. “You mean the tabloids or the American traitor gig? Relax,” she said when she saw he didn’t appreciate her attempt at humor. “He doesn’t even know where I am. Still the same old dad. Can’t tear away from his monitor long enough to look.”

Quinlan nodded slightly and Sabrina could see he didn’t doubt her. He’d met Roger Masters enough times to know that she was exactly right in her assessment. “Maybe we should get back to the matter at hand. Krueger told me you and Arnold had been in contact. For how long?”

Finding herself agitated at the mention of Arnold because it still made her sad, Sabrina stood and walked over to smash out her cigarette in the ashtray positioned next to the pack on the mantel. “Just this past year. I don’t know how he found me, but he sent me an e-mail.”

This is your chance, G.G. It’s time to come home.

The words from that first e-mail ran through her brain. It had been that single word, home, that had made her reply. Then more words followed. Words like destiny. Promise and potential. For a numbers guy, Arnold had been pretty eloquent.

She felt the warmth of the fire hit her face and not for the first time wished she could talk to Arnold one more time.

“You loved him.”

Did she? She thought about the first time they’d met. In the hallowed halls of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Sixteen and full of herself and her brilliance, she’d been cocky as hell. She’d had no idea she was meeting an intellectual peer.

“So you’re her. The girl genius,” he said as introduction.

Certainly his appearance hadn’t been impressive. He had bushy white hair that made him look older than his fifty-five years. Sabrina remembered that day he had on a dismal yellow Oxford with monster pit stains underneath each arm. He had matched the shirt with a cheap green tie that fell, ridiculously uneven, down the front of his chubby body. She’d been repulsed and had immediately pegged him as a standard run-of-the-mill academic geek, which she’d grown to know so well during her days at Harvard.

“Quick, what’s the significance of the number three?”

“It’s between two and four.”

Arnold had laughed at her answer to his impromptu quiz. Cackled really.

“Excellent. Always start with the obvious. You’ll do, G.G. You’ll do fine.”

She glanced over at Quinlan, the memory making her smile. “I don’t know. Love is a pretty strong word. I did admire him. Not just his intellect, but his independence, too.”

“That independence is the reason we’re in trouble now. It was irresponsible of him to leave us blind like this. There hasn’t been much chatter over the wires lately, but that could change in a matter of days.”

“Don’t be mad at him,” she urged, seeing the etched lines of Quinlan’s face grow harder. For Arnold it was always about the work. For Quinlan it was always about duty to his country. The two men had liked each other, she recalled, respected each other certainly, but they never understood each other. “I think…I think part of the reason he did this was for me. You knew Arnold. He never cared much about the consequences, only as far as they pertained to his own agenda. This time I think that agenda was me. He wanted me to have a second chance.”

“And what do you want?”

Sabrina walked over to the stocked wet bar in the corner of the room and poured two whiskeys straight. She handed one to Quinlan, even though she doubted he would drink it, and sat down in the delicate chair across from him, closer to the fire. Closer to him.

“Do you think it’s so impossible that might be exactly what I want?”

“You could have come to me. Years ago. I could have fixed things.”

Sabrina laughed softly. “As if I would have asked you for anything back then. But I guess I know that if I had, you would have tried. You would have failed. I was fired, Q. And they were right to do it.”

“There were circumstances,” he muttered, his eyes pinned on the glass in his hands. He did, in fact, take a sip of his drink.

“Yep. But the broken heart of a nineteen-year-old seems pretty silly when you think about it in hindsight.”

“What happened?” he asked, wanting the specifics of why she did it, she knew. He would have read about how it happened in her file. But the details didn’t matter anymore, just the reason behind them.

“I got lost. You can’t know, can’t imagine, what it’s like to be ten paces in front of the rest of the world. It’s the scariest place on earth when you’re there by yourself, especially when you don’t know where you’re going.”

She lifted the glass to her lips. The smell of the whiskey hit her and reminded her that this would be her third drink of the night. She set the drink down on the end table next to her and stood again, moving back toward the fire. She looked at the flames colored with hints of blue and orange rather than at him.

“I decided I didn’t want to be that person, out in front, anymore. And it was so easy to give up. So easy to tell myself that I didn’t need the CIA. Too easy for them to say they didn’t need me. Then… I don’t know what happened. Maybe it was 9/11, maybe it was sooner. Somewhere along the way I grew up. I started to think about what I was doing with my life. What I was giving away. All my potential. That’s a hell of a thing. It began to piss me off. I was good at what I did. And I liked being good at it.”

“You could have been the best.”

She shrugged and tried not to think about what could have been, but what was going to be if she could pull this off.

“So there’s your answer. It’s ten years later. The past is just that. Arnold gave me an opportunity and I’m taking hold of it with both hands. Yes, I contacted Kahsan. I told him everything. Because you and I both know that he’s the only other person who would want access to Arnold’s data as much as the CIA. Don’t you see? I’ve become the ultimate bait and when I deliver his head on a platter to the CIA…they’ll have to take me back. On my terms. You know they will.”

She thought she sounded pretty convincing. Probably because most of what she’d told him was the truth. No, it hadn’t been her idea to go after Kahsan, but everything else she’d told him was dead-on.

“Possibly,” he accepted. “But this isn’t tiddledy-winks. You’ve been out of the game a long time, Bri. What makes you think you can play with this man?”

“I made you as a tail tonight,” she reminded him.

A short nod acknowledged her victory. “How did you make me? I thought I had been rather careful.”

“I heard your shoes.”

“So you leaped to the conclusion that any man walking on the sidewalk had to be following you. That’s awfully presumptuous even given the circumstances.”

“This is Stansfield, Pennsylvania. In the dead of winter,” she told him, “even the lawyers around this place wear boots.”

He lifted his gaze from his drink and met her eyes. In the light of the fire his normally cold gray eyes didn’t seem as dangerous as she remembered. Instead, they seemed almost inviting, as though he wanted her to share a memory with him. But that wasn’t a place she could go. Not with him. Not again.

He stood and set his half-finished drink on the mantel as far away from her ashtray as possible. “Your fighting was a little sloppy,” he mentioned. “And you were breathing hard after the chase. You’re out of shape. Could be the cigarettes.”

“Yeah, well, you weren’t exactly operating at top speed, either, chief. Could be your age.”

“Okay. For now I’ll buy your story. But this changes everything. I have to tell my superiors what you’ve done. I