Calculated Risk

sleep with Quinlan only a foot away. Still, maybe if he thought she was sleeping, he would be content to let the silence linger. Although he had never had a problem with silence. She had always been the one to break it.

Not this time, though. “You handled that situation back there well,” he told her.

“Guess shooting at people is a lot like riding a bike,” she retorted. She sounded casual but now that the adrenaline wasn’t flowing as hard there was a lingering nausea in her gut. She considered the possibility that she might have killed someone back at the house. Regardless that the someone was, in fact, the enemy…it still made her queasy.

“I meant your accuracy with the gun. You’ve been practicing,” Quinlan suggested.

“I always did like target practice.”

He expelled a breath that might have been mistaken for a laugh. “I wouldn’t call what you did target practice. It was more like some distorted ricochet theory.”

She smiled then with her eyes still closed as the images from her days at Langley returned. Hitting a target while aiming directly at it was a cinch. She believed it had to do with her uncanny ability in spatial mathematics. Her eye could accurately register the distance between herself and any target, and she knew from the kick of the gun, the slight jerk of her hand, the exact trajectory the bullet would take.

Quinlan would stand behind her and tell her to hit the head of a target and she did. He would tell her to hit the leg, and she could do that, too. It was simple. What was more of a challenge was determining a bullet’s ricochet angle. Knowing what a bullet did if it hit steel, if it hit Kevlar, if it hit brick. Knowing the angle at which she was firing, Sabrina always believed, in principle, she could bounce a bullet in any direction she wanted it to go. More often than not she was wrong. But she’d never stopped trying.

With only the woods to use for practice, she’d come pretty close to figuring out just how to hit a tree the right way to send the bullet sailing dramatically right or left. Depending on the thickness of the bark, of course, and the type of tree. If she told him that, though, he’d make some disbelieving sound. It’s what he used to do.

Other memories of their time together spat at her like rapid fire. Because some of them made her want to smile, she concentrated more on the ones that hurt.

“Did you marry her?”

The words fell out of her mouth and she winced. It had always been like that with him. Always pushing and prodding him, forcing him to talk or at least to react to her because she hated it when he dismissed her. Hated that he always seemed to find it so easy to ignore her. The fact that ten years hadn’t changed anything was really annoying.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“It was over a year later,” he elaborated.

“Shocker.” She hadn’t wanted to respond, but she’d been surprised that he had bothered to expand on his answer. He didn’t owe her any explanation.

“Bri…”

“Don’t call me that.” Opening her eyes, she pinned her gaze on him so that he would know how serious she was. The nickname brought with it too many of the memories she wanted to forget.

This wasn’t going to work, she realized.

Her mission would not succeed if she found herself wrapped up in some attempt to seek justice for a wrong that was done to her a bunch of years ago. She needed to let it go. If asked under penalty of torture, she would have sworn that she had. Her questions about his marriage suggested otherwise. But it didn’t have to go any further than that. She wouldn’t let it.

“You should know that I didn’t do all of this as some sort of warped attempt to see you again. You have to understand that you weren’t supposed to be part of this. It’s not what I wanted.” She turned away from him and closed her eyes again.

She heard him release a slow breath. “If only that were true.”

The back seat shifted and without looking, she determined that he was planning to catch some sleep. With Quinlan it wouldn’t be an act, either. Sleep was a precious resource. Like food or water. In any conflict, it needed to be taken when it could. He’d taught her that.

To distract her thoughts away from him, she began doing complicated geometrical proofs in her head. She could see the shapes flowing behind her eyes. Could see the angles and how they related to one another. Could see the purity and the simplicity of the theory that determined the answer for every angle on any scale.

Like drinking a tonic, it cleansed her. There was no emotion in the math. Only truth. Only right and only wrong. It played out like a piece of music that she could actually hear. The symphony of order and reason, which, in so many ways, was in direct contrast to her emotional state-typically chaotic and confused. She allowed her mind to go to that place where so few people had ever gone. Where it seemed as if the answer, the one answer behind everything, was within her grasp if she just let go…

Then a vision intruded. In her mind she saw herself sitting in the same seat hours earlier when Quinlan had first picked her up. She saw herself in the space and measured the distance between her knees and the driver’s seat.

Sabrina opened her eyes and looked down at her legs and at the front seat. There was three-eighths of an inch difference.

“Q,” she whispered.

“Hmm.”

“Wake up.”

Her tone conveyed the situation. Instantly, he was alert. She could almost feel the resulting tension that was quickly being dispersed throughout his body.

She pointed to the driver’s seat in front of her and whispered, “It’s been moved up.”

He looked at the seat but shook his head, indicating that he was unable to see any discernible difference from where it was now to where it had been before. That didn’t mean that there wasn’t one, and apparently he trusted her enough to know that she wouldn’t have said it if she didn’t see it.

He stared through the tinted partition where they could see a part of the driver’s head. Sabrina pushed closer to Quinlan, also trying to make out more of the driver’s face. Then she turned and shook her head.

“Shorter,” she mouthed silently.

He looked at her and she could see he was beyond questioning her at this point. Nodding, he reached for his gun. Then hitting a button on the door’s handle, he lowered the partition between them another few inches. Enough to be heard, but leaving enough protection if the man driving aimed a gun over his shoulder.

“Horner, pull over.”

“Can’t,” came the muffled response from the front seat.

“She’s sick. Pull the car over.” As he said this, he pushed Sabrina back against the seat with one arm and lifted his gun out of the holster with his free hand pointing it directly at the head of the driver.

She understood that if the driver didn’t want to pull over, then the driver was going to die. With her hands she searched for the seat belt. It felt as if they were pushing at least sixty on the speedometer, and anything over forty could be deadly for both of them if the driver was suddenly put out of commission and the car made impact with an unmovable force.

She leaned toward Quinlan ready to warn him to put his seat belt on, as well, even as she struggled to fasten hers, but it was too late. The unknown driver, evidently realizing he’d been discovered, veered the car off the highway.

Their destination was unknown, but Sabrina had a feeling she wasn’t going to have anything good to say about the trip.

Chapter 8

As the careening car skidded off the road, the force of a sudden ninety-degree turn sent Sabrina slamming into Quinlan. Another turn, this time in the opposite direction, sent them flying the other way until they were smashed against the door. The pattern continued so quickly that neither was able to grab hold of