he’d been trained to do.
After almost a year of working with him day in and day out, he’d left her without so much as a goodbye.
Not that she expected any different. Quinlan, she had ascertained during their association, wasn’t a man who formed connections. After all that time baiting him, teasing him, fighting with him, she still didn’t know his story. Because that was the way he wanted it.
Jumping up from her short couch she made her way to the door. She didn’t think to ask who it was, or worry about an intruder. The CIA provided the security that surrounded the building. Granted, the guards who watched the place-most of them on this assignment as a form of punishment-liked to call themselves baby-sitters. Sabrina didn’t mind. They were good at keeping people out.
Including her father the one time he bothered to check up on her. She had refused his visit, and the baby-sitters had done their job.
She opened the door quickly and sucked in her breath just as quickly. “Q.”
“Bri,” he returned.
“Come in.”
Quinlan walked into her room as he did any other room he ever entered: cautiously. He surveyed the small space then turned back to her. “You haven’t done much with it since I left.”
Sabrina considered the bare white walls. There was a single bed, covered with a tan comforter and two pillows. She had a weathered oak desk, a pretty comfortable office chair and a state-of-the-art laptop with wireless Internet access. She had a TV, a lumpy green two-seater couch and a minifridge. It was basically the exact same room she’d walked into two years ago. Except for the minifridge. That had been her only addition.
She supposed other teenage girls might have posters up or shoes and clothes pouring out of closets. Maybe there should be makeup scattered over her desk, and silly pictures of her and friends taken in one of those booths at the fair. But she didn’t have friends. She didn’t go to fairs. She didn’t have money, except for a small monthly stipend that covered the cost of things like shampoo, toothpaste, tampons and the most basic of clothing necessities.
No, the room wasn’t cluttered. Then again, neither was her life. Still, feeling as if she’d failed some kind of test, she asked, “Was I supposed to?”
“No.”
“Have a seat.” She felt like a grown-up for having said it. So much so, she added, “Can I get you something to drink?”
His eyebrow arched in a way she recalled that meant he was assessing whether or not she was teasing. In this case she wasn’t. She opened the minifridge and pulled out two bottles of Coors Light. When he scowled, she merely shrugged. “Arnold smuggled them in for me on his last visit. He says alcohol helps relax the brain. Gives a genius a break and all that,” she defended and handed him one. “It’s no big deal.”
“You’re underage.”
“I can fire a grenade launcher, although they still won’t teach me how to shoot a gun. Which, by the way, I’m pretty sure I could kick some butt doing. I’m a master of several forms of hand-to-hand combat. I can fluently read four languages. I think I can handle a beer. A light one at that.”
Seemingly resigned to that fact, Quinlan took the offered beverage and twisted off the top and tossed it across the room directly into the open trash can next to her desk. Then he moved to the couch and sat. Heavily, she thought. Almost wearily.
On the cushion next to him was a game of solitaire in progress. She gathered up the cards, not before remembering exactly how they had been positioned, and sat next to him.
“Why not just play on the computer?”
“I like the feel of the cards in my hand,” she offered.
He took a healthy sip of his beer and for a few seconds said nothing. She wanted to pounce with questions about where he’d been, what he’d been doing for the past six months and, more importantly, why he looked so tired, but she figured she’d give him a little breathing room. Not a lot. Just a little.
“Your language teachers are concerned,” he said finally.
“You spoke to them?” she asked, surprised he would even know what was going on with her day-to-day class load.
He nodded. “They say you can read fine, but your comprehension is only average and your accent sucks…in everything.”
Sabrina grimaced. Her accents did suck. Badly in French, Russian and Arabic. In Cantonese, forget it. “It’s not my strong suit. I can memorize an alphabet instantly, so reading words is no problem. But speaking a language and understanding it when it’s spoken…” She trailed off not wanting to finish that admission.
“You’re just like everybody else,” Quinlan finished for her.
Leave it to him to be back for five seconds and still find a way to hit her where it hurt. Maybe there had been a time when she wanted to be like everyone else, but not now. Not since he’d shown her how important it was simply to be who she was.
“Auditory retention isn’t my thing. Everything I do, you know the freaky stuff, is visual.”
“That means you might forget something you’ve heard,” he said.
There was some surprise in that statement. Probably because he was one of the few people who understood the limitlessness of her memory. “I guess. I probably remember more than your average person, but I’ve got no real extraordinary talent in that area. Why? You want to tell me something that you hope I forget? Try me.”
He smiled. “No, I just forgot that even you have limitations.”
“Filled with them.”
Another drag on his beer, another pause. Then, “They told me that your father came to see you.”
“Yeah?” Instinctively, she crossed her arms over her chest, the bottle of beer hanging from her fingers. Then looking down and seeing what she had done, she uncrossed her arms and instead took a sip of her drink.
“You didn’t see him.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Sabrina, the CIA is not going to move you into a field operative position with this kind of emotional baggage. You said yourself you didn’t want to be stuck in a room deciphering code for the rest of your life. That you wanted to be on the front line.”
“I do. I just didn’t want to see my father. It’s no big deal. I went down to the Pentagon and asked him if he wanted to have lunch or something. He didn’t have time. So when he came by to see me, I didn’t have time. This is what we do. This is who we are. There’s no baggage.” There was an unhealthy level of competition between her and her father, but that was more his doing than it was hers.
“Okay,” he replied, apparently willing to let it drop.
“It’s been excessively dull here since you left. No one yells at me because the music is too loud. No one gets my jokes.”
“Your jokes aren’t that funny.”
Sabrina’s lips twitched. “And no one rips my self-confidence to shreds like you do.”
“You need it,” he told her.
She shrugged her shoulder in agreement. “Tell me where you were. Afghanistan?”
His response was merely to shoot her a knowing glance that suggested she was foolish for even asking.
“Come on? How secret could it be? I’m one of you now.”
He smiled at that and tilted the bottle up, finishing the beer in a few swallows. He stood up, placed the empty on top of the fridge then reached inside for another. When he sat down again, she eyed the beer. “If you plan on drinking all of them-” which she suspected was his intent despite the fact that it was very un-Quinlan-like “-then you have to replace them.”
“Sure.”
He was lying. But she took a measure of satisfaction in knowing that she was on to him. He didn’t want her getting caught with the beer in her fridge, but rather than fight her on it, he’d simply eliminate the problem. In class they called it “OE”: obstacle elimination.
“Rumor is that you were moving in on Kahsan,” she prompted.
“What do you know about Kahsan?” he asked, his voice skeptical.
“I know he’s public enemy number one,” she elaborated. “The bastard son of a prince from the United Arab
