A skinny, peaked brunette replied timidly, “Two, I think.”
“Right. Two measly hens. We’ve been using the bulk powdered eggs, the ones that taste like crap. We’ve been trying to make them taste better, but it’s hard.”
“Just try adding a little salt, doll.” Sasha knelt before a line of white, labeled food-grade buckets. “I’ve never seen so much damn salt stacked in one place before. Do you guys ever use this stuff?”
“Not really, no one ever asks for it,” said the redhead.
Sasha thought a moment. “Ladies, I think the time has come to make good use of what we have in abundance.”
Carly looked confused. “You want us to feed them salt?”
A devious grin spread across Sasha’s face. “No, sweets, not just salt. That wouldn’t be palatable. One of the complaints I heard voiced on the way in regarded the cuisine here as being unseasoned and bland. I’d say that calls for some spicing up.”
“Spicing up,” Carly muttered. “So, salt, then. Added to everything?”
“Since there’s so damn much of it, why not?” Sasha agreed. “What else do we have in the spice rack? Bay leaves? Any cinnamon or nutmeg?”
The girls in the group traded stares.
“We probably have containers of all that,” Carly said.
Sasha rose with a grin. “Superb. We’ll use what we have to season their meals up something nice…they’ll never know what hit them.”
“Okaaay…but what if we accidentally go too far?” the redhead asked. “Like if we overseason their food. They probably wouldn’t like that.”
“Right,” Carly agreed. “And what if they’re allergic or something? Couldn’t they get sick?”
“I’m not sure, but it sounds entirely possible,” Sasha crooned. “Remember, girls, we’re just sandwich makers and dishwashers, we’re not dieticians. How would we know?”
Chapter 7
Beatrice wasn’t enthused. Her dialogue yesterday with beau Doug Bronson hadn’t worked out as planned. Instead of rolling over, as he had so many times already, and kowtowing to her suggestions, he’d demonstrated resistance and had talked down to her. He’d even taken her constructive criticism personally, as if her overall brilliance on the matters at hand had insulted him rather than rendered him awestricken. What a pompous ass.
Beatrice had awoken this morning to one of the worst bad-hair days she’d encountered in her life. No matter what she tried, she couldn’t control it. It was as if a thousand newly formed gravitational, magnetic, and electrostatic forces had been instituted in other dimensions to specifically target her locks and drag them in every direction. They were all out of whack until she gave up and wrangled them into a bun.
She’d gone to bed alone the previous evening. A deviation to her normal plans, she had remained home and in her own bed for a change. Her husband hadn’t been around. His latest assignment, one she had penned herself, had placed him and his team at mobile encampments outside the wire for the foreseeable future. Everything had been working out in glorious fashion for Beatrice until recently. Until an old acquaintance manifested out of thin air, out of literally goddamn nowhere, and put down her hammer-toed, unsophisticated combat-boot-wearing feet smack-dab in the wrong area of operations.
Beatrice despised her. She’d hated Constance Hensley for years, and for good reason. The two had butted heads on many occasions in the past, and by some means, Beatrice’s opponent had always gotten the upper hand even though Beatrice knew she was better at everything. Smarter, too. And miles lovelier. But none of those things ever mattered. The bitch had become her nemesis. She’d always pulled out the win, and there was no way in hell Beatrice was going to allow that nonsense to continue. She had taken too many strides forward since being here. She’d climbed too many rungs on this ladder. There would be no starting over at ground level. Any actions made going forward were to be direct and sadistic. Callous and inhuman. No more pussyfooting. It didn’t matter who it was—if anyone stood in her way or offered any hindrance, Beatrice was going to kill them.
She sat with near flawless posture at the two-person table in her kitchenette, alternating stares through the window, northeast to the structures within the camp’s confines, and to the analog clock above. A can of V8 juice nearing empty spun about in the fingers in her left hand, and her service weapon, a Beretta 92, lay prone on the table below her right. She had spent the day stewing and plotting, but mostly stewing over what she had witnessed after leaving Doug Bronson’s office yesterday. She had walked out and Tori had walked in, and that was helping Beatrice align herself with her next move.
The clock’s second hand clicked, giving off the air of a metronome. Beatrice reminisced backward several years to her last encounter with Special Agent Constance Hensley. Beatrice had been stationed in Tel Aviv on special assignment to secure assets and gather intelligence on a Palestinian political insurgency that was metastasizing.
Her counterpart’s role had been diplomatic security. Hensley had been assigned to the US Embassy Tel Aviv Branch Office as security attaché and was second in command of the ambassador’s protection detail. The CIA’s presence in Tel Aviv was top secret, but insurgency and terrorism were common threats, and the entities convened daily to discuss plans, share intel, and maintain transparency. The CIA station chief or team leaders briefed DoS on any moves they were plotting, impending dangers, or kinetic operations. If the ambassador had plans to move about in public, DoS gave the CIA outpost prior notice and forwarded his agenda. The departments’ missions hadn’t been one and the same, but congruence between them had been paramount.
That congruence aside, Beatrice only ever assigned priority to one thing: her mission. Everything else beyond that was secondary. She knew Hensley would get in her way eventually. Their first phone conversation and the
