Calculated Risk

by Stephanie Doyle

  “I work for the United States government. I do what it asks,” he explained simply. “Right now it’s asking me to do this.”

  This. Her. “I’m a person, not an assignment,” she protested, now completely annoyed with herself for bringing the subject up. It wasn’t that she thought they had any kind of bond or anything. She knew she was only a job to him.

  And it wasn’t his fault if she’d let him become more than that to her. Which she had. Quinlan was much more to her than an evil trainer inflicting physical punishment. More than a teacher and a rule maker. In a very short time, he’d become her center.

  Because he got her.

  Nobody ever got her before. Not her mother before she took off, or her father, who could never deal with the fact that she was smarter than him. She hadn’t had a whole lot of friends because she’d been labeled weird, almost from the start. And she’d never met a teacher who hadn’t hated her on sight. Of course that could have had more to do with her condescending attitude than her gift.

  Quinlan was different. He didn’t treat her as if she was strange. He expected her to be as smart as she was. Insisted upon it. Nobody had ever done that before. Nobody had ever pushed her to see how far she could go. At least nobody who she ever respected. He made her believe there was a reason why she was the way she was. And that she had an obligation, a duty, to use her capabilities to their fullest extent.

  “Again,” he said, ignoring her protest about not being an assignment. He moved into position and fixed his eyes on hers.

  For a quick second her breath caught in her throat. It had been happening lately whenever he looked a little too deep, or stared at her a little too long. As if he was seeing something inside of her that she didn’t even know was there.

  She didn’t like it. She didn’t hate it, but she definitely didn’t like it. It made her…edgy.

  “Breathe,” he instructed.

  Since she’d been holding it in, the reminder proved to be beneficial. He’d taught her to use the opportunities during a fight to inhale deeply whenever she could. Oxygen meant life. Always.

  Sabrina straightened her back to what she knew was textbook-perfect posture. And like a textbook, she executed the move with exact precision. It was never her technique, but rather her speed and often her lack of commitment that made the strike so easy to deflect.

  “Still sloppy. And too slow.” Her palm glanced off his shoulder and she cursed. It was purely to be mean, she decided, that he felt obliged to add, “And you hit like a girl.”

  This, of course, made her mad, which could have been his intent. It was hard to know. Nevertheless, she began to charge with more energy, but as she did, she could feel her precision dissipate until it became even easier for him to redirect her fists. In a single move, he wrapped his ankle around the back of her knee and tugged, sending her to the cushioned mat with enough force to knock the breath out of her.

  When she tried to get up, he motioned for her to stay down with a simple hand gesture and instead, crouched down next to her head, resting on his haunches while she sucked in a few quick breaths. “Sometimes when people get pissed off, they fight better.”

  “Like Rocky,” she wheezed as she sat up.

  “Like Rocky,” Quinlan agreed with an actual smile. “But you don’t.”

  She gave him a disgusted look to let him know that she’d already figured that part out. Standing to his full height, he stretched out his hand to her and helped her to her feet.

  “You’re going to have to learn how to discipline your emotions. And you need to work harder on your own time. Repetition is the key.”

  “Can’t you just teach me how to shoot a gun?”

  “Your mind is your first weapon. Your body is your second. Guns, knives, those will come later. We’re done for today.”

  “If you say so,” she muttered heading over to the side of the gym where her water and towel waited. Together they sat on the bench in companionable silence and drank deeply from their water bottles.

  Sabrina could smell the lingering essence of sweat in the empty gym. Mostly from her, but some from him. On some level it disturbed her that he could smell her. Enough so that she found it necessary to scoot down the bench a little.

  “When’s your next class?” he asked.

  She checked the clock on the wall of the gym. “I’ve got time. I’m going to need a shower. I stink.”

  “You do,” he agreed, wrapping his own towel around his neck.

  “Yeah, well, you’re no rose, either.”

  He didn’t comment.

  “So do you hate it?” she blurted, still trying to get something from him, although she couldn’t say what that intangible thing was or why it was so important to her. But she figured he had to hate being stuck teaching a teenage girl how to fight. “I mean being here with me,” she clarified when he only raised his brows, “instead of out there in the field.”

  “No.”

  Sabrina waited, but that was apparently all he was going to offer.

  “Were you good?” She bet he was. She bet he was very good.

  “I still am,” he said.

  “Right,” she agreed quickly. “I mean it’s not like you’re retired or anything. You’re not that old.”

  She could see him wince at that comment and smiled because that had been her intent.

  “How old are you? Thirty-something, right?”

  “Close enough. Why all the questions?”

  “We’ve been doing this for months. You know everything there is to know about me. I can’t even get you to tell me if Quinlan is your first or last name. I want to know your story. Did you mess something up? Are you being punished?”

  “You think working with you is a punishment?”

  She’d been told as much. On more than one occasion. But this wasn’t a sympathy exploration. All she really wanted was to find out about him. His past. His future. His scar, how it got there, and if that was the reason he’d been stuck working with her for so long. And most importantly, how long it would be before he left.

  “Most people seem to think so,” she replied. “I’m not exactly easy. Ask my Arabic teacher.”

  “Where’s the fun in easy?”

  She smiled because it was an answer she understood. And he made her believe that he understood it, too.

  “Seriously,” she pressed. “Why me?”

  For a while he said nothing. Only the clock, sounding particularly loud in the quiet gym, made any noise. This was a time when an adult might have said something to ease the tension to let another adult off the hook. She had only just turned seventeen. Not adult enough.

  She only lasted a minute before she proposed, “Maybe it’s because I’m difficult. Maybe they think you’re the only one who can handle me.”

  He turned his head and she could see his brow furrow. Then he shook his head softly. “I’m here because I needed to heal,” he finally admitted, pointing to the red mark over his eye. “Don’t ever get the impression that you’re too special, Sabrina. Trust me when I tell you that you’re not.”

  “Yo,” she moaned, clutching at her breast with her hand in a show of mock pain. “Ouch.”

  His lips twitched and he leaned his head against the wall behind him. “You’re right. You’re not easy. I suppose there are some handlers who might think it’s not worth the effort.”

  “This is the part when you tell me you’re different from the other handlers,” she replied cheekily for the pure challenge of eliciting another smile.

  But just in case he said something else, she wrapped the towel that had been around her neck, around her shoulders so that it covered her barely clad body.

  “You’re late for class.” It was the only thing he said before he stood and walked away.

  Chapter 7

  Present

  Sabrina shifted herself more comfortably in the back seat of the Cadillac and tried not to think about who was coming for her and how close he really was. This was what she’d asked
for after all, what she wanted. But with the adrenaline pumping heavy in her body and her heart still racing from the gunfight, it was suddenly hard to remember why her return to the agency was so important.

  It was. She supposed that was enough.

  Her Defender was still in her hand and with no real place to put it, Sabrina left it on the ledge behind the seat. It occurred to her that she was cold and with good reason. No socks and no coat.

  Glancing over at Quinlan, she noticed that he’d managed to grab his dark overcoat during the melee. Typical. He’d have taken it as protection against a gunshot or flying glass. He’d have taken it in case they had to make a run for it on foot, knowing the temperature was below freezing. A hail of bullets pelting the house and he’d been calm enough and logical enough to put his coat on because it was the sensible thing to do.

  And here she thought she’d been whizbang for grabbing her sneakers.

  There was a panel on the back seat of the upscale vehicle for climate control and Sabrina leaned forward to jack up the heat to seventy-eight degrees. Hot air rushed out of the vents and the sudden change in temperature caused her to shiver.

  “You should have thought to grab a coat or sweater.”

  “Thanks,” she snapped even as she rubbed her hands over her arms. The sweater she had on was pretty heavy and as soon as the hot air filled the car she would be fine.

  “If you think I’m going to give you mine-”

  “I don’t think that,” she said, stopping him. There was nothing particularly gallant about Quinlan, certainly not when it came to business.

  “Talk to me. Explain to me again what that was back there.”

  She wished she knew for certain. “They weren’t trying to kill me.” Best to start with the obvious. The shots had been high and random. The shooters out back had been trying to prevent an escape rather than performing an execution.

  “You contacted Kahsan,” he accused her. “You all but dared him to come and get you.”

  “Yes, but getting me before I know the location of the computer gets him nothing. Taking you out, before he’s sure you’ve told me what I need to know gets him nothing. Think about it.”

  “I am. You can’t possibly know what his motives are. All I know is that you called up the most dangerous man in the world and invited him to play in your fucking backyard.”

  Sabrina considered telling him the truth. That it hadn’t been her idea at all, but rather his own people who had come up with this brainstorm. She stopped herself. Not so much because she cared about keeping Krueger’s secret, but because she doubted that Quinlan would believe her now.

  “I told you why I did it. I want back in. I want a chance to make a difference again.”

  “Spare me,” he said dismissively. “Your sudden patriotism, while touching, isn’t quite as convincing as I’m sure you would like. I want to know exactly what you told Kahsan.”

  “I told him about Arnold’s project. About his death. And how it was going to be a big fat race to see who got to his computer first. But no matter how fast anyone got there, nobody was getting anything without me. Naturally, I explained that the cost to use my brain as a key would be high. Very, very high.”

  He shook his head in evident disbelief. “How did you even know how to get in touch with him? It’s not like he’s listed in the phone book.”

  “I knew the right Web sites to gain access to, the right message boards to post on. I haven’t been completely out of the game for the past ten years. Keeping track of the bad guys sort of became a hobby over time. That and hacking federal agency servers. You guys would be surprised to know how staggeringly vulnerable you are-”

  “Focus,” he ordered. “I want details regarding the actual contact. Did you speak to him?”

  She shook her head. “Our only contact was through e-mail and message boards. But I told him that if he wanted to deal, he had to come himself. And that he better bring a boatful of money. He thinks I’m a mercenary, and every background check he does is going to confirm that.”

  “Right. A mercenary.”

  Sabrina closed her eyes and struggled for patience. His distrust hurt, that was undeniable, but it was also frustrating. Especially since she thought she was lying really well.

  “Look, all I ever did was suck at a job. Okay? I never gave away state secrets. I never compromised a mission’s security. I chose not to break a few codes because I was a kid and I was mad as hell. That’s no reason to believe I’ve gone Benedict Arnold.”

  He sighed and leaned his head back against the seat. With the soft light of the waning moon filtering through the tinted windows, she could see him clearly. The creases around his mouth seemed even more evident. Ten years, and it didn’t look as though one of them had been easy on him.

  “You don’t know,” he said softly. “No, you didn’t commit any crime against your country, but you’ll never know what you could have done to protect it. You’ll never know what it cost, how many lives lost, how many secrets lost, because you weren’t doing what you were born to do.”

  Born to do. No pressure there. But now wasn’t the time to rise to the bait and argue with him over the merits of free choice. “You’re right,” she acquiesced. “I won’t ever know. And neither will you. But I’m here now. And I want to help.”

  “Some help.” He snorted and held his arm out in front of him. She could see a beam of light through the bullet-size hole in his coat. She could also see the bubble of something wet that was about to drip from the material.

  “Jesus, you’re shot.”

  She reached for him and pushed the sleeve of his coat up his arm. It gave just enough to bunch the material over his elbow.

  “It’s nothing. A graze.”

  He was right. His sweater was torn and through the opening she could see a gash on his forearm that was bleeding steadily but not profusely.

  “You got a first aid kit?”

  He moved her back to her side of the seat and lowered the console between them. Lifting open the top, he extracted a small white kit. “Do you remember how to dress a wound?”

  She smirked at him and his lips twitched in return. “Sorry.”

  Sabrina opened the kit and found a tightly wrapped package of gauze and some pretreated wipes. She cleaned the wound, then wrapped it up tight with the cotton strips, tying off the ends exactly as she’d once been shown.

  He flexed his arm once and nodded with satisfaction. “Let’s assume those men were Kahsan’s. Do you think it’s a coincidence that they showed up on the same night I did?”

  Replacing the kit, she closed the console, but didn’t lift it back into place. It was silly but she felt more comfortable with the barrier between them. It made things clearer in her mind. He was on his side. She was on hers.

  She did however turn toward him, her expression no doubt disdainful. “Still testing me?”

  “It was a question.”

  “Of course it wasn’t a coincidence. Very few things in life are. They must have been watching me. Waiting for someone to make contact before they moved.”

  “Why?”

  She knew that he was merely asking for the possibilities. “I made sure that Kahsan knew that I needed information from someone at the CIA. All that smoke with no real fire just delayed us. What if that’s all they wanted to do? To keep us pinned in the house another day. And the only reason they would need to do that is if…”

  They looked at each other and she saw the same conclusion she had reached in his face.

  “He really is coming,” Quinlan finished. His jaw tightened and his eyes narrowed. “I can’t believe he’d risk it. His face is on a hundred watch lists. He even attempts to get through an airport and we’ve got him.”

  “He’ll come by boat, on some cargo ship,” she surmised. “Where our security is most vulnerable.”

  “Maybe,” Quinlan agreed. “There’s no other explanation. It’s all in the timing.”

  Sabrina nodded. “He knows I have to make
it look like I’m cooperating with you. If you take me to Arnold’s computer there is only so much time I can waste pretending to hack into it. So he has to delay us getting to the computer until he’s in a position to make his move. Depending on where he’s coming from, that could take weeks.”

  “They couldn’t have kept us in the house for weeks,” he muttered, obviously still piecing it together.

  “You think he’s already here, in the country?”

  “I don’t know how it’s possible. I truly don’t. But yeah, I think we have to consider it.”

  Sabrina nodded. “Then this is good. This is what we wanted.”

  “No,” he stated quickly, again turning his head toward her, letting her see his annoyance. “This is not what we wanted. What the CIA wanted was for you to bypass Arnold’s security, decipher his code and find the bad guys we’ve already let into the country. This was reckless.”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s a little like the pot calling the kettle black. Whose decision was it to let terrorists in the country in the first place? Not mine. Besides, if the government was really serious about finding these guys, they wouldn’t have waited days after Arnold’s death to contact me. No doubt they spent that time letting some government geek-head try to break Arnold’s code. You didn’t really think that was going to happen, did you?”

  “No. I didn’t,” he stated. “But that’s not what caused the delay. They were waiting for me. You think you’re the only one who can break Arnold’s encryption code. The CIA still thinks I’m the only one who can handle you.”

  “I don’t need to be handled,” Sabrina said softly.

  “It doesn’t matter what you think. Kahsan is close. And maybe, just maybe we actually have a chance to get him. We’ve got to get back to D.C. as soon as possible so I can begin planning.”

  “Does he know where he’s going?” she asked, jerking her chin toward the front seat. The partition between the two seats had been raised most of the way revealing only a portion of his head.

  “He does.”

  The heat had finally kicked in making the back seat almost uncomfortably warm. She pushed the thermostat down a few degrees and closed her eyes in an attempt to feign rest. She didn’t know what time it was-close to five in the morning, she guessed. That time when night just began to break and the sky hinted of a sunrise to come. It occurred to her how tired she should be, a few drinks, several rounds of poker, a hand-to-hand fight, a reunion she wasn’t expecting, all followed up with a gunfight.