Calculated Risk

by Stephanie Doyle

  That was until she learned that her old lady needed a new roof, a new porch, a new heater and new windows. And that didn’t even begin to cover the work that needed to be done to her insides.

  The bitch.

  “You live here?” Quinlan asked.

  Sabrina shot him a bored look since she knew he knew damn well that she did.

  He got out and circled the car, opening the door for her. He made a move to reach for her arm since her hands were still secured behind her back, but she avoided his touch. He backed off and she managed to get out of the car under her own power.

  “Why do you always have to be so stubborn?” he muttered under his breath.

  “Where’s the challenge in being easy?” she returned. She started to walk up the cracked slate walkway when Quinlan stopped her with a heavy hand on her shoulder.

  “Can I have your word you won’t try to unman me again?” he asked, his eyes falling to the wire pinning her wrists together.

  Sabrina considered that for a moment. “Uh…nope.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have to take my chances.” He unraveled the wire restraint, pocketed it, then followed her to a porch that had more than one section of a beam missing.

  “Watch yourself,” she warned him. “Step where I step. I’m not sure that it will support your weight.”

  She took a key out of her pocket and unlocked the door, stepping back to let him inside. In a way she was curious to see his reaction.

  He said nothing moving from the foyer into the living room, but she could tell he was struck by the place. It had been ten years since the last time she saw him, but she could still read him. Not an easy thing to do with a guy whose favorite expression was neutral. But she could tell. The way he stopped and studied each piece like it was a surprise that it should be there.

  For her, walking through the front door each day was like walking back a hundred years. All of the furniture was period, but in excellent condition. Hunted down in flea markets, auctions and estate sales across the East Coast. She’d chosen deep rich colors. Purples, plums and forest green. Naturally the wallpaper on the parlor walls was new, so were the velvet drapes, but they were meticulously matched to the style of the room.

  Seeing the room through a man’s eyes, she thought about how feminine the space was. Not girly. It was much more sophisticated than that. And once again she found herself pleased with the result. This is what it was supposed to look like. She’d done right by the old lady…so far.

  “Have a seat,” she said, pointing to a high-back chair near the fireplace. “Or better yet make yourself useful and build a fire. It’s always cold in here. Wood and stuff are in the closet behind you.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked as she headed down a hall that led to the back of the house.

  She held up her wrists that sported thin lines of blood thanks to him. “Just want to rinse off.”

  “This house. It’s interesting,” he called out.

  Sabrina stuck her hands under the faucet and winced when the water hit them. She let the icy water clean off the blood and then shook out her hands to make sure all the feeling had returned to them. Using a kitchen towel she dried off, then walked back to the living room to find Quinlan crouched by the fireplace. He was positioning the logs, making sure that they were evenly placed. Next he stuffed crumpled newspaper balls into strategic locations that would light the fire as quickly as possible.

  So methodical. So precise. So like him.

  “What do you mean? About the house?”

  He lifted his head, clearly surprised to see her so close. “I wouldn’t have guessed that your tastes ran to the romantic.”

  “Chalk it up to my ‘excess of emotion’ problem.” She reached for a pack of cigarettes she kept on the mantel above the fireplace. She offered him one and he scowled appropriately. He’d always had a thing against bad habits. Because she was feeling perverse, she lit one in spite of his disapproval, then handed him the pack of matches to light the newspaper.

  The fire sufficiently started, he stood and slowly took in every element of the room. “You’ve put a lot of effort into it.”

  “And money,” she admitted. “It’s a pit.” She fell back onto the couch, undoing her boots and letting them drop to the floor so she could tuck her feet up under her bottom.

  “I heard about Vegas.”

  He sat, as well, choosing the magenta love seat. Sabrina couldn’t help but appreciate how utterly masculine he looked despite the feminine color of the cushions. He’d removed his coat and the black turtleneck sweater and pants he wore clung to his frame, subtly emphasizing the muscles underneath without showcasing them. Not even the gun he wore, holstered under his arm, detracted from the look. In fact, it only made him appear more deadly. Like a panther had just gotten loose in her house. Maybe it had.

  “And Atlantic City,” she added, although she was sure he knew that, too. “Booted out of both.”

  “Didn’t take them long, did it?”

  “No. But I had some success with a dark wig for a while. Long enough for me to get a stake. Enough to buy the house. Then there was a pretty successful trip to Monte Carlo. That helped pay the bills until I hit upon my new business.”

  “I heard about the job. So what do you call yourself? A Hollywood gossip columnist?”

  Her lips tilted upward. Poor Quinlan, he couldn’t quite hide his disdain even though he tried. “In some ways it’s a little like my old job at the CIA. After all, I’m acquiring information. Just like you.”

  “Not quite.”

  “You’re right. I sell my information to the highest bidder.” She watched his jaw tighten perceptibly at the mercenary nature of her career, but still he waited patiently. Standard operating procedure, she thought. Let the perp talk it out and get as much information as you can willingly. “You would be amazed at what the tabloids will pay for a little dirt on America’s elite.”

  “Can I say I’m disappointed that this is what you chose to do with your talent?”

  His disappointment. There was a day when those words might have destroyed her. And maybe that had been part of the problem. Her life ten years ago had been too much about not disappointing him, and not enough about doing the right thing simply because it was the right thing.

  The greater good. That’s what her father told her, her life should be about. Right now it wasn’t. This was her opportunity to change that. But first she needed to get back in the game. She didn’t share this information with him, though, mostly because she doubted he would believe her. And partly because it irked her that he still felt that he had the right to comment on her life.

  “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 have no idea how they’ll react. But in the meantime you’re stuck with me. If Kahsan does bite-”

  “If? I would say it was more a question of when.”

  A snap of wood echoed from outside almost in response to Sabrina’s statement. It was a simple sound. The sound a cold, near frozen, branch makes when the wind hits a tree too hard.

  Or the sound a heavy foot makes when it steps on a board that can’t support its weight.

  Inside the house they froze, then stared hard at each other, no communication necessary for what they both understood.

  They had company.

  Chapter 5

  “Who?” Sabrina mouthed.

  Quinlan’s expression was severe. “Who do you think?”

  But that didn’t make sense. If it was Kahsan and he was moving on her, why do it now when there were two of them?

  “No. It doesn’t work,” Sabrina whispered, shaking her head. “Besides, whoever is out there is making too much noise to be anything but hired help.”

  Quinlan held a finger to his mouth, the universal sign to shut up. Quiet descended. Then another creak. This time the sound of pressure on wood rather than an actual snap. Sabrina was even more convinced. Whoever was outside was trying to be more c
areful, but they weren’t quite cutting it. One more step and the board cracked. The noise was unmistakable. As was the surprised shout that followed. Whoever he was, he knew that stealth was no longer an option.

  Instantly, Quinlan reached for his semiautomatic Glock in the holster under his arm. He moved to the corner of the living room dragging Sabrina with him. His body pressed her back against the wall between the front door and the bay window to their right as they waited.

  The first shot that fired through the window wasn’t a surprise. Then came another. Then all hell broke loose. Together they crouched to their knees tucked as tightly as they could in the corner of the room, their bodies hopefully sheltered by the sturdy beams of the old house, while someone took aim at them from outside with what could only be an AK-47.

  Glass shattered inside the room as bullets ricocheted off the brick fireplace. From the foyer she could hear the glass surrounding the front door falling in chunks to the hardwood floor.

  “Damn it,” she cursed.

  “You hit?”

  “No. I used stained glass around the front door. Do you know how much that costs?”

  “How many shooters?” he asked.

  Sabrina counted the bullets leaving marks in her living-room wall. Then she estimated what was landing in the foyer. Applying that to what she knew a semiautomatic rifle could hold, she answered, “Two shooters, far enough away that I’m probably not counting the guy from the porch.” She shook her head. “This doesn’t make sense.”

  “You asked for this,” he growled even as he covered her face with his arm to protect her from the flying glass.

  “No, he can’t want me dead. I’m the only one who can get him what he needs.”

  “Fine, then he’s trying to take me out. Regardless, we’ve got trouble.”