Calculated Risk

by Stephanie Doyle

  Sabrina sat at the computer and had to connect to the Internet via a traditional phone line. The library had what they called a research center, which translated to a medium-size room filled with three long tables that held three aging PCs on each table. She and Quinlan chose the table farthest from the door and the last computer to the right. They were the only ones in the room and pretty much the only two people in the building at this hour, other than the librarian, of course.

  The sound of the modem ringing faintly had Sabrina rolling her eyes. “Some research center. I’m dialing out on a 56K modem. I might as well be back in the stone age. They need a DSL.”

  “Be grateful for what we have.”

  Finally, a standard MSN browser blinked into focus. Sabrina didn’t waste time with the search engine, but immediately went to the Web-address line at the top and started to type.

  “You’re kidding me,” Quinlan said as he leaned over her shoulder.

  “Never let it be said the man doesn’t have a twisted sense of humor.”

  The Disney World logo came into focus, then slowly inch-by-inch the Web page revealed itself on the screen.

  “You’re going to contact the world’s most vicious terrorist through the Disney home page?”

  “Not exactly the home page. The message board.”

  “Hmm, excuse me. Are you finding everything you need?”

  Together they lifted their heads at the voice. They had company. The librarian. A stereotypical elderly woman with her gray hair pulled tightly into a bun, she had an annoying habit of poking her head into the computer room every few minutes and asking them if they needed any help.

  Sabrina couldn’t tell if the woman was bored or perhaps suspicious. She imagined she looked like hell and Quinlan was no fashion plate in blacks slacks and a ski jacket.

  “We’re fine,” Sabrina told the woman, but she continued to linger.

  Then Quinlan’s phone rang.

  “Oh, sir, I’m terribly sorry, but we don’t allow the use of cell phones in the library.” She pointed to a sign next to the door that showed a cell phone in the center of a circle with a red line painted through it. “Too distracting for people trying to read and work, you understand.”

  She waited for a minute so she could see that he had actually turned the phone off, before she shuffled away.

  Sabrina actually giggled. “Our national security system thwarted by a librarian. You’ve got to love it.”

  “I’ll take this outside.” He made a motion as if to leave, then stopped, his eyes watching her as the screen continued to load.

  “Alarm go off again?” she wondered aloud, feeling his indecision.

  She wished she could have said that the look in his eyes was concern over leaving her on her own. But Quinlan knew better than anyone that she could take care of herself. She thought about the next few hours and how they were going to manage Kahsan’s capture or kill when it was clear he still didn’t completely trust her.

  He was trying; she supposed she should give him that.

  Perhaps bringing him with her wasn’t the best move. His suspicion could end up getting them both killed. In the end, though, it came down to the odds. Two against one was always better than one on one. So she sucked in her breath, gritted her teeth and tried to pacify him.

  “All I’m going to do is give him the location you gave me. And I’m going to be doing that in code, so it’s not like you would have been able to follow it even if I was passing on a secret warning.”

  Grimly, he turned and left the room with the two-way phone clutched in his hand.

  As she stared at the slowly processing monitor she thought back to earlier in the hotel room. He’d been the first to kiss her. He’d been the first to break.

  Deliberately, she ran her tongue over her lips, still tasting him there. The urgency in his kiss had been on the point of desperation. As though he’d waited as long as was humanly possible for the contact he needed.

  A man didn’t kiss a woman that way when he believed she ultimately would betray him. At least not a man like Quinlan. She was going to have to count on that. She was going to have to have faith that when push came to shove, he was going to believe her. Believe in her.

  It might be the only thing that saved their lives.

  Finally the message board appeared on the screen and Sabrina logged on with the name she’d given Kahsan earlier. Minnietothetenth was welcomed back and a white box appeared ready for her to type. A primitive but effective coding system allowed her to embed a message into the text. Anyone on the board would read about a recent vacationer who was looking to make contact with a couple she ran into at Pleasure Island, wanting to stay in touch and delivering the promised recipe for her famous chicken casserole.

  Kahsan would read something else.

  Just as she hit the send button, Quinlan returned. She leaned back in the hard chair.

  “Is it done?”

  “I sent it. How often he’s patrolling the message board, I don’t know. Where he is and how long it will take him to get to the location? I don’t know that, either.”

  “You didn’t set up a method for him to reply?”

  She shook her head. “No point. The plan was for me to pass the address then go along with the agent to the location and simply stall until he got there. But he knows I would only be able to stall for so long before someone got suspicious.”

  “And you passed along the number of agents with you,” he assumed.

  “I told him one,” she answered.

  Quinlan swore softly. “He’ll never believe that. He’ll never buy that we only sent one agent to pick you up and deliver you to Arnold’s computer.”

  “I told him you. He knows you. He’ll believe that.”

  “Maybe,” he allowed.

  Sabrina had more confidence. “All of this hinges on the bluff. If he believes that I’m doing this for the money, then he has to believe I’ve kept our contact secret. Since the government isn’t expecting him, there would be no reason to send me with a troop of spooks to Arnold’s cabin. One actually sounds more plausible.”

  Quinlan nodded. “Plus, if he’s smart, he’ll check the area upon his arrival and find nothing. No traps, no ambush. That will work to our advantage, as well.”

  “And leave us completely exposed.”

  He met her eyes. “Worried I’ll miss?”

  “No. You know what they say…fourth time is a charm. What did Krueger say?”

  “Before or after the shouting?”

  “Either.”

  “He’s sending reinforcements, but it will take them time before they get here. Let’s move.”

  “Sir, you have a message.” The driver had lowered the partition between the front and back seats. He held a cell phone up and Kahsan leaned forward to take it.

  “You don’t mind if I take this, do you?” he asked his fellow passenger. Since the question was rhetorical he took the phone and read the text message that was appearing on the small monitor. He was forced to scroll it a few times before he understood the coded message. Then he cleared it and put in a set of coordinates. He passed the phone back through the partition.

  “Plug those coordinates into the GPS and get us to that location immediately.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The partition slid back into place and Kahsan leaned back in the deep leather cushions. He smiled serenely at his guest. “Well, you’ll be happy to know everything is going according to plan. My dear friend Ms. Masters is cooperating as expected and for an added bonus we’ll be running into an old rival of mine. It will be good to see Mr. Quinlan again. A shame I’ll have to kill him immediately after that, but it can’t be helped.”

  The passenger said nothing.

  Kahsan sighed, enjoying the softness of the cashmere sweater his man had purchased for him. Winter, it seemed, could be survived in tolerable comfort with the right sort of clothing. He closed his eyes, confident that his passenger would not see it as a slight, and thought
about how close he was to securing the data that would deliver to him a ready-made army. One that merely needed to be pointed in the right direction.

  For the right price, of course.

  There were times that Kahsan wished he’d been blessed with the sort of feverish belief system his half brother had. Considering Kahsan’s superior intellect, who knew what he might have accomplished if he’d been endowed with conviction? Then again, not having a belief system of any kind made things much easier. He didn’t care when the cause he was working for won. He didn’t care when it lost.

  Money was his only passion.

  What had begun as a family obligation had led to the lucrative career he had today. His half brother, a legitimate prince, had joined a fundamentalist group that stood against the evil Western world. The group had chosen a French embassy in Africa to destroy. A ludicrous choice in Kahsan’s estimation, but a safe one, he imagined.

  Their problem had been they had absolutely no knowledge of how to go about accomplishing such a task. That’s when he’d been asked, or rather ordered, by his brother to work with the group. Given his special talent for strategizing, devising a plan had been relatively simple. In return for delivering the plan, all he’d asked was to be paid. His brother, to whom money was only so much paper, agreed to the tune of half a million dollars.

  Easy money.

  From there, the next step was to seek out other groups who had the funding, but not the education, to blow things up. It didn’t matter who he killed. All that mattered was that he was paid and that at the end of the day he lived…so he could be paid again. But with security tightening as it had in the past few months, it was getting harder and harder to pull off finesse jobs. The job in Milan had been a little on the crude side. Suicide bombers, after all, were so cliché, but they were effective.

  And it was so easy to find radicals who didn’t mind offering up their bodies for the cause. That’s why he was here now. The lure of all those motivated, self-sacrificing men he could command already situated inside the United States was too great an opportunity to pass up. With such an army at his disposal, the cost of his services would be astronomical.

  He could almost count the money. And then, because it was so much money that he lost count, he chuckled to himself.

  It turned out that Sabrina and Quinlan were close enough to the rendezvous point that they could walk. Quinlan took the lead and they made their way through the quaint town, hand in hand like a couple of tourists.

  Quinlan led her down a road lined with a smattering of homes. The ones closer to the main street in town were pretty and well kept. The farther away they got, the houses got smaller and meaner looking. After the last house-a one-story bungalow that didn’t look as if it could sustain life-they came upon a dirt path that took them through the woods down an embankment. Finally, the path opened up to what turned out to be a small dock that jutted into the Susquehanna River.

  Ninety-seven yards beyond the dock sat an island, which was no bigger than a high school football field. It was covered with foliage and enough evergreens to conceal what Sabrina imagined would be a small log cabin.

  “Arnold lived there,” she said, feeling an overwhelming sense of isolation. Even knowing he’d chosen that life, it still astounded her. “How did he stand it?”

  “He liked it,” Quinlan assured her. “It was like having a private world all to himself.”

  He was right. And that would have appealed to Arnold. For the most part he hated people. He hated having to explain himself. The only reason he had agreed to work with her at Langley was because she understood him on one level, but it had taken months before he truly accepted her. She thought about him living what turned out to be the rest of his life in that cabin and suddenly she wished she had e-mailed him more often.

  “I take it the boats are the only way on to the island, that it doesn’t connect to land on the other side.”

  “The boats are the only way out there,” Quinlan confirmed. “Unless you want to swim, which I don’t recommend given the temperature of the water.”

  There were two boats. A small motorboat that was anchored to one side of the dock and a rowboat that bobbed in the water on the other side. Other than the narrow path they had just descended there was only one way in, a dirt road that must be an offshoot of the main street.

  “Only one way in. Pretty convenient,” Sabrina mused.

  “Unless, Kahsan comes by water. But that’s assuming he knows he’s looking for an island.”

  “I didn’t mention the island. I just gave him the coordinates you gave me.”

  “Then we have to assume he’ll come down that road.”

  She watched as Quinlan scouted the area, his trained eyes searching for the perfect spot to lie in wait. Trees surrounded them on the hill, but in the dead of winter with no leaves for coverage, there weren’t many that would hide a man his size.

  “I have an idea,” she announced.

  He turned back to her and waited for her to reveal it.

  “It’s going to require you trusting me,” she told him.

  He said nothing, but simply shrugged his shoulders.

  “That’s not a yes, is it?”

  “It’s more like I don’t really have a choice.”

  Sabrina figured that was the best he was going to do. Still it made her sad. “I wish I knew when it happened,” she said thoughtfully.

  “When what happened?”

  She picked up a stick in front of her to give her something to do other than look at him. She tossed it into the river.

  “When you became so cynical,” she answered.

  He shook his head, then his eyes met hers and he pinned her with his gaze. As if he was daring her to look away. “Your problem is that you have this romantic idea that I was once different. You’re wrong, Bri. The only person I have ever truly trusted was…me.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  She continued to meet his gaze, searching for the truth. But she didn’t need to find it in his eyes. “No, I know differently. I remember it. I remember it, like it was yesterday.”

  Chapter 17

  Eleven years ago

  “Sabrina, wake up.”

  She was in the middle of a delightful dream. She was saving the world and Quinlan was there watching her, telling her how proud he was, telling her that he couldn’t have done it without her. And she wasn’t even gloating. She was just smiling and letting him know that if he wanted to throw her down on the closest flat surface…

  “Sabrina.” This time the voice was more forceful and there was a hand on her shoulder to accompany it. At her best she wasn’t a morning person. Habitually, she had to set her alarm for an hour prior to when she needed to be awake in order to cross over that great divide between dead sleep and alertness via a prolonged series of nine-minute catnaps interrupted by shrieking buzzing.

  Cracking open a single eye, she stared at the clock that, in her dazed state, she believed had somehow learned how to speak to her.

  “It’s three-eighteen in the morning,” she managed to mumble, wondering how it was that the clock had reached out to touch her.

  “Get up. Now.”

  The arm that had been shaking her was pulling her out of the bed and into a quasi-standing position. She focused and found Quinlan standing in front of her, dressed in black jeans and a gray sweater, looking his typical badass self.

  “If this is some kind of drill…”

  “We need you. Let’s go.”

  It felt like a drill. After Quinlan had inducted her into what he called phase two of her training, it had taken several weeks for her hand and her ankle to heal. But the breaks, purposefully, had been clean and it hadn’t taken much time to get her back into perfect physical shape. After that, phase two had kicked into high gear. The intensity of some of the exercises was almost unreal. She’d suffered a battery of psychological tests, physical tests and endurance tests.

&
nbsp; One time she’d been made to stand or squat, not sit, on a two-foot-square raft in the middle of a near frozen lake for over seven hours in nothing more than a leotard. Somewhere during hour eight they figured she’d learned whatever she was supposed to have learned. Or they learned whatever it was they needed to learn about her.

  Not that she ever made that easy. Nobody got her quite like Q. He’d left for a few weeks after what she called the “incident,” but when he came back they had been just as close as they were before. If not closer. He might have been stunned by her acceptance of what he’d done to her, but he didn’t show it. And she never explained why it had been so easy to accept.

  “Seriously, I am not in the mood for a drill. You kicked my ass today. That ten-mile run took it out of me and-”

  “Now, Sabrina.” He reached into one of two dressers that made up half the furniture in her dorm room. Since he’d commented on the decor the last time, she’d added a James Bond poster over her bed. It wasn’t much, but she figured it was a start at personalizing the space. He hadn’t commented.

  It wasn’t until she saw one of her bras clutched in his hand that she realized she’d been standing in front of him in nothing more than a half T-shirt and panties. “Jesus, Q! What the hell are you doing?” Reaching around him, she snatched the pink lace out of his hand.

  In the second drawer he apparently found what he was looking for and pulled out a pair of sweats, pushing them into her hands. “Get dressed. We need you in the Comm.”

  The Comm was the nickname for the communications center. It’s where the science and technology guys received, monitored and analyzed data being communicated from covert operators around the world. She was barely even allowed to know that the Comm existed let alone be needed there.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  He grunted, signaling his frustration with the delay.

  “All right, all right. Turn around,” she told him, shielding her bare legs with the sweats and desperately trying to keep him directly in front of her so he didn’t catch a glimpse of her thong. At one point or another he’d had his hands all over her during combat training, but something about him seeing her bare ass cheeks made her feel ridiculous.