Calculated Risk

by Stephanie Doyle

  “I believe you’re going to be excited to meet my new friend, Ms. Masters. He is, in fact, your greatest competition. Sabrina Masters meet Sal Ploxm.”

  A sinking feeling started in her stomach until it hit her toes. “I think my pride is a little wounded,” she announced, even as she tried to formulate her next move. If he thought he had the location, plus someone who could hack the computer and break Arnold’s code, then she was clearly expendable.

  The question now was why was she still standing?

  “You have to understand it’s not that I don’t trust you… Well, actually it is.” He chuckled at his own joke. “Please toss away your gun.”

  Her hand instinctively tightened around the weapon. She could lie about having one, but he wouldn’t buy it and the lie would hurt her credibility with him. She looked to each side of him to see if there was some kind of angle that she could use, but there was none. Any shot she fired at him, she risked taking out the kid instead. The kid who now had snot running down his nose that he couldn’t even wipe away with his sleeves.

  This was the legendary Sal Ploxm? She had to say she was a little disappointed.

  “Your gun, Sabrina.”

  “You understand what I’m doing here is a show of faith. I have no quarrel with you, Kahsan. I only want my money.” Sabrina pulled the gun slowly from her pocket and tossed it on the ground a few feet in front of her.

  “That’s excellent. Now, where is our friend Mr. Quinlan? You have to know how excited I am to be reunited with him.”

  They had worked out a lie as a secondary plan to taking him out instantly, but already she knew it wasn’t going to play out. Every decision before his arrival had been based on the premise that he needed her. Only now he had options.

  “I killed him,” she said, for the moment sticking with the script. “Once I had the location of Arnold’s computer I didn’t need him anymore. I figured it would be less hassle for you if I took him out.”

  The kid was pushed a few steps forward and Kahsan’s face came into view over his shoulder. Dark eyes, latte-colored skin, cultured expression. Handsome actually. She wasn’t surprised. She’d always figured the devil had to look good, otherwise he wouldn’t be so tempting.

  He made a tsking sound and pouted his lips. “Really, Sabrina. You don’t expect me to believe that, do you? You, killing your former mentor? Oh yes, I know all about it. How he plucked you from Harvard obscurity, much like I plucked this young fellow from Brookfield, Connecticut. Doesn’t that sound like such a charming place to be from?”

  He wasn’t going to buy it and he wasn’t going to give Quinlan a shot. It was time to change the play, Sabrina realized.

  “You’re right. Of course. I think it’s time to end this game. He’s in the boat.”

  Kahsan spoke a few words in Arabic to the driver that Sabrina didn’t have to interpret. In seconds the driver was standing on the dock. “The smaller boat,” she told the driver. “Under the tarp.”

  The driver lifted the tarp and Quinlan came to his knees.

  “The gun,” the driver commanded, and Quinlan was forced to drop it in the river. The driver backed off and let Quinlan get on the dock then to the dirt road. Sabrina turned around and smiled at him. His expression was closed, but she knew what he was thinking. She only hoped that he had enough sense to get beyond his first instinct.

  “Check the rest of the woods. Make sure there is no one else,” Kahsan ordered his driver. “Then find a spot and stand guard.”

  The driver moved off and Sabrina took a few steps back toward Kahsan. He moved the boy slightly to the side and she could see the gun that must have been pointed at the boy’s back was now aimed at Quinlan.

  “You gave him up awfully quickly,” Kahsan noted with a hint of amusement.

  Sabrina turned to him and kept her hands wide so that he could see she wasn’t going to attempt any sudden movements. “What you don’t realize, Kahsan, is this little game I’ve been playing is twofold. Yes, I want the money. Still do. And if you think this kid has a chance in hell of hacking into Arnold’s computer-forget actually breaking Salinski’s encryption code-you’re wrong. But if you want to give him a shot that’s fine by me. Because the other thing I get is…revenge. Ten long years I’ve waited for a chance to meet Quinlan again. Ten years of hate. Ten years of anguish. You said you heard he was my mentor. Did you also know that he was my lover?”

  She watched the expression on Kahsan’s face change slightly. Believe the lie. Sell the story. And focus on the target.

  “He was,” Sabrina continued, even as she made her way closer to Kahsan, but not so close for him to feel threatened. “He made me fall in love with him. He seduced me. He fucked me for, I swear, twenty-four hours straight. Then the next day, do you know what he did? He introduced me to his fiancée. Some senator’s daughter with blond hair and fake white teeth. I was a kid, not much older than this guy. I lost my heart, then my focus, then my job.”

  “So sad,” Kahsan said without sincerity. “But I’m tired of the soap opera.” He raised his gun hand toward Quinlan’s heart.

  “Wait!” Sabrina stopped him abruptly. Immediately, he turned the gun toward her in preparation for some kind of attack, but she merely smiled. Sinisterly, she hoped. Calming her nerves, she focused on what she had to do. She had one chance to get this right and one chance only.

  “I want to do it. I didn’t have the chance before you came. Now, I do.” She had covered enough distance to be standing over where she had tossed her gun and in a smooth, fluid movement used her sneaker-clad foot to pop one end of it up and then the other foot to kick it back into her hand.

  Kahsan retrained his gun on her, but Sabrina turned her back to him and aimed straight at Quinlan’s head.

  “You really thought I wanted to be some kind of hero?” she asked him, her voice as hard as she could make it. His expression continued to give nothing away. “You used me, then threw me out like so much garbage. Then the U.S. government did the same thing. Any loyalty I might have felt toward you and America died that day. So I set it all up. I was the one who made contact with Arnold to let him know that I wanted to help him with his work. I was the one who came up with the plan to contact Kahsan, and I contacted the CIA knowing they would send you. Only you. I did all of it so I could have this moment. How does it feel, Q? To know you’ve been betrayed.”

  Sabrina lifted her hand, walked a few paces to the left, found the angle she’d been waiting for and fired.

  There was a noise, then he collapsed to the ground and she watched as a pool of blood spilled from the wound at his head.

  Coolly, even though her heart was pounding fiercely in her chest, Sabrina turned back to Kahsan. The boy’s eyes were wide and no doubt he was going into shock if he wasn’t already there. Kahsan still had his gun trained on her. She tossed the Colt behind her as another show of faith.

  “Now, are you ready to go get the information you want?”

  Kahsan looked past her to Quinlan’s body. His expression was suspicious, his eyes narrowed to slits, but he continued to stare at the body until something, no doubt Quinlan’s stillness, seemed to satisfy him.

  Then again it could have been all the blood he was losing from his head.

  “If you think this means I trust you…” he began.

  She forced herself not to look at the body. “I don’t give a damn if you trust me. I want the money. The sooner the kid tries and fails, the sooner you know you have to pay me to get what you want.”

  “The boat.” He pointed to the motorboat as opposed to the rowboat. Sabrina walked in front of him, right past Quinlan’s motionless body, and onto the dock. She jumped into the boat, found the key in a box on the floor, and once Kahsan and the kid were safely on board, started the engine. Kahsan untied them from the dock and she pushed the throttle forward driving them deep into the Susquehanna toward Arnold’s tiny kingdom.

  She didn’t once look behind her. But mentally she sent a silent message.


  Please understand, Q. Please understand what I did and why I had to do it.

  Chapter 19

  Ten years ago

  His head hurt. Quinlan looked down at the glassful of whiskey and thought about how this was going to make his head stop hurting.

  “Of course, it’s also probably going to make it hurt worse tomorrow,” he told the empty apartment.

  That didn’t stop him from taking another sip. He’d just gotten back from what had been a bitch of a mission, a failed mission, and he needed to forget. He’d been close. Maybe as close as anyone had gotten to that bastard Kahsan. He was in the right country, the right province and the right city. He had an address. He had been a step away from taking him down…then the explosion.

  Six of his men were dead. The only thing that had saved him was that he’d been in the car radioing the location to his backup team. The explosion had been destructive enough to take out the entire apartment building, deadly enough to send five civilians who had been walking by to their graves and strong enough to send his car tumbling end over end until it landed upside down.

  His body was nothing more than a mass of black, purple and yellow bruises.

  And his head hurt.

  A knock on the door surprised him. Only his immediate superior knew he was in the country. No. Someone else would know, too, by the movement in the apartment directly above her.

  “Go away,” he mumbled. She didn’t hear him.

  He heard a few clicks and then the door was open. Sabrina walked into the room and closed the door behind her.

  “It was open.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  She held up a tiny tool that he recognized as standard lock-picking equipment. “I’m getting pretty good with this thing.”

  “Go away, Bri,” he muttered, but again she didn’t hear.

  “I heard you moving around,” she said, pointing to the ceiling. “Usually, you stop by to say hello. How come all the lights are out?”

  She reached for a switch on the wall next to the door and the living room was suddenly illuminated. He heard her gasp and figured she got a good look at his face.

  “What happened?”

  He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to see in his mind the bodies of his men, who were positioned at the front entrance of the building, flying through the air on the way to their death.

  On some level she must have understood that because she didn’t ask him the question again. Instead, she walked to his kitchen and found a glass in the cupboard and added some ice cubes. He could hear the tinkle of the cubes hitting the bottom of the glass and for some reason the sound was comforting. Then she walked over to the Jack Daniel’s bottle on the counter and poured herself a shot over the rocks.

  “You’re too damn young to be drinking.”

  “I’m going to be twenty next month,” she said in answer. She came back into the living room and pulled the ottoman up close to him. “Relax, it’s not like I drink all the time.”

  “Bad habits can be a hindrance. They should be avoided.”

  “You’re drinking.”

  “Yeah.” He was too tired to fight.

  “Besides, in this case I’m only doing it because you look like you can use some company.”

  “I don’t look that way at all,” he countered. He couldn’t possibly look that way when all he wanted was to be left alone.

  “No, you do. I look a little harder than most.”

  He met her eyes then, such a vivid green, wiser than her years. Not smart. Wise. That had happened in the past four years she’d been part of the program. Somehow she’d gone from being a brilliant kid to a wise and brilliant woman.

  When the hell had that happened, he wondered. It didn’t matter. It was done.

  Between her fresh face and that wickedly smart brain, she was going to make a hell of an operative. Suddenly his insides clenched as the thought of seeing her body flying through the air occurred to him.

  “You know they’re talking about graduating you.”

  “I know,” she said and took a sip of her drink. Then made a face. “How do you swallow this stuff? Yuck. I’ll stick to light beer, thank you.” She put the glass aside on the floor.

  He would have smiled, if he’d had the energy or the inclination. At the very moment he was becoming sentimental about her growing up, he was reminded how young she still was. Still in so many ways a kid. And in so many ways…not.

  His eyes fell to the gray T-shirt she wore, and he could see that her small high breasts were unfettered. She’d matched the cotton shirt with a pair of jeans that emphasized her long legs, but he could see that she hadn’t bothered with shoes. Just a pair of white ankle socks that, for some reason, he found incredibly sexy.

  Yeah, he thought. She was sexy. Previously, anytime the idea had crept into his brain he’d squashed it like an intruding spider. But tonight he ached, everywhere, and his head was starting to become a little fuzzy from the alcohol.

  And his girl was sitting in front of him with her perky smile and white ankle socks.

  So he let it happen. He let himself react to her as he’d never allowed himself to do before. What would it hurt? It wasn’t as though he would make a move. It wasn’t as though she would even know what a move was at her age. A few harmless fantasies played out in his head and a few not so harmless ones, too, as she rambled on about the next phase of her career.

  “I really want to be out in the field, but I’m getting some pressure from Arnold to stay and work with him. It’s not like I don’t care about his projects, but I really think I can do more out there. You know?”

  Her lips on his chest. His fingers in her hair pushing her mouth lower and lower until she was taking his erection deep into her soft, wet…

  “Q? You still alive?”

  “Huh?”

  “You were staring at my mouth.”

  He shook his head a little in an attempt to remove the buzzing he couldn’t seem to shake. “No, I wasn’t.” He tossed back the rest of his drink and Sabrina had handed him her discarded glass. It was dangerous. He knew it was dangerous, but his whole life was dangerous. He took another sip, then another until it was all gone. He set the glass aside.

  “You should go.”

  She shook her head and a curl bounced across her cheek. Without thinking he reached out and let the tendril circle his finger like a cat’s tail might curl around its master’s leg. She should have pulled away, but instead he saw her lean forward, her hands now resting on his thighs.

  “I think you want me to stay,” she told him, even as her hands stroked higher up his thighs.

  He reached down and captured her wrists, pinning them in place. “You don’t want to do this. Not tonight.”

  “Why not tonight?”

  He leaned his head back on the chair so he wouldn’t have to look at her face. The face that had been part of his life for so long and had somehow imprinted itself on his brain so that he could picture it at the oddest times. Like when he thought he was going to die.

  “I can’t fight you. Not tonight.”

  “You’re always fighting, Q. Why don’t you stop fighting for a little while?”

  Her trapped hands moved beneath his grip, her fingers squeezing his legs with enough pressure to make him forget every ache in his body but one.

  His brain railed at him. His common sense told him to get the hell out of the chair, but his body…it betrayed him. Quinlan opened his mouth and shut it. Then he opened it again as the only thought left spilled out.

  “I can’t.”

  Her hand escaped his prison and found the center of him where he was hard. He glanced down at his lap, his erection obvious through his jeans. He hadn’t realized. Hadn’t known that she could see his reaction to her. It would have been embarrassing if the sight of her touching him hadn’t been such a turn-on.

  “I think you can,” she whispered to him softly. Then she was moving into his lap, gently shifting her weight onto his
leg, and placing soft kisses over the bruises on his cheek.

  She felt so good. So damn right in his arms. But he couldn’t let this happen. For so long he hadn’t let it. Again, he stopped her, this time by cupping her face in his hands.

  “You don’t understand,” he whispered, even as his hips flexed a little to bring his erection into contact with her thigh.

  But rather than shy away from the embrace she seemed to snuggle deeper into his body. “I understand more than you think,” she told him. “I understand more than you do. Let go, Q. All you have to do is let go.”

  Her mouth found his and, before he could react, her tongue was inside, stroking his with an urgency that masked any inexperience. Let go, she said. He wanted to do that. He wanted to let go and crawl deep inside her body where she’d have to hold him and give him the kind of peace that he craved.

  No, he railed internally. He’d never done this, never lost this kind of control. People who did couldn’t make it in his world. His world was about control and discipline and order and… God in heaven, her mouth.

  She pulled away from him, but not before she nipped his bottom lip. “You’re still fighting,” she murmured and moved to his neck where she found the soft and vulnerable lobe of his ear. Then she bit down. Hard. “Good,” she laughed softly in his ear before she ran her tongue along the shell of it. “You’ll be graded based on how long you can go without saying the words…I submit.”

  He wrapped his hand in her hair and tugged so that his eyes bored into hers. “This isn’t some game.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  That pissed him off. The fact that she sensed his weakness and was using it angered him on a level he couldn’t remember ever feeling before. He caught her up in his arms and stood, but there was nothing romantic about the way he hauled her across the room and tossed her down on his bed.

  “You want this?” he barked, even as he reached for the snap of her jeans and started pulling them off her legs.

  She didn’t shy away. She didn’t demur. She merely helped him by kicking them the rest of the way off.