Comeback

by Doranna Durgin

  "And you? Are you done with this?"

  "I was never part of it." Simple words, sincerely said.

  The director considered them a moment, then nodded. "Good. Now, I'm expected inside. I believe we're just about to reveal one of our evening's operatives. Always a dramatic moment. In the meantime, I believe you two—" and he indicated Cole and the unknown man "—have something to talk about." He nodded at them all and walked briskly down the hall. After a hesitation, Dobry followed.

  "Walk with me," the remaining man said, the only one of them not dressed for an evening of high entertainment. Not even in a suit, but khaki pants and a thick sweater and warm ankle-high hikers. He cut his gaze toward Selena, and Cole laughed as he ran his hand along the neatly hung coats on the hall rack, stopping at Selena's.

  "Nope," he said. "She comes with me. We'll walk together."

  And that's how Selena learned the CIA was pulling him back into the fold, back to black ops and back to the intense risks they'd both so recently left behind.

  Away from everything they'd been trying to build.

  Chapter 3

  Thousands of miles and several weeks away from that CIA training exercise, Selena hit the three-mile marker of Goat Camp Trail and stopped to tip her head back and slug a generous amount of water. With the late October dry heat and three thousand feet of altitude in the stark, majestic White Tank Mountains of the Arizona desert, she knew better than to short herself on water.

  One of her first lessons at Athena Academy, as it happened.

  If she turned south to Black Canyon, she could close her eyes and imagine the terrain beyond, all the way to the five-hundred-acre tract of private land where the academy tucked in against the base of the White Tanks. The stables snugged up closest to the stark, scrubby wilderness, a place of majestic saguaro cactus and startlingly beautiful flowers, with stunted, scattered paloverde and ironwood the closest things to trees that the area could offer. The saddle of land held more than its share of them, giving shade to students who habitually pushed themselves hard both physically and mentally. Science labs, survival hikes, group bonding exercises, rock climbing, endurance swimming…Athena knew how to turn out a well-rounded young woman. Young women such as Selena, who had started her prelaw work long before she actually hit college, or such as her fellow Pandora group member Kim Valenti, code-breaker extraordinaire before she found her niche with the National Security Agency.

  Yep, she could just about see it from here, even if only in her mind's eye. In fact, if she really wanted, she could easily cut through the rugged terrain and approach Athena from behind.

  But today she stayed to the public trail, honoring park rules and moving fast and light for her morning workout—a quick jog along Goat Camp where the terrain allowed, confident climbing where it didn't. On to Mesquite Canyon, where the steep ground offered up plenty of loose rock to send the unwary tumbling down…no thank you. She'd gotten her quota of cholla spines within her first year at Athena. Not to mention prickly pear, creosote bush and that close call with a bark scorpion. Everything living in this alienesque landscape seemed to sting or stab or prickle.

  And yet she loved it here.

  Not so surprising she'd heard the call of it even from across the country at the Farm.

  Especially not surprising with the conflict now constantly roiling through her head and through her heart. She'd hoped to calm her mind, to let her strong early foundation reemerge, eliminating the self-doubt that had grown since she'd accidentally pulled a man's arm out of joint.

  Accidentally.

  "Who does that?" she asked herself out loud, muttering through a nearly closed mouth to keep the sandy grit out of her teeth when a sudden gust of wind hit her hard enough to flap her shirt.

  It hadn't been too bad until Cole had been whisked off to do whatever it was the agency thought only he could do, even after they'd washed their hands of him in Berzhaan. Then she'd had more time to think—more time than she could fill with workouts in the gym and on the running path. More time to worry about what this separation would do to them, and why Cole had agreed to go in the first place. They hadn't had time to talk before they snatched him away; nothing but a quick goodbye kiss and separation right there at the Farm training exercise, the Russian princess left on her own. But she'd made it through the end of the training session and then she'd known just what to do. She'd come here.

  She picked up the pace, anticipating the slowdown on the Mesquite Canyon trail. No good came of taking such footing for granted, and she didn't. Once she hit the ramada at the end of the trail she picked up a jog, finishing off the ten miles when she reached the borrowed bike parked at the Goat Camp trail head.

  Four miles back to Athena…long enough for her trail-cleared mind to clutter up again. Full of self-doubt, full of concern. Pedaling was no distraction at all.

  When Cole was here, she'd turned to him for her strength. He believed that she'd be able to leave her Berzhaani demons behind, and for a while that made a difference. Several precious months of being in the same house, in the same country, and now he was gone again. They hadn't started their family; they hadn't resolved their future.

  They'd damned well convinced each other that they had their now. That their now was good.

  Selena heard her own harsh breathing and realized she was doing it again. Her legs burned as she sped along the closest thing to a main road in the area and she forced herself to straighten on the bike, one hand lightly keeping it on course as she swooped around a turn, coasting. Even in this dry air she'd worked up a sweat, and she pulled her water bottle free of its clip and squeezed lukewarm water into her mouth.

  By the time she reached the school, cruising past the dorms to reach the paved circle through the staff housing, her flushed face was dry of sweat, but her hair under the helmet was still soaked. Selena parked the bike at the little bungalow that principal Christine Evans had offered for the visit. She went straight inside for a shower, then grabbed a protein bar as she combed out her hair, squinting at the length and contemplating a cut. Done, she glared at herself, giving her flat lower belly a resentful poke. Selena was long and lean from head to toe, and it seemed nothing so curvy as pregnancy would ever even temporarily alter that theme.

  She wondered if Cole had truly considered that possibility.

  She pulled a wide-toothed comb through shoulder-length hair to tame it into order, and clipped it carelessly at the back of her head, up off her long neck. It was a severe look for the strong bones of her face—long and lean like the rest of her—so she pulled a few tendrils loose to soften her jawline and take attention away from the little cleft in her chin.

  Cole liked that cleft. But Cole wasn't here.

  Selena straightened the shower curtain and hung the bath towel and went out to the little kitchenette to grab some more ice water. Handy thing, this bungalow. Small but complete. Trust Athena to have extra housing on hand for alumni visits. Trust Christine Evans to understand how visiting the school could provide the grounding needed by its graduates, so many of whom had gone on to excel in the high-stress, high-risk jobs for which Athena had so ably prepared them.

  Trust Christine to be waiting outside her door with a handful of letters and an invitation to walk around the campus. "Slowly," she added. "You've already had your workout for the day, if I don't miss my guess."

  Selena accepted, slipping on a pair of leather Teva sandals and slipping out the screen door. When Selena had attended school here, Christine had been mentor and supervisor; in the intervening years, her visits had allowed that relationship to mature into mutual respect and affection. They weren't close—but then, Selena had very few people she would call close. Not her divorce-scattered and complicated family, not the fellow students at college who'd been intimidated by her acumen with law and language, and not her coworkers from her years of traveling overseas as an FBI legate. Trust, yes—that had been necessary to function in her role of building counterterrorism relationships in the tumu
ltuous regions in which she worked. But not true, deep friendship.

  Only Cole.

  Now for the first time she looked at Christine with a friend's eyes and realized that the older woman actually looked her sixty-plus years. Though her shoulders were as straight as ever, reflecting her army officer's training, her short gray hair had gone almost entirely white. Her stride didn't hold quite the assurance it had just over a year earlier.

  Of course, getting shot in the abdomen would do that to a person.

  "Are you well?" Selena asked, and they both knew the deeper question behind it.

  "You should ask the students," Christine said, raising one wry eyebrow.

  Selena laughed. "They wouldn't dare suggest otherwise."

  "Then there's your answer." Christine held out the letters. "From some of your classmates. I have permission to share them, of course. It's one way we can all keep abreast of one another's lives."

  Selena felt a stab of guilt. When was the last time she'd written such a letter?

  Christine might well have seen it on her face, for she waved away the moment. "You were a Pandora, Selena Shaw. None of you turned into letter writers. Holiday cards will suffice."

  Selena laughed, short as it was. The Athena students matriculated in seventh grade, starting in a class of thirty, divided into small groups. By the time they graduated, they'd learned to live as a team, work as a team and compete as a team. The Cassandras had been one of those groups, legendary under the leadership of Rainy Carrington—and cohesive enough that when Rainy had died two years earlier, the remaining Cassandras had rallied and proved not only that she had been murdered, but that her death was part of a larger plot, one involving the international crime magnate Jonas White.

  Jonas White. The same man who had masterminded the hostage snatch at the Berzhaani capitol eight months ago, trapping Selena inside the building with the rest of them. The man Selena had killed in order to save Berzhaan's prime minister, and one of the few deaths that had failed to haunt her in the months since.

  But Selena hadn't been in the Cassandras. She'd been in the Pandoras, where instead of one-for-all, the girls had decided that they could most effectively serve their group by being the strongest possible individuals. I work alone first and best was the Pandora motto. Kim Valenti, Diana Lockworth, Ashley Sheridan and Selena made it to graduation, and all four had gone on to make an international difference in recent years.

  Interesting, then, the circumstances under which she'd recently seen Kim and Diana.

  And because she was thinking of that meeting, Christine startled her by smiling—as sentimental an expression as Selena had seen her display—and saying, "It's nice to see that you do manage to work well as a team when necessary."

  Selena hid her startled reaction at Christine's apparent synchronicity with her thoughts. After all, that recent Oracle meeting had been beyond clandestine. In fact, she still didn't know who played the role of Delphi, the Oracle contact. Delphi had been the one to warn her about impending terrorist action in Berzhaan right before the hostage crisis; Delphi had been feeding her such tidbits for years, mining information from various security agencies in a highly secretive effort to overcome the interagency turf wars. And though Selena knew she was far from the only one at the receiving end of Oracle's information, she'd been startled to discover that her fellow agents were also former schoolmates. Kim Valenti had been at that meeting, as had Diana and few more recent graduates. An unofficial Athena force.

  And then there was Allison Gracelyn, the meeting's facilitator—daughter of Marion Gracelyn and currently an NSA programmer. While still at Athena, she'd developed what turned into AA.gov, the Athena Academy Web site, but she'd kept a low profile since then. Selena couldn't help but wonder just what she'd been up to behind the scenes…and just what she was up to now.

  Selena's reaction, checked as it was, must have given something away, for Christine's eyes narrowed slightly. "Whatever you wandered off to think about…I was referring to you and Cole."

  Oh. Right. Work well as a team. That they did.

  When they had the chance.

  "We're trying," Selena said. "Maybe we'll get another chance to work in the field together." She realized that their rambling pace had taken them toward the stables, forty stalls worth of well-trained horseflesh. Arthur Tsosie had been the stable master here when she'd been enrolled, a quiet man with a lilting tenor voice and full of as much people sense as horse sense. It was nearly impossible to recall riding here and not think of the Navajo Codetalker, and how he so quietly and ably shepherded such prodigies as Athena encouraged. "I should take a ride," she said, a total non sequitur that Christine accepted almost as if she realized that the most important parts of their exchange had indeed just happened in Selena's mind.

  "Feel free," she said. "Just after dawn is still best. Tomorrow the girls will be back from their visit to the base, so you'll want to beat them to the best of the trail horses."

  Luke Air Force Base. Along with trips to the Indian nation reservations, the weeklong survival course in Yuma, a week of study at the Flagstaff observatory, Christine made sure the girls got out to the base, to hospitals, to police stations…to see how people and organizations worked together.

  And how they didn't.

  After all, there'd be no need for Oracle if the CIA, FBI, NSA, or recently created Homeland Security actually shared their intel as effectively as they all claimed to. But Selena knew better than to let her thoughts wander there again, not with Christine's sharp eye on her. She changed the topic to inquire after the latest crop of Athena freshman, and led Christine to the barn to point out a few horses Selena might enjoy. And Christine let her do it, which Selena took as the gift it was.

  DAWN BRUSHED THE MOUNTAINS a pale taupe as Selena rode out—borrowed boots, borrowed helmet, but her own schooling tights with leather knee patches and bright lime racing stripes up the outside leg. The horses might have changed since her time at Athena, the stable master might have changed, but the trails were the same, and she knew right where she was going—a zigzaggy route through the clumpy brittlebush, skirting the various cacti and looking out at terrain unobscured by any significant presence of tree or shrub. The odd paloverde, a few scrubby creosote bushes. Low desert mountains: skeletons of the earth. She took her dun gelding through a series of switchbacks to the summit as the light turned from diffuse to etchingly sharp, and after forty-five minutes of rugged riding, she came to the three-thousand-foot summit.

  There she dismounted, loosening the saddle girth a notch and sitting cross-legged with the reins loosely in hand, a process that let her know how much her body would pay for this particular emotional exorcism. Didn't matter how fit she was…nothing used riding muscles but riding muscles. The gelding bobbed its head a few times to see if she really meant it—they were really just going to stand here—and then snorted loudly into the morning air, mouthing the bit a few times before finally settling into a hip-shot stance of equine patience.

  "Just watch," Selena told it. She waited, the southern part of the Phoenix valley spread out before her as the sun rose. The earth warmed and soon enough she saw the first of them—dust devils borne of a cold night followed by the desert sun on flat, hard earth. They spiraled sandy dirt into the air, creating miniature funnels that curved into the sky and danced capriciously across the ground, lifting tumbleweeds high into the sky. Selena grinned, watching them, remembering her younger self doing just this thing. Back then, she'd appreciated the power of the things—compact, giving way before no man, rising and subsiding on a whim. Now she saw their freedom and imagined that feeling in herself. Free from the impact of her past, from her unfulfilled future…free from herself.

  Oddly, she thought about Oracle. She thought about her self-doubts, and how it surprised her that she'd been invited to the recent meeting. A meeting called not because of any particular current crisis, but because Delphi, the code name of the person behind Oracle, thought it was time to be proactive i
nstead of reactive. They'd discussed the potential ramifications of the fall of Lab 33, the organization that had been behind Rainy Miller Carrington's death among so many other things. Be ready, the carefully prepared notes had told them all. At any time, you might be needed to follow up on the information still being gathered in the wake of Lab 33's downfall.

  For starters, there were the Spider files. One of Oracle's agents had been at work deciphering them, discovering a collection of incriminating records against highly placed people. Prime blackmail material. We need to know more about the person behind these files, the agenda stated. Be alert for any references to the code name "A "—now possibly known as Arachne—or events related to anyone on the attached eyes-only list.

  She could do that. No problem.

  High alert: there are indications of imminent terrorist action on U.S. soil. Current priority is to pin down the details.

  She could do that, too.

  Except that she, like Cole, was now a known face, a highly recorded face. And she was damaged goods, already relegated to teaching duty while the CIA waited to see if she got her act together.

  Not that she wasn't good at teaching; in a way, it's what she'd been doing all along, albeit with the foreign dignitaries with whom she'd been trying to establish counter-terrorism partnership programs and not in a classroom. Pulling together the material was second nature, starting with the U.S. counterterrorism policy. First, make no concessions to terrorists and strike no deals. Second, bring terrorists to justice for their crimes. Third, isolate and apply pressure on states that sponsor terrorism…

  And she knew firsthand how those policies translated to real-life action, so who better to explain it?

  But it wasn't what she wanted to do, was driven to do. She didn't want to teach others how to deal with terrorism…she wanted to deal with it herself.