Stephanie Doyle - Calculated Risk

“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.

It had been a hell of a long night. But she wasn’t tired and knew that it was doubtful she could achieve real sleep with Quinlan only a foot away. Still, maybe if he thought she was sleeping, he would be content to let the silence linger. Although he had never had a problem with silence. She had always been the one to break it.

Not this time, though. “You handled that situation back there well,” he told her.

“Guess shooting at people is a lot like riding a bike,” she retorted. She sounded casual but now that the adrenaline wasn’t flowing as hard there was a lingering nausea in her gut. She considered the possibility that she might have killed someone back at the house. Regardless that the someone was, in fact, the enemy…it still made her queasy.

“I meant your accuracy with the gun. You’ve been practicing,” Quinlan suggested.

“I always did like target practice.”

He expelled a breath that might have been mistaken for a laugh. “I wouldn’t call what you did target practice. It was more like some distorted ricochet theory.”

She smiled then with her eyes still closed as the images from her days at Langley returned. Hitting a target while aiming directly at it was a cinch. She believed it had to do with her uncanny ability in spatial mathematics. Her eye could accurately register the distance between herself and any target, and she knew from the kick of the gun, the slight jerk of her hand, the exact trajectory the bullet would take.

Quinlan would stand behind her and tell her to hit the head of a target and she did. He would tell her to hit the leg, and she could do that, too. It was simple. What was more of a challenge was determining a bullet’s ricochet angle. Knowing what a bullet did if it hit steel, if it hit Kevlar, if it hit brick. Knowing the angle at which she was firing, Sabrina always believed, in principle, she could bounce a bullet in any direction she wanted it to go. More often than not she was wrong. But she’d never stopped trying.

With only the woods to use for practice, she’d come pretty close to figuring out just how to hit a tree the right way to send the bullet sailing dramatically right or left. Depending on the thickness of the bark, of course, and the type of tree. If she told him that, though, he’d make some disbelieving sound. It’s what he used to do.

Other memories of their time together spat at her like rapid fire. Because some of them made her want to smile, she concentrated more on the ones that hurt.

“Did you marry her?”

The words fell out of her mouth and she winced. It had always been like that with him. Always pushing and prodding him, forcing him to talk or at least to react to her because she hated it when he dismissed her. Hated that he always seemed to find it so easy to ignore her. The fact that ten years hadn’t changed anything was really annoying.

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“It was over a year later,” he elaborated.

“Shocker.” She hadn’t wanted to respond, but she’d been surprised that he had bothered to expand on his answer. He didn’t owe her any explanation.

“Bri…”

“Don’t call me that.” Opening her eyes, she pinned her gaze on him so that he would know how serious she was. The nickname brought with it too many of the memories she wanted to forget.

This wasn’t going to work, she realized.

Her mission would not succeed if she found herself wrapped up in some attempt to seek justice for a wrong that was done to her a bunch of years ago. She needed to let it go. If asked under penalty of torture, she would have sworn that she had. Her questions about his marriage suggested otherwise. But it didn’t have to go any further than that. She wouldn’t let it.

“You should know that I didn’t do all of this as some sort of warped attempt to see you again. You have to understand that you weren’t supposed to be part of this. It’s not what I wanted.” She turned away from him and closed her eyes again.

She heard him release a slow breath. “If only that were true.”

The back seat shifted and without looking, she determined that he was planning to catch some sleep. With Quinlan it wouldn’t be an act, either. Sleep was a precious resource. Like food or water. In any conflict, it needed to be taken when it could. He’d taught her that.

To distract her thoughts away from him, she began doing complicated geometrical proofs in her head. She could see the shapes flowing behind her eyes. Could see the angles and how they related to one another. Could see the purity and the simplicity of the theory that determined the answer for every angle on any scale.

Like drinking a tonic, it cleansed her. There was no emotion in the math. Only truth. Only right and only wrong. It played out like a piece of music that she could actually hear. The symphony of order and reason, which, in so many ways, was in direct contrast to her emotional state-typically chaotic and confused. She allowed her mind to go to that place where so few people had ever gone. Where it seemed as if the answer, the one answer behind everything, was within her grasp if she just let go…