Stephanie Doyle - Calculated Risk

The protest against his involvement was a pretense. Part of the play that had been scripted by Krueger. Quinlan would be expecting her to try and buck him, so she did. But it didn’t change the fact that what she said was true.

“No.”

Figures. Quinlan didn’t buck easily.

Okay, she said to him silently. You want to play? Game on.

“Look, there’s something you don’t know. There’s another part to this that makes it…complicated. Which means I don’t need any more complications on top of it and you are the mother of all complications.”

“Another part. Really?”

“Yes,” she hedged. “I sort of had this idea.”

“Do tell.”

She glanced over at him. There was something in his tone that wasn’t right. As though he was holding back…rage. She thought about what might enrage him, aside from the attack on his manhood, and came up with only one answer.

“You know,” she stated.

“That you contacted Kahsan? Hell, yes, I know,” he spat, pushing his face into hers. “I have people all over the world whose mission it is to keep me informed about Kahsan’s every breath. The only thing no one can ever tell me is where the hell he is. You can imagine my shock when rumors started circulating about some female genius trying to make contact with him. Then I hear about Arnold’s death, and I get word from my superiors that I’m to collect you and take you to his computer. Suddenly, it all makes a disgusting sort of sense.”

“No,” she said, sensing his anger over the betrayal. “You’ve got it wrong.”

“How much, Sabrina? I want to know. How much did you sell your soul to the devil for?”

It hurt. Ten years was a lifetime ago. There was no reason to think that any bond they might have shared then would have survived all this time and everything that had happened. Still, his instant distrust hurt more than anything he’d done to her physically. She barked out a humorless laugh in defense against the pain.

“Now you know that’s not possible, Q. How could I have possibly sold my soul to Kahsan when I sold it to you years ago?”

Fourteen years ago

“Do you know why you’re here?”

Sabrina said nothing. She had this idea that she would play the role of the stoic prisoner being interrogated by the enemy. After all, that’s what she felt like. The prison in question might be some fancy office in Washington, D.C., but it didn’t change the fact that she couldn’t leave.

And that she didn’t want to be here.

She was tired of being tested. Tired of being pushed in directions that she didn’t want to go. First her father, then Harvard, now this. But the man sitting across from her didn’t seem like the typical geeky Martin-Lewis-professor type she was used to dealing with.

He seemed like a badass. It was in the eyes. Gray and cold. And the fresh scar that ran over his left eye. She was tempted to ask him if it was real, or if it was just for effect.

“I believe I asked you a question,” he said quietly.

“I believe you can go shove it up your ass,” she retorted in defiance of the quiver of intimidation she was feeling being in this man’s presence. So much for the silent stoic routine. Then again, she’d never been quiet when she had something to say.

The man who had been introduced as Quinlan nodded casually at her response, then reached across the desk that separated them and, in a lightning fast move, snatched the nose hoop that dangled from one of her nostrils. Thankfully, the catch came undone or else he would have ripped completely through her soft tissue.

Even with that small mercy, the pain was intense. She screeched and covered her nose with her hand. Then watched as he slid the thin gold loop over his finger. “You sonofab-”

“Your father said you were a young lady. Young ladies don’t use that kind of language.”

He handed her a tissue that he pulled from a drawer. She covered her nose with it and then instantly checked to see how much blood there was. It wasn’t much. But that didn’t make it hurt any less.

Scowling at him she tossed the tissue away. “Yeah, well, my father doesn’t really know me. In fact, I think I’ve grown a couple inches since the last time he looked up from his computer to see if I was still around.”

Quinlan studied her slouching body. “What are you, five-seven?”

“Five-seven and one-quarter inch.”

“You’re tall for your age and no doubt still growing,” he muttered as he made a few notes on a file that sat open in front of him. “Tell me, is that where your bitterness stems from? The fact that Daddy doesn’t pay enough attention to you.”

“Actually it comes from the fact that my mother abandoned me at the age of four,” Sabrina corrected him, then faked a few dramatic sobs. “I’ve never quite gotten over it.”

“Do you know what I see?”

“Like I care,” she replied, then closed her mouth. Her last smart-ass response had resulted in the loss of a nose ring. She didn’t want to think about what she might lose next. Instinctively, she reached for the three hoops that dangled from her right ear.

“I see a sixteen-year-old, immature brat who is too damn smart for her own good. But I’m going to fix that.”

“You can’t fix something that’s not broken.”

“Then I imagine we’ll have to break you. Let’s start over, shall we? Do you know why you’re here?”

“My father told me to come,” she spat at him, pretending that the idea of being broken didn’t scare her. “Can I have another tissue?” He pulled another single tissue from the drawer and handed it to her and waited while she blew her nose. “Out front the lady said your name was Quinlan. Is that Mr. Quinlan?”

“Just Quinlan.”

Sabrina rolled her eyes. “You mean like just Madonna?”

“Okay. Do you know why your father asked you to come here?”

“No,” she answered honestly. “Last I knew he wanted me to go to Harvard. Thought that I could give those guys all sorts of answers. Whatever. He had this vision of me working in an ivory tower developing theories and shit. How far does pi go? E equals mc cubed-”

“Squared.”

“Not the way I do it.” She smiled cockily. Then she remembered the hours upon hours of testing and her smile quickly diminished. “But they didn’t want any answers to any problems. They just wanted to test me. I was their freaking guinea pig.”

“And you didn’t like that.”

“I hated it,” she clarified. “School was never my thing. And pushy people asking me all sorts of questions…really not my thing.”

This actually elicited a small, very small, smile from the man across from her. Just to show her that he got her message, she imagined. But he said nothing. Instead he glanced down at the file in front of him again and read it for a time. Finally, he looked up and met her gaze. “Your father is considered a brilliant man. His work for the National Security Agency decrypting enemy codes has been invaluable to this country’s security.”

“That’s my dad.”

“Your IQ eclipses his.”

Sabrina said nothing.

“Your specialty is numbers. You test off the charts for spatial mathematics, but what is unusual in a case like yours-”

“I’m not Rain Man, ” Sabrina finished. “I don’t even like Judge Wapner.”

“-is your computation ability,” Quinlan continued. “Not only can you interpret formulas but you can also apply them at high speeds. Which probably comes from your ability to hold several hundred numbers in your head at once. Your memory is extraordinary. Few people have a true photographic memory and those who do usually must concentrate on the thing they are attempting to remember. Snapping the picture in their mind so to speak. And there is only a limited time frame in which they can retrieve and recite the image or words that they’ve committed to memory. Your brain, however, seems to have a limitless capacity for…storage. You remember everything, don’t you?”