the new arrival, ready to drive him off with a few snappy orders and the badge jammed into her pocket.
Instead she found Steven Dobry. The burly Farm instructor and CIA technical ops expert was older than Selena, his features and bearing an unremarkable and perfect canvas for demonstrating his disguise strategies to the students. He didn’t do a very good job of hiding his own desire to be in the field, or his skepticism that Selena—younger, female and formerly FBI—had ever belonged there. Dobry said, “I’ve already called for help.”
“Suddenly,” Selena said, “this all makes a certain twisted sense.”
“Nothing about this makes sense.” Dobry waved at the scene before them. “What the hell is this all about?”
Selena shook her head. “No. Nice try, but no.” She released the phone and let her hand settle in her pocket. There, he wouldn’t see that she had it clenched. But on the outside she’d found her cool, the guise of the experienced FBI legate and specialist in international counterterrorism. She’d attended embassy balls and palace dinners; she’d negotiated with heads of state and walked through terrorist territory in more countries than Dobry could even imagine. “That’s your question to answer. You knew they couldn’t tail me undetected.”
“Did I?” He raised an eyebrow at her, visible enough in the faint fan of light from the closest streetlamp.
Fury swept through her, along with the sudden understanding. “You thought they could do it. You figure I’m full of crap, and you were going to prove it. This wasn’t a training exercise…it was an exercise in embarrassment. My embarrassment.” She narrowed her eyes at him, her fist still clenched inside her pocket and her voice deceptively casual. “And how’s that working out for you?”
The woman looked over at Dobry, anger rising on her face. “You used us. You set us up!”
Dobry sent a cold look Selena’s way. “It’s a shame you overreacted so badly. This should have been a perfectly safe exercise.”
“It could have been,” she agreed. “If you’d let me in on it. Not to mention it would have been infinitely more challenging—I could have led them on quite a chase before I dumped them. But instead you sent them out cold and green. I’ll bet you didn’t even warn them not to take me on.”
“He was no threat to you!”
The woman stood up, now freely glaring. “And how was she supposed to know that? She didn’t even know it was us.”
Selena heard sirens in the background, still faint and far away. “You knew my background, whether you believed it or not. You lied to your trainees. You left me out of the loop. Me? I’m just a CIA officer on my private time who reacted exactly as I should have. I know who I’d rather be when it comes to facing the DDA over this.”
“Damned cold bitch, aren’t you?” His sullen anger told her she’d scored a point.
“No,” Selena told him. “I’m smoking hot. Too bad you’re only now beginning to figure it out.”
The DDA—Deputy Director of Administration, the ultimate boss of the Farm—didn’t actually put in an appearance for the chewing-out phase. The Director of Training and Education handled the job just fine on his own. Equally scathing on both their counts, troweling the blame thick. Selena thought she imagined frustration when he looked at Dobry and concern when he looked at her.
On the other hand it could have just been a twitch.
But unlike Dobry, the DDA knew her background. He knew the CIA had offered her a spot high in the counterterrorist hierarchy, but that as she had healed physically from those several intense days in Berzhaan, as she had debriefed and reported and followed through on the incident, the need for an extended period of lower stress had made itself clear as well.
Selena hated it. She saw it as weakness. Yes, she’d spent two days fighting for her life—and yes, during that time just about everyone she’d seen had been trying to hurt or kill her. She’d saved the lives of the prime minister and most of the hostages. Outgunned and outmanned, even on the brink of what seemed like certain death, she’d managed to convey information to lurking rescue forces. She’d won, dammit.
These days, she felt like maybe they’d won, too. Instead of surging forth into her new life, she’d ended up here, instructing. De-stressing. There’d been that one clandestine meeting with Oracle shortly after her return from Berzhaan, but she wasn’t of any great use to that supersecret fledgling intelligence agency as long as she was here. Recovering.
Not that the teaching position was a bad thing in and of itself. She was good at it; she enjoyed it. She just wanted more.
She wasn’t likely to get it as long as she was doing things like turning clueless newbies into broken bits of student. At least the injured trainee would be allowed back for the next session. Small consolation, but one that Selena held on to.
So she didn’t make excuses to the DDA—he knew exactly why she’d reacted with force, and he knew she’d pulled her punches or the injured trainee would be a dead trainee. She limited her responses to acknowledgments and she glared at Dobry’s back on the way out of the Farm’s administration building, holding her anger tightly inside. When she would have walked away, heading through the dark night and the newly falling mist, he hesitated.
“Selena—”
The anger snapped. She pivoted, glaring at him with such force that he fell silent. She said, “Don’t, Dobry. Don’t even try to pretend what happened tonight was my responsibility. I’ll take it like a good soldier for the director, but you haven’t earned that from me. If you hadn’t disrespected me and used your students to prove the point you thought you had, none of this would have happened.” She took one step toward him, lowering her voice into the dangerous range. “And it better not happen again. Not this, not anything like it.”
He paused, that sullen expression lurking and an overlay of his own anger on top of it. Finally he said, “You don’t belong here. Maybe not for the reason I first thought, but you don’t belong here. The CIA doesn’t take on FBI castoffs. They broke you…let them fix you. The rest of us here don’t need your problems.”
Selena let the words sit there until he seemed to give up on a response at all. What she felt underneath—half-believing the validity of his words, half-believing she couldn’t be fixed at all—stayed private. Hers only. She kept her voice matter-of-fact, devoid of the intensity that had startled him a moment earlier. “Too bad that’s not your decision to make.”
And this time she did turn and walk away, heading for the sophisticated gym inside what looked like a perfectly picturesque barn. She hit the locker room to strip away her leather duster, the navy cargos and black trail sneakers, and replaced them with black spandex. Shorts and sports bra and attitude, all of which she took to the gym. She put on a pair of lightly padded gloves and tackled the workout bag, pounding the dust from it with fist and foot alike. She pounded out what was left of the adrenaline, chasing the unfinished feeling left from the alley encounter. Unfinished, because she’d pulled her punches even after the trainee had grabbed her from behind, invoking body memories of life and death in the hands of the rebels-turned-terrorists. Tafiq Ashurbeyli, with his gun jammed to the back of her head. With his body pressing her against the wall. With his men ambushing her when she’d thought herself as of yet undiscovered, unknown.
She wished the punching bag was Dobry, or the dead Kemeni leader, or any one of the men she’d been forced to kill.
