your feelings where Kane is concerned. You need closure on several levels,” Max finished.
Cassie wanted to argue with him, to tell him that he was espousing a bunch of psychobabble. But his words shot straight to her heart, to all the wounded areas that existed inside her, and as much as she hated to admit it, she knew he was right.
Chapter 3
Cassie compared the address on the slip of paper Kane had left her to the one on the front of the downtown brick six-story building. The addresses were the same although the sign on the building proclaimed the establishment on the ground level to be Eddie’s Employment Agency. The floors above the employment agency appeared to be empty.
The building was in an area of Kansas City that hadn’t yet seen the efforts of revitalization of the downtown area. The buildings on either side appeared abandoned, storefronts boarded with plywood that sported the usual colorful and obscene graffiti.
The street was relatively deserted considering it was just after noon, but she wasn’t surprised that SPACE would choose this kind of area for a mobile base.
During the four years that Cassie had worked with the agency, she’d frequented a number of “fronts” in a number of cities used for conducting business. They
were usually set up in areas where there was little foot traffic and where it wasn’t unusual for stores to appear and disappear in short time.
It had been explained to Cassie at her recruitment that because much of what SPACE did pertained to national security and many of the agents found it necessary to work outside of the law, the agency was top secret.
The agency had been dealing more and more with domestic matters following 9/11, while other agencies like the CIA and FBI focused more on terrorists.
Cassie didn’t know where the home office of the agency was, but she suspected it was somewhere in Washington, D.C. She’d always worked out of mobile offices like the one she had just left.
In truth, she knew very little about the agency, although Kane had once told her part of the history. It had begun in the mid-eighties as one of many covert agencies run by the government to deal with problems both foreign and domestic that might need special handling. The agents didn’t have to worry about the restrictions that often bound the hands of law enforcement and were highly trained both physically and mentally for all circumstances.
Cassie wasn’t sure how their recruitment ordinarily worked. She’d come to the attention of somebody because of her stunt work in several movies. Apparently an extensive background check had been run on her and they liked what they saw. It didn’t hurt that she had no family. In fact, Kane had told her the agency preferred their operatives to have no families.
Ancient history and in a few minutes she would be back in the fold of the agency she’d left behind.
She remained in the car for a long moment, staring at the old brick building. It wasn’t too late to change her mind, to turn her car around and forget everything that Kane had told her the night before.
She could go back to her ordinary life, arresting bad guys, bickering with her cantankerous neighbor and having breakfast with Max.
All she’d have to worry about were the nightmares that would plague her as she thought of the danger hitting the streets in the form of a deadly drug.
In truth, she had no choice. She hated nightmares.
She got out of her car and approached the building, aware that once she opened the door and walked inside the relatively peaceful life she’d built for herself would be transformed into something much different.
The interior looked like a hundred other employment agencies. Plastic orange chairs lined one wall, a table provided a place to fill out applications and a water cooler occasionally gurgled from its position in one corner.
A receptionist at a small metal desk looked up from the magazine she’d been reading. “Hi, can I help you?”
“I’d like to fill out an application,” Cassie said.
At that moment a door behind the receptionist’s desk opened and a tall gray-haired man stepped into view. “Cassie, it’s good to see you.”
“Hello, Greg.” Cassie smiled at Greg Cole, the man who had recruited her into the agency years ago.
“Why don’t you come on back. I’ve been hoping you’d show up.”
A sense of déjà vu filled Cassie as she followed him down a long hallway and into a private office. He motioned her into one of the two chairs that faced a large, mahogany desk.
She sank down in one of the chairs, suddenly feeling much like she had nine years ago when she’d had her first private meeting with Greg. Excitement and anxiety battled each other inside her as she waited for Greg to get settled in the chair behind the desk.
Once he was seated, he smiled at her again. “You look good, Cassie.”
“It’s all that good, clean normal living I’ve been doing,” she replied and felt herself begin to relax. The old, familiar excitement was quickly taking over the anxiety. She recognized that she was not only back with the agency physically, but emotionally as well.
Greg Cole was a distinguished-looking man about fifty years old. With his steel-gray hair and blue eyes, clad in a three-piece tailored pale gray suit he looked like he’d come from the same mold as a thousand other successful businessmen.
But Cassie had seen Greg put a bullet between the eyes of a paid assassin yards away. She’d seen him scale a twenty-foot fence like a monkey climbing a tree. Greg was much more than a man behind a desk pushing papers.
“Something is agreeing with you,” he said. “We’ve heard good things about you since you’ve been away
from us. Eight commendations, a folder full of civilian praise for you and a stellar record that proves you’re better than most police officers.”
So they’d kept tabs on her since she’d left the agency. Somehow she wasn’t surprised. “I try to be the best at what I do.”
“You were one of the best agents we ever had when it came to working the streets.”
That had been Cassie’s specialty. Her early experiences on the streets of L.A. had given her an insight into the language, the nuances, the underbelly of that world that few people truly understood.
It was something that couldn’t be taught, but had to be experienced and it was part of what had made her valuable to the agency. She’d been useful in information gathering from the streets, able to tap into gangs, drug dealers and weapon deals by knowing who to listen to and what to say.
“You know what they say, you can take the girl off the street, but you can’t take the street out of the girl,” she said.
“I don’t know about that, you manage to clean up pretty well.” Greg’s smile not only held genuine affection, but respect as well.
During the time she had worked for the agency, Greg had always been the superior she reported to and she’d never doubted the man’s integrity and belief in all the agency stood for. She hadn’t
