CHAPTER ONE
3086 Words
CHAPTER ONE
Washington, D.C.
The next morning
Remi Laurent, former professor of medieval history at the Sorbonne and guest lecturer at Georgetown, was turning out to be a natural.
The gunnery range at the FBI branch office in downtown D.C. was located in a cellar, well soundproofed so as not to worry the businesses and office buildings surrounding it. Remi stood at the range, firing the last from a clip of her FBI-issued Glock at a man-sized paper target 20 meters away. Her instructor, a former U.S. Marine three times her size, watched in admiration as she created a tidy cluster in the chest.
“Go for the main body mass,” he always said. “That has the best chance of hitting and has good stopping power. Don’t shoot at the legs. Don’t tiptoe around and be gentle about an armed confrontation. If you must take a man down, he deserves a bullet through the torso. And don’t aim for the head. Not even Army snipers do that. A 9mm round through the body will stop anyone but a meth freak. If you’re facing one of them, unload your whole clip on the nutcase.”
Remi finished emptying her clip and hit the button to bring the target back to the shooting position. Her instructor whistled.
“Nice one. Except for this.” He poked a finger through the hole made by one clear miss, a good two inches outside the silhouette of the body. “What happened here?”
“I didn’t cool off before the next shot,” she recited.
“That’s right. You got to make each shot an individual action. Don’t rush it. Aim. Focus. Breathe. Fire.”
“Sorry.” Remi could feel herself redden. While she knew she was doing far better than most recruits at this stage of training, thanks to juvenile target practice with her father, a member of the Paris gendarmerie, she didn’t like making mistakes. She’d seen enough fieldwork already to know how a single mistake could lead to serious consequences, even fatal ones.
She had always been a perfectionist. Now that she was a couple of weeks into a special accelerated training program for the FBI, that perfectionism was all the more important.
Her instructor glanced at the wall clock.
“Time’s up. Clean, reassemble, and stow your piece.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, turning away.
“Laurent,” he said. She turned back to him. “Perfect is the enemy of good.”
Remi blinked. Did this man mountain just quote Voltaire at her?
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“This isn’t some academic book where you get everything just so, where all your facts are lined up and no one can say you’re wrong. This is law enforcement. It’s never going to be perfect. You’re never going to hit the bullseye every single time. And you’re never going to get every criminal you go after. Instead of beating yourself up about not batting a thousand, just be happy you’re in the major leagues.”
Remi had no idea what batting a thousand meant, and he had an overly optimistic opinion of the mental rigor that went into academic publishing, but she got the general idea.
“Thank you, sir.”
Her instructor nodded to the door to the arsenal. “Go on, then, Agent Laurent.”
Agent Laurent. The words filled her with pride as she strolled past the other shooters to the arsenal. It still didn’t seem real, and in fact was only partially real. Just a couple of weeks before, she had been a university professor visiting Georgetown for two semesters. Three times she had been called by the FBI to work as a civilian advisor, helping out its new Antiquities Division with cases involving medieval and Renaissance art. She had nearly been killed at least twice, been run ragged across half a dozen states and two continents and had loved every moment of it.
She sat in the armory, putting her Glock on the counter in front of her, and went through the steps of stripping and cleaning it. A simple step by step procedure suited to someone with her meticulous nature and attention to detail. This was easier than target practice, and much easier than the physical training program they had put her on.
While Remi had always maintained good health through long walks and a healthy, non-American diet, she hadn’t been athletically active since high school. Now she felt constantly sore, constantly run down, but she could see herself toning up every time she looked in the mirror after a shower. And she had cut her time for running a mile from twelve minutes to just under eleven. She had been ordered to get it down below ten.
Remi’s boss at the Antiquities Division, Assistant Director Keiko Ochiai, needed her on call and ready for duty, which put the agency in a bit of a bind. If they sent her to the academy down in Quantico, she’d be unavailable for months. So instead, they used a little-known workaround, an intense, individual training program used for recruits that were needed at a moment’s notice. Thus, Remi’s days were filled with target practice, hand-to-hand combat training, and one-on-one courses on investigative techniques. Her nights were filled with the study of procedure and law.
Everything else had to be put aside. She hadn’t even had time to do any more research into the cryptex, her lifelong obsession that had gotten her into the strange circumstances she now found herself in.
Her social life had become all but nonexistent. She saw little of the other students, who had their own schedules and were occasionally called for fieldwork. She saw little of anyone else either. Dr. Cyril Mullen, her lover and the head of the history department at Georgetown, was not happy about that. Not at all.
After a whirlwind fling at a conference a couple of years before, and an agonizing long-distance relationship, he had arranged for her to do a year-long guest lectureship at Georgetown so they could be together.
At first it had been wonderful. The funding was good, and while the university had very American attitudes about relationships between colleagues, they had managed to keep it secret and see each other for a large portion of every day.
The only dark spot was the increasing pressure Cyril had put on her to get married. While she loved him, she didn’t like the feeling of having to make a decision on a timetable. She understood how he felt. Having come out of a rough divorce with a woman who did not deserve such a kind, intellectual man, he was past fifty and eager to put down roots again. When her work visa expired at the end of the academic term, she would have to return to the Sorbonne in Paris, leaving him in the United States. It was get married or have no future in the relationship.
She understood, and she loved him but …
It all felt wrong somehow. Cyril was so obsessed with bringing them together in a permanent bond, he didn’t see how it would be the end of her academic career. Full-time teaching jobs for medievalists were rare, and there were none in D.C., or even in the region. What was she supposed to do, sit home and make curtains?
Then there was his staunch opposition to her freelancing for the FBI, and the difference between what he said and what he felt. Cyril said it was dangerous work for which she was unqualified (true enough) and that it took her away from her academic duties (also true). Secretly, Remi suspected, he really objected because it took her away from him for long and unpredictable stretches and also gave her independence outside his academic world. He thought she was slipping away from him.
Well, she wouldn’t be slipping away if he hadn’t been trying to hold onto her so tightly. Yes, her life had taken a dramatic new turn, but couldn’t he celebrate that, be happy for her? Couldn’t he see that now that the FBI had given her an indefinite work visa, they could enjoy a longer engagement, freeing themselves of the pressure to marry immediately?
No, instead he tried to get her to give up this important and fulfilling new work and remain an academic.
An academic with no secure future if she married him.
With a sigh she finished cleaning the Glock and stowed it in its individual locked container. Then she gathered her things and left, handing the key to the armorer on her way out. She had lunch with Cyril in half an hour. That gave her time to go over some of million regulations an FBI agent had to know by rote. After lunch she had some more physical training followed by hand-to-hand combat. She still needed to work on that. While she had always been healthy and fit, at age 38, punches and flips didn’t come so easily.
But first, those regulations. Time to hit the books, as her students said.
Ex-students, she reminded herself. You’re not a professor anymore.
She trembled a bit. Every now and then, the magnitude of her life-changing decision hit her, and hit her hard.
All that was forgotten a moment later as she was climbing the stairs to the ground floor and saw who stood at the top.
Daniel Walker, her partner.
She hadn’t seen him for the past two weeks since she had started training.
Daniel Walker a tall man about her age with broad shoulders, handsome except for a habitual frown and a belly that was beginning to take on middle-aged proportions. He wore the black suit and tie that was all but a uniform among FBI agents, the regulation sunglasses tucked in his breast pocket. He kept his brown hair cut short. Brown eyes, so hard most of the time, and especially when grilling suspects, softened as she looked up.
“Hey!” she said, running up the last of the steps. “It’s good to see you!”
Surprisingly good. As busy as she had been in her weeks of training, she hadn’t realized just how much she had missed this uncouth, multilayered, fascinating man.
“Good to see you too,” he said with a grin.
Remi stopped, a tad too close, almost going in for the kiss to both cheeks customary in France. A handshake seemed inappropriate too (does one shake hands with someone when they’ve shared life and death experiences?), so she settled for a nod and a smile.
“Got time for a coffee?” he asked.
“Sure. I have … an appointment for lunch.”
A brief sense of betrayal. Why not just say she had lunch with Cyril? The two knew each other, after all. Well, they’d met two or three times. Handshake. Polite small talk. Little to no mention of the other in later conversation.
They headed off to a nearby Starbucks favored by the FBI crowd, where the baristas joked it was the safest coffeeshop in the world. Clusters of men, along with a few women, all in dark suits, sat drinking coffee, eating bagels, and talking shop in quiet tones.
Remi ordered a black coffee, having to repeat her order since no one ordered black coffee at Starbucks. Daniel, like most people, ordered some giant confection with cherry syrup and whipped cream, plus a garlic bagel with cream cheese.
They sat at a small table, crowded in by the other agents, knees brushing against each other before Remi shifted position.
“I see your dietary habits haven’t improved since I last met you,” Remi joked. “Is that going to be your lunch?”
“Huh? Oh no, I’ve already had lunch.”
“I see. McDonald’s, Burger King, or Pizza Hut?”
“Sloppy Yo.”
“I beg your pardon?” Remi thought she had misheard.
“Sloppy Yo, the hip-hop Sloppy Joe place on third.”
“I understood every word but not the sentence they created.”
“A Sloppy Joe is a bit like a hamburger but with ground beef that’s still all loose instead of being cooked into a patty. It’s got onions, Worcestershire sauce, ketchup, and a bunch of other stuff. Sloppy Yo is run by Ice Berg, that Jewish rapper that made it big about twenty years ago. His music career fizzled so he opened a restaurant. Best Sloppy Joes in town.”
“I’ll take your word for it. So how is work?”
Daniel shrugged. “Routine. Chased down a guy who was selling stolen stamps.”
“Stolen stamps?”
“Stamps can be big business. This guy was teamed up with a burglar who targeted stamp collectors. He’d nab stamp collections worth tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, break up the collections, and sell them bit by bit on the private market. Almost untraceable. Stamps don’t have serial numbers, after all. I only nailed him by matching up some of his sales with missing stamps. Tough job, though, because he’d sell the rarest stuff overseas, often after sitting on it for years.”
Remi could hear the boredom in his voice. Daniel was more of a man of action. Tracing stolen philatelic treasures was not his idea of a good time.
Or hers.
“Did the burglar give you any trouble?”
“None. Knocked on his door and he had his hands up almost before I flashed my badge.”
Daniel sounded disappointed. He could be a bit rough with suspects who resisted arrest. She had heard a rumor that he had even stuck a d**g dealer’s head down a toilet and flushed. Opinion was divided on whether or not he used it first.
“I’ve heard your training is going well,” Daniel said. “Class act on the shooting range. Getting good on the track too. Still getting your a*s kicked by Agent Herrero.”
Agent Herrero was the hand-hand-hand combat instructor. He had black belts in Muay Thai, Judo, and Shotokan Karate.
Remi smiled at him over the rim of her coffee cup. “I’d like to see you take him on.”
“Been there. Done that. Got my a*s thrown ten feet.”
“You probably lasted longer than I do. This sort of thing doesn’t come naturally to me.” Remi couldn’t keep the dissatisfaction out of her voice.
“It sure comes naturally when some knife-wielding psycho is trying to kill you.”
Remi laughed, and instantly felt that strange sense of disassociation she had been feeling ever since joining the FBI. The old Remi Laurent would never have laughed at the fact that more than one man had tried to kill her, and nearly succeeded. That would have traumatized the quiet academic she had once been. The speed at which she had changed made her feel at times like a stranger in her own body.
The laughter died down. Perhaps Daniel sensed something about her mood by her expression changing, or perhaps he had gotten to know his partner better after three dangerous cases, because his next question was right on target.
“So how are you adjusting?”
Those brown eyes were fixed on her, as incisive as when they interrogated a suspect, although far more sympathetic.
Remi shrugged and gave an uncertain smile. “It’s … strange. When I was just a civilian advisor, it was all one big adventure. Terrifying but exhilarating at the same time. Now that I’m actually a trainee agent it feels so different … ”
Her words trailed off as she became unsure, or unwilling, to continue.
Her partner/interrogator was not about to let her off the hook. “Different how?”
Remi searched for the right words. “It seems more real now. More in earnest. Beforehand, while I was eager to solve the cases, it was really your case. The FBI’s case.” Daniel laughed. “I know, I know. It probably didn’t seem like it, but that’s how it felt. I’ve been reading about the history of the FBI and speaking with my instructors and hearing their stories. Now I feel like I’m part of a long tradition. It makes me nervous.”
“Imposter syndrome?”
“Exactly!”
“We all get that. ‘Who am I to find a serial killer or bust some international smuggling ring?’ It’s such a big job, and such an important one, and I think a bit of imposter syndrome is good for an agent. It keeps them on their toes and focused on doing their best.”
Remi nodded, smiling. While Daniel could be closed off and prickly, often about the strangest things, it was nice to know he understood.
She had a feeling that would be important whenever they got another case.
The agency had promised to keep Daniel and Remi as partners, and she felt surprised at how important that partnership had become for her.
And how much she wanted to impress him once they did get a new case.
Daniel checked his watch. “Aw, crap.”
“What is it?”
“I need to go. I have an appointment with the boss.”
Remi perked up. “Assistant Director Ochiai?”
“Yup.”
Daniel stood.
“A new case?”
“Maybe. Just focus on learning the regs and kicking Agent Herrero’s ass.”
“Has she said anything about a new case?”
“No. And stop looking like a kid in a candy store with a hundred-dollar gift certificate.”
Remi settled back into her coffee, giving Daniel a wry smile. “Is it so wrong to want another case?”
“Is it wrong to want to case thieves and killers across the United States? No, not really. A bit weird, though. But being weird is why I like you.”
Daniel closed one eye, made a pistol with his finger and said, “Click, pow! See you later, Trainee Agent Laurent.”
Remi giggled, then caught herself and put a hand over her mouth. When was the last time she had giggled?
With a wave and a smile, Daniel was gone, leaving her alone to drum her fingers on the table and wonder if whatever work the assistant director was calling him in for, if she’d be called upon to help.
- Writer
