Out-Foxxed

“Excellent.”

Sabrina strode out of the hotel, her sneakers silent on the shiny marble floor. The same doorman who’d greeted her what felt like a lifetime ago, bid her a good evening. She gave him a smile of thanks and hurried off into the gloomy night.

The rain was gone, leaving the city she loved with a crisp bite in the air and smelling pretty damned clean for a place that teemed with no less than eight million people.

Once in a while, a taxi cruising for a fare rolled by on the street, the tires cutting through the water puddled there.

She didn’t bother hailing one. She would walk, at least for a while, to give herself time to unwind and to let the cold air remind her that she was still alive. That was the great part about her work. She came so close to death at times…close enough to appreciate living one more day. Not everyone understood how that felt. It was the most satisfying feeling she’d ever known. Maybe that made her a freak, if so, that was okay.

The scene back at the hotel would be one of chaos until the feds arrived to take control of the situation. The Stavi family would only know that a maid had saved their lives.

Sabrina hadn’t touched anything in the room so there wouldn’t be any prints left behind, not that it mattered. She didn’t exist in any of the traditional spy world databases. IT&PA wasn’t known in any capacity whatsoever by its sibling agencies.

All involved in the rescue would do exactly as Sabrina was doing now—disappear in the night…until next time.

CHAPTER THREE

THE HOT WATER slowly but surely warmed the winter chill that had seeped deep into her bones, relaxing her tense muscles. Sabrina had ended up walking the entire twenty blocks home.

Without the rain, it hadn’t been so bad. She’d needed the time to clear her head. To rid her lungs of the smell of death.

She studied her arms and the new bruises there. So far her cheek hadn’t swollen. There would be some discoloration from the slaps she’d taken but, if her luck held out, no noticeable swelling. Bruises could be covered, swelling could not. She was damned lucky things hadn’t been a hell of a lot worse.

Just part of the job. Pain and death were a constant in her line of work. She’d gotten used to it a long time ago.

At least that was what she told herself. Occasionally she’d let the kill-or-be-killed reality get to her, but then she would remind herself that what she had done had saved a man and his family. That was what really counted.

The only part that counted to Sabrina.

The first time she’d killed a man, Marx had walked her through the aftereffects.

Sabrina closed her eyes and tried to block the memory but it came anyway. The assignment had been in Ireland. The target had been an American traitor leading a terrorist cell who had recently obtained a military-grade nerve gas. Sabrina had gotten in, made the strike and gotten out in twenty-four hours. Eliminating that target had allowed local authorities to seize the highly lethal nerve gas before it could be used to take innocent lives.

She’d been fine until she returned home.

The reality of what she’d done had hit her then. Marx had known it would. He’d been waiting for her at her apartment door.

During the verbal exchange about how she was fine, she’d fallen apart. He’d talked her through the turmoil, helped her to see the greater good she had accomplished. His wise and calm reasoning had done the trick.

Sabrina blinked away the memory. Funny thing, she realized just then—her father had done that for her dozens of times growing up. He would talk her through a trying time. She supposed, in a way, Marx had stepped into his shoes.

“Way too deep, Sabrina,” she mumbled. She needed to relax and put work behind her.

She’d certainly created the right atmosphere for it. The candles flickered and glowed, filling the room with a cozy ambience. The scented ones oozed their subtle fragrance into the air, adding to the pleasant mood. She’d left the overhead lights off, allowing only the illumination of the dozens of candles. Just like she’d told Trainer she wanted to do.

She smiled and wondered if he’d managed to make his date. Big Hugh was likely out with his significant other, enjoying a quiet dinner for two at some ritzy restaurant off the beaten path. Angie would be at home with her husband of twenty years and their three kids, maybe watching a movie with a tub of buttered popcorn.

Sabrina couldn’t fathom how Angie managed it. Her husband couldn’t know about her work. He thought her employer was an international temps and personal assistants agency. An agency that provided support personnel for visiting dignitaries from other nations or provided support personnel for American businessmen traveling to foreign countries whose companies had no ongoing reason to keep one or more linguists on staff. And that was exactly what IT&PA did in addition to covert government operations.

It was the perfect cover. Movement in and out of a country was never seen as suspicious, and many times their targets were the ones doing the hiring. Now that was burrowing in deep. That was the ultimate cover, one the enemy didn’t suspect for a moment. The usual government agencies couldn’t hope to accomplish that depth of infiltration.

Not everyone employed at IT&PA were secret agents. Some were “exempt” employees, meaning they were exactly what they appeared to be—clerical personnel with additional skills such as multilingual abilities as well as in-depth knowledge of foreign countries. Oftentimes a job consisted of nothing more than serving as an official guide on a visit to another country. Anything a businessman or woman, American or otherwise, could need in the way of temporary assistance would be found at IT&PA.

The agency had been the brainchild of Anderson Marx, the director. Only the president himself, and the directors of the CIA, FBI and NSA were aware of IT&PA’s presence in the spy world. IT&PA was neither bound by borders nor inhibited by the usual rules. Sabrina and her colleagues could be assigned anywhere in the world at any time, and only in the situations where the usual means would not work or had failed. The latter was the reason the standard rules didn’t apply. IT&PA was only called in once there were no other alternatives.

Today’s mission could have been so much worse. She’d been lucky. The four men who’d taken the Stavi family hostage could have killed them all before she’d arrived. The fact that they hadn’t suggested two possibilities—the intelligence they’d hoped to obtain had been extremely valuable, or the men simply were inept.

Telling herself it wasn’t her problem now, she ducked her head under the water and banished all thoughts of the day’s mission. The big brown eyes of those children and their mother elbowed their way into her thoughts, interrupting her desperately needed relaxation. She’d saved them. Why the lingering feelings of uncertainty?

Because it could have so easily gone the other way.

She went through this every time children were involved in a mission. After seven years, one would think she would get over the after-the-fact apprehension. But she didn’t.

If she mentioned the feelings to her team, Angie would insist that it was nothing more than her biological clock screaming at her since those feelings were unfailingly related to missions involving children. Sabrina was thirty-two, after all, Angie would say.

Sabrina didn’t know how to tell Angie this, but she didn’t have a biological clock. It had given up hope and gone out of business years ago. She had no desire for those kinds of strings. No permanent attachments allowed her to accept any and all assignments without hesitation.

The trickle of denial that filtered through her ticked her off. She wasn’t about to let the past intrude on her present.

Not ever again.

Sabrina climbed out of the tub. Frothy bubbles slid down her skin and accumulated on the floor as she stepped onto the cool tile. She should eat. The wine and the bath had been very nice and very necessary, but she needed food. She’d learned from experience in the past couple of years that food could be an extremely reliable way to distract herself from things she didn’t want to think about. Her intense workouts allowed for that occasional indulgence.

Grabbing a couple of big fluffy towels, she wrapped her hair in one, turban-style, and swabbed her body with the other. As she did, she considered what frozen entrées she had in the fridge. There might be the makings of a salad if the expiration dates hadn’t passed too many days ago. She spent so many late nights at work she didn’t stock the refrigerator regularly and as soon as she did, she ended up throwing half of the food out a week or two later after returning from an unexpected mission.

The doorbell rang as she shuffled out of her room. A frown tugged at her brow. It was almost nine and she just wanted to vegetate for the rest of the evening. Why the heck would anyone be at her door now?

Then she remembered.

She stalled in the middle of her living room. No way was she going to answer that door.

This was the one downside to being single. Well-meaning friends. If her single friends were involved in ongoing relationships, they wanted everyone else to be as well. Not one, especially the one likely outside the door just now, could understand how Sabrina could be happy without a steady guy in her life. She couldn’t tell them that a steady relationship created unnecessary questions.

A new round of pounding on the door rattled the hinges. “Sabrina! I know you’re in there.”

Damn. This was a new low even for Veronica.

Veronica Call and Sabrina had started out at the UN together as substitute interpreters. They’d stayed friends after Sabrina was recruited by IT&PA.

“I’ll just keep banging until you open up!” Veronica warned. “Or your neighbors call the cops.”

Knowing she wasn’t kidding, Sabrina released both dead bolts, then wrenched the door open. “I was in the tub.” Not exactly a lie.

Veronica, hands pushed beneath a heavy fur coat and stationed on red silk clad hips, surveyed her skeptically. “You knew I was coming,” she accused. “We planned this evening days ago.”

“I forgot, okay?” Sabrina stepped back, allowing her furious friend to enter.

Once inside the door, Veronica pointed to Sabrina’s bedroom. “Go get dressed. You’re going out.”