4. Chapter Four
Chapter four
Samantha Gunn arrived at Langley Monday morning feeling tired but refreshed, and incredibly tan as she crossed the large CIA emblem in the marble floor.
She queued up in the security line with a thermos of green tea in one hand, her leather satchel clamped under an elbow, and a smile playing at the corners of her lips.
Three days on the ocean with Jake went a long way to relieving the stress of the job, and created delicious new tensions.
Sam carried a warm ache in the pit of her belly just thinking about his lean muscular frame and the feel of his lips on her skin.
As the line to the security checkpoint dwindled, Sam liberated her laminated ID badge which had gotten stuck inside her suit jacket.
She loaded the leather briefcase onto the conveyor belt and swiped her card at the gate.
The light turned green. Sam passed through and waited for her satchel to make the journey.
“Girl, you are tan,” Charise said as she watched the x-ray monitor. Tall, with black skin, and a bright smile, Charise and Sam shared a regular back and forth every morning.
Sam smiled. “Three glorious days on a beach in Miami.”
It was a little disturbing how easily lying became when you worked in the intelligence world.
Sam kept secrets from everybody. Even the security people at Langley.
Three years running covert operations with the Rabbi in Israel had taught Sam the hard way, that you never know who’s bent, who’s passing intel, who’s being manipulated, or who’s leaking without even knowing it.
A friendly security professional might be just that, or she might be compromised.
So three days on a boat off the coast of Saint Pete, became three days in Miami.
“You gonna tell me his name?”
“How do you know there’s a guy?” Sam asked as she accepted her briefcase.
Charise pointed. “Girl, you don’t get that kind of glow from the sun.”
Sam felt her cheeks flush and her ears burn. A broad smile forced its way on her face. She tried her best to contain her excitement. “It was a very pleasant three days.”
“Pleasant,” Charise repeated and shook her head. “Go and get outta here with your bad self, girl.”
Sam waved and joined a group headed for the elevators, passing her own memorial star in the process. Because the stars are nameless, the other CIA employees had no clue that one of those stars walked among them, alive and well.
Sam grinned. Her mind returned to Jake. As good as things were with him, and they were very good, there was real cause for concern as well.
Sam pushed onto the elevator with a thousand questions crowding her mind.
She was a CIA officer attached to a desk in Langley.
Jake was… how had he described it? A knight errant.
They existed in two very different worlds now.
Jake was off the reservation, living under an assumed identity, and Sam had a nine-to-five at CIA, which translated to nine-to-ten most days.
Long distance relationships are tough under the best of circumstances. How long could she and Jake make it work? Sam didn’t want to think about that right now.
The elevator car stopped on three. Sam had to wriggle her way free of the pack, offering apologies to the people who got pushed. “Sorry. Excuse me. Sorry.” She slipped through the doors before they rolled shut.
Her desk crouched in the middle of an open floor plan.
Two modular half walls provided scant privacy.
She’d hung a Nagel print on one partition.
She’d always been fascinated by his clean lines and stark color contrasts.
Most people saw the print and assumed she was a Duran Duran fan, unfortunately.
Not that she had anything against the British pop group, but they weren’t exactly high on her Spotify playlist.
The other half wall had a framed picture of mom and dad, along with a wooden sailboat. The boat was not the Yeoman, Sam would never be that sloppy. But it reminded her of the Yeoman, which reminded her of Jake.
Her desk was just a hardened Mac Mini with a monitor and a single plant. The less distractions the better. The chaos of being smack in the middle of a busy office space was distraction enough. About the only good thing Sam could say about her new work space is that it was close to the bathroom.
“You’re back,” Trevor de Camp said. He juggled an armload of file folders mixed with newspapers, and fell in beside Sam as she made her way across the office to her cubicle. A shock of curly blond hair fell across his eyes. One hand pushed his blond mop back with an impatient stab.
“Well, it is Monday,” Sam told him with a smile. “Traditionally that is when people return after the weekend.”
De Camp laughed a little too loud, as if she’d just told a marvelous joke.
He had a boyish face that other girls around the office found handsome and a body that made women swoon.
He had graduated Camp Peary just six months ago.
He was four years younger, but to Sam he seemed a child, barely old enough to be out of the house without supervision.
In fact a good portion of her coworkers struck her as too young and too inexperienced to be in this line of work.
On a psychological level, Sam knew her own complicated journey influenced her perception.
She’d been shot twice, nearly drowned, faked her own death, and spent three years running covert ops in a foreign country under an assumed identity.
Working with a bunch of twenty-three year olds fresh out of college felt like working with kindergarteners.
Trevor passed her a stack of folders. “The take on the operations in southern Montenegro.” He loaded another stack into her arms. “The intel on the organized crime outfits in Dubrovnik.” Folds of newspaper articles added to the weight. “And several reports of an outbreak in Serbia.”
“All this from the night desk?” Sam asked.
He nodded. “Saturday as well. I can help go through some of that if you need. No problem at all.”
“Divide and conquer,” Sam said. “You take the stuff out of Dubrovnik.”
He took a set of folders back, clamped them under one arm and asked, “Any thing I can get you? Coffee? Tea?”
Sam held up her thermos in answer.
“Right,” Trevor said. “You hungry? I could get you a bagel from the cafeteria.”
Sam grinned, dropped the folders onto her desk and woke the computer with a nudge of the mouse. “I’m good, thanks, Trevor. Let me know if you find anything interesting in there. If not, just cook up a short brief and drop it in my inbox.”
“Will do, Ms. Gunn.”
He started toward his desk, directly behind Sam’s.
“Trevor?”
“Yes?”
“Call me Sam.”
He juggled the folders so he could push hair out of his eyes. “Yes, ma’am… er… Sam. You, uh, you look very nice today.”
“Thank you, Trevor.” She turned to her computer, made a quick log, then picked up the first of the intelligence briefs.
Trevor settled into his adjoining cubicle and a small smile crept over Sam’s face.
He had a gigantic puppy dog crush and, while Sam had no feelings for him, nothing romantic anyway, it’s always nice to be wanted.
Upon her return to Langley, after a lengthy debrief, Sam had been attached to the Balkans desk and mostly left to sift through intel, summarizing and passing anything important higher up the food chain.
It was boring work, and a long way from field ops.
She leaned back in her chair while she read, started to stack her feet on the desk, then remembered she wore skirts now days.
Giving poor Trevor a glimpse of thigh-high stockings might be enough to send him to the hospital.
She spent two hours reading field reports then spotted a Dilbert cartoon among the stack of newspapers.
She pulled it loose, dropping another fold of paper to the floor.
Sam smiled at the office antics of Dilbert.
Deciding that one could go on her growing collection tacked to her wall, she reached down to retrieve the paper from the floor.
The article headline said: Dozens Dead After Mysterious Illness.