Calculated Risk. Stephanie Doyle

your name was Quinlan. Is that Mr. Quinlan?”

      “Just Quinlan.”

      Sabrina rolled her eyes. “You mean like just Madonna?”

      “Okay. Do you know why your father asked you to come here?”

      “No,” she answered honestly. “Last I knew he wanted me to go to Harvard. Thought that I could give those guys all sorts of answers. Whatever. He had this vision of me working in an ivory tower developing theories and shit. How far does pi go? E equals mc cubed—”

      “Squared.”

      “Not the way I do it.” She smiled cockily. Then she remembered the hours upon hours of testing and her smile quickly diminished. “But they didn’t want any answers to any problems. They just wanted to test me. I was their freaking guinea pig.”

      “And you didn’t like that.”

      “I hated it,” she clarified. “School was never my thing. And pushy people asking me all sorts of questions…really not my thing.”

      This actually elicited a small, very small, smile from the man across from her. Just to show her that he got her message, she imagined. But he said nothing. Instead he glanced down at the file in front of him again and read it for a time. Finally, he looked up and met her gaze. “Your father is considered a brilliant man. His work for the National Security Agency decrypting enemy codes has been invaluable to this country’s security.”

      “That’s my dad.”

      “Your IQ eclipses his.”

      Sabrina said nothing.

      “Your specialty is numbers. You test off the charts for spatial mathematics, but what is unusual in a case like yours—”

      “I’m not Rain Man,” Sabrina finished. “I don’t even like Judge Wapner.”

      “—is your computation ability,” Quinlan continued. “Not only can you interpret formulas but you can also apply them at high speeds. Which probably comes from your ability to hold several hundred numbers in your head at once. Your memory is extraordinary. Few people have a true photographic memory and those who do usually must concentrate on the thing they are attempting to remember. Snapping the picture in their mind so to speak. And there is only a limited time frame in which they can retrieve and recite the image or words that they’ve committed to memory. Your brain, however, seems to have a limitless capacity for…storage. You remember everything, don’t you?”

      Sabrina squirmed in her chair. That’s what the geeks at Harvard had wanted to know. How much could she remember? How far back did it go? Test after boring test to questions that she didn’t see the point of knowing the answer to. “You’re making me sound like a freak.”

      Not that she hadn’t known she was one since the age of three. She just hated to be reminded of it.

      “Tell me. Can you remember the answers to the very first math test you ever took?”

      It was addition. Four. Six. Five. Ten. Ten. The teacher thought she was being tricky by putting on the test two questions with two different sets of numbers that both added up to ten. Sabrina had been four at the time.

      Quinlan nodded again, as if her silence was answer enough for him. “Sabrina, you are a freak. Learn to embrace it.” He closed the folder, stood up and made his way to the door.

      “Wait,” she stopped him, sitting up in her chair. “Where are you going?”

      “I’m going to report my opinion of you to my superiors.”

      She felt her gut tighten and wished like hell she didn’t care what that was. “For what? What’s this all about?”

      “We call it our Youth Adoption Program.”

      “We?

      “The Central Intelligence Agency. We find gifted teens and start early with their training to become analysts or field operatives. Your father isn’t as completely out of touch with you as you like to think. He fears you’re not long for the ivory tower. And he thought this might be a challenging alternative for you and a way for you to still apply your unique gift for the greater good. Now I’m going to go tell my superiors if I think you’ll work.”

      “And do you?” she asked as he opened the door, promising herself she didn’t care.

      He didn’t turn around. But she heard him say, “I do.”

      Present

      “I want an answer. Talk to me,” he growled. “Now.”

      “I’ll talk. Not here, though.”

      Not that it really mattered where they were, but she liked the sense of control waiting gave her. He fell back against the seat, seemingly placated for the moment. She hoped that meant on some level he knew she wasn’t a traitor. Not because she cared what he thought, but because it would make her job easier. At least that’s what she told herself.

      The driver stopped in front of her house. House, she mused. More like a work in progress. She could have bought a slick new condo. Instead she had instantly fallen in love with an old lady, a Queen Anne that needed a lot of care and a lot of money. But since it had only been the second time she’d ever fallen in love with anything, she thought that it meant something.

      That was until she learned that her old lady needed a new roof, a new porch, a new heater and new windows. And that didn’t even begin to cover the work that needed to be done to her insides.

      The bitch.

      “You live here?” Quinlan asked.

      Sabrina shot him a bored look since she knew he knew damn well that she did.

      He got out and circled the car, opening the door for her. He made a move to reach for her arm since her hands were still secured behind her back, but she avoided his touch. He backed off and she managed to get out of the car under her own power.

      “Why do you always have to be so stubborn?” he muttered under his breath.

      “Where’s the challenge in being easy?” she returned. She started to walk up the cracked slate walkway when Quinlan stopped her with a heavy hand on her shoulder.

      “Can I have your word you won’t try to unman me again?” he asked, his eyes falling to the wire pinning her wrists together.

      Sabrina considered that for a moment. “Uh…nope.”

      “Then I guess I’ll have to take my chances.” He unraveled the wire restraint, pocketed it, then followed her to a porch that had more than one section of a beam missing.

      “Watch yourself,” she warned him. “Step where I step. I’m not sure that it will support your weight.”

      She took a key out of her pocket and unlocked the door, stepping back to let him inside. In a way she was curious to see his reaction.

      He said nothing moving from the foyer into the living room, but she could tell he was struck by the place. It had been ten years since the last time she saw him, but she could still read him. Not an easy thing to do with a guy whose favorite expression was neutral. But she could tell. The way he stopped and studied each piece like it was a surprise that it should be there.

      For her, walking through the front door each day was like walking back a hundred years. All of the furniture was period, but in excellent condition. Hunted down in flea markets, auctions and estate sales across the East Coast. She’d chosen deep rich colors. Purples, plums and forest green. Naturally the wallpaper on the parlor walls was new, so were the velvet drapes, but they were meticulously matched to the style of the room.

      Seeing the room through a man’s eyes, she thought about how feminine the space was. Not girly. It was much more sophisticated than that. And once again she found herself pleased with the result. This is what it was supposed to look like. She’d done right by the old lady…so far.

      “Have