With a Pull of a Trigger

Chapter Twenty-Two

And that was the start of his and Eena’s close friendship.

“You have a mission.”

Reini looked up from the documents she was signing and found Amrie with her arms crossed, a stormy expression on her face. She wasn’t happy about something, and whatever it was, it involved Reini.

“I do?” asked Reini, closing the folder of documents she had been reading over and opening the brown folder Amrie had just put on her desk.

“Yes. Zurich, Switzerland. Jet leaves in three hours. Your mission is to obtain information from one of our Cell Twelve agents. This is a covert operation. We cannot afford for our agent to be seen with you, understand?”

Reini nodded once, looking over the agent file. She closed the file quickly and looked up at Amrie, finally choosing to acknowledge the problem. “What is it?”

Amrie shook her head. “It’s just another one of our problems, don’t worry about it. Miss Aspen and I are working on it.”

Reini furrowed her eyebrows, putting both arms on the cold desk. “What is it? Maybe I can help.”

Amrie sighed. It was obvious that she was barely making it anymore. “You can’t, Reini, and even if you can, you won’t. Langley called, and apparently, Homeland Security called them, demanding to know what happened to Agent Acker.”

“Oh,” said Reini, her shoulder slumping in defeat. “How are you handling it?”

“We’re leaving in half an hour for Virginia,” said Amrie, checking her watch in such a way that made it the more obvious that she was tired. “Homeland Security is concerned about the welfare of the Pentagon, and they want to meet with us personally.”

Reini nodded slowly. “You won’t need me?”

“We won’t, or at least, not yet. If we need you, we’ll tell you. Our meeting will be in two days, and the only reason why we’re flying early is because the director is paranoid we’ll die on his watch.”

“Okay,” said Reini, nodding her head. Her lips were pursed, and vivid images of what happened that day played across her mind’s eye. “Okay.”

“Do you still have the mission report from Taiwan?”

Greg removed his thin and silver reading glasses with rectangular lenses, and closed his eyes, tweaking the bridge of his nose in an attempt to stave off the headache he knew would be coming soon. He opened his eyes, looked at the other only occupant of the room, and sighed, turning back to look at his table filled with folders and files. “I don’t know. I’ll check.”

The Cell Twelve offices were cold, and the fact that Greg and Eena were the sole occupants of the room, stuck with paperwork, was not helping Greg’s mood. His mood was, quite frankly, dropping at a fast rate, and he knew that if he didn’t take a break, he would just snap. However, he also knew that if he took a break, he wouldn’t get anything else done, so he resorted to closing his eyes every few minutes or so, trying to rest eyes that were watery from the bright light of his laptop screen.

A quick look through the stack of paperwork he had finished revealed the folder he was looking for, and he threw it, sending it flying to Eena’s empty desk, the desk next to the one behind his.

“Thanks,” Eena gratefully said, quickly opening the folder and looking over her own.

And of course, because the gods hated him and he didn’t have the sense to put the stack of finished folders on the floor by his desk, the stacks of both unfinished and finished paperwork tumbled down his desk, mixing up the folder he was done with and the folders he hadn’t started on. Groaning in frustration, Greg closed his eyes, already feeling the headache that was coming. When he opened his eyes, he didn’t expect a folder to be held very near to his face, and he most definitely did not expect the woman holding it.