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Babette? I dropped her on the ground... .”
    Quinn patted her head, smoothing her mussed curls. Sirens blared in the background. Hollow shouts echoed beneath the stage. All this had happened because of him. He’d gone away to fight a war—and now he’d brought it home.

C HAPTER F OUR
    CIA Headquarters
1324 hours Eastern Time
    Â 
    V eronica “Ronnie” Garcia stood naked and flushed outside the shower stall, scrunching wet toes on the rubber mat. Dripping tresses of coal-black hair mopped the coffee-and-cream skin of her muscular shoulders. She grabbed her towel from the hook along the wall, enjoying the coarseness of the cloth after the rigors of her workout.
    Garcia’s Russian father had blessed her with broad shoulders and a strong jaw, but in a roundabout way, he’d also given her the reason she needed to consistently hit the gym. Peter Dombrovski had been attracted to women he described with the Yiddish word zaftig . While Veronica was by no means fat, her Cuban mother had been a round woman, passing on her own ample hips. They were perfectly suited for birthing babies but gave her a tendency toward what Ronnie’s ex-husband referred to as “ghetto booty.” To spite the jerk, she ran twenty miles a week and did a kick-butt kettle-bell workout on the days she didn’t run.
    Garcia blotted at her hair with a second towel and looked down past the hard-earned collection of tomboy scars on bronze knees. She considered her somewhat stubby toes against the puddle of water and shook her head, sighing softly to herself. As a member of the CIA’s uniformed Security Protective Service, she hardly had time for shaving her legs, let alone the niceties of painting her toenails. Her dark complexion made much makeup unnecessary and her busty figure put her at constant risk of not being taken seriously in the law enforcement world.
    Jane Clayton, a svelte marathon runner from Human Resources, stood ten feet away at a bank of stainless-steel sinks. She fluffed her mousy pageboy hairdo with a blow dryer, wearing only a sensible gray skirt and white sports bra. The lunchtime workout crowd had all gone and she was the only other person in the locker room. The two women were acquainted, but not well, and in a place where trust was a seldom-traded commodity, not knowing someone well was tantamount to being total strangers.
    They’d finished their workouts at roughly the same time, but Clayton didn’t have to bother with all the weapons and gear Ronnie was faced with. She finished dressing and stepped into a pair of shiny black Danskos while Ronnie still wrestled to mash her boobs—which were proportionally in perfect harmony with her hips—into the impossible space provided by her female-cut ballistic vest.
    â€œTime for a coffee?” Ronnie asked, securing the wide straps of her vest under her armpits.
    â€œGotta have my double almond latte.” Clayton shrugged smallish shoulders. Her eyes darted to the locker room door, as if she’d said too much already. Overly talkative people didn’t do well at the CIA.
    â€œMaybe I’ll see you there then.” Ronnie smiled.
    â€œMaybe.” Clayton picked up her gym bag. She tipped her head toward the pile of gear arranged on the bench next to Ronnie. “My boss needs a staffing report, like, ten minutes ago. You still have a half an hour worth of crap to put on... .”
    â€œI suppose so.” Ronnie’s heart sank as she watched Clayton scuttle out the door. She looked down at the bench in front of her. Just putting on her patrol boots would take a couple of minutes. There was a wide gun belt, the heavy leather retention holster for her Glock forty-caliber pistol, two extra magazines of ammunition, handcuffs, a wad of keys, pepper spray, a brick-sized radio, a flashlight, and an X26 Taser. It was no wonder her lower back ached. Even with her tendency toward a ghetto booty, there was hardly enough