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Williams,” he said. “Surely you knew that coming in.”
    “I couldn’t have imagined the degree,” she said.
    “Believe it or not, there are those among us who still question the viability of female agents,” Rosen noted.
    “Dinosaurs,” Audrey said quickly. “Time for them to go extinct.”
    The air in the room was alive with tension.
    “I’ve had an Undersecretary of State chewing on my ass all morning,” Rosen groused.
    “Sorry, sir.”
    “The State Department wants you reassigned,” he continued.
    “Far from the bright city lights,” Bobby said with a rueful shake of the head. “Somewhere where you won’t be granting any TV interviews.”
    “I understand sir,” she said.
    Trouble was, she didn’t. Not really. She understood that she’d committed an unfortunate breach of discretion but, wasn’t she expected to make a few mistakes? Any sort of censure was new territory for Audrey. She’d always been the girl in the front row with all the answers. She swallowed hard and wondered whether or not she was willing to be reassigned.
    Right from the beginning, she’d had misgivings about her choice. Wondered whether joining the Secret Service hadn’t merely been a knee-jerk response to looming grad school graduation. Secret Service recruiters had, after all, arrived on campus precisely at her first great ‘what am I going to do with my life?’ moment. It all sounded so romantic. Not only that, but her mother hated it. Thought it was an unseemly occupation for a girl with any Ivy League education. The daily double. What could be better?
    Audrey Williams felt herself trembling with anger as she tried to come to grips with herself and all that had happened in the past couple of days. How she’d killed a man and felt nothing other than relief that it wasn’t her body lying on the dirty grass and then spent the subsequent day and a half justifying her lack of drama to a series of well-meaning company shrinks. God only knew what conclusions they’d drawn. And now this. One slip of the tongue and she was on her way to Boise.
    “What if I don’t want to be reassigned?” she asked.
    Rosen blinked in surprise. “Refusing reassignment is not an option,” he said flatly. “May I remind you that your current status…”
    As the tension began to skyrocket, Bobby Duggan jumped in. “Let’s not be hasty here,” he said. “We….” He leaned against a corner of Daniel Rosen’s desk. His tone took on a conspiratorial air. “Quite frankly, Special Agent Williams, we would prefer not to lose you,” Bobby lied in a low, kindly uncle voice. “Director Rosen and I have discussed your situation at some length and as far as we’re concerned, you deserve an opportunity to redeem yourself.”
    Audrey frowned. She had a terrific urge to argue, to take issue with the notion of ‘redemption’ but managed to curtail it. “Sir?”
    “We need to get you out of sight and mind for a period of time. Long enough for State to cool down and move on to something more pressing,” Rosen said.
    Before she could muster a response, Bobby said, “We’ve discussed a couple of options for you.”
    “I’ll bet you have,” was what she was thinking. “Yes, sir,” was what she said.
    “We wondered if perhaps you wouldn’t like to reconsider accepting your appointment to the Behavioral Analysis Unit over in Quantico,” Bobby Duggan suggested with a smile. “You are, as far as we know, the only person ever to decline their invitation to join. The Bureau assures us their offer still holds.”
    She shook her head. She’d been all over this before. Spent weeks mulling the matter over and over in her mind and another week justifying her decision to her immediate superiors whose ire at her choice had been apparent.
    “I couldn’t do that all the time,” she said. “I enjoyed my time in the training program and I’m still fascinated by profiling, but I couldn’t spend my life dealing with the kinds of things they see