Catcher swore silently. He’d never been as inept with a client as he’d been in handling Agent Chapman. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been warned. But he’d always excelled in his treatment of clients, and had been certain she would be no different.
Perhaps he’d been a tad optimistic.
Polly was as headstrong as he’d been told, which was surprising since she’d done nothing to advance her own recovery. She’d made her resentment of his presence known by barely responding to his questions about her health. And she’d refused to acknowledge him at all when he’d expressed his high esteem of her illustrious career. In the end, she accomplished something no other client had ever done.
She’d made him lose his temper.
He always did what was necessary to endear himself to those assigned to him. His goal was to alleviate the patient’s physical or emotional suffering. Former clients were now friends. The agency he worked for rewarded him constantly for his success in bringing agents who’d lost will or way in their fight for the nation’s security back into the fold.
With Polly, he’d made one blunder after another. It was obvious she detested his presence, though he knew it wasn’t personal. She would have protested anyone coming into her life and telling her what she was and wasn’t going to do with her own body.
He knew the pain she still experienced was real. The woman was too direct to fake anything. The reality was that she shouldn’t have survived the brutal attack of her assailant. Between the puncture wounds, broken bones, and blood loss, she should have expired before help arrived on the scene all those months ago. Only her conditioning, mental and physical, had saved her, as well as a healthy dose of stubbornness, he was certain.
According to the Bureau, she’d never missed a day of work because of illness, had in fact been reprimanded for failing to take her vacation time before the accumulated days overlapped into the following year. And she’d placed herself in harm’s way time after time to save or hide one of the many people The Agency had assigned to her. She even had a code name: Eraser—because she was such an expert in making people disappear as if they’d never been born.
Only this one time the person she had been trying to save was slaughtered along with her children, and Agent Chapman had stepped off her perfect ladder of professionalism and took matters into her own hands. Bottom line—she’d flipped out. And an agent with her classification was too dangerous if not in complete control.
Her job was hanging by a thread—both of them, a fact he figured she knew since she hadn’t kicked his teeth in already. But she also had to be aware that her skills were greatly needed. There were precious few agents who equaled her in stealth, skill, and ability. She could perform the most delicate of assignments, even assassinations when necessary, then disappear in plain sight within inches of her assigned victim. She’d been trained with, and by, the toughest sub-agencies within the mother of all government agencies.
Polly was special. She was lethal. Few who knew her professionally had a clue that the savior of the innocent in the Witness Protection Program was more deadly than the people her clients fled. It was uncommon, outright unheard of, for a government agent to use one agency job to cover what was in fact her real purpose within another branch of the same agency—a branch that remained unknown to any but those with special clearance. He’d only been informed of how special she was after she’d nearly died, because it was his job to patch such people back together. It was a career he always took seriously, but this time it was more personal.
He admired her. She was the best of the best at what she did. And what she did was save the world from the worst of the worst. While others sat in their homes watching sitcoms or playing game shows, she flew across oceans to take out the bad guys. Those who procured or produced weapons of mass destruction, terrorists, and any other miscreants the government declared worthy of a red alert.
She had as many faces as other women had shoes, and as many identities to boot. She breathed, ate, and slept her dual careers, and she took her lumps without complaint. Until now.
The Agency considered her broken.
Her physical condition wasn’t the issue. The problem was that Miss Perfect Agent had freaked out after the grotesque slaughter of her client and the three children. She’d lost her ability to detach herself from the results of that madman’s work, then followed that up by disobeying a direct order, and in the process nearly got herself killed. To top it off, the perp had escaped.
None of that would matter except she wasn’t recovering. She was refusing to follow orders and get counseling. She wasn’t making the scheduled visits to see her physician. She was determined to ride around in an electric wheelchair instead of fighting for her strength. Her emotions now ruled where once there had been only an analytical mind that dictated how she logically functioned.
Catcher exhaled heavily as he stared into the space where he’d last seen her entering her room. If he couldn’t help her, if he failed, then the nation would lose one of its greatest secret assets.
He’d have no choice. He’d have to kill her.
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