“Hi, Gianna. How are you?” Five little words. Five innocuous, toneless words. Five bullets that scored dead centre of their target. There was no need to answer. He wasn’t concerned about her well-being. His presence in her workroom said it all. Ironically this was the fifth attempt by the State Department to reach her and this time they chose the right tool, the kind that didn’t rely on electronics to deliver its message. He simply knocked on the door and then walked in without waiting for an invitation.
The moment she saw him the bile rose in her throat. The only reason she didn’t throw up was because she knew Nick wouldn’t understand the true nature of her discomfort. He might even ask if it was something she ate for breakfast. She knew that the State Department wouldn’t give up trying to coax her to do a small ‘favor’ for them, but she truly didn’t expect to see Nick Penney walk through the door of her work room. She had already ignored then blocked their emails. She was under no obligations to respond to unsolicited emails, even if they were from the government. She turned off her cell phone, shredded their couriered mail un-read, recycled faxes and turned deaf to phone calls through the landline. Once the situation reached this stage, she knew a live presence was inevitable, but she expected a couple of humorless bureaucrats to walk through the door and start threatening her into compliance—not the man she woke up to every morning these past two years.
He tried to smile, failed and then settled for a small hand-wave at her messy work bench, and said, “Dr. Pontiac, I see you’ve been so busy that you probably didn’t even take a coffee break. You must be starving. How about I take you out to lunch?”
“What a surprise to see you, Agent Penney, especially since you said this morning that you were taking me out to dinner to that new sushi house you found in Bethesda,” she said, putting down a brush she was using to clean the surface on the mandible where she was about to apply glue. She was working on the last skull. The other three already rested in their holding webs, ready to be scanned.
He turned to a side but not fast enough. She caught a tail end of a smile fragmenting into a grimace which was a much better expression, given the situation.
“I couldn’t wait until tonight,” she heard him say but the urgency that should have driven those words wasn’t there.
“And yet Nicolas Penney I know is very patient—as a man and as our country’s policeman,” she said, keeping up her end of the feeble charade. For the first time in four years she’s known him, she didn’t want to be in the same room with him. He was thirty four years old, well over six feet tall and built to carry the world on his shoulders, and still as lovingly earnest and honest as a boy-scout…until today.
