The two men groaned in protest.
“I work with my brain,” Steve said, making a dismissive gesture with his left hand, still holding his latte in his right hand. “I don’t need any self-defense… I’m a shrink. I can talk my way out of pretty much anything.”
“You’re not gonna talk your way out of this one, Steve, that I can promise you,” Lou replied.
“I don’t need this either, I think I’ll head out,” Brian said, making a beeline for the exit. “Thanks for the coffee, mate.”
“Not so fast,” Lou said, cutting across his path. “I was tasked to do a job here, and I will not fail.”
Brian stopped and looked him in the eye. Then he relaxed a little. “OK, let’s see what you have. Although I have to warn you, I am a total klutz when it comes to guns and fighting. I am a businessman; I fight with numbers.”
“What am I doing here, Lou?” Tom asked, surprisingly appearing out of nowhere. “I have tasked you to train the team. Why did you call me?”
Unperturbed, Lou handed Tom the remaining cup of coffee.
“Well, aren’t you a part of the team?”
They all laughed, seeing how shocked Tom looked.
“I’m not… Well… I don’t need this, you know. I rarely go undercover any more, I just stay behind—”
“Oh, no, no, no,” Brian said, grabbing Tom in a side hug, “what’s good for the goose, you know…”
“Yeah, OK,” Tom conceded. “Lou, please remind me to train you on how to take direction,” he added with humor in his voice.
Tom Isaac was the founder of The Agency, the man who had created their small investigative unit, focused solely on high-profile corporate clients. He was the one who brought them all together — their mentor, and their friend. To Alex, he was more than that; Tom and his wife, Claire, had become Alex’s family.
“Ready?” Lou asked, and was immediately rewarded with a variety of grimaces, long sighs, and smirks. He didn’t seem to care.
He opened a duffel bag filled with handguns. “Brian, what do you do if you have to fire this weapon?”
“Umm… I examine it and, if available, I read the manual first,” Brian replied, and Alex couldn’t contain a chuckle. In all fairness, she had been the only one who had discharged a weapon in the past couple of years. However, without Lou’s diligent training in Krav Maga and firearms, she would have been toast a few times over.
There was no way of knowing, before taking a client’s case, what types of danger they’d be facing. Most of them had worked for The Agency for more than ten years and their lives had never been in any significant danger. Corporate investigations sometimes bordered on boring rather than adventurous, or even dangerous.
Yet Alex had been held at gunpoint on her very first case. Gun proficiency was a good skill to master, even if one’s record didn’t support that belief. Sometimes, although seemingly benign at first, the cases they worked uncovered significant crimes being committed by people with either too much, or nothing left, to lose. That, in itself, was a recipe for danger. That was the reason why she had accepted to go through the rigorous physical conditioning Lou was imposing on her every week, complete with self-defense, close quarters combat, and timed target practice. Although, in all fairness, she still hated the crap out of that physical conditioning routine.
“OK, that’s not going to work,” Lou replied, all serious. “You have to be ready at a moment’s notice. Today we’ll do basic gun safety, gun operations, and you’ll all handle these guns until your hand knows what to do before your brain even acknowledges it.”
“Lou, please start with these two,” Tom said, “I really don’t think I need this much of—”
“Nonsense,” Lou interrupted, “what would you like to start with? A Sig? Or a Beretta?”
Alex smiled discreetly. Her protégé knew how to hold his ground.
…5
Lila Wallace straightened her flight attendant uniform, getting ready for departure. The same uniform she wore almost every day for work without even noticing suffocated her now. She had tossed and turned for the most part of the night, thinking she’d be stuck on the same flight with Mr. Flying Asshole, the first officer and copilot.
She forced herself to take a deep breath and swallow her tears. Even if he’d been a cheating bastard, fucking anyone in range who registered any life signs, she had to behave at her best, or risk being put on report by the flight’s commander, Captain Gene Gibson.
Captain Gibson is a real gentleman, she thought. Too bad they don’t make them like that anymore. Gibson had tried to warn her, discreetly of course, but she didn’t listen. She dismissed the advice for caution expressed by Gibson, who had encouraged her to give the relationship some thought, and she’d fallen hard, head over heels, for the moronic first officer Andrew Klapov. Andy, as she had once loved to call him, had been her very own Prince Charming for about two weeks, which happened to coincide with the exact time it took him to get her in bed.
She thought they had something real, and had never been so happy in her life. That lasted until their next flight together, when she’d assumed she had an open invite for Andy’s hotel room, and stumbled onto naked Andy performing cunnilingus on her colleague, Corinne. From between Corinne’s legs, Andy had looked her in the eye and smiled, licking his lips and winking at her. Heartbroken and disillusioned, she’d run out of there in tears, without being able to say a single word.
Corinne never learned of Lila’s personal tragedy; she’d been carried away on the wings of mindless bliss at that dramatic moment, and hadn’t even noticed her coming into the room.
From the scene of that crime, Lila ran all the way to the hotel’s business center, where she submitted a request for crew transfer, filled with typos and making little sense. Probably having seen such correspondence before, and understanding implicitly what had caused the request, the airline management had approved it, but it was to go into effect at the first of the following month. One more trip, that’s all she had left to endure. One more trip with Mr. Flying Fuck.
On top of it all, their typical route, which was San Fran to London and back, had changed at the last minute, and that last trip had to be to Tokyo and back. Four days instead of three. Great… just great.
She brushed her chestnut hair back and tied it neatly in a ponytail, then applied fresh lipstick and touched up her nose with the powder puff. She gently tapped, without smudging her makeup, the corners of her eyes with a tissue, to absorb the tears that had been welling there. No way was she going to look heartbroken over that prick.
“Fucking bastard…” she muttered. “I so deserve better than this.”
Then she grabbed her wheelie and walked out of the restroom, watching her reflection in the mirror, noticing in passing how strong, professional, and beautiful she looked. Not bad for a girl from Fayetteville, Arkansas. Not bad at all.
Before stepping onto the jetway, she stopped for a moment to grab the flight’s manifest from the gate attendant, and gave it a quick look, hoping for a miracle. Nope, none to be found. Flight XA233, nonstop service from Tokyo to San Francisco, had 423 passengers checked in and ready to board.
Well, it could have been worse, she thought, considering the plane’s capacity was 496. But an almost full cabin might be a blessing in disguise, keeping her busy, and making the fourteen hours go by faster.