An Act of Persuasion(21)

At least he hoped so.

“Bullshit.”

Mark shrugged and obviously wasn’t willing to lie beyond what he’d already alluded to.

“What the hell are you doing here anyway?” Ben asked. “Shouldn’t you be the new section chief in Afghanistan?”

Initially he’d been annoyed he hadn’t been aware of Mark’s presence in the city—it wasn’t until Anna had announced who she was working for that Ben had known. A former agent, moving into his territory. It should have shown up somewhere on his radar. No allowances for the fact that he’d been quarantined in a sterile room at the hospital while Mark set up shop.

“I quit. Just like you did.”

Ben had left the agency when the politics started to matter more than the results. There were days he’d felt the entire agency was a tool being used solely for the administration’s end game. Instead of uncovering information, they were manufacturing it—something he was not willing to be a part of. Unfortunately, the higher up in the ranks he was promoted, the closer he got to the bullshit that was D.C. It was either leave or have his career stall at the same level, watching less talented but more politically savvy agents advance ahead of him.

“Like I did?” He thought Mark would have been one of those more politically savvy agents.

“Stevens got promoted to section chief.”

Then again, obviously not. Stevens’s quality of work left a lot to be desired—a fact overlooked by the key decision-makers he networked with. “You were better than him.”

“Yes, I was. But you know that doesn’t always matter.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“After you left the fun of trying to one-up you was gone and my ambition seemed to tank with it. I couldn’t deal with the politics any more than you could. Watching men and women who cared more about furthering their careers than getting the job done was driving me mad. I discovered I wasn’t willing to play and so I got skipped over. Then some other things in my life changed and that was a sign that it was time to get out of the game. The fact that I made the transition so easily tells me I already had one foot out the door.”

“Really, you’re finding the...transition...easy?” Ben hadn’t. It had taken him nearly a full year to stop looking over his shoulder every other second. Now, he did it only every other minute. So far in the six years he’d been out no one had ever been behind him.

“I’m...adjusting.”

“Why here? Why Philadelphia?”

“I have my reasons,” Mark said. His attention seemed to wander momentarily before he refocused on Ben. “They weren’t all about you.”

Ben believed him. In a strange way, as much as Mark had always annoyed him with his antics, it felt right to be sitting here with someone who had lived the same life he had, who had seen the same things and knew the same information. Like he was finally connected to someone again.

He hadn’t felt like this since...Anna.

The reason he was here.

“She’s pregnant with my child.”

Mark didn’t flinch from the sudden shift in the conversation. “I know. She told me when I interviewed her. You want to talk about how you let that happen with an employee?”

“You knew she was pregnant and you still hired her?” Ben asked, ignoring the other comment.

“I’ll take that as a no, you don’t want to talk about how it happened. Okay, fine. Why did I hire her? Ben, you know it would be discrimination if I held her pregnancy against her. Besides, she could have come to me and said she had two months to live and I still would have hired her. She was your trusted assistant for six years. Which means she’s completely and utterly capable. You wouldn’t have kept her around for so long if she wasn’t.”

“What do you have her doing?”

“Right now setting up the office. Placing ads in appropriate print media and online, setting up a computer system for billing and a fair amount of researching on the cases I currently have.”

“She said you specialize in cold cases.”

“I do. I have no intention of spending my days photographing cheating spouses. I’m fortunate enough to have saved quite a bit of money during my years abroad so I can select only the cases I want. Which means criminal cases most likely. And I like challenges, so the older the case, the bigger the challenge.”

“You said right now. What are your plans for her in the future, if she chooses to stay with you?”