Desperate Girls (Wolfe Security #1)(79)

Which made her all the more determined to coax it out of him.

“Okay, so . . . broad brushstrokes.” He gave her a stern look.

She nodded.

“You referred to our training. That’s what it all goes back to, same as in the Marines.” He paused. “We have a saying: The more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed in war.”

The thought of him bleeding in a war or anywhere made her sick. But she kept her face blank.

“So training is key. People’s lives depend on it.” He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “We go through all sorts of drills—firearms, close-quarters combat, tactical driving. And it’s not just a one-pass deal, something we do as trainees. It’s ongoing. That’s critical. These skills—especially the shooting—they have to be practiced over and over, until it’s pure muscle memory. You follow me?”

She nodded.

“The average attack is over in less than three seconds. So there is no time—none—to hesitate or second-guess yourself. Your reaction must be instantaneous. It must disrupt the threat and save the life of your protectee. Three seconds. So we can’t be slow on the trigger or sluggish or inattentive. That’s what I mean when I say I have to be in the moment, every moment. In this job, there’s no margin for error.”

She gave another nod, and he paused to look at his hands.

“I was six years in, and I’d moved up the ranks. At this particular time, I was posted to a teenage principal.”

Brynn lifted her eyebrow. Given the time frame, a teenager could have been one of four people in the president’s or the vice president’s family.

“For the sake of the story, we’ll give her a code name. Butterfly.”

“You guys really use those?”

“We do. Makes things easier over the radio. And every family’s names begin with the same letter. Anyway, Butterfly was up in Boston visiting some friends over Christmas break, and we were with her. She told us she had plans to go out to dinner, but we’d already pretty much figured that was a ploy, because what she really wanted to do was slip out the back and go to a bar.”

Brynn smiled. “She tried to ditch you guys?”

“All the time.”

“Did she manage to do it?”

“On occasion, she did. She was actually pretty good at it. Which sucked, by the way. It never happened on my watch, but the few times it did happen, it was a shit show. ’Scuse my language.”

“That is hysterical.”

“No, it’s not.” His expression hardened. “Because one time when she tried to do it, somebody grabbed her.”

“What do you mean, ‘grabbed her’?”

“Some guy grabbed her in the back of the restaurant and locked her in the women’s room.”

“Locked her in there? Like held her hostage?”

He nodded. “This guy had been stalking her. He’d followed her all the way up from D.C., which was bad enough in itself. Then he saw his opportunity to get her alone without an agent, and he grabbed her.”

Brynn put her hand to her chest. “You must have been freaking out.”

“We were when we finally figured out what was happening. Due to some major gaps on our part, it took about ten minutes. And in the meantime, she’s in there with him, and he’s reading her a love letter.”

“So he’s crazy.”

“Schizophrenic, as it turns out. It took another five minutes for us to send a female agent in to get her out of there. She posed as a civilian, let herself into the bathroom with a key, and pretended to be surprised to find them in there. Then she had the guy on the floor and cuffed in about four seconds flat.”

Brynn shook her head. “I never saw this on the news.”

“Nobody did.”

“Was the girl okay?”

“Physically? Yeah. But she was traumatized. Scared the hell out of her. Scared the hell out of all of us.” He looked down at his hands. “This guy had mental issues, which was dangerous enough. But if he’d been a foreign operator? Or someone with military training?” He shook his head.

Brynn watched him, wondering about everything he wasn’t telling her.

“So . . . this wasn’t your shift, but somehow you took the fall for it?”

“Shift doesn’t matter. I knew about the guy, and he’d been on my radar for a while. I’d interviewed him, even. The reason he got to her was sloppiness, pure and simple. We were short-staffed across the board and cutting corners. People were skipping out on training routinely while supervisors looked the other way. On this assignment, we had too few people staffed, and the ones we did have were not on the ball. Every single agent on duty that night had worked over ninety hours that week. One had worked a hundred. You can’t run a detail with people who are sleep-deprived and strung out on caffeine. Bottom line, it’s dangerous.”

Brynn watched his eyes. “What did you do?”

“I outlined a list of procedures that were being flat-out ignored because of staffing and budget issues, put it all in a letter, and handed in my resignation.”

“You chose to leave?”

“I left in protest. But yeah, it was my choice.”

“What happened to your protest letter?”