Prologue

Lee untied the lengths of cloth that had held her wrists bound behind the chair back. Her shoulders protested as she moved her arms for the first time in an hour.

"Are you alright?" he asked.

"I'm fine." she answered automatically, and then rethought the answer.

"No. You know what? I'm not fine."

"He didn't hurt you, did he?" his jaw clenched.

"Not really. He got the jump on me when I came through the office door, and the next thing I knew I was tied to this chair, and he was on his merry way with our surveillance tapes. All that effort wasted …"

Amanda looked down at her feet. She was ashamed. The surveillance tapes were their best chance to catch a ring of counterfeiters suspected of funding West African dictators, and her job had been to recover them from the suspect's office without being detected. And she'd blown it. To add insult to injury, she'd remained tied to a chair for an hour, waiting for the cavalry to arrive, which it eventually had in the form of Lee and a recovery team. But not before she'd had a lot of time with her thoughts.

"This is ridiculous. How am I supposed to be an effective member of the Agency if I can't handle a simple assignment like this one?"

"It could have happened to anyone, Amanda. You didn't realize they'd been watching you …"

"That's just it! I didn't realize. And I should have. I should be able to spot a tail by now. Lord knows I've had enough people follow me around over the past three years. But no-one's ever taken the time to train me on counter-offensive techniques. You've all been too busy complimenting me on my 'intuition', or saving me from some situation or another that I've stumbled into."

Lee thought about what she was saying. She wasn't entirely wrong. When Amanda first joined the Agency, there had never been a plan to make her into a field agent, so she'd only undergone basic protocol training. But over time, her role on his cases had evolved from administrative support and sometimes cover to one of a fully-fledged partner, albeit one without full agent status. And if he was being honest with himself, he'd sped that transition along without much thought to formal training, because it suited him to work closely with her and he figured he could keep her out of harm's way. He felt a twinge of guilt, but moved quickly past it to propose what seemed to him the most logical solution.

"Well, we're just going to have to get you some unofficial training then, aren't we?"