It had been any other afternoon, except for the added bonus of being able to see Jethro. As Army Lt. Colonel Hollis Mann walked smartly to her car across the Navy Yard, she felt almost as if someone was following her. Lurking, in the shadows. She smiled, and shook off the ridiculous notion – why would anyone want to follow her? Shaking her head and smiling to herself, Hollis stepped into her car, started the engine, and drove off.
Hanging bat-like in the middle of the night was Jenny Shepard, her black clothes blending into the darkness, just a pale face a slash of red hair suspended in nothingness. Watching, waiting for that moment when Mann would pull into her driveway, and then she could strike. Cautiously fingering the knife – she had decided that it was, indeed, the best course of action, seeing as office mishaps were hard to stage in a room full of agents – Jenny waited, poised, until she heard the tell-tale scrunch of a car rolling into the driveway. Mann's car.
Jenny grinned to herself, and leant forwards, hand raised, wrist flexed, preparing to throw the knife. From her lofty position in the tree that overhung Mann's house, she was perfectly concealed. As her target exited the car, and began to make her way to the house, Jenny prepared to throw, and solve this little problem for once in her life.
The last thought that passed though Jenny's head, she remembered, was a somewhat over-confident assurance that she had still "got it", and that years of politics instead of field work hadn't at all damaged her abilities. Unfortunately, although her mind was still willing, the tree, it seemed, was not. Sitting on the ground, bemused, scratched, and getting very damp, Jenny glowered up at the tree. Just as she had begun to release the knife, she had pitched forwards, hitting every branch on her slow descent to Hollis Mann's front lawn. To make things worse, the woman wasn't even dead; merely startled by the sound of something large falling out of her tree. At least, that was what Jenny imagined she had thought, although her head was still spinning. Either way, Mann was still alive, but at least she hadn't been discovered. Sighing and dragging herself up, stopping first to recover her knife, Jenny limped the two blocks to her car, stroking the scratches on her arms and face as she did so. Still, there was always tomorrow, although a new method was called for.