Chapter 5

Charlie paces back and forth in the coffee room, her hands enclosed around a steaming cup of coffee, her eyes half shut as the earphones in her ears play her latest negotiation back to her from audio file on her iPod. She listens to the woman's trembling voice demanding to be left alone and her calm tone answering back, listening for any signs that she could've ended the standoff sooner.

It's been three days since her domestic violence case and she's relieved she hasn't been called to one since. She's still having nightmares from it, her coping pattern entailing coffee and 2am nights at the office, the flickering florescent lights above her desk making her headaches a killer as she eyes the half empty bottle of Advil sitting in her top drawer.

She listens to the woman's voice rise and Charlie's calm voice soften and Charlie inhales and exhales as she listens, replaying the scene in her head as she continuous to pace. It's not until she turns around does she see Steve watching her, his arms crossed across his chest as he leans against the doorframe of the coffee room. She pulls one ear bud out of her ear and stops her pacing.

"Sorry I was caught up in… this." Charlie motions to her earphones and iPod, tugging the other earphone out and starting to wrap the chord around the iPod.

"I called your name a couple times but you didn't hear me. I figured I'd just wait till you turned around then startle you."

Charlie grimaces remembering the last time when Steve couldn't get her attention and had touched her shoulder while she was reviewing audio from a case. She had nearly broken his nose at her suddenness to get away. Touches that she wasn't prepared for didn't suit her.

"What do you need?" She grabs the coffee pot and refills her cup, dousing the steaming liquid in sugar, the heat of the coffee radiating through the cup and into her hands.

"Briefing in ten minutes on the 22nd floor. You ready?"

Charlie nods, her nerves steel as she leans her hip against the counter. The briefing was going to be in front of the top FBI agents who were going to be getting a rundown on her techniques as a hostage negotiator to bring back to their own guys in Washington. Being one of the top negotiators in the country with the least casualties they had ever seen had its perks. Many people usually mistaken her for the receptionist or the wife one of the guys, she makes sure that they never make that mistake again.

"I'll change and meet you in 7 minutes."

She trades her worn in blue jeans with the hole in the knee for black highwaisted jeans with a zipper running up the side and a cobalt blue button down top that matches her eyes. Her hair runs loose around her shoulders, waving gently to the middle of her back and as she does a turn in the mirror to make sure everything looks right her heeled black ankle boots click on the tile floor.

She slides her badge into the waistband of her pants and holsters her gun in the specialty holster that was designed for her at the small of her back. Her shirt is tucked in so the gun is visible which is on purpose. Walking into a room of men who have their weapons holstered to their sides that are used as a first resort, she shows her gun is a last resort and that she can hold her own.

Her boots click as she walks down the hall and towards the elevator, nodding at the people she knows as she enters the elevator and rides it to the 22nd floor.

She can already hear the buzz of voices as the steps off and takes a deep breath. She enters the room, ceiling to floor glass windows and chairs set up across the floor and her stool set up right in the middle of the stage at the front of the room. The room is filled with men and a few woman, all talking with cups of coffee in hand, all dressed in standard black slacks and button downs with blazers. People take notice of her attire quite quickly.

She finds her usual seat at the front of the room and crosses her legs, waiting for Steve to find her, preferably with coffee which he does in less than two minutes.

"Big crowd huh?" He hands her a steaming cup of coffee and she accepts it gratefully, taking a cautious sip.

"We've done bigger ones." She smiles a reassuring smile and he pats her knee.

"You'll be great. You always are." He then gets up and grabs the microphone from the table nearby, asking everyone to take their seats.

"Agents, you are here to learn about the newest negotiating techniques that have our casualty rate down to 7%. The only hostage negotiator who has created and has brought this cities casualty rate down to 7% is here to speak with you. Charlie Greyson."

There's applause and she smiles at Steve as she rises from her seat and accepts the microphone with one hand, setting her cup of coffee down on the table on stage beside her. She settles onto the stool and schools her expression to confident before speaking.

"Three years ago I was recruited by Special Agent Steve Cleary because I had a specific type of skill set that he hadn't seen before. Three years ago I met Steve while taking a set of aptitude tests that had been recommended to me by my superiors after I had surpassed their colleagues in my first year of training. I scored in the top 4% range for conflict resolve and was set to train with some of the best in the country in hostage negotiation."

She pauses and lets her words sink in and keeps eye contact with the crowd as she continuous. "Within the first three months I came to understand the type of person it takes to deal with these situations on a daily basis. You need to be calm, you need patience and you need to be willing to take risks. I came to Steve after only four months into training and I told him I didn't think hostage negotiation was for me. I asked Steve to let me handle a situation on my own –unheard of for someone four months into their training, but I needed to know if I could do it, if whatever I thought could be done better would actually work.

"That evening I was called to a hostage situation regarding three men holding hostages in the World Bank. There were seventeen hostages and when the situation was resolved nine hours later, there were seventeen survivors. From then on I was given higher priority assignments to handle on my own along with my own team who have stayed with me for the last three years."

Charlie takes a drink of coffee and relaxes on the stool. "Hostage negotiation means taking a risk every time you get a call. Most of the negotiators I worked with, most of them in the FBI, prefer to work via phone communication where they have a team on standby. I however, prefer to be on the floor with the threat and the hostages. That means walking into a situation clean, no gun, no comm, no vest. That first ten seconds before you walk into the situation is where you find out how ready you are to get shot. Whoever your negotiating with can sense your tension, they're adrenaline is already coursing through them, to come into a situation and act like you're in charge will not only get you shot, it will result in casualties.

"My team thought I was crazy the first time I told them I was walking into a situation clean, but they have now realized that in order to resolve a situation and come across and a non-threat –you have to look like unthreatening."

Charlie spends the next forty minutes discussing the various ways she calms down a threat without using the words calm down. When the forty minutes come to a close she takes a sip from her almost empty cup of coffee and stands to stretch her legs.

"Does anyone have any questions?"

Hands shoot up and she point to a younger looking man in a powder blue dress shirt.

"Is it true that you're only 23?"

Charlie internally sighs. This question has the potential to break her entire briefing for just that fact that she is about ten years younger than most of the people in this room, and twenty years younger than any other established hostage negotiator.

"Yes I'm 23. I was recruited when I was nineteen and I was twenty one when was assigned my own team to handle cases. I am the youngest hostage negotiator in the country as well as one of the only five female ones and the only hostage negotiator in Chicago."

When she says this she isn't bragging, it's fact. Being the youngest in the country and female has its downturns and she experiences them at least once a day, she has the right to state what she's capable of.

Another man raises his hand and she points at him.

"What made you decide you wanted to be a hostage negotiator?"

"At first it was because the tests that I took told me that I would be an ideal candidate but the more calls I took that had me in the middle of crisis's, the more I realized I had found where I belong. Hostage negotiation is the chance to stop a turn of events just by being there. Domestic violence, victims held at gunpoint in a bank or trapped on an airplane, they didn't ask to be there, there is nowhere else they would rather be. But being a hostage negotiator means taking the chance to save those lives, to intervene in the courses of evil and get a little justice."

The man raises his hand again and Charlie shrugs off the annoyance, masking it with a polite smile as she nods to him.

"But what moment made you decide that that was where you belonged?"

Charlie hates this question, the exact moment sticking to her brain like tar and she stares down the man asking the question.

"What's your name?"

"Adam." He almost looks smug when he speaks and she wants to punch the smile off his face.

"What division of the FBI are you apart of Adam?"

"I just finished at Quantico."

He says this with a smug smile too and she sits on the stool as she stares at him.

"And you're interested in hostage negotiation?"

He nods, "I seems interesting, like it's never boring."

"How old are you Adam?" she asks and when he tells her he's twenty four she smirks.

"It was a freezing cold day in November when I got a call saying that I was needed. I wasn't even on call, but no one else wanted to take this case because of the way it would appear to the public eye if they failed. I remember showing up at the station and Steve, he had this look in his eye, almost like he was scared for me.

Anyway I rode with the team to this tiny little neighborhood where this rundown brick house sat on the corner of this forgotten road. As soon as the engine shut off in the car you could hear the screams that came from the house. Inside was two little girls and they're mother and the mother's ex-husband. The day in November was Remembrance Day and he had just returned from Afghanistan after a three year tour. He had such extreme PTSD he had almost killed her in the middle of the night while thinking he was in combat and then had gone to his daughters room to take care of them as well. She had told him that he needed to leave because she feared for her and her daughter's safety. I sat on their cement steps for almost three hours in the freezing cold trying to talk him into letting me inside when a rookie agent that had just graduated decided that he could do my job better than me.

You see the FBI had sent him here because he was interested in hostage negotiating and thought some real world experience would do him good, too see if he really had what it took to spend seven hours talking to someone standing on the top floor of a building and watching them step off the ledge in front of you.

Anyway he had his sniper positioned as backup from our other sniper and this rookie decides to take the shot, without my order, trying to be the hero. It turns out the father was so paranoid that he installed bulletproof glass into their living room window."

Charlie stares down the man and watches him squirm.

He fired that shot and less than a minute later I kicked down the door of that house to watch that man put a bullet into his wife and two daughters before killing himself. His daughters names were Ava and Lena, they were five and seven. His wife's name was Meredith."

She looks around the room at the sullen faces in the crowd and feels the ache in her chest.

"You're right," She looks at the man who looks embarrassed, "it's never boring. Just remember, one wrong move and you could take away someone's happiness. If you're not careful enough, if you're not patient enough, if you're in it for the spotlight. You will kill someone and it will haunt you. I've been doing this for four years and have had twelve casualties and I still see their faces every time I get called. They never leave you. If you can't live with the fact that their blood will be on your hands, then don't even think about doing this job."

She stares down that man one more time and then gets up and walks off the stage, mindful of the men watching her in a newfound wave of acceptance.