Disclaimer: I don't own the situations or characters portrayed herein. I'm just playing with them for a while.
No Thanks for the Memory
Lee had a china cabinet.
She didn't know why this surprised her. Maybe it was because his apartments had always had a definite air of bachelorhood and exotic travel — bronze cowboys and wooden African folk art and Turkish metalwork all thrown haphazardly about. He didn't seem the sort of person that would own something as delicate as a glass-and-mahogany china cabinet filled with a (complete and matching) set of Pfaltzgraff covered in pretty blue flowers.
She suspected it was Amanda's doing.
Amanda, after all, knew how to jiggle the plug of Lee's coffee machine just so and where to find the sugar to refill the sugar bowl and which drawer held the spoons and how to lift the china cabinet door just a little so that it would shut right. Amanda knew where the coffee beans were kept and where the measuring spoons were. And, Francine realized as she headed back to the agency to get the surveillance van, Amanda knew where to step lightly so that the floor didn't creak.
Something was definitely up.
If only they didn't have a whole defection to worry about. Then she could have thought the whole thing through.
But they did have a defection to worry about. She blamed Amanda for that, too. After all, it wasn't every day that a basic Class C interrogation turned into a full scramble between the agency and the KGB in order to put paid to Tolst, the man who had been giving the West nothing but headaches for twenty years. And no one could have guessed that the turning point in Zhmed's decision to defect would be the fact that Amanda knew there were four Mavericks instead of three. Or that Amanda King's treehouse would loom quite so large in international politics.
Two days later, the agency had succeeded in capturing Tolst and rescued Zhmed. It was mostly down to Amanda that they figured out the most likely location of Tolst's plan at all. Still, their success had depended on them pulling a straight 72-hour shift, stealing a mail truck, wrecking a piano, bullying Pentagon and Air Force officials until they gave up highly classified information, starting a taxi enterprise, and kidnapping a human computer from under the Soviets' noses.
A remarkably smooth mission with very few hiccups, in fact.
So why did it seem that the case had raised more questions than answers?