Elizabeth remembered when she was Pluto. The planet, not the Disney character.
It wasn’t that long ago. She’d transferred into the elite Field Unit of the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Lower Manhattan, the only agent ever not to be handpicked by the task force chief, Evan Pritchard. He wasn’t happy about it.
But Evan Pritchard knew better than to butt heads with the mayor.
Mayor Edward “Edso” Deacon held sway over the city with the kind of power not seen or felt since the days of Fiorello La Guardia. If Deacon wanted his young and pretty detective Elizabeth Needham transferred into the JTTF from his personal security detail—for reasons that he had zero intention of sharing—then, damn it, no one was going to stop him. Including Evan Pritchard.
Elizabeth got the job. Her getting the most high-profile assignments, however, was another story. She’d arrived only days before the attempted Times Square bombing. So much for easing into things. But when the follow-up attack on Grand Central station was thwarted and the terror cells eradicated, it was no longer all hands on deck at the JTTF. The natural pecking order resumed. Elizabeth was the rookie, the newbie, the most distant planet in Pritchard’s solar system. Pluto.
That was then. This was now.
While Pritchard was demanding, caustic, and sometimes a flat-out son of a bitch, he was also fair. His unit within the JTTF was first and foremost a meritocracy. The harder you worked, the more you rose in that pecking order, and no one worked harder than Elizabeth. Pritchard took notice. As sure as gravity, she began being pulled in to assist on the most high-profile assignments. He even had her move desks so she’d be closer to his office. Why bother dialing an extension when all you have to do is scream?
“Needham! Get in here!”
This morning was no different.
Elizabeth rose from her chair at the sound of Pritchard’s booming voice, taking the short walk to his office. It was before 8:00 a.m., and he knew she’d already be at her desk—even though most of her fellow agents weren’t at theirs.
“Needham!” he bellowed again. He sounded like James Earl Jones with a megaphone.
“One day, he might actually say please,” muttered Pritchard’s assistant, Gwen, as Elizabeth passed by. Gwen, short on height and long on chutzpah and sarcasm, had been with Pritchard for decades. His hours were her hours.
“Don’t count on it,” Elizabeth muttered back, adding a wink.
Elizabeth entered Pritchard’s office, taking a seat in one of the two metal folding chairs in front of his massive yew desk. The chairs were purposefully old and unpadded. A hard reminder, literally, that no agent should ever feel too comfortable in front of him.
“What are you working on, Needham?” he asked.
Pritchard knew what all his agents were working on, all the time. Elizabeth was half tempted to point that out. The other half, which included her brain, thought better of it.
“I’m on that offshore gambling thing,” she answered.
“You mean, Rabbit’s Foot?”
It wasn’t a question, but a reminder. Pritchard wanted Field Unit operations to be referred to by their official name. Order and consistency was paramount to the former land component commander from Desert Storm. He never once referred to that operation as “that freeing-of-Kuwait thing.”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, correcting herself. “Rabbit’s Foot.”
“Who are you partnered with?”
Again, Pritchard already knew the answer to the question he was asking. “Sullivan,” she said.
“Anything to share?”
“Nothing yet, although that might change by the end of the day. Turkish intelligence is finally cooperating.”
The purpose of Rabbit’s Foot was to track large payouts by offshore gambling sites to shell companies possibly set up by terrorist groups. While the vast majority of operations that ran through the Field Unit of the JTTF were based on actionable intelligence, there were occasionally those that fell under the heading of speculative intelligence, otherwise known as a hunch. Instinct.
Elizabeth watched as Pritchard leaned back in his chair. She was certain he was about to ask her how she and Danny—Agent Sullivan—were able to pull the end run around the Turkish minister of finance, who’d been adamant about not sharing private banking information for suspected shell companies based in his country.
But that’s not what Pritchard asked.
He had a different question. A real doozy. “So, Needham,” he said, folding his arms. Pritchard always had his sleeves rolled up tight to his elbows. “Are you sleeping with anyone these days?”