Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sunlight glittered off brilliant blue waves as Susan Cooper strode out of the ocean, water streaming down from her hair and running in rivulets down the glossy neoprene that covered her body from head to toe, because the water was 37 fucking degrees in Nova Scotia in the spring.  She lifted her knees as she walked, trying not to catch her flippers on the rocks that made up the beach.  “Nancy?” she called, hoping the waterproofing on this earbud was better than from that mission in the Red Sea.

“I’m here, Susan!” Nancy said, her voice most welcomingly perky after a mile-long swim in just-above-freezing water.  “Did you find the submarine?”

“I did.”  Susan reached a piece of driftwood and dropped down for a much-deserved break.  “Turn on the tracker, make sure it works.”

There was a breathless few seconds before Nancy crowed with delight.  Susan let out a relieved sigh.  Success.  “What’s my exfil?”

“Someone should be there to pick you up in… ten minutes.”

Ten minutes.  Ten minutes was a long time to sit on a piece of driftwood in Canada.  With wet hair.  In March.  Susan curled up a little bit to preserve warmth and tried not to let her teeth chatter.  “How did your sniper qualifications go, Nancy?”

“Fantastic!” Nancy said.  “I broke the company record.”

“You mean the record you set last week in practice?”

“Exactly!”

Susan curled up even tighter, feeling both cold and conflicted now.  “So that means you’re moving out of the basement, right?  Into the field?”

“Well, no.  Director Crocker says I can’t go into the field until I go a week without dropping my rifle.”

“How many days have you managed so far?”

“Um, two.  And it turns out dropping rifles isn’t great for them, so now, before I can practice not dropping a rifle for a week, I have to go a week without dropping an egg.”

Susan grinned.  “And how many eggs have you dropped so far this week?”

“…eight.”

“It’s Wednesday!”

“I’ve started buying them by the crate.”

Susan sighed, amused and relieved.  “We’ll get you in the field eventually.  For now, I’m glad I have you watching my back.”  She laughed self-consciously.  “Though, I hate to say it, I’m starting to understand Fine.  The idea of being in the field without you is a little terrifying.”

“I’d be sure to find you someone just as good.  Besides, I’d still be watching your back, only instead of using a computer monitor, I’d be watching you through a sniper scope!”

That was actually a little terrifying.  Also, Susan was really, really getting cold.  “How far out’s the transport?”

“Six minutes.”

Susan groaned.  “I’m freezing here, Nancy.”

Nancy let out a sympathetic noise.  “I do have some hot juicy gossip to warm you up.”

Susan perked up immediately.  “Spill.”

“Did you hear that Fine was being sent on a mission to Italy?”

“I knew that.  He was getting briefed when I was picking up my tech for this mission.” 

“Did you know he was going undercover at a single’s resort in Italy?”

“Well, I’m not surprised.”  Without Susan, Fine’s rescue and recovery rates had plummeted.  He was currently restricted to honeypot missions, which was where his natural strengths lay.

“It’s a gay singles resort!”

Susan rolled her eyes.  “He’s done those before.  He’s the only male agent who’s bi.  Cress and Wright can’t play gay convincingly and Ford…”  Huh.  Had Ford ever done a honeypot?  It was hard to imagine him wooing anyone.  Except her, somewhat.  Did it count if you were drunk on champagne and drugged by an excess of beef jerky?

“So you know about Ford?”

“What about Ford?”

“He went rogue!” Nancy crowed.  “Again!”

“Oh, jeez.  Are you trying to tell me he didn’t believe Fine could pull this off?  Because Fine has slept with more men than I have, and Ford is… well… Ford.”

“According to Sharon, Ford has already made contact with Fine and they may be hatefucking.”

Susan let out a sound somewhere between a gasp and a wheeze.

“Or fighting,” Nancy added.  “I can be hard to tell when you only have infrared to work with.”

“Huh.”  Apparently Susan wasn’t going to be calling Ford when she got home.  Not that she called Ford a lot.  Or really at all.  Just after missions, sometimes, when she really needed to relax.  Or warm up.  Or—

A car pulled up.  “Oh, hey, Nancy, I think my ride’s here.”

“Great,” Nancy said.  “She’s going to give you a bag and take you to the airport.  You’re going straight to London.”

Which meant the Ford question was moot.  Susan dragged herself to her feet and limped toward the car.  “What’s my cover?” she asked as she opened the passenger door of the car.  The blonde woman at the wheel smiled and handed over an envelope.

Over the earbud, Nancy said, “You’re Poppy Ramsbotton, travelling to Europe for a proctology conference.”  A second later she laughed.  “Oh, I see what they did there!  How clever!”

“That’s one word for it,” Susan said, staring at Poppy’s dossier in horror.  “How does a proctologist have time to raise a herd of alpacas, anyway?”

Chapter Text

“I cannot believe I’m actually using this,” Susan grumbled, spraying herself thoroughly from a can labelled Clinical Strength Deodorant, Prescription Only.  The misting chemical smelled pretty good for what it actually was, which was a near-toxic bug spray.

“It’s not that surprising,” Nancy said over the earbud.  “The bomb maker is also an entomologist.”

A bomb-making entomologist who dabbled in genetic engineering, which explained the cloud of artificially aggressive bees swarming over the roof of the Shard.  There were so many of them that it took a minute for Susan to track down Nigel Bittleford’s dirty bomb.  “I found it,” she said breathlessly, trying to ignore the bees that were buzzing angrily less than an inch from her skin.  “What do I do now?”

Five incredibly stressful minutes later, Susan stalked away from the deactivated bomb, stripping off her calf-length hand-woven alpaca fleece cardigan.  The bees had gotten tangled up in the fleece and the cardigan was so covered in insects that it writhed on the ground.

“The bomb’s deactivated,” Susan reported from the elevator.  “But the bees aren’t going to keep the tourists out for long.”

“Not a problem,” Nancy said.  “Aldo’s in town and I’m sending him to help.”

Susan dropped her head back against the wall of the elevator with a groan.  “In that case, I’ll find my own way to the airport.  ETA to Aldo’s arrival?”

“Eight minutes.”

Damn.  Susan was going to have to hurry.

Thanks to some stealth and a little luck, Susan made it to the street without getting groped or sexually harassed.  As she headed toward the nearest tube entrance, she asked, “How goes the egg-sitting?”

“Good!” Nancy answered.  “I’ve only dropped five this week.  Also, I started hard boiling them.  It makes it less messy when they’re dropped, plus I can eat them for protein.”

Susan grinned.  Medical had been getting on Nancy about her protein intake.  Sniper rifles were heavy.  If Nancy was going to be carrying one regularly, she needed to put on some muscle.  “That’s a great idea.”

“I know!  Curtis actually recommended it.”

Susan’s eyebrows rose.  “Curtis?”

“I mean, 50 Cent,” Nancy said, sounding delighted and also a little smug.  “He sent me tickets to his last concert.”

Susan grinned again.  “That’s great, Nancy.”

Nancy sighed wistfully.  “It really was.”

Susan laughed, but didn’t ask for details.  All of these missions were recorded and she doubted either Nancy or 50 Cent would appreciate having their liaison immortalized in the CIA’s records.  “How about Fine and Ford?  Did they finish their mission?”

“Not yet, but Fine set up a camera in his room, in case the target makes a move there.”

“Of course he did.”  Fine always set up a camera in his room for honeypot missions.  He claimed it was for operational security, but the general consensus was that he was a shameless exhibitionist.  “Ford didn’t complain?”

“Apparently not,” Nancy said.  “Since he called me to ask if you’d seen the video.”

Susan felt a rising sense of… something.  Doom, maybe.  “What video?”

Susan’s phone chirped.  “That video!”

Susan glanced around, then ducked into one of London’s absurdly narrow alleys and pulled up the video.

Five seconds later she snapped her eyes shut.  “Nancy!  I’m in a public street!  I can’t be watching this!”  She opened one eye and gulped.  It looked like Fine was plenty happy when Ford did the thing with the thumb.

She closed her eyes again.  Her body was currently thrumming in a way that was not at all appropriate unless she was on a honeypot mission.

“Oh, fine,” Nancy said.  “Though you should watch the whole thing later.  For now, skip to about an hour in.”

“An hour?” Susan felt a little faint.

“Ford’s stamina is quite impressive,” Nancy said earnestly.  “Did you go to the end?”

Feeling nervous, Susan skipped ahead to where Fine and Ford were lying back on the bed, utterly rumpled and breathing heavily.  After a few moments, Fine said, “I wonder if Susan’s back from Canada.”

Susan frowned at the screen.  On the one hand, Bradley Fine was thinking about her!  In bed!

On the other hand, she’d already completed two missions – by herself! – while Fine and Ford together were still working on the one.  Jerks.

“I’m sure she is,” Ford said, and Susan felt a bit warmer toward him.  She really did like Ford, when he wasn’t being an asshole.  “Susan Cooper’s the best fucking agent the CIA ever had.  Except me, of course.”

Susan rolled her eyes.  Was Ford ever not an asshole?

There was a pause.  “I heard a rumor,” Fine said.  “That you and Susan were…”

“Fucking?” Ford asked.  “You’re damn right we’re fucking.  We’ve broken three fucking beds with our fucking.  Cooper and I have invented twenty-three positions that make the Karma Sutra look like a children’s storybook.  I once gave her seventeen orgasms in one hour and then she fucked me into a two-day coma.  And I kept her fucking satisfied for both fucking days, even while unconscious.”

“Right,” Fine said, looking dubious, which was fair since none of that had actually happened.  Though Ford was pretty good in bed, once you got past his personality, and she did regularly get more than one orgasm in an hour. 

Susan sighed.  Apparently, this mission wasn’t going to end in orgasms either.  It was hard to believe, but she was, just a little bit, missing Ford.

“I just don’t understand,” Fine said.  “What does she see in you?  You’re such a sexist prick.”

“I’m not sexist,” Ford said, sounding genuinely offended.

“You call me Beverly, as an insult.”

“Yeah, and?  Besides, what about you and that negging bullshit?”

“Excuse me?”

“Susan,” Ford said in a mocking, high-pitched voice.  “You successfully completed your mission.  Good thing the bad guy was such an idiot.”

“I’ve never said that,” Fine said, though his voice was a little uncomfortable.

Ford snorted.  “I’m not an idiot and neither is Cooper.  You might’ve gotten away with that shit when she was locked in the basement, but she’s a field agent now.  She knows when someone’s talking shit about her.”

Fine frowned.  “I don’t talk shit about Susan.”  Ford remained pointedly silent.  “I don’t mean to?” Fine added, sounding uncertain.

“Really, it just means—”

The video suddenly ended.  Susan clutched the phone, waiting for more, but the screen stayed blank.  “Nancy!  What the hell happened?”

“The camera battery died,” Nancy said wistfully.  “It’s a shame, too, things were really getting interesting.”

Interesting wasn’t the half of it.  Susan slumped back against the filthy alley wall.  “Did everyone see that?”

“Well, not the talking bit at the end.  I cut that out of the recording before uploading it to the server.”

“Thank you, Nancy,” Susan said with a sigh.  “You’re the best.”

“I hope you still feel that way after I tell you about your next mission.”

“I don’t get to take a break?” Susan groaned.  Forget Ford, what Susan was really starting to miss was her apartment.

“I’m afraid not.  With Fine and Ford both out of commission, we’re short-staffed.  Which means it’s back to Canada for you!”

“Great,” Susan said flatly, and she left the alleyway to make her way to the Underground.

“Maybe you’ll get a company holiday,” Nancy offered as Susan stumbled her way down the steps to the station.

“Maybe,” Susan said, though she doubted it.  It was true that sometimes the CIA gave field agents a paid vacation, usually as a reward for highly successful and/or highly hazardous missions.  Fine got at least one company-sponsored vacation most years, and some of the other agents had semi-regular breaks as well.  But the agents who got company holidays were all the glamorous spies, the ones who wore bespoke clothes and drank fashionable cocktails and traveled the world to blend in among the criminal elite.

Nothing at all like Susan Cooper, whose nicest cover identity to date was a butt doctor with a fetish for alpaca clothing and who seemed to spend half her mission time in Canada.

“At least I get to be in the field,” Susan muttered, and dragged herself onto a train.

Chapter Text

“Remind me again why the CIA cares about the Canadian maple syrup supply?” Susan hissed as she peered around a wall to glance at the back door of the processing plant.

“Because the maple syrup gang is using the money to fund terrorist activity,” Nancy said.  “That’s not very sweet of them!”  She laughed merrily at her joke.

Susan rolled her eyes.  She was sore, jet-lagged, sexually frustrated, and definitely not in the mood for jokes.  “How many people are in there?”

“It looks like six or seven.  I have backup on the way; they should be there in fifteen minutes.”

Susan grumbled under her breath.  She never slept well on planes, which meant her last good night of sleep was in London, while waiting for Nancy to track down the location of Nigel’s bomb.  Exhaustion combined with sexual frustration was hell on Susan’s patience.

“I’m going in.”

“What?  No!  Backup is only fourteen minutes out!”

“Have them meet me inside.”  Susan turned off her communicator and ran toward the building.

Twelve minutes later, she hauled herself out of a half-rendered vat of maple sap, just in time for her backup to burst into the room and take in the bad guys lying unconscious all over the floor.  “Uh,” Susan said, trying to wipe sap from her face without much success.  “Does anyone have a spare communicator?”

The largest agent in the room – at least six foot six and three hundred pounds of pure muscle – silently handed over an earbud, his eyes wide.

Susan took the bud and dug a little proto-syrup out of her ear canal before putting in the communicator.  “Nancy, can you hear me?”

“Susan!  I can’t believe you hung up on me!  You know Director Crocker has said—”

Susan leaned back against the vat, letting Nancy’s voice wash over her.  All around the processing room, her backup team were zip-tying Canadian thugs.  When they got to the guy that had knocked Susan into the vat as he fell to the ground, she mouthed tighter to the woman binding him.  The woman lifted her eyebrows, but tightened the restraint a couple of notches.  Susan nodded her head in thanks.

She was just wandering over to make sure she dripped as much sap as possible on the bad guys when Nancy’s rant wound down, “And if you’d stayed on the line, you’d know that Fine and Ford are in trouble!”

Susan’s attention snapped back to the conversation and she stalked past the bodies of Canadian syrup terrorists, trying to ignore the way her boots were sticking to the ground with every step.  “What do you mean they’re in trouble?”

“Sharon said that they just missed their third check-in.  No one’s seen them since yesterday morning.”

Susan’s stomach lurched.  It wasn’t uncommon for spies to miss a check-in or two – unpredictability was the nature of the game.  No one missed their third check-in if they could help it, however, since that was when the agency sent out a rescue team.  “Who’s on rescue?”

There was some typing.  “It looks like it would be you, if you weren’t just coming off three missions in a row.”

“Tell Crocker that I’m taking the mission.  Get me the details.”  Susan looked down at herself and grimaced.  “And find me a shower, please.  I have syrup in places that syrup was never meant to be.”

Chapter Text

“Giuseppe Boyanov?  Are you kidding me?”

“I’m afraid not,” Nancy said in her ear.  “He’s Rayna's cousin and the last remaining Boyanov – when Rayna went to jail, he took over the Boyanov crime syndicate and merged it with his arm of the Italian mafia.”

“I can see why the CIA would want to nip that disaster in the bud.  Was Giuseppe Fine’s target?”

“He was.  It looks like Fine was using Ford to make Giuseppe jealous, which seemed to be working until they were both kidnapped.”

“Kidnapped?  Are you sure?”

“Yeah.  Sharon went back through the footage from Fine’s room camera.  From what we can tell, some sort of knockout gas was pumped into the room through the air vents.  The boys were taken out of the building by paramedics, but never reached the hospital.  Everyone’s reviewing security footage now, but so far we haven’t found any video of them being put in a vehicle.”

“It probably wasn’t an ambulance,” Susan said, “because you would have been able to find that easily on the traffic cameras.”

Nancy hummed in agreement.

Susan swore under her breath.  “What do we know about Giuseppe Boyanov?”

“Not much,” Nancy said.  “Apparently we aren’t even a hundred percent sure he’s gay.  All we knew was that he was going to be at that resort for a meeting.  They sent in Fine to get more information.”

Susan swore again, more loudly this time.  “I’m going to have to talk to Rayna.”

“Way ahead of you,” Nancy said.  “Tickets are waiting for you at the Montreal airport.  And Susan?  Be careful.”

“Rayna’s in jail, Nancy. How dangerous can she be?”

~~~

“You’re running this prison, aren’t you?” Susan said, three minutes into her interview with Rayna.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rayna said, flipping her professionally styled hair over her shoulder and adjusting her prison uniform, which had clearly been tailored.  The prison guard who had escorted Rayna into the room was looking positively smitten and Rayna herself had a sparkle in her eye.

Susan looked at Rayna more closely.  Rayna did have a sparkle in her eye.  In fact, she looked like she was enjoying a refreshing spa retreat, not serving hard time in prison.

Susan quickly re-evaluated her entire previous interaction with Rayna.  “Oh my god,” Susan said.  “I can’t believe this.  Do you mean you were trolling me that entire time in Budapest?”

Rayna looked startled for a second, then smiled.  Unlike every smile Susan had ever seen on Rayna before, this one appeared genuinely amused.  “That’s why I like you, Susan Cooper.  You’re never quite what I expect.”

“And usually everyone behaves the way you predict,” Susan said thoughtfully, remembering some details from Rayna’s file that hadn’t seemed very important before.  Rayna had been top of her class at Cambridge, far ahead of the salutatorian.  She’d even graduated a year early, while helping to run her father’s criminal empire.  “You didn’t want to take over your father’s business when he died, did you?  You acted bored that whole time because you were actually bored.”

“It is more fun to build your own empire than it is to run someone else’s.”

Part of Susan desperately wanted to follow up on that ominous statement, but she forced herself back to the matter at hand.  “I’m actually here to talk about your father’s empire.  Specifically, about the person running it now: Giuseppe Boyanov.”

“That pathetic little sadist?  Let me guess: he’s already run the whole thing into the ground.”

“Actually, he’s captured two of our agents.”

Rayna burst into laughter.  Again, Susan was struck by how genuine her laughter was.  “Don’t tell me.  They sent in Bradley Fine to seduce Giuseppe and that darling agent in the clogs ran in and ruined the entire mission.”

“That’s… not entirely inaccurate,” Susan admitted.

Rayna shook her head.  “I have no idea how your agency suffers such incompetence.  He wouldn’t have lasted a day working for me.”

Honestly, Susan had wondered the same thing more than once.  “Do you know where Giuseppe might have taken them?”

Rayna sighed, looking bored for the first time in their conversation.  “Oh, probably to his dungeon.”

Susan’s eyes got wide.  “He has a sex dungeon?”

“No,” Rayna said.  “He has a torture dungeon.  Though I wouldn’t want to look at the place under blacklight.  A lot of neighborhood pets disappeared when Giuseppe hit puberty.”

“Oh,” Susan said with a grimace.  “Ugh.”

“Precisely.”

~~~

Giuseppe Boyanov’s house was a 12^th century castle.

“It’s actually quite interesting,” Nancy said breathlessly.  “Italy gave away hundreds of castles, to be turned into tourist attractions.  Boyanov got one on the coast and turned most of it into a luxury hotel, with the penthouse being his private residence.  We think the hotel is a cover for his smuggling.”

And for his torture dungeon, apparently.  The good news was that Susan was going to get to step foot in a luxury hotel at least once in her career.  The bad news was that she was only going to be there long enough to figure out how to get into the basement, which was where the historical torture dungeon was located.  Since that part of the property wasn’t open to the public, it was likely still being used for its original purpose.

Susan’s cover was Sasha Baciare, professional weightlifting coach.  She would have been disappointed by this cover when she first started out but, seeing as her last three covers were a beaver hunter, a proctologist, and a marine volcanologist, she would take her hideous velour tracksuits and just be grateful that they were comfortable.  Certainly, they were serving their purpose – not a single person looked her in the eye as she wandered around the hotel, placing IR sensors in discrete locations.

“Okay, I think that’s got it,” Nancy said over Susan’s earbud.  “It’ll take a couple of hours for the sensors to finish mapping the building.  In the meantime, there’s a jacuzzi in your room!”

Susan sighed.  “I don’t think I could really enjoy a jacuzzi now.  Not when the guys are probably getting tortured right this minute.”

“Field agents are trained to resist torture.”

“Trust me, I remember,” Susan muttered.  Part of her refresher training had been resistance to enhanced interrogation techniques.  Of course, the only way to learn resistance was to be subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques.  That was not a week of her life that she remembered fondly.

Using some of the skills she learned during that week of hell, she forced her thoughts in a different direction as she headed back to her room.  “How many eggs have you dropped this week?”

“Just the one!  Director Crocker says I’ll probably be ready for a rifle sometime next year.”

“And what was her tone of voice when she said that?”

“Very supportive,” Nancy said, and the kicker was that she probably meant it.  It was amazing that someone so sweet and innocent could take such satisfaction out of shooting people in the head.

On the plus side, if Nancy did ever make it into the field, she was going to be the most well-adjusted sniper in the service.

~~~

“Susan.  Susan, wake up.”

Susan snorted and jerked upright, looking around frantically before realizing that the voice was coming from her earbud.  “Nancy?  Wha—  How long was I asleep?”

“Just over an hour.  I think you needed it.”

“Yeah, I did.”  Susan yawned and stretched.  She could really get on board with these tracksuits – comfortable enough to sleep in and stretchy enough for yoga.  “I’m going to need a break after this mission, or I’m going to knock out the next bad guy by falling asleep on him.  How’s the scan coming?”

“That’s why I woke you up – it should just be another couple of minutes.”

Susan immediately got out of bed and started putting together her gear in Sasha’s gym bag: gun, baby powder (for seeing laser tripwires), pepper spray canister (which contained a powerful sedative), vaginal deodorant spray canister (which contained pepper spray), and fungal cream (infused with thermite).  She was just finishing when Nancy said, “I have a route.”  There was a pause.  “Do you have a slightly more discrete tracksuit?”

One navy blue tracksuit later, Susan was walking confidently through a door labelled “Employees Only”.  “I think everyone should be issued those tracksuits,” Nancy said, sounding awed.  “They make you invisible.”

“I don’t think a velour tracksuit would be enough to make Bradley Fine invisible.”

“That’s true,” Nancy said.  “Not everyone could pull off that look.”

Susan just shook her head.

“Head’s up, Susan.  There are two bad guys around the corner on your left.”

~~~

The door to the dungeon looked like it might actually have been the original door from the 12^th century, and the thermite gel cut through the lock like it was butter.  Inside was a surprisingly large room, with manacles dangling from the stone walls and several torture stations, including a Saint Andrew’s cross, a barrel of water next to a table with a pile of rags, and a metal chair with wires that connected to a car battery.

There were also two very dirty spies shackled against the far wall.  Both were battered and bruised, but they were conscious and at least they were still wearing their underwear.  Considering what Susan had been imagining, she’d take this as a win.

The guys saw her just a second after she saw them.  “Susan?” Fine said, sounding shocked and a little awed.

“Cooper, finally,” Ford said at the same time.  “What the fuck took you so long?”

A growl drew her attention as an enormous man with bulging muscles stepped out of the shadows.  “Oh, dear,” Nancy said in Susan’s ear.

“Coop!” Fine said, launching forward only to be jerked back by the manacles.  “Fuck!”

“Simmer down,” Ford said, lounging back against the wall.  “She’s got this.”

Susan considered her options.  She was out of ammo and the sedative spray was as likely to take her out as the bad guy if she used it indoors.  With a sigh of annoyance, she pulled out the vaginal deodorant can and got to work.

~~~

By the time Susan and the boys got back to her room, Nancy was reporting that Giuseppe had been picked up at the airport by Aldo.

“How does Aldo keep ending up on my missions?” Susan hissed as Ford and Fine fought over who got the jacuzzi first.

“He seems to travel a lot,” Nancy said.  “And he always volunteers when we reach out for local support.”

“Of course he does,” Susan muttered.  “At least this time he’s nowhere near me.  What’s our exfil?”

There was a pause.  “Nancy?”

“Agent Cooper, this is Director Crocker.”

Susan straightened automatically.  “Director!”

“I understand that you just finished your fourth mission in a row, is that correct?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And Fine and Ford are in reasonably good condition.”

Susan peeked into the open bathroom door, where it looked like the guys had compromised by sharing the tub, though they were both glaring at each other resentfully.  “Cuts and bruises, mostly.”

“Fantastic.  Company policy dictates a mandatory 48-hour break after every mission—”

Well, it would have been good for Susan to know that three weeks ago!

“And a minimum one-week recovery period after a kidnapping.  Your hotel suite is covered for the next seven days.  Enjoy your break.”

The director’s voice cut off.  A few seconds later, Nancy came on.  “Oh my God, Susan!”

“The CIA is paying for my vacation,” Susan said, feeling numb.

“You know what this means,” Nancy said.

“I’m getting a company holiday,” Susan said, and the numbness was quickly melting into a hot flash of joy.

“It means you’ve made it!  You’re a real spy!”

Susan leaned against the wall, happiness bubbling through her veins.

Nancy’s voice cut through her euphoria.  “Also, you’re still wearing your contact cameras and I noticed that the boys left the bathroom door open.”

Susan shook her head and laughed.  “They did.”

“Then what are you waiting for?  Go get your man!  I mean men!”

“Nancy, you have the best ideas.  See you in a week?”

“Of course!  I’ll want all of the details.”

“It’s a date.”

~~~

The video didn’t lie – Bradly Fine loved the thing with the thumb.