It was there Roth found her. He saw her treat a soldier in the back of a Chinook helicopter. The soldier had just seen his entire squad blown up and Laurel handled him like a horse whisperer with a wild stallion.

Levi Roth was a man who knew it when he saw it, and when he saw her with that soldier, he took notice.

When she saw him, she thought anyone who wore a tailored Tom Ford suit and horse-bit loafers around Fallujah was out of his mind.

Soldiers on the base called him the rabbi because of his beard, but there were also rumors he was the only person in the CIA with a weekly face-to-face with the president.

That got Laurel’s attention.

She remembered standing in front of his desk at their first meeting, his secretary handing her a plastic cup of ice-water.

“Are you ready to be all you can be?” he said.

The meeting was a blur now, but she remembered learning that the operatives under Roth’s command were the four most valuable assets the nation possessed, and that he wanted her as handler for one of them.

She wondered now if she was still the person he’d seen on that helicopter. She looked at her reflection in the glass conference table and wondered, if he asked her now, would she still say yes?

He offered her the job of handler without saying what it entailed and she accepted.

She later learned what an asset was, and that her job was to keep hers on task, to make sure he achieved his objectives, came back after missions, and didn’t go off the deep end in the lulls between assignments.

And it was the lulls they worried about.

Those were the times when alcohol, drugs, and sex threatened to overtake the men who had nothing, and no one, to come home to. By the time a new asset completed his first few missions, his handler was the only person he could speak to. She was the one who knew what he’d done. The risks. The dangers. The sacrifices he made. The sins he committed.

She heard him.

She saw him for who he was.

She cared.

Or at least it was her job to appear that way.

Assets were a special breed, and they required a special breed to handle them.

Laurel didn’t envy them. Everything she’d experienced was a drop in the ocean compared to what they went through.

They were selected based on combat performance, and sent to a facility at Camp Peary, Virginia, where they went through a grueling two-year program that, if the rumors were true, killed as many candidates as it graduated. They received training in advanced aspects of modern weaponry, explosives, foreign and domestic firearms, hand-to-hand combat, tactical driving, escape skills, surreptitious entry, vehicle hot-wiring, extreme survival, wilderness training, field medical training, tactical communications, cyber skills, and tracking.