And her goldfish was dead. Again. She flushed it down the toilet and went to the kitchen.

She needed coffee. She had the fanciest espresso machine she’d been able to buy, copper with brass accents, and she made herself a strong americano. Then she sat at the counter and stirred stevia into it. She turned on the TV and let the news anchors drone on a while. Before she knew it she was running late.

CIA headquarters was in a leafy suburb outside the city. It was a nice place to live, but Laurel had refused to get an apartment there. Instead, she paid twice as much to live in a loft on U Street in downtown DC. It was lively, with dozens of nearby restaurants and bars. It let her escape the world of federal bureaucracy she inhabited for work, but it meant leaving early to avoid traffic.

She dressed hurriedly, she could put on her makeup in the car. Her Tesla was a block away at a charging station and she bought more coffee at Starbucks on her way to it.

At Langley, she passed through security and went straight to the conference room. Her meeting with Roth had been bumped. She was ten minutes late but he would be later. He wasn’t on time as a matter of principle. He was a man so aware of his own importance he’d ordered the Cadillac Escalade used for his transportation to be fitted with the same protective measures the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia used. The upgrades included a bombproof undercarriage, bulletproof windows, and a specially built, supercharged 6.2 liter Hemi V8 engine that delivered 707 horsepower at 6,000 rpm and could get the massive vehicle from zero to sixty in less than four seconds.

Laurel forgave his quirks. He was a master at what he did. He got results, and at the end of the day, that was what they were there for. She didn’t care that he ruffled feathers. The world had bigger problems.

She made her third coffee of the morning, black with sweetener, and Roth’s, just black.

Levi Roth was in charge of the most sensitive, high-value operations in the entire CIA portfolio. His status rivaled that of the CIA Director, the Defense Intelligence Agency Director, and the president’s National Security Advisor. Not only did he have direct access to the president, but unlike his rivals, he had full operational autonomy.

So when he came into the conference room, stepped up behind her, and lightly patted her ass with an open palm saying, “Good morning, Vietnam,” in an atrociously bad imitation of Robin Williams, she accepted it as part of the natural order of things.