She had played a central part in bringing them to justice, and, for a while at least, it looked as if she could have her pick of assignments. That might have been the case, except for the fact that she had made a bad decision with her boss and had then been forced to try to disengage her personal life from her professional one. Orville wasn’t a bad guy, at least that was what she had thought, but he had taken the end of their relationship pretty badly and had started making life difficult for her. She had hoped that the situation would quiet down after Michigan, but that had not been the case at all. Orville had stayed clear of her for a month or two, but, once the press had moved on and the investigation into the militia had been handed over to other agents to conclude, he had tried to force his way back into her professional life. It was like her father said: a man like him was like a bad smell; you could never really wash it all the way off. Ellie had given some thought to making an official complaint. Her stock had been high after she had helped close out the case against the militia, but she had known that it wouldn’t last forever. Orville was a consummate agency player, and, more to the point, he was male. He would have been back at some point. She could have filed her complaint and gone toe-to-toe with him, but there would have been no guarantee of success and it would have been a bitch of a thing to handle.

She’d decided against it.

Instead, she had parlayed the fact that her star was in the ascendant and engineered a transfer to the FBI’s counterterrorism division. She had found a home in one of the two sections in CT: International Terrorism Operations Section II. It was responsible for the Middle East and other regional groups. The CIA was involved in the section, with an agency officer serving as deputy chief.

Ellie had worked all around the world ever since. She had been in Libya and Iraq and had worked against ISIS in Syria. She had contributed to the ongoing investigation into the assault on the US embassy in Benghazi. The attack had been back in 2012, but the case was still being processed all these years later. She’d made her name as a diligent and hard-working agent with a series of successful operations under her belt. She had no personal life to speak of, and that lack of attachment to home had meant that she had often volunteered for some of the more onerous assignments that others had shied away from. That, and her first-class closure rate, had seen her make a rapid ascent through the ranks.