An Act of Persuasion - By Stephanie Doyle Page 0,21
waited. It was a power play, keeping silent so Ben would speak first and state his purpose for showing up. Silence was better than asking a question that could potentially deliver an answer you weren’t prepared for. He couldn’t necessarily blame the man for the ploy. After all they both knew why he was here. And this was Ben’s move.
“You’re going to let her go.”
“Let her go?” Mark affected a confused expression. “If you mean as my employee, then, no, I’m not. If you mean it in another way...”
Ben knew Mark was toying with him. Using the one advantage he’d always had over him—his ability to seduce women. The interesting thing was Mark was hardly a Casanova. He was much too focused on his work to ever devote a lot of time to seducing women.
But when he did want a woman he made that a priority. The fact that he always seemed to want the women Ben showed interest in was no coincidence.
This situation, however, was different. Ben was confident Mark’s attention to Anna wasn’t sexual. Or if it was, there hadn’t been time for him to act on it. Not with all Anna had going on recently with Ben’s weeks of quarantine, finding another job and coming to terms with being pregnant.
At least he hoped so.
“Bullshit.”
Mark shrugged and obviously wasn’t willing to lie beyond what he’d already alluded to.
“What the hell are you doing here anyway?” Ben asked. “Shouldn’t you be the new section chief in Afghanistan?”
Initially he’d been annoyed he hadn’t been aware of Mark’s presence in the city—it wasn’t until Anna had announced who she was working for that Ben had known. A former agent, moving into his territory. It should have shown up somewhere on his radar. No allowances for the fact that he’d been quarantined in a sterile room at the hospital while Mark set up shop.
“I quit. Just like you did.”
Ben had left the agency when the politics started to matter more than the results. There were days he’d felt the entire agency was a tool being used solely for the administration’s end game. Instead of uncovering information, they were manufacturing it—something he was not willing to be a part of. Unfortunately, the higher up in the ranks he was promoted, the closer he got to the bullshit that was D.C. It was either leave or have his career stall at the same level, watching less talented but more politically savvy agents advance ahead of him.
“Like I did?” He thought Mark would have been one of those more politically savvy agents.
“Stevens got promoted to section chief.”
Then again, obviously not. Stevens’s quality of work left a lot to be desired—a fact overlooked by the key decision-makers he networked with. “You were better than him.”
“Yes, I was. But you know that doesn’t always matter.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“After you left the fun of trying to one-up you was gone and my ambition seemed to tank with it. I couldn’t deal with the politics any more than you could. Watching men and women who cared more about furthering their careers than getting the job done was driving me mad. I discovered I wasn’t willing to play and so I got skipped over. Then some other things in my life changed and that was a sign that it was time to get out of the game. The fact that I made the transition so easily tells me I already had one foot out the door.”
“Really, you’re finding the...transition...easy?” Ben hadn’t. It had taken him nearly a full year to stop looking over his shoulder every other second. Now, he did it only every other minute. So far in the six years he’d been out no one had ever been behind him.
“I’m...adjusting.”
“Why here? Why Philadelphia?”
“I have my reasons,” Mark said. His attention seemed to wander momentarily before he refocused on Ben. “They weren’t all about you.”
Ben believed him. In a strange way, as much as Mark had always annoyed him with his antics, it felt right to be sitting here with someone who had lived the same life he had, who had seen the same things and knew the same information. Like he was finally connected to someone again.
He hadn’t felt like this since...Anna.
The reason he was here.
“She’s pregnant with my child.”
Mark didn’t flinch from the sudden shift in the conversation. “I know. She told me when I interviewed her. You want to talk about how you let that happen with an employee?”