he was banking. If they even were chits. If he even wanted to collect. Maybe he was happy staying at home, hanging out with Kira and Tony. He doted on them, read to them, made them laugh, cooked them oatmeal for breakfast and tacos for lunch. He was a good dad.
And she wasn’t exactly sitting around eating bonbons.
So when he agreed to Birmingham she didn’t argue the point.
* * *
Now here they were. She had the job she’d aimed for her since that conversation with Ned. And the job was…
Awesome.
From the first she had loved the bureau. She loved its sense of mission and purpose. She loved being the last line of defense, making complicated cases that the local cops were too overwhelmed or politically compromised to bring. She loved the resources the FBI had. If she had a question about fingerprints or DNA sequencing, someone at headquarters or Quantico would have the answer. If no one did, criminologists and scientists were happy to help when she told them she was an agent. While her classmates from UVA wrote briefs about collateral estoppel, she listened to wires, pulled phone records, took long-lens surveillance photos. I can’t believe I get paid to do this stuff.
Birmingham had been a smart choice, too. After September 11, the bureau’s biggest offices had put hundreds of agents on al-Qaeda–related investigations. In cities like New York, up to half the agents were now chasing counterterror leads. The impulse was understandable, but so far the work had mainly come up empty. Maybe al-Qaeda did have dozens of sleeper cells in the United States waiting for orders to wreak havoc. But the FBI hadn’t found them.
But Alabama had relatively few Muslims, which meant the Birmingham office could focus on the work it had always done, with less interference than usual from D.C. Mid-career agents might worry they would be marginalized because they weren’t doing counterterror work. But Rebecca would have plenty of time to work her way up and wait for the tides to shift. Sooner or later the bureau would return to its more traditional strengths, like public corruption and organized crime—especially if the counterterror investigations didn’t go anywhere.
She especially liked the senior agent in the office, a fiftysomething Tennessean named Fred Smith. He reminded her a little of Ned, but with more gray hair and a southern accent. In the FBI, the agent who ran an office was known as the Special Agent in Charge—and the joke at Quantico was that some SACs lived up to the name. Not Smith.
On her first day, he’d told her, “This is my last posting. Don’t have to worry about political stuff from me. I just want my agents to make cases. Let me show you the ropes, work hard, we’ll get along.” The speech sounded too good to be true. But Smith had turned out to mean every word.
Really, the only problem with the job was that she liked it too much. She could always do more work. Agents interviewed witnesses in teams, so that part of the job was nine to five. But she could always pull another property record, listen to another wire, practice her shooting. The phenomenon of new agents plunging into the job was common enough to have a name: “Hoover Fever.”
But unlike a lot of those new agents, Rebecca had two little kids at home. And a husband.
She’d helped Brian find a twenty-hour-a-week job as an information technology administrator at the University of Alabama, working on the school’s email system and fix other computer issues. The job wasn’t exactly sexy. But it made him something more than a stay-at-home dad. She thought having a salary would be good for his self-esteem. As for what he thought, she wasn’t sure.
Maybe she was to blame. The energy she had left over after work she focused on the kids. She hated the idea that they would think of Brian as their go-to parent. Right now her priorities, truly, were bureau/kids/Brian, and the race wasn’t all that close.
About the only place they still clicked was in bed. After she had Tony, their sex life had dried up, but since they moved to Birmingham, it had come back. She enjoyed him as much as ever.
Okay, almost as much. Like all couples, they’d lost a bit from the spectacular have-to-have-you of the first few months. But the fact that the sex was still good reassured her. Their marriage couldn’t really be in trouble if they could still connect that way.