The Sigma Protocol Read Online Free PDF Page B

across the room she could smell his drugstore aftershave. He had a ruddy moon face the texture of lumpy porridge.
    There was a time when she actually cared what men like Arliss Dupree thought about her and tried to win them over. Now she didn’t give a damn. She had her friends, and Dupree was simply not among them. Across the table, David Denneen, a square-jawed, sandy-haired man, gave her a sympathetic glance.
    “As some of you may have heard, Internal Compliance has asked for our colleague here to be temporarily assigned to them.” Dupree turned to her, his eyes hard. “Given the amount of unfinished work you’ve got here, I’d consider it less than responsible, Agent Navarro, if you accepted an assignment from another division. Is this something you’ve been angling for? You can tell us, you know.”
    “This is the first I’ve heard of it,” she told him truthfully.
    “That right? Well, maybe I’ve been leaping to conclusions here,” he said, his tone softening a bit.
    “Quite possibly,” she replied, dryly.
    “I was making the assumption that you were wanted for an assignment. Maybe you are the assignment.”
    “Come again?”
    “Maybe you’re the one under investigation,” Dupree said in a mellower tone, evidently pleased by the idea.
    “It wouldn’t surprise me. You’re a deep one, Agent Navarro.” There were laughs from some of his drinking buddies.
    She shifted her chair to get the light out of her eyes.
    Ever since Detroit, when the two of them were staying on the same floor of the Westin and she turned down (politely, she thought) Dupree’s drunken, highly explicit proposal, he’d been leaving condescending little remarks, like rat droppings, in her performance evaluation folder:… as best she can given her obviously limited interest…errors a result of inattention, not incompetence …
    He described her to a male colleague, she’d heard, as “a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen.” He tarred her with the most vicious insult you can give someone in the Bureau: not a team player . Not a team player meant she didn’t go out drinking with the boys, including Dupree, kept her social life separate. He also made a point of papering her files with mentions of mistakes she’d made—a few minor procedural omissions, nothing at all serious. Once, on the trail of a rogue DEA agent who’d been turned by a drug lord and was implicated in several homicides, she’d neglected to submit an FD-460 within the required seven days.
    The best agents make mistakes. She was convinced that the best ones in fact made more minor gaffes than average, because they were focused more on following the trail than on following every single procedure in the manual of rules and regs. You could slavishly observe every last ridiculous procedural requirement and never crack a case.
    She felt his stare on her. She looked up, and their eyes locked.
    “We’ve got an unusually heavy caseload to deal with,” Dupree went on. “When somebody doesn’t do their share, it means more work for everyone else. We’ve gota midlevel IRS manager suspected of organizing some pretty complicated tax scams. We’ve got a rogue FBI guy who seems to be using his shield to pursue a personal vendetta. We’ve got some ATF shit-heel selling munitions from the evidence vaults.” That was a typical array of cases for the OSI: investigating (“auditing” was the term of art) misconduct involving members of other government agencies—in essence, the federal version of internal affairs.
    “Maybe the workload here is a little much for you,” Dupree said, pressing. “Is that it?”
    She pretended to jot down a note and didn’t reply. Her face was prickly warm. She inhaled slowly, struggling to tamp down her anger. She refused to give in to his baiting. Finally she spoke. “Look, if it’s inconvenient, why don’t you refuse the request for interdepartmental transfer?” Anna asked it in a reasonable tone of voice, but it wasn’t