Certainly, arriving in the Ops Room for a crash briefing at oh-three hundred carrying a hangover or, worse, a drunk wasn't going to help her career prospects. And the less said about what it would do to a mission, the better. These things, combined with a warning from the Madwoman of the Second Floor-staff psychiatrist Dr. Eleanor Callard-that should such behavior continue, Chace could find herself confined to a desk if not out of a job, served as a wake-up call.

"Find a hobby," Callard had urged her, "preferably one where you don't punish yourself for sins you haven't committed."

"May I still punish myself for the ones that I have?" Chace had asked sweetly.

"By all means."

It had taken Chace a while to find something that would engage her. As a girl, her mother had taken great pains to see her educated in a "proper" fashion, including piano lessons, ballet lessons, and riding lessons. Chace had loathed it all when she was six, and now at thirty-one, she discovered that nothing had occurred in the intervening time to alter that assessment. Unlike Poole, she had no interest in cooking, and her kitchen was merely the room where take-away was moved from a paper sack onto a porcelain plate, and even then it was most likely to be eaten straight from the container while she stood over the sink. Unlike Wallace, her interest in automobiles was entirely professional. She knew enough to break into them, to hot-wire them, to drive them much too fast, to use them to kill people without getting herself killed in the process, and, sometimes, should the situation warrant it, to travel in them from Point A to Point B.

It ended there.

Finally, she'd decided to try painting, resurrecting a dim memory from her boarding-school days at Cheltenham Ladies' College. Not with oils or watercolors and palettes and easels, as she had learned, but with great sections of canvas spread on the floor or tacked to the wall, and pails of paint to spatter, drip, drizzle, and smear.