Hawaiian Freediving Association Semifinals The Elysium Grand Resort Wailea, Maui Lisa Kealoha searched the beach crowd crammed against a rope line thirty feet from the water—a collective living, pulsating organism, growing by the minute as more pushed in to see the local favorite Kelly Alana. Finding her target among all that movement was no easy task. Show your face for me, Koa. I just want to talk. No arrests today, unless you do something dumb. She needed an in with the local criminal element. And she’d grown up with the perfect candidate—Koa Alana, the cousin that Kelly Alana saw more as a brother. She always had, ever since they were all kids, even though Koa had dragged both Kelly and Lisa into a lot of trouble over the years. Lisa stayed close to the rope on her approach, minimizing Koa’s view angle, but he’d always had sharp eyes. He saw her coming. “Hey, Sistah. I heard you back. Didn’ believe it ’til now.” “Don’t run, Koa.” “You see me runnin’? I don’t care if you some big, scary LA cop now. I don’t care where you been.” Funny, because he did look scared. Lisa had overtaken him in height after…

Home Paris Ben climbed the stairs from the metro station at Saint Germain and turned north on Rue Bonaparte under the late morning sun. Its rays did nothing to ease the winter cold, and he altered his route to his flat in the 16th arrondissement to take him past a favorite café. In the ten months of Ben’s posting there, Paris had stolen his heart. He loved his country, certainly, but his American roots had thinned. His parents had him late in life and passed while he was still muddling around in his six years at Rice University, deciding what he wanted to be when he grew up. He knew he didn’t want to be a cabinetmaker, so he’d sold the family business, the last tie binding him to his hometown, and moved on. No siblings. No connections. The Company sought out people like him. They’d recruited him—­rescued him—­during his first year as a commodities trader. Life at the schoolhouse ended nine months later with his death. Drug overdose. Tragic. His professors at Rice would have never guessed. The Company resurrected him in London as Ben Calix, and he’d never looked back. With a fresh cup of tea to warm…

From Chapter Twelve State Route 123 Langley, Virginia Jordan had played her. Talia’s mind spun as her Civic clanked over the flattened hydraulic barriers of Langley’s southern gate. How foolish she’d been. No conversation with Jordan was ever just a conversation. “Leave them wondering how much you know,” Jordan had told her moments before Talia walked into her first mock interrogation back at the Farm. “That’s the key.” The Art of Interrogation–one of Talia’s worst memories from her training despite a syllabus that included Arctic Survival and Sewer Navigation. The memory filled her with regret. “But how?” she had asked Jordan. “Scott won the toss and played interrogator first. He has the advantage.” Talia watched him twiddle his thumbs on the other side of a two-way mirror. “The information is new, but the format is the same. The game favors Player One.” All Farm students spent time on both sides of the table in a two-player game. Each had to extract a set of unique, fictional information from the other. The more information extracted, the higher the score. Talia held up well under Scott’s shouting, but he had gained enough points to take the lead in the class. “Then think…

Ask any marriage counselor and they’ll tell you the top three reasons couples fight are money, mothers-in-law, and what to watch on movie night. Okay, I totally made that up, but those topics are up there, right? Let me spare you a few arguments with the infographic below. Even better, these are all double features. So, if you and your spouse are not into staying up super late, this list might be good for ten movie nights. Here’s a little context: I love spy movies, and I love heist movies. This came out in spades in my latest thriller, The Gryphon Heist. Review after review has called it a mashup of “Mission Impossible” and “Ocean’s Eleven,” and you don’t see me complaining. In fact, I decided to take the idea a step further. This infographic pairs ten of my personal favorites–five heist movies and five spy movies–into epic double features. As a bonus, each comes with a mashup–the movie we might have seen if the film canister contents got all jumbled up. Take a break from the movie argument, pop some corn, and enjoy. . . *** THE GRYPHON HEIST by James R. Hannibal Talia Inger is a rookie CIA…