Mickey smiled at the woman that was going to be his neighbor for a while. For a moment, she just stared at him, and he was about to start feeling worried, wondering if there was something wrong when suddenly an answering smile spread across her face.

It stopped him short. At first glance, she looked almost ordinary, only slightly pretty. She was dressed much like he was, in cotton pants, sneakers and a tank top, all in matching blue and grey. She must have been doing chores, cleaning up her front yard, he realized when he saw the plastic bag at her feet. He wondered if he should give her some space so she could finish up, but the look on her face was welcoming.

He met her eyes and was almost surprised at how bright they were, like green gems. Or maybe that was just the sun.

Now that he was closer, he could tell she was shorter than him. From a distance, she looked tall, slim and athletic, with tanned skin. That didn’t change up close. Her gold streaked white hair was held up behind her head in a loose bun, wispy tendrils escaping the knot and floating in the breeze.

"Sorry if I'm bothering you," he started conversationally. "I can go back…" he pointed his thumb over his shoulder, hesitating to get any closer.

She blinked at him a couple of times, then her eyes widened, lips open in an 'o' of surprise. He blinked back. Maybe she'd just been lost in thought. She might not have even noticed him approaching. He didn’t let himself panic, but this was important. He wanted her to only have the best first impression of him.

"Oh, no! No, I'm so sorry. You're not a bother." She looked down at the plastic bag still open at her feet, the paper gloves over her hands.

He watched, fascinated, as her face warmed in a pink blush. She pulled off the gloves and shoved them into the plastic bag, twisting the top closed and pushing it aside with her foot. Then she glanced up at him, almost shyly from under her eyelashes, and he wondered if she was trying to be seductive on purpose.

"Forgive me, I was just cleaning up. I knew there was someone moving in, but I didn’t know when so I was surprised to see the truck and then I saw you and assumed you were the person moving in." She smiled nervously, wiped her hands on her thighs and took a step closer with her right hand raised for a handshake.

"Uh, yeah. I would have been here a few days earlier, but I had a lot of stuff to carry and getting the moving van took a lot longer than I thought."

He shook her hand, holding onto it longer than necessary, really, before releasing her and shoving his hands in the pockets of his pants.

"So, official introduction to the neighborhood. It gets pretty quiet around here, but it's not a bad area to live in. I'm sure you'll be very welcome here. I'm Laurie."

"Nice to meet you, Laurie. I'm Mickey, the new neighbor," he said pleasantly, giving himself a mental pat on the back when she smiled and shifted closer.

Mickey engaged in some getting-to-know-you small talk with Laurie, though it took all of his willpower to keep his concentration. Usually, he wouldn’t have a problem with it, but then this wasn’t like the usual situation.

Because he'd been prepared for a lot, but he noted Laurie was a lot more attractive in person, more than he had expected.

He had, of course, researched the whole neighborhood. They were tracking someone specific, but they didn’t know if he had friends or allies. Besides, it just paid to be careful, considering it came with the job. The only reason he'd even had to come out here was because someone hadn't been careful enough.

Special attention had been paid to his neighbors, Laurie and her brother, Karl Nash.

He'd read the file on her that he'd been given. He knew some details about her, like that she was a graduate student in computer science and she was paying the whole thing for herself. She owned the house she lived in alone until her brother moved in with her.

It was mostly generic information you could find on a quick search if you were good enough. Then there were the details that made him cringe for this woman, having her privacy invaded as psychology experts tried to build a profile for her to determine where she fit in the mission. Like how he knew she had few friends in the area. She had a part-time job at her university as a teacher's assistant as she finished up her degree. She rarely went out on dates and hadn't been on one in nearly a year. She loved biking and took her bike everywhere.

She was as much under suspicion as her brother, because she had taken him in once his father kicked him out of their family home. There were those that found it suspicious, but Mickey couldn’t imagine why. He'd only met her for a few minutes and he could tell, unless she was a really good actor, she wouldn’t be capable of such subterfuge. The only reason she was even a suspect—well, the biggest, anyway—was because she was so good with computers.

But she hadn't been home in a few months because her schedule kept her busy. Her relationship with her father was rocky at best, so she wasn’t even keeping up with calls. She was too busy with her own life. Mickey didn’t think she'd find the time to do it, even if she'd had the motivation. Still, her expertise, the grudge with her father and taking in her brother made her a suspect, and he couldn’t disregard that.

He was pretty sure she was just stuck in the middle, though. He realized this the more he talked to her. He found himself laughing, his relaxation genuine and not just the usual mission-calm he aimed at everyone he was meeting undercover. He found her likable, and from what he could tell so far, honest. There was no way she could have been a part of it. Likely, her brother had done it on his own and then ran to her when he didn’t have anywhere else to stay.

There were people that didn’t find that likely, though. Karl Nash was twenty-one, defiant, mischievous, thoughtless, selfish idiot. He didn’t always walk the narrow road. There were at least a couple of arrests from when he was still a minor that his father had tried to suppress which involved drugs and theft. He had seen a few psychiatrists, and everyone had the same thing to say about him. Profilers couldn’t find a link between the event and someone with his level of stupidity.

But he'd had the opportunity and the motivation. There was a link between him and a small mafia gang. The guy that provided him with his drugs. They had probably been the one to tell him to go for it, instead of his sister being the mastermind. There was little data on how the siblings interacted, seeing as they'd only been together for a couple of weeks. So, there was no way to tell if they were cooperating, or if the younger brother was acting on his own. He was there because they needed direct contact with both the subjects, and he had been picked for the job.

Considering the weight of what was at stake, no one could afford to be wrong, so they were playing cautiously and covering their bases.

Of course, his impression of her in a few minutes wouldn’t hold up against the hours spent by experts analyzing data that had been gathered by spying on her for the past several weeks. There was no way to tell whether the surveillance was over, now that he was here, or if they would be keeping an eye on her for him as a backup. He wouldn’t put it past them.

Really, Mickey considered it a shame that this lovely woman in front of him was currently suspect-by-association in the leak of Pentagon documents caused by her brother.

She was putting her brother up, but he questioned how much she really knew, what her brother had told her and if her father had told her anything at all. The man had clammed up in the wake of the situation since there were plenty of people that were nowhere close to satisfied with him simply throwing his son out of the house, even if the boy was going to go to the only other family he had.

He also wondered if she was just a really good actor. As she warmed up and lost some of the nervousness, she grew even more lovely, even more beautiful as she smiled wider and laughed openly with him. He didn’t even realize they were drifting closer together until he realized he could suddenly see dark specks in her green irises. They were close enough that his body blocked her from the sun and he could see her better without the sun in the way. Her tanned skin lost a bit of its glow from the sun, but she didn’t lose any of her radiance.

They had been standing there for some minutes, when the familiar sound of wheels on the road getting ever closer had them both pausing their conversation and looked up. He saw her brother come riding home on his motorcycle, and Mickey was sure it was him even before he got close enough since the guy wasn’t wearing a helmet. He also matched the description he'd gotten -- on the skinny side with blond, undercut hair. There weren’t any clear recent pictures of him, but if the kid got close enough, Mickey would recognize his blue-gray eyes from earlier pictures.

He noticed the frown on Laurie's face, and he could guess why, considering her personality. From his records, he knew Karl's license was suspended, so if he'd been caught by a cop, he would have been arrested. And being the person he was living with, Laurie, as his older sister, would have been the one to have to bail him out of jail.

Mickey could imagine it wasn’t easy for her, having to deal with her younger brother.

He offered a friendly wave, trying to act 'neighborly' as he rode past them. Not that the little punk appreciated it because he went ignored. He heard a gasp from Laurie beside him and glanced down out the corner of his eye to see her glaring at her brother with narrowed eyes.

"I'm sorry about him," she muttered without taking her eyes off her brother. "He's my younger brother, and I'm afraid he's been going through some tough times. He wasn’t always like that, but it's really no excuse for him to act this way and treat you like that."

Not missing a beat, he turned back to her and sympathized with Laurie's obvious annoyance with her brother.

"It's okay. He's probably just at that age and he's trying to be rebellious. Most kids don’t have the best outlets and that's usually what it boils down to. I don’t have any siblings, but plenty of my friends do."

She glanced up at him, her glare softened as her eyes seemed to melt, a corner of her lips curved up in the barest smile. Her annoyance wasn’t gone, just momentarily masked, but he could see something like amusement on her face.

"You call him a kid, but he's really not as young as he's acting. He's actually twenty-one."

Mickey could feel surprise take over his face, though he wasn’t shocked. Karl, being their true target, had a larger file than Laurie, and Mickey had read through it thoroughly to familiarize himself with even the barest details. There weren’t pictures of him floating around, but a lot of people were more than ready to talk about Karl, the problem child, the delinquent. Karl had roughly the maturity of a five-year-old, an overdeveloped libido and pleasure drive, and limited language, knowledge, and empathy or so many said, including all of his psychiatrists in their reports to the boy's father.

Besides, with the way he looked, he could definitely have passed for younger.

"Wow, really? But I guess it still falls under that bracket. Twenty-one isn’t all that old these days. But," he added with regret, pulling his hands from his pockets to cross his arms over his chest. "I guess you're gonna want to go and talk to him, so I should leave you alone for now. I'm going to get back to setting up my place, but would you like to come over for coffee? I'm sure I have at least a table and a couple of chairs set up."

Her smile grew a little wider at his poor attempt at a joke and then widened some more almost to its previous brilliance. Really, he didn’t want to leave her just yet, but if she agreed to come over to his place, then that would be so much better. He could do what he was supposed to do, get closer to her while getting to spend time with her.

A win-win, something rare in his line of business.

"You're inviting me over to your place for coffee?" she repeated, sounding a little dazed.

He grinned, and it came to him naturally, it wasn’t another calculated part of his personality meant to lure her in. He found that he really wanted her to come over, and not just for the mission. He hadn't known her that long, and already he knew that he would love more of her company. A lot more.

"I believe that is what I just did," he joked. "Obviously, not right now. Your brother should come first, it would probably be best to talk to him as soon as possible. But I really would like it if you came over some time. For coffee."

There was some hesitation, and he was surprised to realize he'd actually held his breath with the hope that she wouldn’t deliver a swift refusal, even though he could see from her face that, despite the hesitation, she did want to. She glanced in the direction her brother had gone off to before her expression hardened into something like determination, and she looked back up at him.

"I'd love to," she said in agreement. "But only if we can wait until tomorrow afternoon. Right now, I have to deal with my brother. Whatever's going on now, I can't just leave him alone after that."

He nodded, having expected that. She appeared to have a sense of responsibility, unlike her brother, and it felt like it just fit her character. He ignored the relief that went through him at her answer, grinning at her.

"Sure," he agreed cheerfully.