“Excuse me, Abigail, but whose shift did she get away during?' Townsend asked with a glare.'Excuse me, Townsend, but who was supposed to booby-trap the doors?''I'm an agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service,' Townsend said, indignant. 'I do not do booby traps.”

“I'm an agent of Her Majesty's Secret Service. I do not do booby traps.”

“Townsend shrugged. 'With all due respect to the good doctor, I highly suspect he's a moron.”

“You get some sleep, Abigail," Townsend told her. "I'll keep watch.""That's very gracious of you, but being that we're on an airplane..."Even after the plane took off, they kept debating security perimeters and protocols. I'm pretty sure they argued for forty-five minutes about where the best place for cappuccino was near the Colosseum.”

“Abby must have been the one who found the safe house, because Townsend didn't like it."The building across the street is under construction," he snarled as soon as we'd carried our bags inside."The elevator has key card access, and I've hacked into the surveillance cameras from every system on the block," Abby argued. "We have a three-hundred-sixty-degree visual.""Excellent." Townsend dropped his bag. "Now the circle can see us from every angle.""Don't mind Agent Townsend, girls," Abby told us. "He's a glass-half-empty kind of spy.""Also known as the good kind," he countered. Abby huffed.”

“After finals and winter break...after I'm back to full strength, we'll go get Preston. Whether Mom and Abby and Joe and Townsend like it or not, we'll go get him. And then...' I trailed off. 'And then we'll finish this. Next semester, this thing ends.”

“So you're Zach." Townsend didn't even try to hide the judgement in his voice as he looked Zach up and down in some sort of silent but dangerous examination.Zach huffed but smiled. "so you're Townsend."The two of them stared for a long time, wordless. It felt like I was watching a documentary on the Nature Channel, something about alpha males in the wild.”