Calculated Entrapment

And you didn’t volunteer.” Alexis jumped up and patted him on the back. “However, since you’re married to Ree, I’ll give you a head start if you want to talk to her first. Unless you want me to do it.”
Parker stood and cracked his neck. “Nope, that’s definitely worse. If Stefanie helps out, she’ll find out about Ree’s involvement on multiple operations, which means we need to run this by the CIA too. I’d rather warn her and extract her if things get tricky, but I think you’re right. She’s going to want to get involved.”

4
The morning after her successful research platform deployment, Stefanie came into the office with a bounce in her step. Amazing how a decent night’s sleep after a rewarding day could give her such an energy boost. She placed her oversized bag next to her desk and took a large sip of coffee from her reusable mug. She took in her brand-new office, still not quite believing that she’d landed a job at the Oceanic Exploration Group. The man who hired her said he believed in her potential, and she had no intention of letting him down. A small tag on her office door read: Stefanie Ryland, Director of Research. Even though she only had one direct report to start out, the pressure she was putting on herself was immense. At least her first trip out on the OEG’s flagship vessel had gone smoothly. It helped that her direct report, Nash, had her back. They’d known each other for some time – he’d worked for her at a start-up when he was in college. When he graduated, the company she’d been working for didn’t have a position available, so she’d written him several recommendation letters. He was the one who’d reached out to tell her about the latest open position and likely put in a good word for her.
Stefanie started up her laptop for the day and eyed the email in her inbox from Cole Davidson, her manager. While she’d expected a request for an update on the trip, instead she found a reminder to fill out the friendly ‘get-to-know-you’ email she’d received from Peggy, his administrative assistant. The questions had clearly been fully sanitized by corporate lawyers to include such challenging questions as: How many siblings do you have? How many pets do you have? What are your hobbies? Stefanie eyed her still-full coffee. She hadn’t had enough caffeine yet to answer canned questions, so she filtered the questionnaire into a folder for later review. They could find out about her karate black belts and childhood goldfish later. First, she had a report to write on the prior day’s research platform deployment.
Stefanie’s phone had saved the data they collected while they were in range of the newly-deployed platform. She had set up a schedule with the customer to go out and retrieve additional data every couple of weeks on a smaller boat since the equipment wasn’t far from their home base. Stefanie pulled up pictures she had taken from the trip and added them to her report. She pulled up the map on her phone, but she was too far away from any of their platforms to get a signal. She wasn’t sure exactly what she’d been hoping for. Something about seeing the extra research platform signal the day prior still bothered her, and it hadn’t been remedied by a good night’s sleep. She shook off the thought – she had enough things to worry about. She certainly didn’t need to fabricate problems to add to her list.
Once her report was complete and coffee long gone, Stefanie sorted the remaining messages in her inbox into appropriate folders to manage later. While her sister, Ree, was an engineering professor whose neatness extended to color-coding her files, Stefanie generally just tried to organize things enough at the start of a day so that things didn’t get out of hand by the end of the day. On a busy project, her desk would occasionally start to transition from neat piles to merely sorted, borderline-toppling ones.
When the last bolded email was handled, she locked her computer. It was finally time to go to the lab to do some more interesting work. Before she could rise from her chair, Stefanie heard a quick tap on the door. She looked up to see Nash in the doorway. He was a lot more formal in the office than when they were working together on the boat. She didn’t possess his ability to change her personality on demand. However, she generally was a considerate person, which meant she didn’t end up with her foot in her mouth very often. “Hi, Nash. What can I help you with?”
Nash leaned against the door frame. He was a couple of years out of undergrad and had black, medium-length hair that occasionally fell over his eyes. He often pushed it back out of his face as a nervous habit. “Hey, boss. Actually, I was hoping to chat with you more about your request to build a couple of backup platforms and deploy them as test systems the next time we go out to check data.”
“Oh?” Stefanie waved him in. Nash might be younger than her, but he had more experience than she did at the company. He wouldn’t be bothering her just to recap her own ideas. “I’m guessing you’re here because there’s more to it than I thought. Don’t hold back – if I proposed something impossible, please challenge me on it.”
Nash sat down in her guest chair. “Oh, not at all. I love the idea. I proposed the same idea just before you started. I couldn’t get approval from Cole. Even though the cost would be minimal since we were just going to place them next to our customer’s equipment whenever we took out a platform. I’d even figured out a way to network the buoys so we can treat them as a system, not just as individual platforms. It could extend our