He striving to be polite, and she being an obtuse bitch. There was too much history between them for this. He was her closest childhood friend, no matter that she’d spent most of her adolescence swooning over him in his absence. Emily tried to relax, even a little.
“What is it you want, Em?”
“Want a list?”
“Sure.”
“It’s a short one.”
“Fire away.”
“I want to return to the front. That’s where I belong. That’s where my life makes sense.”
He nodded again, inspecting the toe of his shoe. He’d never been one to avoid her gaze.
“Not yet, Em. There are a few things that I need. I need you here. I need…” He drifted off, fascinated by the presidential seal woven into the rug beneath his feet.
Something was eating at him. And it felt like more than his wife’s safety. She couldn’t put her finger on it. However, if he didn’t offer, she certainly wasn’t about to ask.
He jolted from his chair so abruptly that she slammed against the back of her own in surprise. He strode to the Resolute desk and, without looking in her direction, wrote two lines on a piece of paper, signed it with a flourish, and tucked it into an envelope.
Then he returned to his seat and looked her right in the face. Right in the eyes. Not the Commander, not the President, Peter looked out at her.
“I need you to stay a little longer. I have reasons. I just can’t say what they are. At first I was irritated that Katherine wanted me to remove a SOAR pilot from active duty to fulfill her whim. But once I thought about it being you, I was glad for the chance.”
He must have seen the look on her face.
“I know that makes no sense to you at the moment. Let me simply state that I have guesses and I don’t dare bias your observations. I need you to be smart. As smart as I know you are. As smart as a woman who flies for SOAR and manages the amazing things you do. For the last year, ever since North Korea, I’ve received a priority report of every flight you take. And you are beyond amazing. Colonel Gibson has recommended you for a Silver Star.”
“Colonel Gibson? I don’t know a Colonel Gibson.” A Silver Star? When had she ever done anything to deserve that? It was the third highest combat honor in the U.S. military. A Silver Star? She couldn’t breathe. She tried. Her brain tried. Her body tried. But she couldn’t breathe.
“Colonel Michael Gibson of Delta Force.”
Michael was a colonel?
“Your commanding officer, a Major Henderson, sent one of his own for a Distinguished Flying Cross.”
A Major Henderson whose ass she’d be kicking shortly, if her mother hadn’t done so already.
“I can’t believe you did that. Simply amazing. I shouldn’t spoil the surprise, but I guess I already have. General Brett Rogers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and I debated and chose the higher award. We approved your Silver Star just a few hours ago. Simply amazing.” He shook his head for a moment.
He sat again, leaning forward so that they were close.
“I know you’d rather go, but I need you to stay a while longer. Please, Em. For me.” He handed her the envelope. “Here. In case you need it. I wasn’t sure when you first arrived, but I am now. I need you to figure out what’s going on with Katherine.”
“You mean other than the attempts on her life?”
He just pointed to the envelope.
She pulled at the unsealed flap.
“No. Read it later. When you’re alone.”
She folded it in half and slid it into the back pocket of her jeans beside her crumpled White House ID. Crumpled already, despite the thick plastic.
There were many things the letter could be, but she was pretty sure she knew what it was.
And she hoped to God she was wrong or she was in so far over her head, who knew where she’d come ashore.
One thing was for damn sure. If she was right, she was going to need help. Fast.
Chapter 35
Mark was still standing by the time Emily arrived, appearing perfectly at ease despite a full hour of her mother’s interrogation. Emily tried to unravel the tableau she observed from the hall before anyone spotted her.
Her father reading through a stack of papers from his ever-handy briefcase. Comfortable as any typical evening at home.
Mark lounging back in an Edwardian wingback chair as if it were an old car seat pulled out of some wreck and propped up beside a makeshift basketball court. An empty beer bottle and another still half full stood sweating on a cherry-wood end table. No coaster beneath. And her mother hadn’t killed him or even corrected the situation. That was a degree of tolerance that Emily had never been afforded, not even as a little girl.
And her mother, perched in her usual chair, a glass of barely touched white wine held easily in her hand. She wasn’t on the attack, at least not obviously. Something was wrong.
“So, Marky…” Smooth and friendly, Mom in her full-on hostess mode. “Once you’re done with racing, what are your plans?”
Oh, god. Her mother was trying to reshape Marky Herman into Mrs. Helen Cartwright Magnuson Beale’s image of a possible mate for her daughter. Apparently, any mate was better than her daughter’s twenty-nine-year-old spinsterhood in the U.S. Army. She definitely had to break this up fast.
“Hey.” She strode in fast. “Sorry I’m late. Mom, thought you had a dinner meeting at eight?”
With the closest Washington D.C.’s leading hostess ever came to being discomfited, Helen kissed Emily’s cheek and took Mark’s hand.
“I look forward to seeing more of you.”
Sure, Emily thought, and reshaping him in your image. Not gonna happen, Mom.
Her mother rushed out to her meeting just moments later, offering Emily an ugly scowl of severe disapproval. Easy to read: “You finally bring home a boy, and this is the best you can give me to work with?” Just great. Emily would have to deal with that later.
The atmosphere of the house changed the moment her mother was gone.
Her father eyed her for a moment. “Should I leave as well?”
Emily shook her head. She’d had time to think about this. She needed help—and needed it badly. She’d been at a loss for where to turn since meeting with Peter. Now, whether or not she liked it, and she didn’t, an option had presented itself.
“Can we go somewhere to talk? The three of us?”
Her father raised one eyebrow inquisitively. Mark offered a disappointed look fitting his chosen character.
“For a walk, or…” Her father trailed off.
“Or,” was her only response.
This time her father turned to study Mark more carefully. Mark stood more squarely and met his gaze head on, something few could do with the FBI Director.
Finally her father nodded and turned for the door to his den.
Mark glanced her way but kept his mouth shut.
Down the stairs into the basement. She stopped Mark outside the darkroom while her father went in. She knew he was keying a code into the darkroom timer that would open the other door hidden in the far wall.
“Okay,” he called softly.
She tried to take Mark’s elbow to guide him in. Somehow, they ended up holding hands as she led the way. First through the darkroom where she and her father had spent so many happy hours, one of their few shared hobbies, then into the unlit room beyond.
She stopped Mark clear of the unseen door and recovered her hand in the dark.
Her father closed it. And only after it snicked shut did the interior lights came up. No revealing flash of light spilled out of the darkroom to tell where they’d gone in the basement.
It was larger than she remembered, though she hadn’t been in here since the one time her father had shown it to her on her twelfth birthday. The room stretched twenty feet long and fifteen wide. Indirect lighting and soft, apricot-colored walls made it easy on the eye. A couple of bunk beds and a supply of stores lined the back wall. But that wasn’t t
he real purpose of this room.
A couple of couches and chairs and a single computer. A computer not hooked to anything. No T-1 line here. No communications panel. A Class C security site, requiring a retinal scan to even power on the machine, never mind the voice code to unlock it. Neither of which she had or wanted.
Emily turned to the bank of switches by the door and started throwing them. At first it was a game.
Turn off the outside keypad.
Switch the lights over to battery.
The feeling shifted, and she became more Captain Beale of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and less Emily Beale of the First Lady’s staff. And, even less, Squirt to the most powerful man on the planet.
She turned off the last of that feeling with the ventilation system, moving over to canned air combined with a state-of-the-art air scrubber.
The second to last caused her to finally pause.
What if her mother came home? To the best of Emily’s knowledge, her mother had never been in here, though she must know of the room’s existence.
To cut over this switch would be to cut her mother off from them despite any emergency. To cut off any communications from the rest of the world.
She flipped it, and her mother became an outsider. A row of lights turned green one by one as inhibitors, signal jammers, and ultra- and infrasonic noise maskers fired up. No electronic signal of any kind could penetrate this bunker from any direction.
There was one switch left, but she couldn’t throw it. Wasn’t authorized to. Didn’t want to.
Her father had stood silently through her shutdown of the room. Now he reached past her and pressed his thumb on the fingerprint scanner beside the last switch.
“No, Daddy. That’s too much.”
He pulled it down.
A small screen reported, “Active defenses engaged.”
If attackers struck the thick, steel door with more force than a mild kick, they’d be immediately gassed. If unexpected pressure was applied to any of the multilayered walls, ceiling, or floor for more than twelve seconds, such as a shaped charge of C4 plastique being attached, electronic jammers and other devices that functioned less kindly would attempt to destroy any timer or trigger. And sonic weapons would engage, probably blowing out the attackers’ eardrums and rendering them unconscious, perhaps even killing them outright. Her mother’s hand resting on the door for more than twelve seconds would have the same effect, but hopefully she knew better.
They were now in a secure fort programmed to automatically defend itself against all intruders short of a bunker-busting bomb.
No half measures. Her father’s attitude was clear. He’d always believed that. He’d trained it into her as she now enforced it from her helicopter. “If you are going to do something, do it completely, heart and body, mind and soul.” He must have said it a hundred times to her. A thousand. And they were more than her watchwords for her own actions. Those words were her favorite memory of her father.
“Nice place you have here, sir.” In that moment, the slovenly man who did nothing to stir her blood had been replaced. Mark Henderson stood straighter, taller, sharper. Once in the room, his T-shirt and trademark bandanna around his neck looked foolish, but it didn’t matter. Because now the man shone through.
“First, please allow me to introduce Major Mark Henderson, my commanding officer. Mark, this is my dad.”
They exchanged one of those manly handshakes. She could see her father leaning in a bit with twenty years of fieldcraft and a lifetime of staying fit. At the end of it, they were both smiling.
“A pleasure, sir. I can’t tell you how invaluable your daughter is. She is the best pilot I’ve ever had the honor of flying with. You should be very proud of her.”
Emily glanced at Mark. He didn’t make it sound like friendly platitudes. If General Arnson’s remarks hadn’t forewarned her, she’d have fainted to the floor in surprise.
Her father waved them toward the chairs.
She sat. The leather squeaking loudly, almost painfully, in the anechoic silence of the space.
“So…” Both men turned from regarding each other to look at her. “Why are we here?”
Chapter 36
Emily clearly bit back an oath. “That’s my question for you. What the hell are you doing here, Major?”
He considered answering with the truth. “I’m busy proving to my best friend how stupid I can be about one particular woman.” And he might have, if her father hadn’t been sitting right beside her. She’d never mentioned what her parents did for a living. He could feel his palms sweating where they rested on the arms of the chair he’d chosen across from the Director of the FBI.
Clearly he’d landed solidly in the “bad surprise” category and that knowledge came with a bitter taste he didn’t like at all. It meant she really was doing the impossible, sleeping with the Commander-in-Chief despite his being married.
“I thought you might need help. That attack came too close to succeeding.” And if you weren’t such a perfect pilot, it would have. He’d seen the tape on the news, and it had scared a decade off his life.
“I have a lot of untapped leave, the front is quiet at the moment, so I put in for some time.” And had cashed in yet more favors to get it on such short notice. Now he actively owed people, something he never did.
She leaned forward, elbows on knees and hands clasped. As she stared down at them, her hair swung forward and hid her face.
“Okay… Okay,” clearly talking to herself.
“Can I ask what you’re doing here?” He had some guesses, but they didn’t make sense. She was more than chef and pilot, but he couldn’t figure out what. Harem girl to the President?
“Someone is trying to kill the First Lady.”
“Apparently,” the FBI Director told her.
“Apparently?”
Her father nodded. “It helps keep my thinking flexible.”
“Apparently,” she echoed. “Apparently President Matthews wants me to find out who.”
She told him about her role as bodyguard. That clearly was news to her father as well. Emily was so good at secrets, Mark thought. Who could tell what she was thinking? Did she know he was the one who’d made love to her? That was the question he really wanted to ask and couldn’t. During the kiss at the White House a couple of hours earlier, he’d been relieved that she had clearly known. But now that he knew the truth about her, he just wanted to be as far away as possible.
Jim would be so proud. Mark had found new levels of dumb. He’d gone and trapped himself next to the woman he wanted, and he’d probably have to help her sneak into bed with her lover. To keep himself from breaking something, he focused on the stories she was telling of limousines, model airplanes, and highly classified light weapons.
“And the First Lady doesn’t trust the Secret Service?” Her father sounded incredulous. A worst-case scenario if ever there was one.
“That’s black. Actually, that’s black-in-black.”
Mark blanched. White operations ended up in the news. Often were even fed to the news, after the fact of course. Invasion of Baghdad, both times. Capture of Saddam Hussein. Downing of bin Laden.
Black Ops were operations that were never told to anyone anywhere at any time for any reason, except for other people with similar clearance and commitment. Like that sweet bit of flying Beale had done to fetch the defecting North Korean. That one had been chatted around SOAR, but not a single member of the outfit would ever tell an outsider. It had also been a key in his requesting her and her copilot at the end of their training.
Black-in-black. Never told to anyone outside of the action team. Ever. Those operations happened once every couple years to the unfortunate, never in their life’s service for the lucky. Black-in-black never went as planned. And it was always a royal, terrifying, life-threatening mess when it slid sideways, which it did every single time.
Fourteen years in the service, ten working with Special Forces, and this wa
s only his third. Emily knew the phrase, so she’d probably been part of one while flying for the 101st Airborne.
“So, what’s the play?”
“The play? You’ve already chosen it for us. You’re playing my ex-mercenary boyfriend who knows nothing about my real past.”
Playing Beale’s boyfriend was a role he’d have given a year’s pay to hold, if he didn’t now know what lay behind it. He could dream of a bonus track or any other special features, but not with a cheating woman.
“Okay.” He did his best to swallow his disappointment. “Where are we operating?”
Chapter 37
“The White House!” The words exploded out of both men at once.
That’s where the game was, and Emily couldn’t change it.
“Wait. Wait. Wait.” Mark had both hands up. “You’re talking about a black-in-black military operation in the most well-known building on the planet? And, in case you’ve forgotten, the military is not authorized on U.S. soil. That’s so illegal that I don’t even know where to begin.”
“He’s right, dear. It would require a presidential executive order, and even that might not hold up. I’m sorry, but we can’t proceed with this.”
She hung her head again. She didn’t want to do this. She didn’t want to pretend to be with Mark. It was too dangerous to both their careers, especially because she apparently had no control when he was close. Didn’t want to have control.
But she also didn’t have any choice in what they were doing. Her Commander-in-Chief and the best friend she’d ever had were counting on her.
“How do you do this, Daddy?”
When the silence dragged out, she looked up at him. He was studying her closely. He nodded to himself.
“You have learned the keeping of secrets. It is different training than we have as agents. Our life is sifting secrets, unraveling them to see what lies behind. The bottom line is to just say what you are thinking and then we can go over it carefully.”
“But my feelings are biased.” She managed not to glance at Mark. Not knowing what he was thinking hurt. And he appeared to be cutting up pretty stiff and commander-like for reasons she couldn’t fathom. Hadn’t his kiss buckled her knees just a few hours earlier? Well, she wasn’t about to tell him any more of her past than she was going to tell her father.
Night Is Mine Page 17
