Night Is Mine (23 page)

“There’s my name at last. That’s a good sign.”

“I haven’t been avoiding you, Peter.” She offered his name carefully and distinctly. She was a grown woman and could call him by his name without becoming unglued. “My current job, at your request—”

“And you’re bitter about that.”

Not something she intended to admit to her Commander-in-Chief so she put her mental head down and continued.

“—At your request, is to serve the First Lady. I expected to see the two of you together more often.” She’d feared and hoped she’d see him more often. “But as that isn’t the case, I simply haven’t seen you. And, no matter how it may seem, I’ve actually served under forty-eight hours inside the White House. There was that little four-day gap where I just felt like lying around with bandages over half my face.”

He nodded to himself for a long moment. Watched her face closely.

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.

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 the 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?”

Emily clearly bit back an oath. “That’s my question for you. What the hell are you doing here, Major?”