Chapter 27
Emily traded seats with Michael. The Tac Room remained quiet as she and Claudia began doing what this team did best—tracking stray threads of information.
Except Emily’s skills had grown rusty with disuse.
She could feel Claudia racing down the data pathways while she was still trying to refresh her login credentials.
Had it been so long a gap that they’d been reset?
Apparently yes. Once she was in, even the screen interface was unfamiliar.
She hated software updates almost as much as she hated being back here doing this.
If she could teleport Lauren back from Hawaii and into the second chair, she’d do it in a heartbeat.
Not that there was room in the small office for another person—one detail she’d overlooked in the design, having three observers.
What she knew was flying helicopters. Except she didn’t anymore—not at the level she had as a Night Stalker or even flying to fight wildfire as she’d done for a half decade.
From her first flight at sixteen, every waking minute of the next twenty years had been about flight.
Well, not every minute. Mark, Tessa, and Belle had entered her life near the end of her flying career.
Soon after she’d landed her last helo, the Protection Force team had spun up here at the ranch.
They’d eventually connected with Miss Watson inside the White House, which had largely been Dilya’s doing.
Ever since, the Protection Force had anonymously provided threat information to the US Secret Service protection details.
They’d even identified and recommended recruitment of truly exceptional individuals who now filled roles such as the head driver of the President’s limousine among others.
Their mandate was small, focused on supporting Executive Branch protection in ways that they didn’t already cover themselves.
However, with Claudia and the vacationing Lauren, backed up by Colonel Michael Gibson, Emily had become redundant. In that limbo after being done with this group but before she’d reached the decision to retire, she’d been offered command of the Night Stalkers.
After a year, she almost had a handle on running the three thousand personnel and two hundred aircraft of the 160th. But she didn’t have a whole lot of—
Someone nudged her shoulder.
Finally logged in, Emily focused on—
The next nudge was harder, enough to twist her chair. She spun to face Dilya. “What?”
This time Dilya pushed against her shoulder with a single finger. Finally catching up with the message, she rose to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Mark and Michael as Dilya slid into her seat.
“I may have grown up in the pre-tech world as a Southwest Asian war orphan,” Dilya didn’t turn as she began poking through the data structures. “But being inside the White House bubble for a decade, I caught up a bit.”
Emily tried not to think about just what systems Dilya would have the opportunity to infiltrate during her years there. If she didn’t know that Dilya would never do anything to hurt her adopted parents, adopted country, and the First Families, she’d be scared stiff. Should she be anyway?
In under a minute, she was having trouble following the threads Dilya chased and lost track entirely within two. By three, Dilya was trading one-word sentences with Claudia about which ideas they were each chasing.
“Dilya. You shouldn’t…”
Mark placed a finger on the bottom of her chin and pushed her jaw closed.
When she glared at him, he opened the door and gestured for her to lead the way out.
Old habits, left over from when he’d been her commanding officer and later the wildfire Incident Commander, made her step out of the room. Mark closed the door behind them.
He nudged her toward the stairs.
“But…”
“We need to wake the girls for breakfast and school soon.” Taking her hand at the bottom of the stairs, he led her out of the barn into the November darkness. “I was thinking of giving them a sick day to see you, but I don’t know how long you’ll be here this time, so we’ll play it by ear.”
“The Lieutenant Colonel Mark Henderson I knew was never one for playing it by ear.”
“Accept that perhaps I learned a few things watching you.”
“Watching me?” Emily didn’t know what anyone could learn by watching her. “What? Lessons in how to screw up your life?”
He stopped her a foot from the broad steps up to the lodge’s porch by the simple expedient of picking her up by the shoulders of her coat and turning her to face him before plopping her back down onto her own two feet. “Don’t try to piss me off, Emma. It doesn’t suit you.”
“No, but it does seem to suit me. I’m running so hard that I slept right through the girls crawling in bed with me.
But, oh sure, I spring out of bed when duty calls.
” She slapped a pocket but couldn’t find her phone.
She could picture it on the nightstand beside the girls.
She hoped no one else had called to wake them.
“So quit.” When she couldn’t answer, Mark nodded to himself. “Didn’t think so. You’ve still got good work to do, honey. Hold that focus and get it done. We’ll still be here.”
“You make it sound so simple.”
“I wish.” His low chuckle made her feel better. “But we’ll get through it. They…” he nodded toward the barn hidden by the darkness “…will have answers soon enough if there are any to be found. Now let’s go roust the girls. I’m thinking they’ve already had too much beauty sleep.”