“Got it,” she said. “Pill drive’s in one pocket, cell phone’s in the other, I’ll snag my laptop.”
“Three quick other things, Heather. One, can you deal with it if they go past midnight? This is one of those things that might.”
“Bad?”
“The worst. Do you need emergency toiletries?”
“All the purse crap—and I don’t need much—is in the side pockets of my laptop case. I’m good. Two?”
“Two, I don’t know if there’s a connection to Daybreak, but there could be, so I’m going to take our DoF part of the Daybreak team and keep them together on standby; when they go home, they’ll all be on call, so if you need the Daybreak team for anything, you already have it. For that matter, if you need your boss, you know I don’t have a life anyway, but I’ll be extra available tonight.”
She felt her breath drawing in and her shoulders squaring, the way they had in her late twenties when she was kicking down doors and busting bad guys. Usually she didn’t notice how much she towered over Graham, who was only five-foot-seven, but at times like this it was hard to miss. “So something’s in the soup.”
“That brings me to number three. Cameron Nguyen-Peters is convening it. We both know what kinds of thing he deals with.”
“Uh-huh. Bound to be interesting. ’Kay, I’ll grab my stuff and tell the troops something; Nellie can handle the wrap.” Truth to tell, her administrative assistant always did handle things like this, and a good thing too.
She cleared her throat at the door; they all looked up. “Everyone, I’ve been called to an emergency meeting. They won’t tell me what it’s about until I’m in the secure room, but it may be something to do with Daybreak. Nellie?”
“Ready.” Her assistant’s fingers poised above her laptop keyboard.
“Contact list from this meeting, available for all of us ASAP. See about a tentative meeting two days from now; DoF folks, Graham wants to talk to you right after this meeting. Sorry to run but I have to.”
Everyone stared at her. She didn’t blame them; she’d have been staring too. She folded her laptop, dropped it into its case, and was out the door.
Cell, pill drive, laptop, survival stuff, good till next morning if I have to be. Ready to go, just the same as the old days. There’s a dance in the old dame yet, she thought smugly. Hey, if I’m not entitled to be arrogant, who is?
She had just time enough to notice what a beautiful fall day it was, with the leaves a wild uproar of bright colors in damp golden sunlight, before the limo shot up the main drive and braked in front of her.
Man, this is big and someone is worried, for real. The driver seemed military; as she climbed into the front seat and got a better look, she saw it was a Secret Service ERT in light-duty uniform, no external armor, but a telltale holster-buckle bump on his left shoulder. “You’ll want to buckle up.”
“Always do,” she said. As her belt clicked closed, he whipped the big car out into the mid-day traffic, letting tires squeal and horns honk as they would, and gunned it across three lanes of traffic.
“Isn’t Homeland Security in the Nebraska Complex?” Heather asked, since they were going the other way.
“Most of it still is. Secretary Ferein and some key offices have already moved to the new complex at St. Elizabeth’s.” He took another turn fast and tight. “Escort should pick us up next block, then we can go faster.”
A DC police cruiser with siren and lights going cut in front of them, and the driver gunned the engine, apparently trying to park the limo on the cop car’s bumper. They roared up an entrance ramp to the parkway, zagged across to the left lanes, and headed south at what the speedometer said was just over eighty miles an hour, the regular traffic fleeing to the right in front of them and re-merging behind them.
Heather had never realized that St. Elizabeth’s was this close; usually, she supposed, it wasn’t. The driver turned off with a wave to the cop, drove without touching the brake through four gates that opened inches in front of his grille, and followed a short driveway to a side door on a big, old mock castle of a building.
“Let me guess,” Heather said, as he pulled the car around the little circular drive. “They just said deliver Heather O’Grainne to this door, as fast as you can?”
“That’s all they told me.”
The limo halted and Heather opened her door. “Thanks for keeping it down to terrifying.”
He grinned at her in a not-quite-professional way and departed at a much more sedate pace.
A slim young woman, discreetly armed and overtly capable, led Heather to an elevator, which must have descended at least eight floors.
St. Elizabeth’s had originally been built as the first national insane asylum, before the Civil War, and over the decades had been used for many things that needed to be hidden from the public: advanced weapons, cryptology, off-the-record briefings on black ops, meetings with outlaw governments, meetings to make decisions no one wanted to own—like a toxic dump for unspeakable secrets, as if the madness and violence at its foundation had drawn every dirty, secret thing to the old fake-feudal brickpile.
The elevator door opened, and Cameron Nguyen-Peters was waiting for her. “Hey, there, buddy,” she said, grinning and throwing an arm over his shoulder, a half hug that she knew would simultaneously please him (he’d had a crush on her for fifteen years) and offend him (he’d grown steadily stuffier in his dignity with time, and he hadn’t exactly started off as an egalitarian hippie, anyway). “How the hell are you?”
“Life’s been better. We have one big mess on our hands.” He seemed to be looking at something through the wall, twenty miles away.
“Well, if you’re holding this meeting on the day of Game Seven, I know it’s nothing small.”
“Exactly.” He glanced around. “Gotta say the Pirates appear to be getting a very unfair level of divine intervention. Anyway, thanks again for coming right—”
“Mr. Nguyen-Peters,” a female voice said from a speaker somewhere, “the DoDDUSP”—she pronounced it daw-duss-pee—“and the liaison from Deep Black are here.”
Dude, Heather thought. This is big.
Deep Black was the satellite reconnaissance office. They didn’t show up for many meetings because the breach of security in talking to or about them was so often worse than any situation that might have come up.
But if “Deep Black” was a red flag, DoDDUSP was a shrieking siren—the painfully long abbreviation for Department of Defense Deputy Under Secretary for Policy, which could be roughly defined as the guy in charge of having at his fingertips all the plans for all the wars the United States seemed likely to get into, in case the President should say, “occupy Sudan,” or “seal the Mexican border,” or ask “How long would it take us, starting from right now, to seize Abu Dhabi?” For forty years and more, DoDDUSPs had planned Grenada, Haiti, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Eritrea, Jordan, the Second Korean War, the Taiwan defense, both Iranian wars, and the Myanmar Relief in Force—and a few more things the public had never heard about.
If DoDDUSP was here, it was because Cam thought there might need to be a war.
Cameron was nodding slightly, his lips pressed together, signaling her, Yes, that’s right, it’s that bad. “I have to confer with—”