Girl Takes The Oath (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 5) (23 page)

~~~~~~~

“What does she want with Jiang?” Connie asked.

“It’s something to do with a Chinese student,” Michael said. “A girl from Shenzhen who’s got her worried. She wants him to check up on her family.”

“Can’t you do that for her?”

“I already have. They have a small business supplying glass to the construction industry, which is pretty lucrative, given how fast that place is growing. Can we discuss this in the study?” Michael suggested, with an eye on Li Li and Stone, who sat at the kitchen table with cookies and milk, and ears cocked perhaps too sharply on this conversation.

“Why is Emily even interested in them?” Andie asked, once the door clicked shut.

“I’m not sure, but apparently my intel isn’t enough for her.”

“What more does she want?” Connie asked. “And do you even know how to contact Jiang?”

“I don’t think she knows what she’s hoping to hear. All she said was the girl may be in trouble.”

“Is she at the Academy?” Andie asked.

“No, the college next door.”

“And Jiang?”

“That part was easy. I left word with a bric-a-brac shop in Alexandria, and he called a few hours later.”

“Is the girl
in trouble
,” Connie asked, “or is
she
the trouble?” She mulled this thought over for a moment. “It sounds to me like
Emily
may be in trouble.”

“Perry’s there with her,” Michael said.

“What about Theo?” Andie asked.

“He’s still in Kabul.”

“I bet Perry can only stay a few days,” Connie said. “I need to get over there.”

“She won’t like it,” Ethan said.

“Don’t worry, I’m not gonna shoot anyone… not unless I have to.”

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Chapter Twenty One

A Shadow on the Wall

“You’re not chained to the Yard,” Perry said, as he pulled himself into a seated position on the sofa. “You still have some liberty and we have the place to ourselves.”

Emily could sympathize—he’d called in every favor to get a week’s leave from the other side of the world, and would end up spending more than half of it in transit, on a hastily cobbled together array of cargo planes, commercial flights, a cruiser and a couple of Sea King utility helicopters—and lying next to him in his friend’s living room had plenty of allure. But she hadn’t driven her friends away in order to luxuriate in the fire his touch ignited in her body. The silence in her heart required her to silence everything else, to commune with it, and through it to comprehend her place in a universe larger than anything that could be experienced in Perry’s embrace.

“I’ll see you in the morning, before you ship out,” she said, and leaned over to kiss him. It wouldn’t have been difficult to deflect his hands, reaching around to caress the small of her back, to tingle a cheek and make tremble the tiny hairs on the nape of her neck and the top of both legs. The kiss lingered, maybe a bit longer than she’d intended, and when she pulled away, her lips caught ever so briefly to his.

Walking back home from the little house at the bottom of Revell Street, Emily tried to picture the day when she wouldn’t have to leave him, but as hard as she tried, she just couldn’t bring it into focus. All the trees on Shipwright Street had completely budded out, and most were already in full leaf. The cobblestones had mainly been paved over in this part of the historic district, and only peeked through here and there. The bricks of the sidewalks had been preserved more carefully, though tree roots had caused them to buckle and heave every few steps. In the distance, glimpsed barely out of the corner of her eye, a shadow flickered in the leopard shade. She assumed it was nothing, or perhaps Kano, and didn’t let it darken her mood.

Skipping over the low spots, and cresting the peaks, she cut across on Conduit Street and turned up Main, passing a diner, a sushi bar and a new, upscale crêperie. Across the way, sitting in the window of the only decent pizza/ice cream parlor in town, she noticed Ruochen Ma, sitting with three other students, including Diao Chan, enjoying as un-Chinese a meal as Emily could imagine. She started to cross over, when the girls saw her, and the expression of terror on Ruochen’s face froze her for an instant. Whatever had frightened the girl, she tried not to draw attention to it, and waved a casual greeting to the group. Diao Chan smiled back and turned to show off her new, shoulder-length hairdo, while her friend trembled and shook her head in a tiny gesture, as if to say, “Please do not stop.” Emily nodded and walked on by.

~~~~~~~

“You came,” Trowbridge said. “I had my doubts.”

They had the basement study lounge in Bancroft Hall to themselves, unsurprisingly, for a Sunday evening at the end of a long weekend, and the plebes generally preferred to study in packs in the lounges on the upper floors.

“I said I’d be here,” Emily replied with a frown.

“It’s just that it was over a week ago, and the way things have been going, I thought you might have had a change of heart. You’re not afraid to be seen with me?”

“Why should I be?”

“I don’t know. But the way all your friends from the Twenty Eighth seem to be avoiding you…”

“They’re not avoiding me. I’m avoiding them.”

“And Tanahill and Carnot?”

“I forced them to move out.”

“Then why meet with me?”

“Because no one’s likely to try to get at me by hurting you. I’m sorry if that sounds cold, but it’s a calculation I’m forced to make.”

“You mean because no one would think you care about me?”

Emily nodded, and tried not to make eye contact with him, at first. But in the end, she felt more uncomfortable avoiding it.

“Can we talk about happier topics,” she said, “like your vector calculus problem?”

“I don’t know why they want us to learn stuff like this. I just want to fly choppers, not design ’em.”

“I know. It seems strange. But it’s not about becoming an engineer. They just want you to get into the habit of thinking about air the way an engineer does. Or a physicist.”

“Sure, I suppose,” he said, sounding unconvinced. “Anyway, the problem is figuring out the turbulence and vortex at different pitch angles and turning radii. It’s a little like cavitation in water.”

Trowbridge spread his books and notes across the table, and they pored over them together. Emily pointed to one drawing he’d done, apparently as a doodle, showing the air currents under a banking helicopter as if they’d been produced by cartoon angels blowing on them.

“That’s not bad,” she said. “It reminds me of something one of the Johnnies was telling me the other day.”

“You talk to those guys? I thought they were just a bunch of hippies and beat poets.”

“Nah, they’re okay. Besides, I take human contact where I find it these days. Those guys study at least as much math and science as we do, and not just the math geeks. All of ’em have to read Einstein and Quantum Mechanics, even the hippies.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Weird, huh? It’s a fully-required curriculum over there. Everyone has to study everything.” She paused a moment to let that revelation sink in. “Anyway, this one guy was sitting near me in the deli on West Street, and he saw what I was working on, and he said it was like this vector analysis of a plucked string he’d just finished, you know, like on a guitar. It got me to thinking that your problem is also some form of wave equation.”

“I suppose, if you treat the air like a string… but how does that help me? Wave equations are like impossible to solve.”

“That’s just what this guy was explaining to me. You don’t have to solve it. Just recognizing it as a wave equation means you can start looking for wave-like aspects in your problem.”

“Such as…” he muttered, still skeptical.

“Harmonics, dummy. Don’t you play the guitar?” A light seemed to flicker behind his eyes.

“Oh… yeah, nodes. If it’s harmonic, there should be nodes where the turbulence cancels out, like pockets of smooth air. That’s amazing,” he gushed suddenly, and began to scribble notes frantically. “This is genius, Tenno. I can’t believe you figured that out.”

“One thing the hippies across the street understand better than we do is that questions can be useful even if you can’t answer them.”

“Right,” he said, still preoccupied with his notes. “Whatever.”

Just then, Bauer walked past the door to the lounge along with Gunderson, and after a double-take, poked his head in.

“What on earth are you doing with
her
, Trowbridge?”

“He’s been spending a lot of time with her, I hear,” Gunderson said.

“She’s just helping me with some homework.”

“If her own company won’t study with her, I don’t think you should either,” Bauer said.

“He’s made his choice, Casey,” Gunderson said. “If he gets caught in the sweep, when NCIS decides to take her away, it’s his problem, not yours.”

“It’s not like that,” Trowbridge protested.

“Weren’t you the one telling me I need to pick my enemies more carefully?” Bauer asked. “It looks like you need to pick your friends more carefully.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Trowbridge said to Emily once the two of them were alone again. She remained silent for an uncomfortable moment.

“They’re right about one thing,” Emily said, standing up to leave. “You
do
need to choose better friends.”

“They’re really not so bad,” he said, though without the air of conviction such a statement would need to be persuasive.

“I don’t care what they are. Have you forgotten that evening in Cumberland Court?”

“No, and I’m sorry I wasn’t more help then.”

“I didn’t need any help,” Emily said.

“You sure didn’t. You still have those idiots off-balance, half-terrified that you’re gonna file charges against ’em at any moment. Why haven’t you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“I’ve got better things to do than waste my time with this,” she said, and stepped toward the door.

“Wait,” he hushed in an urgent whisper. “There’s something else.”

She turned to look at him, uncertain what to expect. When he didn’t speak right away she grew impatient. “Well…?”

He motioned her back to the table. “It’s a message. Someone gave it to me for you, and I don’t know what to do with it.”

“A message? What is it?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” he said, fishing in his pocket for something. He pulled out a crumpled slip of paper and held it between two fingers, as if he wanted to minimize his contact with it. “Someone left this in my bag yesterday in Nimitz Hall. I didn’t know what to do with it.”

Emily noticed her name scrawled on one side. On the other, she could make out a few Chinese characters. “And you want to give it to me?”

“I don’t know what to do with it. I thought of handing it over to NCIS, you know ’cause it looks pretty suspicious.”

“Why didn’t you? Aren’t you afraid of getting into trouble?”

“Because that’s what I think whoever put it there wants me to do. I think I’d rather trust you, than not,” he said, his face contorted by doubt and fear. “Can you read it?”

“I think so, if it’s in Mandarin.”

“What’s it say?”

“Are you sure you want to know?” When he nodded, she said, “ ‘
Your time is ripe’
; that’s what it says.”

“Do you know what it means?”

“No,” she said after a moment. “I think you better turn it over to NCIS. Whatever it means, you need to steer clear.” The expression on his face, more like a sick child than someone about to enter into a command position in the armed forces, stopped her from leaving him just then. “Why would you trust me with this? I mean, with everything that’s happening around me…”

“Hankinson,” he blurted out after an uncomfortable moment in which he appeared to weigh options. “He was good to me in my plebe year. He likes you, and I trust his judgment.”

“Whatever,” she growled. “Just keep your distance from now on.” When he didn’t react, or at least didn’t look like her words were sinking in she said, “Whoever wrote that chose you. Why would they do that?”

“You’re okay, Tenno, you know that?” he said, seemingly out of the blue. “You’ve been kind to me, these last few months, helping me train, teaching me about breathing, sparring… and helping with vector calc.” He added, “I wouldn’t have done nearly as well at Quantico without your encouragement.”

Emily grunted, but still said nothing.

“Why did
you
help me anyway?” he asked. “You know, with everything else that was going on.”

“Stacie said you were different… and maybe she was right.”

“That business in Quantico was really hard on her. I mean, she did well in the women’s division, and I was eliminated before the second day, but we decided to stay to watch the finals, and share a ride home.”

“I didn’t realize you guys were there,” Emily said. “I didn’t see you.”

“It was hard to get anywhere near you, especially afterwards, what with the Marines surrounding you and all. I think you really impressed those guys.”

“Yeah, that was sweet of them.”

“But Stacie, when she saw what happened… I think it really freaked her out,” Trowbridge said. “I mean, you know how keen she is to be a warrior, to be the best, the most aggressive… when she saw that knife she tried to rush into the ring. But there was no way to get through the crowd. And when you killed that guy, she was like completely stunned. I was standing next to her, and her face, it had gone all white, like someone had drained all the blood out. I don’t think she said a word the whole ride home.”

Emily had noticed something different about Stacie after Quantico. She seemed more reserved, even diffident. She’d been wide-eyed and envious when she heard about the shootout on the bridge, but that was just based on rumor and fancy.

“I didn’t realize she’d seen that,” she said. “I wish I’d known. I’m sure it was hard on her.”

“It couldn’t have been as hard as it was on you.”

“I’ve seen worse,” she muttered. “I’ve done worse.”

“You’ve gotta cut yourself some slack on that one, Tenno. You only did what you had to do. I’m sure Stacie understands that.”

Of course, Emily had no use for Trowbridge’s reassurance, since it didn’t speak to the way all those dead souls haunted her heart. But she recognized the kindness he intended.

“My friends call me Em… that is, if you want to risk it.”

“You mean, put myself in the crosshairs of NCIS? What’s that all about anyway? Quantico?”

“Yeah, that and some other stuff.”

“Like the shootout on the Patuxent Bridge? Rumors have been flying about that, and the story gets wilder every time I hear it. You and CJ apparently killed a dozen guys, according to the latest version.”

“I heard that too,” Emily said, with a wry smile.