Night Is Mine (32 page)

Mark’s voice sounded rough as he too fought for control. “Then let’s do something simple—find out why she’s doing it. If you find the reason, the motive might prove the actions.”

“That’s where we need to look. What is she getting out of it?”

The First Lady had just whisked off to visit a friend in Colorado for a weekend and taken Daniel along. Beale’s father had insisted that he’d known Zack Taylor for twenty years and there was no possibility of his being involved in Katherine’s plans. Once again they were stalled.

Mark found himself at loose ends and didn’t like it. Beale was making him completely stir-crazy. He understood her refusals. Even inside the protective shell of the Secret Service, there wasn’t the privacy, the freedom. Her kitchen far too public, her tiny apartment too claustrophobic. This crazy place was pressing in on his brain so hard that he wanted to scream.

They’d gone for a walk through the White House gardens together just to have something to do. They walked in silence, Emily so distracted by her own thoughts that she’d have walked into a tree if he’d let her.

They turned up the next path and Mark froze.

Agent Frank Adams stood not a dozen feet away scowling at him.

Emily practically jumped out of her skin.

“Didn’t mean to spook you.”

“Sure you did.” Emily recovered her voice quickly.

His smile for her was easygoing, even friendly. “Okay, you caught me. Surprised it worked.”

Mark was pretty surprised, too. Beale was normally unflappable.

“Thinking deep thoughts. Where you headed?”

“I’m just off shift, heading to the gym. Want to join in?” Agent Adams was completely ignoring Mark. So whatever this was, it wasn’t about him.

“The gym?” Beale was rolling some idea around on her tongue.

Mark looked back and forth between them. There was a subtext going on here that he was missing. Clearly they weren’t talking about a workout.

“Sure,” Emily answered her own question. “The gym, as long as Marky can come. It’ll give us a chance to find out.”

“Find out? What?” Adams waved for her to lead him down the garden path toward the east entrance.

Who’d be standing afterward, of course. They were talking about a sparring match. Against this guy? She had to be kidding. Mark was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to try taking on a top Secret Service agent. He needn’t worry; Adams wasn’t any more interested in him than a bug.

Beale didn’t bat an eye as she answered the agent.

“Why, who’s prettier of course.”

Adams grunted. “Damn. Lost that race before we even got out the gate.”

***

The Secret Service headquarters was a short six-block walk away. Emily did her best to keep the talk light. She and Adams were both D.C. kids in a city of transients. Discussing the changes in architecture, monuments, and most significantly, the mood of the city, was fun. The blacksuits’ headquarters was an imposing, block-long megalith of brick and glass in the midst of a long row of imposing buildings of brick and glass. Even so, it stood out.

As they entered the doors, she leaned over to Mark and whispered in his ear, “Remember who you aren’t.”

He startled slightly and then smiled at her, “Uh, right. Sure, babe.” Good thing she’d reminded him.

Adams signed them in and led them into the complex and down a broad marble-and-granite corridor tastefully lit from the recessed edges of false columns of black stone. Clearly designed to absolutely humble any guest.

“Nice,” she managed, with the word completely sticking in her throat.

“Shooting range down those stairs.” He indicated a double-wide staircase off to the right. Several agents moving up and down the treads.

“How long were you in SOAR?”

“I am,” she hit the word hard, “in SOAR. Two years, if you include training. Seven flying for the Screaming Eagles before that. And I will be in SOAR after you’ve retired and they’re wrapping wet nappies around your butt.” Damn it! She was still a pilot. Just on some kind of screwed-up, unwanted sabbatical that now had her hunting ghosts behind every presidential portrait.

“Touchy. Touchy. So, you’re saying I probably don’t want to shoot against you.”

She clamped down on her tongue. This was a senior blacksuit she was facing. “Um, tell you what. I’ll take you on, automatic weapons .50 caliber and above. Especially weaponized vehicles.”

He grunted and continued down the hall. “Okay, that wouldn’t exactly be something we practice much down in the basement.”

“No. But I’ve taken a fair number of your snipers out on the Fort Benning range. And they learned how somewhere.”

Adams laughed and turned down a short hall. “It’s hard to remember from minute to minute that a beautiful young woman like you is also a highly trained soldier. Today, though, we’re going to see just what the Secret Service has that you helicopter jockeys don’t.”

“Yeah, squat. Squat and diddly.”

All he did was point at a door marked for gender.

“Through there. You’ll find clothes for guests over in the far-right corner. See you inside.”

Most of the black T-shirts had a big “USSS” logo. Mark couldn’t find one with no logo.

Agent Adams merely grunted when Mark pulled it on inside out so that the logo didn’t show. He’d been trying to figure out how to play this for the whole walk over while Beale made nice-nice with Adams. Clearly some grudge match going on here and his role was to be invisible. He was surprised they’d let him in the building at all, even if only to the gym. It said something of how highly they thought of Beale. He could play it as jet-setting playboy-wimp, but the Secret Service had surely drilled past that facade by now. So, Mr. Paramilitary-cocky-as-can-be stud. He could get into that role.

He scared up some shorts and figured his sneakers would be good enough.

The door on the far side of the locker room led to a true wonder. SOAR did a lot of cross-country running; the worse the weather, the better the workout. A SOAR gym consisted of a set of free weights in the corner of a hangar. Volleyball and hoops were common pastimes. The three battalion headquarters had serious setups, but with the current operational tempo they were almost never parked there.

The Secret Service gym dedicated whole sections to different equipment. A banked track encircled the massive room. Eight lanes wide with a couple dozen agents spread out around the course. Rings, bars, and horses. Clearly, agility mattered. Weights, cycles, steppers, every machine imaginable.

Everything in excellent repair, all showing signs of active use. And in the center of the room a broad, clear area, heavily padded with bright blue mats. Wrestling, grappling, sparring, martial arts. Seventy people could take a class there, though right now only two couples and one threesome were using the mats.

“Cool setup.” He did his best to sound casual.

Adams grunted at him again, making it absolutely clear that he didn’t care in the least what Marky Herman thought.

Then Beale came out the next door over. Somewhere she’d found a T-shirt marked “Army” that clearly no one knew was there, or it would have been purged or used for target practice. It was a size or two small and made his insides quiver like Jim’s stupid squirrel dog that had caught the scent. The black running shorts exposed miles of beautiful, well-toned leg. He didn’t have to pretend for a second to be blown away by how good she looked.

“Let’s warm up a bit first.” Adams’s voice sounded just a little bit rough, and Mark couldn’t blame him. After a quick set of stretches on bars conveniently located nearby, they all set off at a slow jog.

Adams let Emily set the pace, and Mark dutifully followed along.

She opened up a bit after the first kilometer.

By the second kilometer she hit her stride. Mark knew it well as they often trained together. At this pace she could run with little change for two hours without water. Six with water. Ten with water and energy bars. It wasn’t especially fast, but it was a mile-eater nonetheless. He wanted to push ahead, show Adams a thing or two about field training, but Emily caught his gaze and gave a short shake of her head.

Mark cursed, managing to keep it under his breath. No matter what his instincts told him, he wasn’t part of their contest. It would be unfair of him to push ahead and drive the challenge when he wasn’t a part of it. He heeled in alongside through four kilometers, a shade off his normal stride, which made it pretty frustrating.

He followed them to the weight machines. Adams chucked water bottles at each of them from a small fridge.

“You take cold water for granted. Still amazes me every time.” Beale said it a moment before he would have. Right. His role. Florida, Australia, Italy, plenty of cold water. His best bet, he decided, was not to speak at all until this was completely over.

“How long were you over there? Wherever you were.”

So, there were limits to how much Adams had uncovered about Beale.

“For the last couple months. Hot. Sweat-in-your-sleep hot. And dry and dusty like you wouldn’t believe. For six months before that, hot and humid like Mississippi never saw.”

Adams dropped his empty bottle in the recycling bin beside the mini-fridge and walked over to a weight machine. He pulled the pin and moved it down a good ten weights. If Beale tried to match a load like that, it would simply lift her off the ground, but Adams starting yanking away on it with the ease a D-boy operator would show.

Mark went to a setup and inserted a pin thirty pounds over Adams. At Beale’s glare he shoved it up another twenty pounds. He’d regret that, but there was no backing off now. So she’d pegged him for the wimp role. Nope. No way. Not Mark Henderson, not even Marky Herman.

“That’s warm-up weight?” Beale focused on Adams, giving the man respect and drawing his attention away from Mark. Damn her for playing fair. He wanted to wear the man down a little before Beale faced him in the ring. She went to a machine facing him and set the pin about sixty pounds lighter than Adams had.

“Gets me started.”
I’m showing off a little, but not very much.

“Don’t think I’m going to try wrassling you.”

“Don’t chicken on me now, Army. You’re on my turf.”

“You two are going to try the mats?” A guy of Adams’s build, but clearly only a few years out of school, stopped spinning his cycle nearby.

“Army, meet Steve. Steve, Army.”

No point in introducing Mark; he was too far beneath contempt. He did his best not to grunt as he started pressing the stack. That extra fifty pounds was going to be a mistake if they did this for long.

She nodded a greeting to Steve and her thanks to Adams.

Decent of him. Better that neither of them had a name, even inside here. What people didn’t know, they couldn’t tell.

“Oh, this is gonna be good.” The young guy pinned his pinkies between his teeth and let out a shrill whistle.

Emily kept pulling her weights and so did Frank. Mark kept his moving in unison with Adams, not that anyone was paying him any attention. His muscles were starting to burn already. Every other agent in the room stopped and looked around. Being obviously the only two people ignoring the signal, all eyes soon locked on them. About thirty guys and maybe a dozen women. The crowd ranged from teenybopper undercovers to grizzled old warhorses.

Most went back to their workouts but kept looking around to see if Adams and Emily had moved yet.

“Warm?” Adams’s grin looked dangerous.

“Getting tired?” She shot back without slowing her workout.

Steve was right: this was gonna be good. Mark would bet on Beale any day, but looking over the head White House blacksuit, maybe he’d hedge his bet.

Adams pulled five more reps then let the bar drop with a clang against the stops. A room-ringing announcement as clear as a starter’s bell.

“No. You?”

She shrugged acquiescence, dropped her own weights loudly, and waved for him to lead the way.

Adams pointed at Mark, as he eased his load down against the stops. His muscles on fire.

“Steve. Keep an eye on this guy. A close one.”

Steve nodded, and Mark recognized the look. He wouldn’t be going anywhere Steve didn’t want him to go.

Adams turned his back on them and stepped up on the near edge of the mats.

She moved so fast that no one had time to shout a warning.

Frank Adams hit the mat face-first with a loud smack as Emily rolled out from where she’d cut him off below the knees.

He rolled onto his back.

Catcalls followed her as she scrambled around and caught a fistful of hair and pulled down toward the mat, keeping him pinned.

Mark could see that Adams’s eyes were watering and he winced in sympathy. He knew she played dirty, had a recent reminder of that when trying to protect his ticklish spot while wrestling in her hospital bed.