On Your Mark

Chapter 1-3

Oh well. He figured that, just like Malcolm, he’d keep patrolling ahead and someday he’d catch a scent and track the right lady.

Pity about Reese Carver though. She was quite something. He wondered what it might be like waking up next to her. It was a very nice image.

At the security booth, he and Reese stepped through the door while Claremont waited for the next dog team to come out.

They both showed their IDs and were waved through easily.

So Reese was known. Of course she was known. Her code said Presidential Protection Detail. That was a very small, very elite group. Strange that he hadn’t seen her walking around. There was no way not to notice her.

If Jim the dog handler was arrogant, Reese decided that his backup security was perhaps the least subtle guy on the planet. Pleasant, well-trained, and just about everything he’d said could be taken as s****l innuendo. He always said it as if it was a joke—no way to quite take offense despite her sensitivity being set on ultra-high. But it was getting old by the time they reached the entrance to the grounds. What the guy really needed, she decided, was new material.

Once through, Jim waved to a Uniformed Division woman headed out to take his place. She was preceded by a small, brindle-colored mutt. They looked as if they both belonged in suburbia somewhere, but he wore the harness of a USSS dog and his handler was vested and armed.

“Hey, Malcolm,” the woman called out to the springer spaniel.

“Hey, Thor,” Jim did the same to her dog. The two of them traded smiles as they passed.

Thor? Reese could only shake her head in wonder. That little mutt was the one who’d caught a potential bomber outside the fence and then saved the President’s life just last month? Never judge a dog by its stature, she supposed. The female handler followed Thor as he trotted happily out the gate and joined up with Claremont before heading off on patrol along the other side of the fence.

She looked down at Malcolm and silently asked, Anything you want to be telling me?

He just wagged his tail at her.

Reese turned for the White House and almost ran over a teen standing there.

“Hi!”

How did some tourist and her Sheltie dog end up on this side of the fence?

Malcolm almost took Reese out as he and the Sheltie rushed to greet each other in the area usually reserved for her knees.

“Hey, Dilya,” Jim said from so close over Reese’s shoulder that it was all she could do to not jump.

“Hi, Sergeant Fischer.”

“You don’t call me Jim and I know you’re up to something.” He sounded just a little too relieved at having an excuse to say his name in front of her. At least he knew he had been a jerk.

“Doesn’t replace a proper introduction, Sergeant,” she muttered at him. Southern politeness said that you introduced yourself properly when meeting. And, in her experience, it was a bad sign when a guy couldn’t be bothered to do that.

He might have blushed at being caught but he recovered fast, making it hard to tell. “Right. Sorry. Reese Carver, this is First Dog Zackie. Zackie, this is Reese,” he addressed the Sheltie. Which explained what the dog was doing here.

“Hey,” the girl protested.

Jim just grinned. “And this pint-size piece of trouble is Dilya Stevenson.”

“Not the introduction I meant,” but Reese could see that he knew that. She turned to the kid, “Hi.” She never knew what to say to kids.

They would come up when she used to do publicity for her NASCAR sponsor. The boys were easy—they were either young enough to have a crush on her car or old enough to have a crush on a woman who won races in one. The young girls were tricky. They were either some weird mix of shy and tongue-tied that she’d never understood, or chatty-beyond-belief, which she’d both never understood or had time for. A lot of them idolized her as a symbol of all women or all African-American women or…

She was just a girl who’d grown up in a racing family outside Charlotte, North Carolina. They’d lived a five-block walk from the Charlotte Motor Speedway rather than out in the McMansions along Lake Norman with most of the other pro drivers. As a young girl, if she wasn’t watching Pop or her brother racing, she was timing their competition or hanging out in the garage or the pits. The school bus never dropped her at home—it had always dropped her at the Speedway’s back gate.

This Dilya was the first teen Reese had been near since she’d left racing and joined the Secret Service. Without even racing as a guide, she had no calibration for what the kid could want.

She was mid-teens, with that strung-out look of hitting her growth, though she’d never be tall. Her skin was about half as dark as Reese’s own but the tone was different, so not African heritage. Her hair fell in a thick ruffled wave almost to her elbows, but that wasn’t her standout feature. It was her eyes. Impossibly green, they assessed Reese as thoroughly as Reese was assessing her. Except she had the feeling that those green eyes could see far deeper into her than the kid was letting on. Or than Reese was comfortable with.

Her parka was bright blue. Her jeans stonewashed. Her boots red cowboy. She also wore a beautiful, hand-knit scarf of brilliant colors.

The three of them—the five of them counting the dogs frolicking up and down the wide, secured street between the EEOB and the White House—headed toward the entrance to the West Wing. Left with no choice except to draft along, she fell in behind them.

Jim wasn’t doing a lot to impress her so far.

“Are you on the New York shopping trip?” Dilya slowed down to ask her.

“What trip?” Reese hadn’t heard anything about New York.

“Oh. Never mind.” Her smile was pleasantly enigmatic.

Staffers were hurrying past. Dilya and Jim walked as if there was all the time in the world. Reese considered moving by them, but that seemed rude, even for her.

She scanned behind her to the fence line and saw nothing out of place. Thor and his female handler, with Claremont in tow, were just disappearing behind a large beech tree, still devoid of leaves. To her right she could catch glimpses of the grounds through the screen of trees: the children’s garden, the basketball court, a hint of blue of the swimming pool, and the white facade of the south face of the White House.

When she turned back, Dilya was eying her closely. A Marine in full uniform had come up beside Jim. It sounded as if they were talking football scores. Didn’t they get that it was February and the season was over?

“Maybe you both got off on the wrong paw,” Dilya must have noticed the direction of her glare. “You know, I just read Pride and Prejudice. They hated each other at first but it was just because they didn’t know each other.”

Reese swallowed hard. She barely knew the story, but it was a romance novel and they only ended one way. No way was this Presidential dog walker going there.

“You better not be saying what I think you’re saying.”

“What would that be?” The girl practically batted her eyelashes at her in all innocence. Inside the door, Dilya pulled out her security badge, swept it through the turnstile, then flipped the lanyard over her head.

Reese noted that it was an “All Access” badge: Residence, the Oval, Air Force One, even the Motorcade. She knew for a fact that neither the President nor the VP had kids yet, though both wives had just recently been reported pregnant—the security briefing beating CNN by less than an hour.

“Where did you come from?”

“Uzbekistan. At least I think so. I don’t really know. I can still speak Uzbek, so I’m guessing I grew up mostly there.”

“How did you end up here?” Reese was finding the conversation more than a little surreal. They stepped through the lobby and past the Situation Room entrance, where the Marine peeled off. There was a solid flow of people around them now, all moving fast and with purpose. Normally she’d be in perfect sync with them, but now she was with these slow-moving dog people and felt out of step with herself.

“I walked.”

“You walked from Uzbekistan to the White House?” Reese only roughly knew where that was. North and west of Afghanistan?

“No, silly. I would have had to swim the ocean. I only walked to Pakistan.”

Jim stopped so abruptly that Reese slammed square into his back. It was like walking into the SAFER barrier that encircled racetracks. The man was impossibly solid. She stepped back, but her nervous system felt as if she’d just been hit with a taser charge. No man should feel so real.

“You walked to Pakistan?” Jim was staring down at Dilya.

The teen shrugged.

“Is that hard?” Reese actually made the mistake of engaging him in conversation despite her plan to never waste her time on him again.

“You walked across the freaking Hindu Kush?” Jim ignored her and kept his attention on Dilya. “That’s worse than surfing in a Texas hurricane.”

Reese had heard of those mountains. Okay, that was hard. Beyond hard.

“With my parents, before they were killed. Then by myself until Kee found me.” Dilya winced—perhaps at the memory, perhaps at talking about it at all. “Not fun.”

“Not fun?” Jim’s eyes were wide. “I drove that road nigh on a couple hundred times. It’s the worst place I’ve ever seen to cross.”

Reese looked at him again. More change. He’d driven the Hindu Kush a couple hundred times? That meant he’d been in the military, part of the war effort there. So, he wasn’t just some dog handler, not if he’d done that.

“We didn’t follow roads much,” Dilya took a sudden interest in the First Dog, kneeling to comb his fluffy brown-and-white fur with her slender fingers.

“You really went all the way across those mountains?” Jim missed the teen’s desire for a subject change.

“To Bati.”

“The soccer stadium? The one converted into a US Special Operations fort?”

Dilya stopped fooling with Zackie and looked up at Jim abruptly.

“I delivered some loads there,” he explained. “Fuel and food, mostly. Hauled out some pretty shot-up helicopters too.”

“I lived there for over two years with my new parents,” Dilya’s voice was small.

“You were embedded with—” Jim glanced at Reese and snapped his jaw shut.

Dilya shrugged. “They rescued me from the middle of a firefight…and then they kept me.” She jolted to her feet and was gone so fast it was as if she’d never been there.

“Bati?” Reese asked as Jim gazed down the crowded hallway in the direction Dilya had disappeared.

“Forward operating base,” he spoke as if he stood ten thousand miles away, looking at the scene. “Spec Ops. Very hush-hush. Home to the best team and best pilot of the entire Night Stalkers—that’s Army airborne.”

Hard to have grown up in Charlotte and not know about the Night Stalkers. They flew overhead all the time on their way between their base at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and the Special Operations teams stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. They’d done numerous demos at the Speedway before big races. Once even delivering the pace car from one of their big black helos.

“What was the pilot’s name?” She wasn’t sure why she asked. She’d only ever met one pilot years before, but the woman had left an indelible impression. A female Army helicopter pilot. Reese hadn’t even known there were any. Reese had spent a really fun one-week stand with her gunner—a macho Latino named Tim Maloney—but it was the woman who stuck in her memory.

“Emily Beale. Most impressive woman I’ve ever met.” Then Jim turned to face her and that Mr. Charm smile was back. “So far.”