Take Over at Midnight (The Night Stalkers) (16 page)

Lola watched Tim’s tight butt as they headed down the sidewalk. Turnabout was fair play. She’d seen his body’s reaction to her and found it actually pleased her more than she’d care to admit. He wanted her. He wanted her so bad.

She should have stuffed a credit card in the pocket of her shorts. Then they could just get a room and… Okay, she wanted him pretty bad herself too.

She glanced at her own reflection in the front of a mirror-glass building. Almost didn’t recognize the woman who could want a particular man so much.

Free of Tim’s family, and the constant stream of attention and friendly but persistent curiosity, she started to ease back into herself and settle into the run. She had no idea how they were going to do this. Cities were not made for running. Even Bati field was better than this, though the endless circling eventually got pretty old.

Wide open spaces, country roads, field and pasture, that’s where you could run.

Running in a city was about getting out of a trap. About getting away from someone.

The scenery in this city wasn’t so different from any other if you were out for a run. Tall buildings. Bankers and lawyers and women in ridiculous dresses that were a cross between office worker and fashion model, which gave off more of a high-end hooker motif than anything else. They all hustled about as if what they were doing was so damned important.

And Tim and his nice butt just ran through them so smooth and easy, as if they weren’t even there. He barely stirred the slightest wake in the crowd with his passage. Lola felt clumsy because men stopped and gaped at her, often completely in her path, and she had to keep circling around. One actually walked head-on into another, neither of them watching where they were going. At least she was looking good on the outside, however she felt on the inside.

She and Tim jogged in place waiting for a light, then crossed the street. A half block later, she forgot about everything else.

Looming large before her was the White House. Just there, across the street, through a black iron fence and a bit of lawn sporting a small fountain amid a bed of red roses. Impossibly white. Impossibly daunting. It seemed to rise up out of the ground as if it grew by magic. The seat of the most powerful ruler in the world, her Commander-in-Chief, stood just across the street.

Lola ground to a halt trying to take it in. Every mission she’d ever flown had started here, in some form or other. Every military operation of the U.S. forces and most of the ones done by the UN and NATO forces had originated right here.

Tim circled back and jog-trotted in place beside her.

“Didn’t realize you’d never been to D.C. Kind of a showstopper, isn’t it?”

All she could do was nod.

“Okay, I’m going to change our route a bit. There are some things you have to see.”

When Tim started off again, she followed along in his wake. They turned and crossed streets, and still the White House dominated the area. Sometimes lost in trees, sometimes in clear view. It was as if the building was the main rotor hub and the rest of the world was spinning around it. Roads radiated away from the hub like the main blades of a chopper, but you could feel them reaching far beyond the mere limits of the city. Lola just couldn’t get over the feeling that they extended south to New Orleans and east all of the way to her little airfield in Pakistan.

Then they broke out onto the National Mall. The Capitol building shone to the left, the Washington Monument soared straight ahead, and in moments they were running along the Reflecting Pool, straight toward the Lincoln Memorial.

As if he were teasing her, Tim led them right past the memorial. At her protest, he called back, “We’ll loop around to it,” and led her onto a bridge over a river.

“Got a silver dollar?”

“No. Why?”

“Right about here is where George Washington chucked his silver dollar over the Potomac. Thought you might want to give it a try.” Clearly he was trying to lay it down as a challenge. She found herself half surprised that he didn’t produce a coin for her to try with.

Lola looked from one bank to the other, glanced up at the “Welcome to Virginia” sign as they ran along under it, and decided against picking up his tease. Maybe with a golf ball in space, like that cosmonaut. The ball had remained in orbit for about two days, which would make it about a million-mile shot. That would clear the Potomac and then a bit. But trying to throw a silver dollar across a mile-wide chunk of river? Not so much.

At the Virginia shore, Tim turned south. This time he slowed until they were running side by side.

“Kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?”

Then she saw the building and again ground to a halt, feeling like a tourist idiot, but she couldn’t help herself.

The nearby roadway roared with morning commuter traffic. She could see it, but it seemed to flow in perfect silence. The waterfront park they were standing in was teeming with early joggers, cyclists, moms with baby carriages; they appeared frozen in place.

Tim took her hand, and that was the only thing holding her steady.

“That’s the Pentagon,” she managed a whisper.

“Largest office building in the world. Did you know that you can walk from any office to any other office in seven minutes flat? That’s the coolest part.”

The thing was so massive, an aircraft carrier parked in a sea of fishing boats, impossibly huge in both size and power. But an aircraft carrier at full speed could outrun most enemies. Not here. This building hadn’t managed to outrun the terrorist-controlled airliner.

“Which wall did they hit?”

“The one we’re facing.”

Lola studied it carefully. “I was cutting classes in high school when the planes hit. You know, kicking around with a couple other girls who were trouble waiting to happen but had nowhere to go. Some were listening to their Walkmans. One girl had a small ghetto box. She’d tuned it to a Cajun station, and we all stood there pretending we were too cool to want to dance to the fast beat of Buckwheat Zydeco’s latest.”

The building wall looked no different. She’d seen the diagrams, knew the shape of the hole in the wall, but the same company who had built it in 1941 had dug stone from the same quarry and refinished it to match. She couldn’t see the lines where old joined new.

“I remember the radio bulletins.”

Tim squeezed her hand in quiet sympathy.

“It’s like I became so much smarter that day. Until then I’d been making a conscious life choice to not play the game. I mean, what was the point of playing if you knew you were going to lose?”

Lola tried to stop her voice, but it all spilled out anyway.

“The fact that Mama Raci would’ve beat the shit out of me was the only reason I hadn’t gone to whoring. Not yet. That day, between feeling all rebellious and the total emptiness of my wallet, it looked pretty good to an attractive, seventeen-year-old Lola LaRue. Since sex was the only power I’d ever have, I figured that maybe it was time for me to start using it.”

That one day older had made all the difference in her life.

“They killed all of those people too late for me to make anything of myself in high school, but I was the only one of those girls to finish and graduate. LSU let me in for reasons I still can’t fathom. ROTC got me some money and a ride into the Air National Guard. The rest came from a swim team scholarship and tips from being a bar waitress every weekend and weeknights when I didn’t have a practice or a meet.”

Tim stood close in simple support. She just told the man she’d almost become a whore and still he stood by her.

Funny. Her whole journey since then had all led back to here, to this starting point. To standing in front of the Pentagon on a beautiful summer day. Her life had changed because people had died here. Right here. For some reason, the attack on the headquarters of the Department of Defense in the nation’s capital had hit her harder than the Twin Towers. Harder than the jet that had augered into the Pennsylvania farmland.

“I once spoke to a Colonel Jim Baker,” Lola recalled.

She could feel Tim’s silence as he turned to look at her, though she couldn’t take her eyes from the massive building.

“I met him at some conference a couple of years ago, right before I applied to SOAR. He’d gone out for a run that day, kinda like we are now, up the National Mall and back.” She glanced across the river and squinted toward the Capitol building made hazy by distance and the rising heat of the day.

“He described it as being a day just like this. He’d circled the Capitol and was just jogging off the bridge when the jet came in.” Lola looked back and forth at the land and the highway. “He must have been right about here. It came so low, he said, that you wanted to duck. A roar of full power and they drove it into the Pentagon.”

She and Tim both looked up into the sky, scanning, checking the vast expanse of blue for a predator, the worst predator, a human who is sicko enough to think that their god justifies murder. But the sky remained achingly clear.

“His office was almost dead center and all his staff died instantly. His assistant—who had almost come on the run with him but changed his mind at the last minute—gone. His entire group ceased to exist.”

Tim didn’t reach for her. Didn’t try to console. The ones who’d been through it knew better. You couldn’t. You just had to stand up on your own and face the Devil.

When he spoke, his voice was barely louder than the wind and the morning traffic. “I signed up that day. I’ve always told my family I signed up as a cook. My family always had. Five generations in five wars we’ve been Army cooks. The story I tell them is that Army thinking put me in helicopters. That the story I tell everyone.”

He pointed across the river.

“I stood right over there.”

Tim’s face must be a reflection of her own, grim, angry, betrayed.

“And I watched it burn. I watched the tape of the towers going down. So I signed up for Army, real Army. Never mentioned to them that I could cook. I learned to shoot better than anyone I met before Kee Stevenson. I learned to fix helicopters. I learned to reach out and do my damnedest to make sure this never happens again.”

He turned his gaze to face her, and she saw something more than just grim determination. What she saw on Tim’s face was an absolute commitment to the cause of protecting his family. A man of immense honor watching the world of his family across a vast field of inner conviction. She felt hollow to be standing beside him, knowing her own inner drive had only recently found first gear.

Lola wished she could be like him. Wished she didn’t feel every action she took might be the wrong one for the wrong reasons. Wished for the certainty that she was serving someone, something, besides her own petty whims. Maybe she was finally getting a taste of it. Major Beale and Tim Maloney, they were teaching her more and more about herself and what drove her.

“If this is what you brought me here to see, thank you.”

His smile was slow in building. But when it came, there was no doubting the joy behind it.

“Nope. Not what I wanted to show you at all. C’mon.” He settled back into a medium run and Lola fell in close behind.

“Damn fine butt, Mr. Maloney!”

Even from behind, she could see the blush going up his neck until it hit his ears.

Tim faded back until he was beside Lola as they crossed the bridge back into D.C. He guided her down the right pathways but wanted to make sure she had an open view when they arrived.

He liked the feeling of running beside her. She did it so naturally. He always felt like a bulldozer struggling against a headwind when running. He did it by brute force. He’d grunted out twenty-milers with a fifty-pound pack with the best of them. Nothing was going to stop him.

But Lola LaRue floated. She was a natural-born runner and a complete joy to watch. Even without the skimpy attire. Though the idea of resting his head on that sleek, tight belly on a lazy summer afternoon was definitely high on his to-do list.

He kept her face slightly turned toward the river until in a single burst they were right on top of the Tidal Basin.

It was perfect.

She gasped aloud. But didn’t stop.

No chest-blow impact of man-made objects. Instead the breeze that swept up from the Chesapeake, alive with the scent of the sea and possibilities, shook down a gentle pink shower of fluttering petals.

Lola spread her arms and laughed aloud as she ran. Ran as if she could catch the beauty of three thousand blooming cherry trees. As if every one welcomed her personally with fluttering pink petals in a blue sky.

She changed for him in that moment. He’d been enraptured since he’d first seen her in Poland. He’d been totally lost ever since she’d bloodied his nose with her helmet. Some combination of wild beauty and wilder vibrancy had captivated all of his attention.

Now Lola laughed again. From the heart. A sound of pure joy. She didn’t shine—she radiated.

As if he ran beside a goddess of old, the joy flowed over him, into him, until he too was laughing, unable to hold it inside.

Like children three years old, they jumped and chased after the petals falling like pink and white rain. Tim scooped up a handful of cherry petals from atop the grass and tossed them at Lola. A hundred, a thousand caught in her hair. One stuck to her nose, another to her cheek.

He hooked a hand around her waist and they turned into each other with all the force of their stride and all the joy, and he feasted upon her mouth knowing he could never have enough of this woman. Not today, not tomorrow, not in a lifetime, not in a dozen.

He’d fallen in love with a woman who tasted of heaven and smelled of cherry blossoms.

Their run forgotten, Lola had been comfortable to wander through the falling blossoms hand in hand with Tim. She’d rarely been to a place like this, never such a wonder of natural beauty.

New Orleans had its moments, but the Deep South was about lazy heat and the people. For all her time in the service, the dice had rolled against her. She’d never served in such a place. Air National Guard had kept her close to home. The Army had shipped her off to Iraq the first moment it could. SOAR had trained at Fort Rucker, Alabama, and in the Nevada desert. Then they’d fired her off to Pakistan.

“Why do the crazies always live in the desert? Why can’t they live somewhere like this? Or maybe the Bahamas?”

“Flew security there once. Nothing much happened. Some nice beaches. A lot of women wearing even less than you are. But I’d rather be here.”

He turned to look at her and squeezed her hand lightly, just as if they’d been walking hand in hand for years.

“Feels right here. Feels like home.”

The wind curled around and chilled her skin for a moment.

“Not a feeling I know.” Actually she knew what home felt like, and it wasn’t something she’d ever wish on anybody. The only thing worse than home was family. Tim’s was different, though. Overwhelming. Overbearing. Overprotective. She bet his family was talking about her right now and how she’d never be good enough for their boy. But despite all that, at least they didn’t leave you with your skin creeping no matter how long you scrubbed in a shower.

Well, screw ’em. All she wanted from Tim was a good time and some good feelings.

Wasn’t it?

It had to be. Whatever hesitation preceded that thought was to be ignored as stupid and foolish. Lola LaRue lived her life loose and easy. Sure, she’d committed to her crew. Flew hard. Had their backs and they had hers. That was enough for any soldier. It was enough for any girl. All she needed.

She let Tim lead her wherever he wanted to go. He led her from the glorious avenue of falling petals and somewhere back toward the city through long parks and manicured trees. For now she did have all she needed. All she wanted.

They wandered down tree-covered paths, moseying like any other couple on a warm spring morning.

Tim was easy. They chatted about nothing and he made it easy. He talked about growing up in the city and visiting family in Puerto Rico during the winter and Boston during the summer. He told funny stories about his brother and sisters. Discovering that he’d probably served Emily Beale and her family at their restaurant when he was a teenager, but neither of them remembering.

Connections. To Tim everything was connections. His best friend had fallen in love with Connie Davis, and now she and Big John were his two best friends. His loyalty to his crew, to those who flew on the two DAP Hawks wasn’t something felt, like hers; it was integral to his being. To him they were family. Perhaps closer than. When someone else on the crew got shot, everyone wished it had been them instead. She’d feel that way even about bloody Kee Stevenson. The difference was, Tim would leap in front of the bullet if he could.

Tim remembered the name of every teacher from kindergarten to SOAR. She’d be challenged to remember half, never mind name them.

“Really,” Lola insisted when Tim pushed. “I was the weird kid in the back of class.”

“What did you do there, polish your nails?” Tim got her to laugh the way he said it.

“No, that was Betsy and Jeannie. I read.”

“What?”

“Anything about anywhere that wasn’t where I was. I read mostly… You’ll laugh.”

“Of course I will. C’mon, give. This sounds good.”

Lola ignored him.

He leaned forward and kind of looked up at her like a sad puppy dog.

She turned away and studied a blooming bush of vibrant yellow.

He stepped around her and held her other hand, repeating the puppy dog look from the other side.

When he whimpered she lost it.

“Science fiction,” she managed between her laughs.

That stopped him. “Last thing I was expecting to hear. I figured gothic romances or war history.”

“Nope. Arthur C., Heinlein, Card, anything I could lay my hands on. Our local library only had a couple shelves, so I read them from Douglas Adams to Roger Zelazny. I started stealing them from bookstores by the time I hit high school.”

“Ever get caught?”

“Once.” She left it as a tease. She’d never thought talking about books could be flirty. She usually kept her passion quiet and to herself. Those worlds were as far as she could get from the one she lived in. She’d lived for Diaspar and Dorsai. Regulus Base and the Benden Weyr. Kept the books hidden. They were just for her. Tim was the first one she’d ever told.

“And…” he picked up on the tease. So fun to be with.

“I got caught putting a book back.”

Tim snorted. “Putting one back?”

“Well, I had nowhere to keep them.”

“What about your room?”

That killed any sense of fun. “I had nowhere to keep them.” She knew her voice had gone cold. Couldn’t help herself. Ran her free hand down the length of his muscled forearm in apology.

All it did was raise goose bumps on her own flesh.

She could feel him turn to look at her a few times. She just kept her attention straight ahead. Focused on the line of marble steps ahead. Steps that led to somewhere hidden by the low brow of the trees they’d been wandering under.

Tim remained quiet as they continued forward.

“Holy crap!” Lola couldn’t stop the exclamation.

Tim started. Clearly he had been thinking deep thoughts or he’d have expected her reaction. The Lincoln Memorial rose abruptly out of the trees. The massive columns towered stories and stories above them.

Even on a weekday morning, the place was swarmed with tourists. Buses were emptying load after load, yet the place was so massive that Lola didn’t feel in the least crowded. They climbed the stairs.

Right near the top, with old Abe looking down on them benevolently, Tim stopped and turned her to face the city.

All she could do was sink to the warm marble steps. Washington D.C. laid out before her like a road map. The great green of the center of the city, as if saying, “We’re so powerful, we can afford to leave the whole center of the place empty for a park and pretty buildings. Our power is hidden. Our hammer is out of sight. Be careful not to forget that.”

“We’re part of that hammer.” Her voice came out as little more than a hoarse whisper.

She could feel Tim’s nod from how he sat so close beside her that their shoulders rubbed.

“We rule the night.” Tim made it sound like a prayer.

“The Night Stalkers.” Something to be proud of. Something to belong to.

Perhaps it was a prayer.