Alexandria, Virginia, lies on the banks of the Potomac River, just south of Washington, D.C., but this little cul-de-sac well west of the water felt a thousand miles away from the hustle and bustle of the nation’s capital.
Tree-lined and quiet, Candlelight Court was the epitome of the burbs.
Just after seven a.m. on a frigid January morning the only movement inside 3802 Candlelight came from a woman opening the freezer in the kitchen, retrieving a box of Eggo waffles, and dropping two in the toaster. She then moved to a cabinet, pulled out a pair of white cups with the eagle emblem of the U.S. State Department on the side, and added creamer from the fridge to them both.
Nichole Duffy was an attractive thirty-five-year-old blonde, and she wore a dark blue pencil skirt with a white blouse, low heels, and eyeglasses. Already wide awake after a run and a cold shower, she’d even staged her purse, her heavy coat, and her shoulder bag by the door the night before.
A creature of habit, Nichole was a highly disciplined individual, and she knew her efficiency would be helpful this morning because she had others to lead.
After pouring coffee into both cups and taking a long draw from one of them, she pulled bowls of hot oatmeal out of a microwave, then made her way to a drawer and grabbed a fistful of forks and spoons.
She moved with pace, but methodically, not frantically. After all, she did some version of this most every morning.
A man in a dark suit came down the carpeted stairs and stepped into the family room, checking the knot of his burgundy tie in the mirror on the wall. Satisfied, he looked over to the steaming mug of coffee still on the counter and began advancing on it.
“Morning, babe,” he said, a little tiredness in his voice, contrasting with his wife’s more alert response.
She glanced his way as she pulled a plastic bottle of syrup from the pantry. “Any nightmares last night?”
“You look gorgeous today.”
She looked at him and chuckled. “Thanks. I must have wandered into some good lighting. Any nightmares?”
“Not that I remember,” he said, and he averted his gaze to pick up his coffee.
She turned away after a moment herself, then went back to what she was doing.
She knew Josh had been up during the night; she’d reached out for him in the dark and felt nothing but sweat-drenched sheets. His PTSD was unrelenting, and it aggravated her when he tried to keep it all bottled in.
“What’s your schedule?” he asked just before taking his first sip.
Nichole shook off a moment of melancholy. This wasn’t the time for a deep discussion about her husband’s mental health. “Dropping the kids,” she said. “Then I have to be at Foggy Bottom at eight thirty. Mandy and Huck will stay at aftercare till I grab them at six.”
Both Josh and Nichole worked for the U.S. Department of State, she as a junior political officer, and he as a special agent in the Bureau of Diplomatic Security. But their offices were miles apart. She worked in D.C. proper, while he had a little desk at DS’s Washington field office in Dunn Loring, Virginia.
He smiled at her now, waking up with the introduction of caffeine into his bloodstream. “Today’s the day, isn’t it?”
Looking out the window over the sink into the cul-de-sac, she said, “Yeah. It’s ridiculous. I’ve spent two years waiting for a foreign posting, and now that I’m about to learn where they’re sending me, I’m nervous as hell.”
“It’s not ridiculous. This is a pretty momentous thing.” He moved closer to her. “You’ve proven yourself with everything you’ve done. They’ll send you somewhere interesting, don’t worry.”
“Hopefully not too interesting,” she replied.
He put his hand on her shoulder. “Wherever they send you, we’ll all go, together.”
“That’s the best part,” she said, and then she took plates down from the cabinet.
“You driving today or taking the Metro?” he asked.
“Driving. It’ll shave eleven minutes off the Blue Line commute, and I don’t love the parking at Van Dorn station, anyway.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll take the Toyota.”
Nichole cocked her head in surprise. “Why aren’t you taking the Metro?”
“Have to be in Dupont Circle at eight sharp.”
“What’s in Dupont Circle?”
“Got a text last night. A Dutch EU official is here for meetings with members of Congress and some other foreign dignitaries at the Washington Hilton. They want a four-person team on her, and with all the other dips in town, they needed an extra body.”
Nichole had been stirring milk into a bowl of oatmeal, but she stopped and looked up at him. With only the slightest hint of worry in her voice, she said, “Any specific threats?”
To this, Josh was adamant. “Not at all. Typical detail for something like this. I’m the junior, so I’ll probably get tasked with standing outside the shitter when she takes a bathroom break.”
“What’s a shitter?”
The question did not come from Nichole; rather, it came from a high-pitched voice on the staircase behind them.
They both turned towards the new participant in the conversation. Mandy Duffy, age eight, wore purple leggings and a jean jacket; her sandy blond hair was in pigtails and she looked ready for school, exhibiting all the efficiency of her mom.
Nichole looked back to her husband. “Great, Josh.”
“Shit,” he mumbled.
She rolled her eyes now. “Stop talking, please,” she said, and then she turned to her daughter. “It’s nothing, sugar. Your dad’s speaking French again.” She gave a little wince. “But…but don’t say that word in school, okay?”
“Shitter? Or shit?”
“Neither,” Nichole blurted out. “And don’t say them at home, either.”
“I’m not a kid, Mom. I know what those words mean.”
“You are a kid, so don’t say them, please.”
Mandy looked like she was going to carry this further, and then the toaster popped behind her mom.
Her attention shifted, Mandy shouted, “Eggos!” and then skipped to the kitchen table.
“Eggos!” Duff echoed.
Nichole said, “You wish. Oatmeal.” She handed him his bowl.
Josh then stepped over to the stairs. Calling up, he said, “Huck?”
A six-year-old boy with a sandy brown bedhead came down seconds later. He was barefoot, but his school clothes were on, at least, and when he saw the Eggo on a plate at his seat, he rubbed his eyes and ambled forward.
Soon all four sat, the adults with their oats, the kids with their waffles. Mandy said the blessing—she insisted on saying the blessing both at breakfast and at dinner, and Huck seemed fine letting her do so.
Mandy then looked to her mom. “Tonight you’re going to tell us what country we’re moving to?”
“That’s right, sweetheart.”
The little girl sighed. “I don’t want to move.”
Nichole and Josh flashed a glance at each other, and he put a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. “I know, sweetie. But it’s the job. I promise you, wherever we go, you are going to make lots of new friends and have lots of new experiences, and you’re going to love it.”
Nichole raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility that they’d be sent to some developing nation where the kids couldn’t travel outside a bubble of American diplomatic families.
But Josh was trying to keep Mandy from having a meltdown, and Nichole appreciated the attempt.
To the surprise of both of them, their young son said, “I want to go to Africa.”
“Africa, Huck? That’s new.”
“I want to see a monkey.”
“A monkey?” Nichole smiled now. “They have those in South America and Asia, too.”
“Really?” he said, excitedly. “Why don’t we have monkeys here?”
“I’ve got two of them right in front of me,” Josh said.
Huck laughed, and Mandy grinned with a mouth full of waffle.
Nichole added, “And I’ve got three.” After a moment she took a sip of her coffee, then looked over the mug at her husband. “Got to be honest. I’m a little annoyed.”
Without missing a beat, Josh said, “Again? Or still?”
She laughed a little; Josh often made her laugh when she didn’t want to, but finally she turned serious. “I don’t love that they’ve got you on a protection detail today, just out of the blue like that. I like it better when you’re sitting at your desk doing visa fraud investigations.”
“I’ll be doing that the rest of the week. This is a staffing issue. We just walk some Dutch EU diplomat through her day. There will be a lot of muckety-mucks with security at the hotel, so as long as we don’t all step on each other’s toes, we’ll be fine.”
Nichole looked incredulous.
“It’s no big deal. It’s not like the old days.”
After holding his gaze a moment, she looked back down to her food. Softly, she said, “Thank God for that.”
Josh said nothing in reply, and Nichole noticed this. “You sleep okay?”
He had not.
“I did.”
Her eyes narrowed; she was evaluating him, trying to peer into his brain to feel what he was feeling. Eventually she said, “The fact that they don’t use you to work protection much…as far as you’re concerned, is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
Josh shrugged as he dipped a spoon into his bowl. “It’s just a thing.”
Nichole was going to dig deeper, but Mandy changed the subject. “Daddy, can we do karate after dinner tonight?”
Josh had been showing Mandy and Huck self-defense techniques out of a concern that everyone in the world could possibly be a danger to his kids. Nichole knew where his paranoia came from, that was no mystery, but she still didn’t love that her husband was teaching the children how to fight.
He said, “As soon as we load the dishwasher after dinner, I’ll show you and Huck how to do a wrist lock. You can drop anyone to the ground with this move, and it’s really easy.”
“Have you ever done that on a bad guy?” Huck asked.
Josh thought a moment. He’d never wristlocked an opponent in the real world, but he’d always wanted to. He decided not to say that at the breakfast table. Normally in his past life he’d just shoot people in the face, but he wasn’t going to bring that up, either.
Before he could answer, his wife said, “Your dad’s a lover, not a fighter.” Raising an eyebrow, she said, “Right?”
“That’s right,” Josh replied, and then he winced a little and scooted back from the table. He stood and put his left foot on his chair, then lifted his trouser leg and made an adjustment to his sock. Doing so exposed, just for a moment, a high-tech-looking black prosthesis.
He began quickly rubbing his left hamstring.
“Cramping?” Nichole asked, and Josh nodded, concentrating on his massage.
Josh had lost his left leg below the knee while working as a civilian military contractor in Beirut six years earlier, long before joining State, and he was now on his fourth prosthesis, this one a super light and strong carbon fiber model that he’d grown so accustomed to he almost never took it off except to bathe and sleep.
Nichole watched him reposition his upper leg on the chair. “You okay?”
He nodded. “I just need to get it recalibrated. It’s been too long. Still…I ran four miles yesterday. Hamstring’s a little sore, but it’s the good kind of sore.”
“What’s a good kind of sore?” Huck asked.
“The kind you get from exercise,” Josh replied to his son. “Not the kind you get from banging your nose.” Josh used the back of his oatmeal-covered spoon to gently bop his son on the nose.
Huck grinned and wiped his face, his blue eyes still sleepy. “That didn’t hurt.”
“Because you’re tough,” Josh said. With a wink to Nichole, he said, “Just like your mom. She’s a fighter, not a lover.”
Nichole didn’t love the joke. “Josh!”
“Just kidding. Some people are so cool, Huck…that they can be both.”
Huck said, “I’m a fighter.”
And Mandy jumped on the bandwagon. “I’m a fighter, too.”
Nichole looked at the kids’ plates. Huck was done with his waffle, but Mandy hadn’t finished her breakfast. “I need you to be an eater right now.” Then, to both kids she said, “Ten minutes—coats, hats, and in your case, Huck, shoes on. Let’s go.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Josh said. She was talking to the kids, not him, but Nichole ran the mornings around here, and Josh had learned to follow orders in the U.S. Army, so when an officer, even a former officer, even his wife, gave an order, he saw it as his duty to comply.
Exactly ten minutes later the kids were loaded into the minivan, a five-year-old gray Pacifica the Duffys had bought with money earned from a security contract Josh had worked in Mexico. Nichole kissed her husband, then climbed behind the wheel.
“Be safe today, Josh.”
“It’s D.C., babe. You be safe.”
“That’s fair,” she replied.
The Pacifica disappeared up the cul-de-sac, and then Josh climbed into the family’s eight-year-old Camry. He drove out of his neighborhood, then north on the Richmond Highway towards the city, the speakers blasting out a self-development audiobook his wife had recommended to him. The narrator talked about leadership and setting goals, and Josh made his way through the heavy traffic while listening, albeit somewhat distractedly.
Nichole loved personal development books, and she wanted Josh to love them just as much.
He did not, but he did love her, so he listened.
He’d met Nichole in Syria. At the time, she was a captain in the U.S. Army, the commander of an Apache gunship, and he was a young security contractor working in the war-torn region. When her helicopter was shot down in enemy territory, he alone came to her aid. Though she was injured in the crash, the two of them fought their way out of danger.
Nichole was an officer, the daughter of a general, and a born leader. Josh, in contrast, was a “sled dog,” a “gun monkey,” an enlisted infantryman who left service after four years and then became a private security contractor.
They could not possibly have been more different.
But after he visited her in the hospital in Germany while on leave from Syria, something sparked between the two of them, and within weeks of her crash the two of them had fallen in love.
Nichole fully recovered from her injuries in time, but she decided to leave the Army, much to her father’s displeasure. Marrying Josh only added to the retired general’s discontent. Soon they had Mandy. At the time, Josh was making big money doing high-threat work, nearly always abroad, while Nichole was back at home in Virginia, transitioning from Army life to motherhood.
Life was hectic but good; Nichole became pregnant with their second child, but before his birth, Josh was gravely wounded in Lebanon.
He lost his leg, Harry was born, and Nichole worked tirelessly, caring for three. The money stopped coming in and the bills kept piling up. She began cleaning homes and offices overnight out of desperation, and eventually Josh recovered enough to secure a job as a mall cop in Northern Virginia.
Depressed and nearly destitute, he finally agreed to a high-paying but ultra-high-threat contract in Mexico, serving for the first time in his long career as a team leader.
He and his team went through a gauntlet of danger in the Sierra Madre mountains, and he was only able to bring two of his men home alive.
This weighed heavy on him. Even now, three years later, he dreamed about it, just as he’d dreamed about Beirut before that, and Jalalabad before that. He had full-on PTSD, his wife told him over and over, but Josh minimized his struggles as much as he could.
Nichole worried about him; this he knew. Hence the endless self-help books and audiobooks. Positive thinking and discipline, assertiveness, leadership, and management. She told him he needed to have a growth mind-set; he needed to move on from the mountains of Mexico and his other experiences with combat, to put the pain and doubt behind him and develop himself.
His loving wife had his best interests in mind, of this Josh Duffy had no doubt, but this morning, like most mornings, he found himself just wanting to listen to some classic rock on his way to work instead of some hard-charging ex–Navy SEAL telling him that he needed to get off his lazy ass every morning and make his fucking bed.
He flipped on his satellite radio and began listening to the four-minute guitar duel at the end of “Free Bird” as he took the Arland D. Williams Jr. Memorial Bridge over the Potomac and into the District.
After all he and his family had been through, this was a damn good life, Josh told himself as he passed the Lincoln Memorial on his right. The State Department jobs for him and his wife had been absolute godsends. Nichole got hired as a Foreign Service Officer first, not long after the attention the couple received in the media from what happened in Mexico had died down. She’d worked as a political officer for the past two and a half years in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood of D.C., and she was known as an exceedingly smart and diligent employee, even in her short time there.
Josh’s path had not been as smooth as his wife’s, because the nature of the DS job and the nature of his leg injury meant he had to undergo arduous physicals and eventually receive special dispensation because of his amputation. But he’d worked hard, he’d made it through months and months of training, and now he spent the vast majority of his time at a desk in Virginia trying to track down visa and passport fraudsters.
But not for much longer. Josh and the kids would go to whatever country Nichole was sent to, and hopefully Josh would find an opening for himself with DS’s Regional Security Office there at the embassy and travel with her as a tandem spouse. State was good about moving spouses and families together, and even if there were no job openings he was qualified for at the embassy, DS would allow him to take a leave of absence without pay to follow her, and this was something that factored in highly to their decision to both apply for jobs at the department.
They’d move as a family, so Josh was eagerly awaiting news of where Nichole would be sent.
They both knew their first foreign assignment would be somewhere in the developing world; virtually nobody at State was sent to London or Paris or Rome their first time out, but they also knew that the Regional Security Office at the embassy would make it a safe environment for the children, and this was more important to them than any personal or professional ambition.
Wherever they ended up, Josh knew two things to be true. One, Nichole was going to soar up the ranks at the embassy; she was a natural at her job, an overachiever with a brilliant mind. And two, Josh would never experience the intensity of true combat again, like he’d done so many times in his past.
Diplomatic security was serious work, but it wasn’t running and gunning in wild cartel combat in the mountains of Mexico.
And that was fine with him.
As Josh drove along Twenty-Third Street NW, he looked out at the frigid January morning, and he was glad today’s work would be indoors. He was armed with a SIG Sauer P320 Full-Size pistol tucked in a holster at his three-o’clock position and hidden by his suit coat and his black wool three-quarter-length coat. He also carried handcuffs and pepper spray on him, a pair of extra magazines, a folding knife, and a small flashlight.
But Josh Duffy’s most important pieces of gear were his affable, intentional, and competent nature, as well as the earpiece in his left ear and the radio on his belt that would keep him in contact with the rest of the detail.
Today would be easy. The high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy wasn’t a protectee that anyone was too worried about, especially since she would be spending her day in a location cordoned off by dozens of members of law enforcement.
Still, it beat sitting at his desk trying to find people who had lied on their visa apps to get into the United States.
He tried to tell himself he didn’t miss the excitement, but though events in his past gave him regularly recurring nightmares and occasional panic attacks, something told him he was just wired for the exhilaration of high-threat protection.
But as he’d told his wife, that was his old life, and his new life, while not pumping him full of the same amount of adrenaline, was stable, and stable was good.
The last notes of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” faded away as he parked his Camry in front of the Dupont Circle Hotel.