THURSDAY, JANUARY 2
1823 JEFFERSON PLACE, WASHINGTON, D.C.
Even in the twenty-first century, people just didn’t expect a woman.
Not to do this kind of work: surveillance, security, personal protection, and the rest.
As far as Samantha Reese was concerned, that blind spot only made women better choices for the job. People would look right past them, just a glancing thought, a reflex—“oh, a woman.”
So you use that, every slight, every prejudice; it’s all opportunity.
Reese has gotten to the restaurant early, watched it for an hour before it opened and then entered through the small French doors at 11:30 A.M. just after seeing the owner, Giovanni, open up. She sits at the bar drinking Campari and soda, deciding which table she thinks would be best, then excusing herself and asking where the restrooms are. She goes the wrong way so she can scan parts of the place one can’t see from the main room, and apologizes when she wanders into the kitchen and finds the back door to the alley, making amends in perfect Italian before she returns to the dining room.
When the man she is meeting arrives, she is seated at a corner table from which she can see the whole room. She watches him slip through the small front door.
She waits.
He looks the same, which is to say good, still lithe, strong. He always reminded her of a panther, quiet, watchful, dangerous. He isn’t her type; he’d also been married until recently. Still.
“Thanks for coming, Sam,” Peter Rena says when he gets to the table. He is wearing a gray suit and a formal wool overcoat, the Washington uniform of respectable anonymity. Reese is wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt under a down vest, her only acknowledgment to the gray January cold.
“You only need to ask, Peter,” Reese says. “You know that.” She glances around the restaurant. “Good place.”
It is called Trattu, a small Italian restaurant on Jefferson Place just down the block from the office at 1820. It is Rena’s favorite restaurant in the city. Twelve small tables in the basement of another town house. Giovanni and his wife, Antonia, serve northern Italian food they learned to cook from grandmothers, parents, and aunts—Mama Style Oven Fish Stew, Chicken Breast Stuffed with Roasted Red Pepper, and Corn Meal from the Pot.
“What’s so urgent I had to leave Colorado for?” she asks.
“I want you to keep an eye on Randi and me.”
Reese raises an eyebrow.
“You think someone’s watching you?”
“Anthony Rousseau thinks it’s possible.”
That raises the other eyebrow.
“You’ve seen Tony Rousseau? What are you into, Peter?”
She and Rena met in the army when Reese was doing a rotation in the military police. Rena had never met anyone so determined and disciplined, even in uniform. She came from a military and athletic family, her mother a talented triathlete, her father a decorated marksman. Her mother died young and in the open spaces of Colorado; her father taught her to hunt and track and shoot. In college she accomplished something her father had aspired to but never achieved, a spot on the U.S. Olympic biathlete squad—the hybrid sport of cross-country skiing and shooting. She enlisted in the army, like many Olympians, for the support and discipline required to help her train. Reese became one of just four female soldiers to successfully make it through the grueling nine-week Army Ranger school. When injuries set back her Olympic prospects, and the army failed to deliver on promises, at age thirty-one she resigned her commission.
She lives in Colorado near Snowmass, where she can train and work when she wants at a gym she co-owns. She keeps a low profile, and clients barely notice when from time to time Reese seems to vanish because she and a group of other military friends have taken a job doing surveillance or personal security, so-called body work.
Rena still hasn’t answered Reese’s question about why he had seen Anthony Rousseau.
“Don’t make a show of the watching our backs,” he says. “You don’t need to be invisible. But I don’t want to make Randi crazy. Or anyone else. Far enough away that most people would never notice you. Close enough that if someone really good were watching, they’d know.”
“Why would someone be watching you?” she asks again.
“I don’t know that they are.”
“Why would Rousseau think so?”
Rena isn’t sure how much to say.
Reese is a brunette with broad shoulders and the sculpted features of an athlete. Her manner is direct and eerily calm, something she refined from years of her father telling her to win men’s respect by looking them in the eye and telling them what she really thought, not by looking away and winning their fascination. Often her expression is sardonic.
“Sorry, Peter. You need to tell me what this is about. Or my answer will be no.”
Of course. He would demand the same if their roles were reversed. So he tells her what he can—the assignment from the president, their frustrations, their visit to the lake, and Rousseau’s warnings. Not everything. Hopefully enough.
“You must think the threat is at least plausible,” she says.
“Something went wrong out there in Oosay, and people don’t want to talk about it—maybe not even tell the White House the full story.”
Sam Reese has a refined sense of irony. The idea that people would be making mistakes and then panicking to cover them up seems to fit her worldview, which—as best as Rena can make out—is that if people thought harder about the state of their lives, they would be in a perpetual state of panic or despair. So most people don’t think about it. Not that Reese has ever sat down and told Rena her worldview.
“How big a mistake was this in Oosay?”
“When we know, we’ll be done with this.”
“And you’d like to stay alive long enough to also find out what they’re hiding.”
“Not funny, Sam.”
“Sure it’s a joke?”
“If I were, I wouldn’t be asking you to do this.”
She offers the first shadow of a genuine smile.
“Okay.”
And they eat their lunch in peace.
RENA HAS BEEN HOME a few days from California. He has made little more progress on Oosay than he has with the cat Vic gave him for Christmas.
The animal has spent his first days in Washington hiding behind the dryer in Rena’s row house. The only evidence the animal has moved is when Rena returns home from work and there is a little less food in a dish that now sits on the floor in the breakfast nook. Even the litter box is inconclusive. The cat still has no name.