Girl Takes The Oath (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 5) (28 page)

“Don’t you have anyone you can trust here?”

“I have friends… at least, I used to. But they don’t know how dangerous it is to be my friend.”

“And I do, you mean?”

“Yeah,” Emily said, turning her face up to let Connie see into her eyes. What she saw there was more than she expected, deeper and brighter than even the first time they met, when she’d been sent to kill a high school girl on a college visit, in a bathroom on the campus of the University at Charlottesville. Like the first meeting, she saw pools of blackness she could almost dive headlong in to, and a serenity like no place else on earth. At the bottom, a dark fire smoldered, and a storm threatened to burst through it all; and the tension that held it all in balance seemed so delicate as to defy comprehension. She saw something else this time, and it frightened her, something behind the blackness of the fire and the storm, deeper and darker than the serenity, a night so black as to make the rest somehow visible, the horizon against which everything inside stood forth to be seen.

That blacker night she saw in Emily’s eyes could only mean one thing: nothing remained to hold her in the light.
She’d found her way out.
Connie shuddered to think what this might mean for anyone who opposed her, or who tried to keep her in the world through love or pain. Or what might remain for those who loved her.

Emily had been right about the fieldhouse—nobody troubled them there, or even noticed them, and Connie laid out Jiang’s intel for her, first the bad news, then the worse. The extradition request, which had drifted to the back of Emily’s consciousness, since it now looked like the least of her troubles, and perhaps the scheme all along had been to so overwhelm her with troubles that she’d hardly resist extradition—whatever the goal had been, the Chinese seemed to have lost interest in it with the death of Dong Zhuo and the attempt on Ambassador Zhang’s life.

“That sounds like good news, right?” Connie said.

“Not if it provides a motive for me to have killed Dong Zhuo. That it succeeded in ending their efforts suggests that whoever killed him knew he was behind it.”

“But the Ma family are what they seem,” Connie said, more hopefully, “innocents caught in the crossfire.”

Emily’s eye’s flashed when she heard this, or so Connie thought. She told her the rest of it, about General Diao, the connection to her grandfather’s work, and showed her the photo of a mysterious, young woman in an evening gown on his arm at some formal event. Before she could fill out Michael’s speculations concerning her, Emily stood up abruptly.

“What time is it?” she asked. “I have to find CJ.” When Connie said seventeen-thirty hours, she rushed down the bleachers. “Come, hurry.” Outside, practically running, she gave Connie a message for Jiang. “You have to make sure Michael speaks to him tonight. This can’t wait. Go,” she cried, and took off at a sprint for Bancroft Hall.

By the time Connie caught up with her, a few minutes later, at the south entrance to King Hall, all she heard was Emily say to another girl, a tall blonde, “Do you have a cellphone on you? You need to call Dave right away. Ask him to check on Ruochen Ma. It’s urgent.”

When Emily glowered at her, Connie said, “It’s done. He’s got your message. Whether he can get through to him tonight is another story.” Now she had questions for Emily—first of all, who is the Ma girl to her? But mostly, how else can she be of assistance?—and she might have had time to ask them, if she hadn’t felt another hand on her shoulder.

“We have a few questions, Commander Savaransky,” Agent Horton said. “Will you come with us, please?”

Connie turned and looked this interloper up and down. Almost Ethan’s height, though nowhere near his bulk, he must have hoped his baritone voice would obviate the need for more formal threats. But it was easy to see that the much smaller woman standing next to him carried the water in this partnership. She looked past him to the beady eyes of Agent Everett.

“Honey, unless your questions are about where I parked my car, pretty much anything else you want to ask me is above your pay-grade.”

“So your interest in Midshipman Tenno is a matter of national security, then?” Everett said with a smirk.

“It can be if you need it to be.”

“I’m afraid you’re gonna have to do better than that, Commander.”

“Fine,” Connie growled, and handed Agent Horton a card Michael had given her for just such an eventuality. “Call that number, and see if you’re cleared to talk to me, or detain me in any way.”

Connie didn’t know who in the Pentagon would answer that call, or what it cost Michael to arrange it, but within a few seconds of making the connection Horton’s face turned white, and when he handed the phone to his partner, she could make out at least the tone of voice of a severe dressing down. Connie retrieved the card from Horton’s hand and, since Emily had slipped away in the interim, she brushed past him into the galley.

It only took a minute or so to locate the tall blonde Emily had spoken to, and another minute to get her to open up. She knew how to strike a pose that looked innocent to onlookers, but intimidating to whomever she’d cornered, and with the girl pressed up against a column, and enough ambient noise from the dinner service to make it difficult for anyone to listen in, she pressed her questions.

“I don’t know much about her,” the girl said, eyes wide and breathing  “She’s a student across the street, you know, at St. John’s.”

“What did you find out from this Dave?”

“He said no one’s seen her over there since lunch on Saturday. She missed all her classes today.”

“The other girl, Diao Chan, did he find out about her?”

“I’m not sure who that is. But if it’s Ruochen Ma’s friend, she’s gone missing, too.”

With that information, Connie abruptly left King Hall and exited the Yard through Gate One.

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Chapter Twenty Five

Breath on a Mirror

“I appreciate what you did this morning,” Emily said. “But it’s really none of your business.”

“The hell it isn’t,” Trowbridge roared back. “A couple of assholes in my company spreading malicious rumors around the Brigade, it’s bad for everybody.”

“Fair enough,” she conceded. “I think you lifted Zaki’s spirits, so thanks for that. But, please, keep out of it. You have no idea how dangerous this really is.”

“I think I have a pretty good idea,” he said. “Whatever it is, it got Bauer sliced up inside the Yard. What’s more, this evening, I found another note in my things over in Nimitz. Whoever’s behind this seems to want to involve me in it, no matter what you think.”

Emily looked at the note in his hand, almost afraid to touch it. Her name in English letters filled one side—“Turn it over,” she said—and two characters were drawn on the reverse.

“What’s it say?” Trowbridge asked.

“Come alone.”

“Come where?” he asked.

“No clue. But I’m gonna have to find out.”

“Do you want me to give this one to NCIS, too?” Emily pondered this question for a long moment.

“Yes,” she said. “But not until the morning. Okay?”

“You’re going over the wall tonight, aren’t you?” he asked. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“If I’m not back tomorrow morning, it means I’m dead, or worse, and Stacie, too… and probably Kathy Gunderson. Give the note to NCIS in the morning and tell ’em I went to St. John’s. They should be able to figure it out from there.”

Easing Trowbridge out of her room got easier once she’d given him a mission. She had problems to solve, like how to sneak out and do a better job of going over the wall than the woman in the security video, and avoid being picked up by the cameras altogether. Not to mention that heightened perimeter security might make going over the wall undetected impossible.

Of course, she could easily walk directly out of Gate Three onto Maryland Avenue, overpower the guards, and walk the two blocks to St. John’s. The problem with that plan is that she’d be on the run from that moment on, and helping Stacie and Kathy would be that much harder. Not impossible, but the risks would be so much greater, not just for her friends and herself, but also for whoever might track her.

More practical questions presented themselves, like what she should wear. Something dark, of course, and her taste inclined to one of her running suits. She hesitated, thinking that it might confirm Everett’s suspicions if she dressed like the woman in the video again. But what else did she have to wear? A uniform wouldn’t do, and her Marine fatigues weren’t dark enough. The Newari outfits she’d brought back from Kathmandu were both too fancy, and perhaps a little too constricting. She didn’t have any jeans, just khakis.

She settled on a black t-shirt and her black leather Moto jacket, and a pair of black training shoes. Down a flight of stairs, and two hallways later, she knocked on CJ’s door.

“I need your black jeans. Please don’t ask why.” Thank goodness she was alone in the room.

“Who was your friend?” she asked, rooting around in a drawer.

“What friend?”

“The one who interrogated me against a column in the galley. You know, the scary-ass blonde, early forties, five foot ten or so, huge hands.”

“Oh, crap,” Emily said. “What did you tell her?”

“Pretty much whatever she wanted to know. She’s very persuasive.”

“I’m sorry about that, CJ. Really sorry. Did you tell her about Dave and the girls at St. John’s?”

“What do you think?” she asked, and handed her the jeans.

“Thanks. I gotta go.”

“Are you going to get Stacie?” The turn of CJ’s eyes as she asked this question made it difficult not to answer. Emily nodded.

“One way or another, I’ll be with her soon,” she said, then went back up to her room. Sorting out the rest of her plan took up another hour, which also conveniently gave the moon enough time to drop below the horizon. It took several, large plastic storage bags to sort out her gear.

She didn’t care for waterproof packs, since in a swim they eventually get sodden and weigh you down. A mesh pack with light shoulder straps suited her better—Perry had sent her one last summer, part of an elaborate inside-joke between them. “You’ll need this for the SEAL trainer,” he wrote on the card, even though they both new regulations wouldn’t allow her to apply. He also knew she would never even consider it anyway, since she thought of the SEALs as assassins. She’d never said as much to him, but he knew how she felt.

Shortly after twenty-three-thirty hours, dressed in her darkest running suit, she slipped out a stairwell window on the Arcade Road side of Bancroft Hall, and ran as stealthily as she could manage through a parking lot, and along Holloway Road, stopping here and there to avoid the security cameras. She needed her departure to go unnoticed for at least an hour.

At the far corner of Sims Road, crouching next to the hedge that bordered the last athletic field, she stripped off the running suit and stuffed it into the last plastic bag along with her running shoes and socks, which she fitted into her pack. She lowered herself into the water from the end of one of the little piers that cleared the College Creek shallows and swam for all she was worth.

The shortest route would be to follow College Creek directly to the St. John’s Boathouse, probably not much more than a half mile. But it would pass under several bridges, and the chance of detection seemed too great to her. Instead, she headed northeast, out into the Severn River, and headed for Woolchurch Cove. It wasn’t the closest point on the opposite shore, but a nearby swamp had discouraged development in the vicinity. The swim-distance was the same, though the river currents posed a greater challenge, and then she’d have to run a roundabout route, picking her way through backstreets and sleepy neighborhoods to avoid coming in sight of the Academy walls.

“Tell me I can’t pass the damn SEAL screener,” she muttered as she swam. The pack caused some drag, but nothing she couldn’t manage.

On the other side, she changed into dry underwear, and put the running suit back on, and ran off along Homewood Road, and then Baltimore-Annapolis Boulevard. Past the Severn Inn, she turned left on Rt. 450, and crossed the bridge. No crabbers at this hour—no one to see her now.

A bit less than an hour later, she crept through the shrubbery along the east side of Chase-Stone Hall, and tapped on Dave’s window, hoping (for CJ’s sake) he was alone. As luck would have it, he didn’t turn on the light before sliding the window up.

“It’s me,” she whispered. “Michiko Tenno. I need your help.”

“Holy crap,” he said, then took a deep breath and reached a hand out to help her up. “When CJ called, I had no idea…”

“Keep it down,” she hushed at him.

“Don’t worry,” he chuckled. “People climb in and out of these ground floor windows all night. No one’s gonna notice you.”

“Well, keep the light off anyway, okay? Just for my peace of mind.”

Dave smiled, then turned away, suddenly embarrassed, as she stripped off the running suit and changed into CJ’s jeans, and her t-shirt and Moto jacket. She stuffed the rest into the pack and kicked it under Dave’s desk.

“I need to find Ruochen and Diao Chan. Do you know where their rooms are?”

“Is this about Stacie?” he asked in a shaky voice.

Emily didn’t want to tell him anything, for fear of tempting him into harm’s way, and she remembered how quickly he inserted himself into the fight after the Boathouse party. On the other hand, keeping him completely in the dark might slow her search down.

“Yes, and another midshipman and maybe Ruochen, too. Where do they live?”

“They’re both in Pinckney, on the third floor.”

“How can I find it?”

“It’s the next dorm over. I’ll show you. We can climb in by the fire escape.”

She felt like laughing when she caught a glimpse of Pinckney, as they followed a brick walkway through a boxwood garden. The idea of climbing up the outside of the building to gain access seemed sure to alert Security to her presence. But one glance up at the side of the building revealed students lounging on the fire escapes, deep in philosophical discussions, or just chatting aimlessly about one thing or another. Someone plucked at a banjo on an upper floor, and a few others were climbing up or down between floors, not bothering to use the interior stairs. Dave was right, no one would ever notice them.

“Wait here,” she said, continuing her caution, but he ignored her and climbed up anyway.

She squeezed past two guys on the second floor landing, one of whom she recognized. “Hi, Chelly,” she said, and kept on moving. Not to have said anything would probably have drawn more attention to herself, she figured.

On the third floor, she climbed in through the window next to the fire escape and found herself in the bathroom of what was obviously a girls’ floor. It was an easy guess that the second and fourth floors were for boys. Dave followed her a moment later and the two of them stepped through to the main hallway.

The idea of living with so little security shocked Emily, but she also saw the attraction of being able to give oneself over to a bohemian, intellectual existence, at least for the few short years of college. Even if it made them vulnerable to the intrusion of someone as violent and dangerous as she feared Diao Chan to be, the likelihood of such a person invading their space was tiny. Yet here Emily was, dealing precisely with that eventuality, and chasing the faint chance of rescuing her friend.

A directory at the end of the hall, next to an ancient campus phone, showed who lived in each room. “Diao Chan is in 309,” Dave called over to her. Emily looked at the door, tried the knob—it turned freely, not locked—and pulled her hand away.

“Ruochen’s room?”

Dave checked the list: “303. It’s down here.”

Emily pushed his hand away from the knob. “Let me take it from here.” She pushed the door open and scanned the room. Nobody home. No clues on Ruochen’s very neat desk. No clothes on the floor, nothing out of place. Hanging from the mirror over the chest of drawers in the closet, Emily noticed a gold chain with a medal, a St. Christopher medal… Stacie’s St. Christopher medal.

This is where Diao Chan wanted her to come, but she hadn’t come alone. Dave watched from the doorway.
Would that really make a difference?
She noticed some smudges on the mirror, and leaned over to breathe on them, her face inches from the glass. When she turned on the vanity light, the numbers appeared—38.995, 76.528—GPS coordinates, she thought.

“Do you have a phone?” she asked. “Quick, give it to me.” She punched the numbers into an app, and saw where they pointed: a parking structure on the north end of the Annapolis Mall, sure to be deserted at this time of night. “Great.” She cleared the program on Dave’s phone and wiped the mirror.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

“You can’t help me anymore,” Emily said, as she pushed past him and ran down the stairs. “Go back to your room… and thanks.”

No fire escapes on the front of Pinckney meant quiet, and a moment to think. Getting to the Mall meant a three or four mile run down West Street, which might take her twenty minutes flat out, or thirty if she paced herself. She could get her motorcycle out of mothballs at her sponsor’s house, but that would end up taking about the same amount of time, and would not make for a stealthy arrival.

Standing under the great east portico of McDowell Hall, which dominated the brick walkways radiating out across the sloping lawns of this end of campus, the scene of the croquet match just a few days ago… those pleasures nibbled at the edge of her consciousness. She’d avoided her friends even then, flirted with a few cadets down from West Point, and the highlight of the weekend, Perry surprised her with a visit for the first time since last fall. She’d had to disappoint him then, and probably would again, maybe many times over.

The walkway on her right beckoned, with its pattern of horizontal bricks interrupted every few feet by a broad concrete stripe. The spacing of the stripes, too long to match an ordinary stride, suggested it had once been used for drill practice.
This must have been a military academy in a previous incarnation,
she thought
. I wonder how many of the current, free-thinking Johnnies know that
.

No more time to spare, she took off on a dead run along the drill walk. Halfway down the slope, she noticed movement behind a boxwood hedge on her right. A dark figure, she spotted it out of the corner of her eye, but when she looked in that direction, it was gone. She knew what that meant: Kano had found her trail. She didn’t have time to stop and confer with him; and even if she had, what was there to say? Should she discourage him from following, or tell him her entire plan, such as it was?

“Follow if you can, old man,” she muttered, and ran on.

The path led her on to College Avenue, which she followed past the Governor’s Mansion and Church Circle. At the corner of West Street, ostensibly using the ATM at a shuttered bank—at oh-two-thirty…
sure
—another figure in casually dark clothing watched her pass. It might have been Connie, who she knew wanted to help, but would only be able to do so by following. Or perhaps it was one of Diao Chan’s confederates—she didn’t get a good look—and they knew where she was headed. All she could do was keep on running.