Protective Measures

by Maggie K. Black

  “There!” Then she saw it—a tiny, miserable bundle of white fur clinging to an outcrop of rocks. Thank You, God! The dog was still alive. She pulled out her earpiece and pressed both it and her cell phone into her brother’s hand. Then she leaped up onto the railing. “Tell me you’ll keep that makeshift floatation device handy.”

  “Of course.”

  Zoe dove neatly into the river. Instantly the current wrapped around her, yanking hard against her body. She gritted her teeth and swam for the frightened animal. Water beat against her body. Underwater rocks scraped and battered against her legs. She made it to the outcropping, braced her legs and reached her hand out toward the puppy.

  “Come on, dog.” She stretched her fingers out as far as she could, coaxing the animal toward her. “Come here. I’ve got you.”

  The puppy scrambled into the crook of her arms and licked her face furiously. A chuckle slipped her lips. She pressed the dog against her chest. “It’s okay,” she whispered. Her fingers looped through the dog’s collar. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”

  Lord, what kind of monster would throw a puppy in the water? How do I protect Leo’s daughters from them?

  Something cold and plastic brushed against her fingers. There was a small bag wedged under the dog’s collar, tied to it by a small zip tie. She eased it out. There was a tiny envelope inside it.

  * * *

  Leo sat with one long leg in and one leg out of the Ash Private Security van. His girls leaned over him and told their rambling stories to a couple of officers. The police looked a bit lost. To be honest, Leo couldn’t blame them. Three police cars and an ambulance had converged on-site responding to a 9-1-1 call about a drowning child. Instead, they’d found nobody drowning and two small girls babbling about someone throwing a dog in the river. Emergency lights still flashed around them. Two paramedics had rushed down to the water, presumably in case Zoe and Alex, who were still down there, needed help. Not that he knew of any reason why the siblings would need help, but he couldn’t see them from the van. Emergency vehicles were lined up along the road and regular traffic was slowing down to see what the commotion was about. He could hear the whir of rotors overhead now, but couldn’t tell if they were from a rescue helicopter or a news one.

  “Do you want to file a report, sir?” The question came from a tall officer with a bushy moustache standing to Leo’s right. All of the emergency service people who’d arrived on the scene were being nothing but exceedingly professional, efficient and polite. But it didn’t stop Leo from suspecting they thought their time might have been wasted.

  “You want to file a report,” Ivy said. “Right, Daddy?”

  He looked down. Both girls’ gazes were locked seriously on his face.

  Guide me, please, God. I don’t know what to think right now.

  The vandalized poster of the girls flashed before his mind’s eye. The Anemoi had set the castle on fire and defaced a picture of his daughters. Now his daughter claimed someone had thrown a puppy into the water, right in front of her. The idea those three things could be linked somehow was pretty far-fetched. But the thought of them just being a coincidence didn’t ring much better.

  If the old man had thrown the dog into the water on purpose, he’d have had absolutely no way of knowing that Ivy would jump into the water after it. The thought that some stranger had intentionally lured Ivy into the water was a pretty big stretch.

  So then what would his motivation for drowning a puppy be? To scare Leo’s daughters? To upset them?

  “You do believe me, right, Daddy?” Ivy asked.

  “Sweetie, I want to believe you,” he said. “But what you said about the man and the puppy doesn’t make sense. And I don’t understand why you didn’t ask me for help instead of running off like that and trying to fix it all by yourself. I’m just very, very thankful you’re okay.”

  He slid his arm around her. But her small shoulders stiffened like a board, like his daughter’s mind and heart were locked deep inside her again, somewhere he couldn’t reach them.

  “Excuse me! Coming through!” Zoe’s voice rang out strong and clear above the din. “I said, ‘Excuse me.’”

  He watched as she pushed through the crowd, politely but firmly nudging officers twice her size out of her way, as she ran toward the van. Then she reached them. Her hands stretched out, past him, toward the girls.

  “There’s someone who wants to see you,” she said. She pushed a small, wet, squirming bundle of puppy into Ivy’s outstretched arms.

  A soft, whimper-like squeal slipped through Ivy’s lips. She buried her face in the dog’s fur and for the first time Leo realized just how sick with worry his daughters had probably been. Ivy looked up at Zoe with tear-filled eyes. “You rescued him!”

  “Of course I did,” Zoe said softly. “I promised you I would try.”

  Tears began to slip down Ivy’s cheeks, Eve launched herself into her sister’s arms, and for a long moment he watched the small, hugging bundle of girls and puppy, feeling a lump of emotion sit heavily in the back of his throat.

  He heard Zoe thank God under her breath. He turned and faced her. Her body was muddy and soaked. Tears brimmed in the corners of her huge, dark and luminescent eyes. For a moment, it took all the self-control in his chest not to reach out, sweep his arms around her and pull her into the van to join in the family embrace.

  Instead, he got out of the van and stood.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “No problem,” she said. “We need to talk, privately, without an audience.”

  “Understood.” He took a few moments to make sure the police had all they needed from him, that the girls were happily occupied with the puppy, and that Josh and Alex had a close, watchful eye on his family. Then Leo and Zoe walked to a nearby bench. He sat, sideways, close enough that he could see both girls but far enough away that they couldn’t hear his words. Then he turned back to Zoe. “Go ahead.”

  “When were you going to tell me that you were a spy?” she asked.

  “I’m not a spy.”

  Zoe crossed her arms. “You can trust me, you know.”

  “I know and I’m not a spy,” he repeated, slower this time and with added emphasis. “I am a naval commander with security clearance and a great deal of battle experience in certain types of operations.”

  And a mission to get smuggling intel from an informant.

  “Do you really think the military has another Seth Miles situation on its hands?” she asked. “A mole who’s trying to stop crime and see justice happen?”

  “You mean could our informant be a good guy? Or someone who has good intentions? I don’t know. I hope so. I pray for them.” He ran both hands through his hair. “I pray for this whole entire mess.”

  “I need to show you something.” She pulled a small laminated card from her pocket and pressed it into his hands. “There was an envelope on the dog’s collar. It’s addressed to you.”

  He pulled out a simple plain white card. It was blank except for the scrawled picture of a crude black storm cloud. Forks of lightning shot from its depths.

  “We’ve seen this symbol before on The Anemoi message boards,” Zoe said. “It’s like their calling card.”

  “So these criminals have gone from setting fire to a castle full of people to terrorizing my children?”

  It took all the self-control he had not to crumple the page in anger and disgust. Instead, he dropped his head into his hands. This was all about retrieving smuggling secrets from an informant, wasn’t it? How did scaring his children fit into that? What am I missing? What am I not seeing?

  Then he felt Zoe’s hand brush his back and for a moment let himself take comfort in the simple touch of her hand. “Maybe they’re warning you not to go after the intel. Or they’re warning you what will happen if you do.”


  He sat up again, pulling his shoulder away from her.

  “This isn’t a warning,” he said. “It’s a taunt. A warning is specific. So is a demand. I learned, time and again in my very long career, that whether you’re going against ships, groups or individuals with evil in their hearts, that you need to take warnings seriously. But taunts? Taunts are somebody else’s garbage way to provoke you into doing something you don’t want to do. You were an athlete. Weren’t you ever taunted?”

  “Yes,” she said slowly, “I know what it’s like to be taunted.”

  “And did you ever do anything you regretted because of it?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Her one-word answer cut like an unexpected chill through the air. Then, to his surprise, her slim shoulders rose and fell, like she was watching a particularly unhappy memory play through her mind. For a moment he felt the impulse to give her a hug and ask what the memory was that upset her so much. Instead he crossed his arms in front of his chest.

  “Well, I can’t afford to let some ragtag group of vigilantes taunt me or distract me from getting this intel,” he said. “I remember I used to see ratty old pirate boats pull up alongside the beautiful, powerful battleship I was commanding, and have to order my crew not to respond when their sailors lined the decks taunting us with lewd gestures and obscenities. Because I never knew if it was a trap or what could happen if we got goaded into a fight. Not to mention how many times I had to discipline somebody under my command for getting into a fistfight because somebody insulted their honor. I don’t know why they’re taunting me, or what they’re trying to provoke me to do. But it’s not going to work. I can’t let it. There’s too much counting on me.”

  “But your daughter...” Zoe started.

  “My daughter should’ve asked us for help instead of trying to settle matters by herself.” He stood, wishing not for the first time that his eldest hadn’t turned out quite so much like himself. “The Anemoi had no way of knowing she’d do that. But it doesn’t change the fact that protecting the girls has to be my top priority. Now even more than ever.”

  He strode back toward the van. The sooner he met the informant, got the intel and analyzed it, the sooner this would all be over and his daughters would be safe. Alex and Josh were standing sentry by the door in an incredibly casual way that made it look like they were just two buddies killing time. His girls were huddled happily on the van floor playing with the puppy now. He could sense Zoe walking behind him, as if all the questions moving through her mind were slipping out as whispers in the air. He knew she wanted him to sit back down and talk with her, like they were friends or the kind of people who solved their problems together.

  But he had to take his children home, get them changed into clean clothes and remind them of the importance of telling him if they saw anything that upset or worried them. He had to review his symposium schedule for tomorrow and figure out which sessions he’d be sitting through as apparently his mission wasn’t over so his cover still needed to be upheld. He had to put in a call to the local animal shelters and police station about the dog his daughters had inexplicably named Fluff on the very slim possibility someone stepped forward to claim it, not to mention go buy all the necessary pet supplies on the very likely instance that nobody did and so the dog was now theirs.

  He had a whole list of things to do, most important of all was putting distance between himself and that beautiful woman who, yet again, challenged him and drew him in at the same time. Of all the battles he was fighting, on all sides, one of the largest was the flicker of something that Zoe threatened to awake in his heart. He couldn’t let that happen.

  After Josh left to go back to his honeymoon at Cedar Lake, Alex and Zoe followed Leo’s truck in the black nondescript Ash Security van. They waited in the parking lot while he and the girls went into a pet store and practically loaded his truck full of every toy and piece of dog gear Ivy and Eve imagined the dog they had named Fluff might want. Then they waited again while he went into the grocery store and loaded up on groceries, before finally going home. The girls waved the van good-night and he took them inside. Periodically in the evening he’d look out and see it there, just calmly parked somewhere on the street or pulling smoothly through the neighborhood.

  After the girls had gone to bed, he sat with his coffee on the front porch, listened to the wind in the trees and the roar of the Ottawa River in the distance, and stared through the foliage at the dark tinted windows. Was it Zoe inside or Alex? He didn’t know. Nor why it had felt so odd somehow to run those errands and then make a meal without going out and inviting them in. He’d hired them to watch his back. Nothing more. And yet, he found himself walking into the kitchen, pulling a second coffee cup out of the cupboard and looking at it. What would happen if he poured a second coffee, walked outside and knocked on the van? What if Zoe was there and he invited her to join him on the porch? There was nothing wrong with grabbing a coffee with your private security to go over planning details. Surely, if he called and gave her a heads-up, they’d find a way to arrange a conversation without blowing her cover. Not to mention, he had several friends who were female—Alex’s fiancée, Theresa, was one of them—who he wouldn’t think twice about having coffee with.

  But somehow this was different, as if the simple act of pouring Zoe a coffee and knocking on a door would open himself up to something more and tempt his damaged heart into wanting something he couldn’t have. He put the mug back in the cupboard, turned off the lights and lay on his couch, staring at the ceiling and trying to pray. But instead, he found himself lost in the memory of a pair of dark, luminous eyes.

  * * *

  Zoe was waiting for him in the driveway the next morning, standing by the driver’s side door of his red pickup truck, in blue jean leggings and a long gray T-shirt. Despite the fact he’d practically had to drag his girls to get dressed and out the door, the moment they laid eyes on Zoe they squealed, leaped off the porch and ran across the lawn to her. Eve launched herself into Zoe’s arms for a hug. Then, to his surprise, Ivy gave her a super fast hug, too.

  “Daddy’s making us leave Fluff at home!” Ivy said petulantly.

  “Well, that sounds very smart of your daddy,” Zoe said seriously. “Dogs don’t like summer day camp. I’m sure Fluff will be very happy to help guard the house.”

  That seemed to settle the matter and the girls climbed in the backseat of the truck. What? He’d gone six rounds with the girls earlier about making Fluff stay at home, but they’d been willing to accept it from Zoe without so much as a squeak? It was something in her voice. Something that made her sound like she was on your side but that things just had to go another way. It made a person want to follow her.

  “Morning, Leo! So, you’ll be going in the van with Alex and I’ll be driving your truck.” She stretched out her hand, ready to catch his keys.

  “I’ll drive my truck,” he said, “and drop you off.”

  “But then you’ll have to drive all the way out to Nepean just to turn around and go back downtown.” Zoe’s arms crossed. “It makes a lot more sense for me to drive your truck and you to catch a ride with Alex. I’d offer to take them in my car, but Alex and I drove out to Ottawa together in the van. I promise you, I’m a very good driver. I only crash when people are shooting at me.” A smile turned at the corner of her lips. It was quirky and playful, and made him even more grateful he hadn’t given in and asked her to join him for coffee last night.

  He felt his brow furrow. “I’ll drive.”

  He didn’t talk on the way to day camp. He didn’t need to. Eve chirped away from the backseat, telling Zoe all about Fluff’s first big night in the house and asking her questions all about her dog back home. Even Ivy joined in, here and there, which was a change from her usual habit of staring out the window. He dropped them off at a beautiful, old-fashioned one-room schoolhouse, where the Department of Defence was holding day ca
mp for children from military and government families.

  There were government security personnel on-site and a whole fleet of diplomatic cars waiting in case something arose and Zoe needed to leave with the girls. Still, he stressed that he’d return to pick them up personally. As he eased the truck back down the highway into the downtown core, he wondered what Zoe would do all day, while she waited for the girls. Would she grab a coffee and sit in a lobby to wait? Would she volunteer to join in the crafts, making things out of macaroni and glue?

  He gave Alex a quick call and told him he could take the day off, go back to the hotel to get some sleep in an actual bed, before another long stint in the surveillance van. Leo’s day would be spent with symposium delegates, in lectures as people talked about their various roles and work in different places around the world. They were fascinating stories, truth be told, but still the time seemed to crawl as Leo’s eyes drew him back to the clock on the wall.

  Zoe and the girls were waiting for him on the schoolhouse yard practicing handstands. The girls tumbled into the truck, faces flushed and eyes aglow.

  “Daddy!” Eve bounced up and down on her seat. “Zoe taught the class how to fight!”

  “Did she, now?” His eyebrows rose.

  “I volunteered to help out,” Zoe said. “They did sports in the afternoon and so I showed them some combat moves. Basic stuff.”

  “Can Zoe stay for dinner?” Ivy asked. “She said she likes pizza.”

  Two sets of hopeful eyes stared up at him through the rearview mirror. An unsettled feeling brushed the back of his neck. The girls were quickly becoming attached to Zoe.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “I’m sure Zoe’s very busy.”

  Just like that the light in the girls’ eyes fell. He pulled out of the parking lot and started for the highway. He was now the bad guy in his daughters’ eyes again because he wasn’t about to welcome a stranger into their home? Not that Zoe was typical. She had rescued a puppy, caught Eve when she fell from a tree and showed them fighting moves. It was no wonder they were crazy about her.