Off the Leash

by M. L. Buchman

  It must have been painfully loud right next to the car, but Linda and Thor both merely looked at the wailing vehicle, sniffed their way around it, then continued along the street.

  For an hour they left behind a trail of red Post-its and for the most part ignored sirens, gunfire, and other distractions. Once an actual explosion spattered them with dirt. For that, Linda had wrapped her arms around the dog and huddled in a bookstore doorway with her back turned toward the worst of it. Moments later they were back at their task.

  Clive could look down in wonder. She’d positioned herself so that if the explosion had been lethal, rather than merely a training distraction, she’d have given her life to save her dog. Maybe the guys on the Presidential Protection Detail really would step in front of the bullet if given the chance. Would he himself step in the line of a rogue chocolate shard? Perhaps, but only because that didn’t sound terribly threatening.

  When they reached the end of the course, they stopped in the center of the intersection. From a small pack, she pulled out a fold-up bowl and poured some water into it for Thor before drinking herself. Then a doggie treat. Nothing for the handler.

  With a tip of his head, Jurgen indicated that Clive should follow him down.

  As they stepped out onto the street themselves, she was tossing a bulbous Kong toy for Thor. He’d once more turned into the dog most likely to belong at a little girl’s tea party, eating all of the cookies whenever the hostess wasn’t looking.

  “You missed two,” Jurgen snapped out his form of a polite greeting, not bothering to look at his clipboard.

  Linda flinched as if she’d been slapped and her shoulders sagged.

  But Clive had learned some things about Jurgen’s expressions: there was a sourness there like bitter chocolate. “What’s been your best score by any other team?”

  “Five misses,” Jurgen’s scowl now included him since Clive had just spoiled his fun.

  Linda still didn’t look any happier. That told him a lot about her—this was one seriously driven woman. Anything less than perfect was a hundred percent failure. Which he supposed was true when your job was to make sure that no one blew up the President.

  At that moment Thor stopped playing with his toy, trotted up to Jurgen’s feet, circled him once, and sat abruptly with his nose aimed at one of the lieutenant’s shoes.

  “Damn it,” he growled. “Okay, that makes one miss.”

  “Let me guess,” Clive could get to enjoy this after all. “The observer’s station also has an explosive.” Then his breath caught in his throat. He wouldn’t put it past Jurgen to have him sitting on an explosive the whole time he’d been in the observer’s chair.

  Jurgen’s expression said it all.

  “Of course,” Linda couldn’t believe she’d missed it. “It is always the person and place you least suspect that gets by you.” That was certainly never going to happen again.

  She was furious with herself for missing that but wasn’t going to show any weakness. It was one of the great traps of serving in the military. If a woman showed the least weakness, she’d forever be tagged as unable to perform. If a guy showed ten times as much, he’d be tagged as being tired and probably told he’d done a good job. The military had taught her how to hide anything she was actually feeling—often until she barely felt it herself.

  It was even more galling that some stranger had to be the one to point it out. He didn’t sound or act like Secret Service, making it even worse.

  “Usually takes a new dog-handler team weeks of hard work to get even close to that kind of performance. Fine!” Jurgen’s tone said it was anything but. He yanked a sheet from his clipboard, scrawled a signature, and handed it across. “Oh eight hundred tomorrow. Report to Captain Carl Baxter at the USSS office in the West Wing of the White House. Take that damn dog with you. I’ve got a meeting to get to.” Then he stalked off. A trumped-up meeting, because earlier he’d said he had all day.

  Linda could only look down at Thor in amazement. She squatted down and gave him a big scritch. It wasn’t Thor’s fault that she’d screwed up and not led him into the control center to sniff around and she had to make sure that he knew that. She’d never before worked with such a well-trained dog. He flopped onto his back and presented his belly. As she rubbed it, his back leg began kicking spasmodically in joy.

  “You did so good, Thor. You are such a good doggie!” She used that ridiculous high-pitched voice that so many dog trainers used. She was long past being embarrassed by it. Mostly. She couldn’t care less about Jurgen, but something about the other man who’d stayed behind made her less sure.

  “Maybe I should leave you two alone.” He had a nice deep voice, befitting his large frame.

  Linda glanced up at him. Her automatic profiling assessment kicked in: Caucasian male, closecut dark hair, dark eyes, built big like a wrestler—enough so that he’d look heavy if he wasn’t six-four. Instead he looked like the guy most likely to wrap you up in a friendly bear hug, which would force her to flatten him if he tried. His standout feature was powerful hands well marked with small cuts and burns. That and an amazing smile, which lit up his whole face. He wore a fleece jacket over a maroon turtleneck and a knit scarf in a blocky pattern of brilliant colors that made his brown eyes even warmer.

  “Hi,” his pleasant tone not the least diminished by her own silence, which was now growing awkward.

  Thor had rolled to his feet, sniffed around the man, then looked up at him wagging his short tail.

  He knelt down and reached out to scratch the dog’s ear.

  She snapped her fingers to get Thor’s attention and made the hand sign for “enemy” as a test.

  He looked up at her in surprise as if she’d lost her mind.

  She sighed and whispered, “Spiel.” Play. The dog could do what he wanted.

  He nosed out and slipped his head under the stranger’s half-extended hand. Without a moment’s hesitation, the man began to rub the offered ear. Easy for the dog.

  Not so easy for her. Well, she had to start somewhere and he looked kindly enough.

  “Nice scarf.”

  He looked down at his chest. “Oh, this one. Thanks. My mom knit it for me last Christmas. It’s the colors of home.”

  “Where did you grow up, in a kaleidoscope?”

  “Almost. South of San Francisco there are these huge salt flats that turn wild colors as their salinity increases. This is the last scarf she ever knit for me. I made one of cherry blossom colors for her that same year.” His smile was wistful, which was more than she’d ever feel if her mom died.

  “You knit?” She couldn’t imagine how with those big hands of his.

  “Doesn’t everyone?” But his smile said that rather than an actual expectation, it was some form of humor—not one of her strengths. It was getting strange, not knowing if he was someone to salute or not, so she held out a hand.

  “Sergeant Linda Hamlin. New to the Secret Service—as of today, I suppose.”

  “Clive Andrews,” which still didn’t tell her who he was. He reached up from where he still squatted by Thor. His hand was warm—her fingers were freezing—and as powerful as it looked. His massive hand completely enveloped hers. That’s when she realized that he wasn’t merely big, he was immensely strong. If he was trained, she might have trouble taking him down—though she’d learned more than a few dirty tricks fending off unwanted attentions in her decade of service.

  There was an easy roll to his voice that hinted at Scottish, overlaid with a soft American accent that she couldn’t pin down—which must be San Francisco. It made him sound as much of a mutt as Thor.

  “Not Agent Hamlin?”

  “Special Agent is separate from the Uniformed Division. The canine teams are UD; we use ranks.”

  “Oh.”

  Great way to build a friendship—her first potential one outside of the military in a decade—by correcting him. It did tell her that he wasn’t Secret Service or he’d have known that. Which raised th
e question of what he was doing on their secure base.

  “And this is a White House patrol dog?” He rubbed under Thor’s chin.

  She looked down at Thor’s shaggy appearance. Despite his exceptional performance, it was clear that she was going to be endlessly harassed about him. She sighed and changed the subject.

  “And you are…?” Best way to appease a man, talk about him.

  “The White House chocolatier.” His cheery wince said that he too was expecting a certain dismissive reaction.

  When she didn’t take the bait, he merely acknowledged it with a shrug.

  Again the silence was stretching… “Is there a reason a chocolatier is here at James J. Rowley Training Center?”

  This time the shrug looked a little awkward as he rose back to standing, much to Thor’s dismay.

  She was an expert on reading a dog’s body language. Men were a mystery to her. Well, except for a few obvious nonverbal messages that she had made it a rule to ignore. But she wasn’t getting those from Clive the Chocolatier.

  “Grown men actually make their living with chocolate?”

  That earned her another of his dazzling smiles, “Only the lucky ones.”

  “Chocolate was never a big motivator for me.”

  He slapped a hand on his heart and staggered backward as if she’d knifed him with her Benchmade Triage foldable. “You have set me a challenge, madam. I shall expect you to visit the White House Chocolate Shop at your first convenience so that I may convince you otherwise.”

  “The White House has a chocolate shop? Like where you buy chocolate?” She was definitely back in civilian land. The places she’d been operating, a chow tent was a luxury and a mess hall mostly a distant dream.

  He sighed and hung his head as if she was a hopeless case, which wouldn’t surprise her for a moment. But then he smiled down at her again, as cheerful as ever. He and Thor were apparently two of a kind.

  “Actually, in the world of chocolate, a chocolate shop can be either a place of sale or a kitchen. Mine is a actually a chocolate kitchen. We just call it a shop.”

  “Okay. Sure. Whatever. I’ll look you up if I get there.” A chill breeze flapped the piece of paper directing her to report at the White House tomorrow and made her shiver. “Okay, when I get there.”

  Clive cast off his fooling around. His friendliness actually made her feel warm despite the freezing temperature. She really needed to get some gloves. Did he know how powerful that smile was on his handsome features?

  Her jerk-o-meter wasn’t twitching either, which was unusual.

  Then, of all unlikely things, he bowed deeply—once to her and once to Thor, the second bow accompanied by a brief head pat—before turning and heading for the parking lot.

  A nice guy. One who remembered her dog. She didn’t like being charmed by any creature with less than four legs, but he’d somehow managed it.

  Chapter Two

  “And?”

  Clive wondered how anyone could pack so many emotions into such an innocuous word: inquiry, curiosity, impatience, and a touch of someone busy working on a jigsaw puzzle in which he himself was but one of the smaller pieces. Not the most comfortable feeling.

  That it was also Miss Watson’s form of a greeting only made it all the stranger. As if they were in the middle of a conversation that he’d already missed the start of and would never catch back up with as it raced away from him.

  He always felt like a cave explorer whenever he came down here.

  Her office was a tiny space deep in the White House Residence’s lowest subbasement. It was two stories below the kitchen and his chocolate shop, directly beneath the dishwashing room. The latter was proven by the nest of drain piping that covered the ceiling of her office. Any conversation here was punctuated by a succession of gurgles from dishwashers flushing away the remains of meals, ranging from the President’s private dinners to massive state banquets.

  The walls were old brick that probably dated back to the massive Truman renovation. They were lined with packed-solid bookshelves. He’d never been able to make sense of the titles. Even an eclectic reader was unlikely to cover such a range of interests: religious texts, English law, German something or other (not one of his languages, not that he actually had any other than mostly forgotten high school French only slightly enhanced while apprenticed to the great Jacques Torres in New York), contemporary thrillers, dictionaries in a variety of languages…

  As an excuse to look somewhere other than her steel blue eyes, he inspected her collection of curious artifacts—some of which he wondered how Miss Watson had gotten past White House security. Fierce knives and strange-looking rifles that were like none he’d ever seen being carried by the Secret Service or the military. Some of them looked like they’d be more appropriate in a spy movie than in real life.

  High on one wall, with its own tiny spotlight as if it was a place of honor, a tattered wool scarf hung pressed in a glass frame, faded almost a uniform gray with hard usage. The sloppy knitting followed no discernable pattern. There were even holes that he could tell had been dropped stitches that had expanded with age. He’d never found the nerve to ask about it and, he thought about it a moment, today wasn’t going to be the day he braved her daunting expression.

  The office looked as if not even a single dust mote had been changed since his first visit here three months ago.

  It had been a lovely day in October, one of the most beautiful months in DC. He’d found a note. Not a text or an e-mail, a handwritten note in a flowing black ink script. The problem was that it had been locked inside his personal recipe file box—to which he knew for a fact he had the only key.

  “Come see me. Residence, Subbasement Two, Room 043.” Nothing more. The paper had begun to dissolve just from the moisture on his fingers. He dropped it in the sink and it dissolved completely in the moisture accumulated there.

  He’d only been called to her twice since and always left more puzzled than when he arrived. Everything about the room made the small, gray-haired woman who sat behind the battered steel desk seem all the more daunting and mysterious.

  He tried not to fidget and totally failed. “Sergeant Linda Hamlin’s score on the course was apparently exceptional. She—”

  “I have them here,” Miss Watson rested her hand on a slim file.

  “Then why did you send me out to—”

  “Tell me what isn’t in the file.”

  Protesting that he didn’t know what was included in the file didn’t seem like a path that would lead anywhere good, so he abandoned it untested.

  Clive wished that Miss Watson had actual guest chairs—not that the office was big enough to accommodate them. Instead, she had a single, four-legged wooden stool on which one of the legs was a half inch short. Sitting on it, he always felt out of balance…and kept checking his head to see if he should be wearing a dunce cap like the bad boy in the corner. It was also short enough that even with his stature he was barely eye-to-eye with her across the desk.

  He looked at her again. Penetrating blue eyes. Silver hair back in a 1950s bun. She wore a hand-knit cable cardigan adorned only by a small bronze broach in the form of an oak leaf. She had an intricately patterned sock of gray, pale orange, and brown wool half completed on the corner of her desk. It was a Fair Isle pattern he’d learned at his mother’s knee. He’d rather talk knitting than what he didn’t know about Linda and Thor—but the thin needles caught the low desk light brightly, making them appear dangerous, as if they were weapons of war rather than of wool.

  He’d never raised the subject of knitting with her on any of the four occasions she’d had reason to call him to her office. And he wasn’t brave enough to this time either.

  “Linda and Thor, a rather silly-looking little dog, moved about the course as if they were a single being connected by gesture and tone. They were more cohesive than most restaurants’ menu plans, though Lieutenant Jurgen said it was their first meeting. There was a well-trodden path leading i
nto the test area that they didn’t follow. Linda led them onto a path of her own choosing instead.”

  “They see no boundaries.” Miss Watson typically gave him the impression that he was only one of a myriad of more important topics she was contemplating. He now had her full attention and wished he didn’t—it was rather daunting.

  He tried to think of what else might not be in a performance report by Lieutenant Jurgen.

  Linda’s lovely face, flowing hair, and cautious eyes came to mind. Also, how hard it had been not to reach for her fine hand again as he left. He’d wanted to hold it again, however briefly, and that seemed a little creepy so he’d done his best courtly bow instead.

  “During the course, there was a mock explosion that spattered them with dirt. Linda put Thor’s life ahead of her own, shielding the dog with her own body. She did it so fast that I never saw it happen.”

  “You like her,” Miss Watson made it a flat statement.

  “Linda offers a lot to be admired.”

  Miss Watson brushed that aside with a flick of her ringless fingers. “You like her.”

  He grimaced. At which Miss Watson smiled like a benevolent grandmother rather than a scary old lady in the White House subbasement who was never discussed on the floors above. Did the politicians orbited through and mingled in the Residence even know she was down here?

  “It is not mindreading. Your voice and expression would give you away. Your automatic use of her first name as well. Yes,” Miss Watson gazed up at the waste pipes that formed her ceiling but appeared to be looking up through the two subbasements and the four stories of the Residence, right up to the Delta Force snipers permanently stationed on the roof. “Yes, I shall have to arrange to meet her.”

  “She promised to come by my chocolate shop.”

  Miss Watson tipped her head down to look at him as if she was glaring over the rims of her reading glasses, except she didn’t wear any.

  “Uh…”

  She waited.

  “Perhaps I’d best be going.”