Winds of Change Book Two

by Melissa Good

  Kerry smiled. “My pleasure.” She lifted Dar’s hand and kissed the knuckles, then ducked past her as the front door bell rang. “I’d get some beer ready. I think they’re gonna need it.”

  “Mm.” Dar detoured to the kitchen, listening to Kerry’s voice as she greeted Andrew and Ceci. She opened the refrigerator and studied the contents. “Beer or milk?” she mused. “Maybe a beer for Mom, and chocolate milk for Dad?”

  “Dar?” Kerry’s voice echoed softly from the dining room.

  “On the way.” Dar plunked a choice of beverages on a round wooden tray and headed out into the living room where Andrew and Ceci were now occupying the love seat, having gained the rapt attention of the two dogs. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” Ceci eyed her. “What exactly are we going to hear about that you’re bringing everything from seltzer water to vodka out?”

  “Vodka’s for me,” Dar said, putting the tray down. “It was that kind of morning.”

  “Lord.” Andrew sat up and stared at her. “What in the hell happened? You get drafted? By the Army?”

  “Don’t give them any ideas, Andrew”

  DAR WATCHED THE lights go past through the window of the hotel room, idly listening to Kerry talking to her mother in the background. It was dark and they’d landed a half hour prior. It seemed that a sushi dinner was in her future with a senator and probably some aides.

  That was all right. She didn’t mind spending some time with Kerry’s mother. At least it would keep her mind off the stresses of the day and keep her from thinking about their morning presentation tomorrow.

  “Okay, we’ll meet you there in twenty minutes.” Kerry said. “Bye, Mother.” She hung up and came over to where Dar was sprawled, perching on the arm of the chair she was sitting in. “We’re going to that little Japanese place I told you I went to with her the last time I was here.”

  Dar amiably nodded. “Sure. Round of Saki and a platter to share is just about what I’m in the mood for right now.” She let her head bump against Kerry’s hip. “Don’t even mind that it’s with your mother.”

  Kerry chuckled. “Yeah, the world sure has changed.”

  “You going to tell her your name has?” Dar asked.

  “Oh, hmm...you know I sort of forgot about that,” Kerry said. “What do you think her reaction’s going to be?”

  Dar thought about that for a minute. “Damned if I know. On one hand, she’s pretty up on the whole family thing, but on the other hand...”

  “She was married to my father and changed her name to his,” Kerry said. “So yeah, she shouldn’t have much to say about that, but sometimes my mother is oblivious to hypocrisy.”

  “Up to you, babe. I’ll go along with whatever you tell her.” Dar half closed her eyes as Kerry gently ran her fingers through her hair. “Today sucked my brain out. Hope it soaks back in overnight.”

  “C’mon.” Kerry got up and plucked Dar’s sleeve. “It’s only a couple blocks from here. Let’s walk over.”

  So they did. Dar zipped up her leather jacket and stuck her hands in her pockets, following Kerry out the front door of their hotel and out onto the sidewalk.

  It was cold and windy, but as Kerry had promised the walk wasn’t long. In under ten minutes they were turning into the entrance of the restaurant, Dar pulling the door open and standing aside to let Kerry precede her inside.

  “Thank you,” Kerry said. She hooked a finger into one of Dar’s pockets and pulled her along as they entered the small restaurant and stopped at the seating station. “Hello,” Kerry greeted the young woman standing there. “I’m expecting at least one more person, so maybe a table for four?”

  “Yes.” The woman picked up some menus and gestured to them to follow her. She led the way through the mostly empty restaurant to a lacquered table in the center. “Okay?”

  “Fine.” Kerry took a seat and picked up the menu as Dar went around the table and sat down to her right. “Can we get two glasses of white wine to start?”

  “Yes, sure.” The waitress whisked off to the bar.

  Dar leaned back in her chair and looked around. The restaurant had booths around the edges and a square sushi bar where five or six patrons were seated with plates in front of them. It looked like a thousand other sushi joints she’d been in but the customers here were a touch more conservatively dressed and there was no big fish tank.

  The restaurant door opened and Kerry’s mother entered with an aide at her side. Dar lifted a hand in greeting, gently nudging Kerry’s knee under the table.

  Cynthia Stuart brightened, then evaded the hostess and came over to the table. She slipped her fur lined jacket off and settled it on the back of the chair. The aide remained behind, slipping past them and taking a seat at the end of the sushi bar. “Hello there, Kerrison, Dar, how nice it is to see you.”

  Kerry felt the slightly squirmy discomfort of not knowing exactly how to respond, but she stood and took her mother’s outstretched hands, giving them a squeeze. “Hello, Mother. Thanks for agreeing to subject yourself to sushi again for our sakes.”

  “Oh, but it’s no sacrifice.” Cynthia released her and sat down, settling the small white napkin on her lap. “I have been coming here quite often since your last visit. I do quite enjoy it now.”

  “That’s cool,” Kerry responded. “I’m glad I introduced you to it then.”

  Dar cleared her throat and kept quiet, feeling more than just a little zoned after the long day. She listened to Kerry and her mother exchange pleasantries, content to sip her wine and ponder the menu.

  “The intelligence committee is so looking forward to hearing you speak tomorrow, Dar.” Cynthia caught her attention away from the unagi. “There has been quite a lot of debate about this new program of the administration’s.”

  “I can imagine,” Dar said. “Hope they feel the same way after I stop talking. I tend to get pretty technical.”

  “Oh I’m sure it will be fine,” Cynthia said and then paused, seeing

  the wry look on Kerry’s face. “Won’t it?”

  “There’s no doubt, Dar does get technical,” Kerry said. “But it’s a technical subject so I think you’ll all have to muddle along. I’ll be there to translate for you though if you want, Mother.”

  “Oh.” Cynthia blinked a little. “Yes I’m sure it’ll work out just fine then,” she said in a determined tone. “It’s quite amusing you know. Some of my colleagues were fit to be tied about the whole thing until the president showed his support.”

  “They probably swallowed so much bile they turned the color of a salamander,” Kerry said. She looked up as the waitress returned for their order. “What’s it going to be, Dardar?”

  “Mm...spicy tuna roll and a chef’s choice,” Dar said after a pause. “And some hot green tea, please.”

  “Same,” Kerry said. She stacked her menu on Dar’s and leaned back a little as her mother ordered and the waitress zipped off. “How’s Angie doing? I got an email from her the other day sounds like she’s having some fun with the kids.”

  “It’s been quite active,” Cynthia said. “She and Brian have just finished some house hunting. I think they’re going to make a decision soon. Though I have enjoyed having the children around the house, it’s right for them to want to start their own I think.”

  “Given Kerry’s tendency to smash your furniture, I’m sure it’s probably safer that way in the long run,” Dar said, ignoring the droll look she got from Kerry. “I think that was the only comic relief to be had that night.”

  Cynthia looked uncertain then she smiled, apparently deciding Dar was making a joke. “Yes, that was a terrible, long, and stress-filled day. I hope I never see another like it.”

  “Oh, me either,” Kerry agreed at once. “Never want to go through that again. I think that’s one of the reasons Dar and I decided to participate in this new program. Maybe something we can do can prevent that.”

  “That’s exactly what the administration said in the proposal,” Cynthia said
. “That we had to find a way to make the technology work for us to give us a way to stop this sort of thing before it happens.”

  “Well, that’s the idea,” Dar said.

  “You can do that then?” Cynthia asked.

  “Dar can do pretty much anything when it comes to technology, Mother.” Kerry took a sip of her wine. “I’ve gotten a whole new appreciation for that after the last month of us starting up our own business.”

  Dar produced a charming smile at that. “Flatterer.”

  “Not really,” Kerry said. “All these people are calling us, wanting all these different things and Dar is just like, ‘yeah, I can code that, no problem.’” She flicked her fingers in a throwaway gesture. “Want an accounting system? I got that, no problem. Do we need a customer database? Give me a minute, I have that on a hard drive here

  somewhere.”

  Dar started laughing. “Ker.”

  “Sweetheart, it’s true.” Kerry mock sighed. “Somehow ILS had you so busy being management they forgot to take shameless advantage of you as a programmer.”

  “Well, isn’t that nice?” Cynthia rallied gamely. “If that’s so, then I think this project will be successful. It would be nice to have a political scene become something useful for a change.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Dar said.

  Cynthia nodded. “And how has it been going with your new business?” she asked. “It must be strange after working for that other company for so long, Dar?”

  “A little. We’d already tendered our resignation though,” Dar said. “So in the end it was just annoying with all the garbage going on.” She leaned back as the waitress returned to deliver their sushi. “After all that time, it would have been nice to have a graceful exit.”

  “Many of my colleagues feel the same,” Cynthia said. “And very often end up being chased out of their offices by newcomers with very little ceremony.”

  “Wonder what that’s like at the White House?” Kerry mused. “That must be weird.”

  Dar wielded her chopsticks, tapping the tips together. “Wonder if they do things like leave an old fish in a garbage can in the Oval Office.”

  Kerry snickered.

  Cynthia frowned. “I’m sure they don’t. After all, these are professional people.” She paused in thought.

  “Thinking twice about that?” Kerry’s eyes twinkled a little. “But seriously, I think in the past even though there was a lot of head bashing and competition, there was a sense of...um...”

  “Decorum,” Dar supplied.

  Kerry nodded. “Yes. That you didn’t always get to hear exactly what everyone was thinking. That’s faded.”

  “But anyway...” Dar paused as her phone rang. She pulled it out and glanced at it and then gave Kerry an apologetic look as she stood and pushed her chair in. “Be right back.”

  “Oh, boy.” Kerry watched her step outside. “I’m sure that’s not good.”

  Her mother eyed her warily. “Is something the matter?” she asked in a diffident tone.

  Kerry used a piece of sushi to give herself a moment to think about answering. Then she swallowed. “Where do I start?” she answered wryly. “So much has happened in the last month. But what Dar’s worried about right now, and me too, is that our former company is kind of in the crapper.”

  Cynthia’s eyebrows lifted. “Kerrison.”

  Kerry chewed another piece of sushi and swallowed it. “Actually I was going to say it was a Technicolor clusterfuck but I thought you’d freak out.”

  Cynthia stared at her, chopsticks half lifted in one hand.

  Kerry winked at her, then went back to her plate. “Want to hear the details?”

  DAR WAITED FOR the door to swing shut behind her before she answered the call. “Dar Roberts.” She leaned against the wall of the restaurant, watching the cars go by.

  “Hey, Dar, it’s Mark.”

  “Hey.”

  “So listen, I know you guys are up in DC, but that skanky guy called me again,” Mark said. “Only this time he wasn’t slimy, you know? He was scared shitless.”

  “Well, that’s better than slimy, I guess.” Dar hitched one knee up. “So what’d he want now?”

  “What he said was, okay, so, no bull, he’d be very grateful for any information me, or you, would be willing to give him to get this fixed.”

  “That is better than slimy. It’s borderline honest,” Dar said. “So, I assume you told him the obvious—put things back?”

  “Sure. He didn’t go so far as to say he’d tanked the repository, but he said it was down and far as he knew, unrecoverable.”

  “Idiot.”

  “Yeah.”

  Dar studied the road in front of her. “Shit.”

  “You came to the same conclusion I did, then,” Mark said. “Hey, you’re pretty close to Herndon, right? That’s got both sides, you can get to everything.”

  Dar considered walking...no, being walked into the control room and seeing all those people again and it made her stomach churn. “I don’t want to go to Herndon,” she said. “I don’t want to put my hands on a keyboard, matter of fact.”

  “Dar, they’re not going to be able to fix that shit,” Mark said. “We both know it.”

  “No, I know.”

  “So?” he said. “Like, no offense, Big D, but I want to get this crap to bed. I don’t want it hanging out over you, or me, you know? I’m done with them.”

  “Okay,” Dar said. “You can call him back and tell him if he’ll send me the current configurations of all the master routers, I’ll look at them and make whatever changes seem reasonable to me and send them back. See what he says to that.”

  “Unless his brain’s migrated back to his ass, I bet he’ll cry like a baby,” Mark said. “Okay, send you what I get if he even knows how to pull them.”

  Dar nodded to herself. “Okay. Talk to you later, Mark. I’m having some dinner with Kerry and her mom.”

  “Ah...have fun?”

  “Yeah. Bye.” Dar closed the phone and folded her arms, trying to decide how she felt about the new development. On one hand, it seemed like some sense was returning to the situation, but on the other hand she thought there was still an opportunity for her to get screwed in the process of trying to help.

  After all, trying to help on the island didn’t end well, did it?

  Dar sighed and pushed off the wall, heading back into the restaurant. Maybe she could get away with providing the minimum of help. She wondered if she could just look at the configs and send them back saying they were hopeless and she couldn’t fix them.

  Dar paused with her hand on the door and watched her own eyes reflect back from the outside surface. She gave herself a wry, knowing smile, then opened the door and went back inside.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “AH AM SOME pissed.” Andrew sat squarely in the chair on the porch, arms folded. “Ceci, ah know no good deed done go unpunished but Jesus P Fish.”

  “Yeah.” Ceci was in the other chair and a tray with rum punch sat between them. “Dar didn’t deserve that. She did the right thing helping out that kid.” She had one knee hiked up and her arms wrapped around it. “I’d have done it. You would have, too.”

  “Jackass.”

  “He would probably have invited us for dinner,” Ceci said. “Instead of being so stupid as to wave a red flag in front of us and threaten to evict us from his preciously pretentious rock pile.”

  “Kids should go live on down in that little place in the keys.” Andrew said. “Ain’t a right place for Dar here anyhow.”

  Ceci smiled. “It fits them better. But that’s one hell of a commute, you know? Especially in weather.”

  “Mmph,” Andrew grunted softly. He reached down and picked up Mocha, who had taken a seat on one of his boots, and set the puppy on his lap. “Cute little thing.”

  Mocha seemed to enjoy his new perch, his small pink tongue emerging as he looked around.

  Ceci accepted the subject change. “He is cute.
I wonder what made Dar decide to get another one?” She gingerly patted Chino on the head. “To keep this one company?”

  “Could be,” Andy said. “Social critters.”

  Chino wagged her tail. Then she got up and walked over to where Andy was seated, putting her nose up against Mocha’s nose and giving him a lick. She moved to the edge of the porch, standing up and putting her paws on the rail, peering out over the ocean.

  Ceci regarded the animal, watching her upright but folded ears twitch as she sniffed the ocean air. She’d never considered dogs to be interesting, but now, having minded Chino so many times she’d come to the conclusion that there was some kind of intelligence in the beast that surprised her.

  When the big dog looked at her, there was definitely something going on behind those soft, brown eyes. Thoughts, though not human kinds of thoughts, but thoughts nonetheless. “Hey there, Chino.” Ceci waved at her.

  “Growf!”

  “Dar said they’d been bringing these two into the office with them,” Ceci remarked. “Must be cozy.”

  “Think it’s good,” Andy said. “Dogs love those kids and no politics about it.” He held his hand out and Mocha put his paw in it, then turned his head and looked at Andy. “Crazy things that happen to them, that’s all right.”

  “Yeah.” Ceci leaned her arms on the chair and regarded the horizon. “We going to go talk to that guy, Andy?”

  Andrew pondered that in silence. “Ah am not sure talking will do much for the situation.”

  “You could be right, sailor boy, but I’m not in the mood to be put in jail tonight and we promised to watch the dogs until Dar and Kerry get back. So maybe we could try talking first and then, after the kids get back, find other ways.”

  “All right,” He agreed. “We can go have us some pizza pie anyhow.”

  Ceci warmed to the plan. “We can take these dogs for a walk over there and sit outside. We’ll look like a total set of snoots.”

  Andrew gave her a droll look that reminded Ceci of Dar and she grinned. “Okay well, a pretend pair of snoots.” She got up. “Let me go get the leashes.”