“My name is Diao Chan,” the taller girl said in a leading tone, nudging her friend with an elbow.
“Tenno Michiko,” Emily replied, extending a hand, though the gesture didn’t seem to make sense to either girl. Finally, the quiet one touched her hand lightly with very soft fingers.
“I’m Ma Ruochen. My family is in Shenzhen.” A shadow seemed to pass across her face as she said this, or so Emily thought. “Are you from around here?”
“I grew up in Virginia, a few hours drive south of here. It must be hard on you, being so far from home.”
“I miss my family.”
“I don’t,” Diao Chan said. “I like the adventure.”
“Are you upperclassmen here?” Emily asked.
“She is,” Diao Chan said. “It’s my first year.”
“I hope you don’t mind my saying, but you seem a bit old for a freshman.”
“It’s okay,” she replied. “I had to work for a couple of years before my family could put together enough money for college.”
Listening to Diao Chan, Emily wondered what she’d worked at. The air of confidence she exuded, together with her bearing, her posture and the strength visible in her hands and shoulders, all suggested military training. The more Emily looked at her, the more struck she was by the sheer physical beauty of the girl—the sort of beauty typical of people at the peak of physical training—her body lithe and athletic, a face framed in a soft oval by a mane of black hair, and a little bit of magic in her eyes.
Ruochen Ma, by contrast, had nothing of the soldier or the athlete about her. Softer and sweeter, with a fine nose and gentle eyes, she gave the impression of wounded innocence, as if the world oppressed her.
“You look like you’ve had some physical training,” Emily said.
“My father taught me Qi Gong,” Diao Chan said. “And I’ve been teaching it, too.”
“I’m not familiar with that style. Is it like Tai Chi?”
“Yes. They’re both about channeling vital spirit, but Qi Gong emphasizes more flowing movements.”
It sounded familiar to Emily, but she couldn’t help wondering how this girl could seem so restless inside, if she had really devoted herself to a study like that. Surely, it would have taught her to focus that energy better.
“I envy you, you know, being able to follow a career in the military,” Diao Chan added after a moment, then nudged her friend.
“I hope to see you again,” Ruochen Ma piped up, before Diao Chan pulled her away.
After a bell rang, the larger half of the crowd departed, filing past Ed Braswell and his partner by the main glass doors. Emily watched as Ruochen and Diao Chan left, and then, with a little smile tipped her head toward the Conversation Room, a sort of invitation to her DSS watchmen to join her in the Question Period. She found a seat on the edge of the main oval seating area, and felt the eyes of the students upon her. Did midshipmen ever attend these things? She didn’t feel unwelcome, though she was certainly an object of surprised curiosity.
The first few questions came from students, and Emily was impressed by the self-assurance with which they presented themselves. One young man, with a barrel chest and roman features asked about the role of philosophers in Hölderlin’s vision of spiritual life. “Wouldn’t they just be a distraction?” Emily thought, but the lecturer spent some time sketching out a philosophical method that seemed to have a poetic sensibility. “Plato may have announced a feud between poetry and philosophy,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean we have to take him at his word.” He spoke at some length about Martin Heidegger and his notion of Being with a capital B, but it didn’t really register with her, seeming more like a word-game than a genuine insight.
When she eventually raised her hand, the room went silent in what seemed like an exaggerated deference to her, which she found a little annoying. Haven’t they ever seen anyone in a uniform before? Her irritation distracted her for a moment, but no one dared speak in the silence she left. “If Hölderlin thinks spiritual courage involves waiting and opening ourselves to the most ancient gods, does it matter which gods?” she asked. “I mean, does he think they’re all interchangeable?”
The lecturer took a moment to size her up as she stood off to one side of the room, ramrod straight, cover under one arm. “Hölderlin focuses mainly on Dionysus, as you probably noticed,” he began.
“Yes,” she interrupted. “And it isn’t clear to me how Dionysus can shelter our spiritual aspirations. He seems more like a god of forgetting than of memory.”
“That’s right, but perhaps forgetting is essential to remembering, not just as a precursor, but also as a structural component. Isn’t there a way in which memory operates in tension with forgetting?”
“You mean, I suppose, if something is present to the mind in memory, it must be present against the background of a forgetting.”
“Yes, exactly. And in those terms, Hölderlin might well think that Christian salvation shines so brightly in our imaginations because of a forgotten darkness, which it carries within itself in the form of the pagan rituals it has assimilated over the centuries.”
“That still leaves my question about whether the darkness is the same thing, something generic in all ancient cults. In Shinto, for example, Susanoo is the guardian of the night sky. But when Amaterasu refuses to come out of her cave, and plunges the world into a darkness beyond even his powers, he is forced to make peace with her. Shinto imagines a darkness behind the darkness of the night sky, deeper than it. Which one of those should I think of as the sheltering darkness? Or is that sort of talk even appropriate in such a context?”
After a bit of hemming and hawing, the lecturer admitted that he didn’t have a compelling insight to offer her. “My instinct is to say that the night sky shelters, because it’s the one with the stars. But the story of Susanoo and Amaterasu clearly points to a deeper darkness as the target of a different sort of courage. I suppose it’s not an accident that he coaxes his sister out of the cave with the gift of a sword.”
Other listeners intruded on the conversation, eventually pulling it in other directions that no longer interested Emily. At a suitable moment, she stood and tipped her head to the lecturer with a smile, and left the room. Outside, in the main lobby, she found Ed Braswell and his partner looking exceedingly bored. When they noticed her, they scraped themselves up off the vinyl-upholstered benches and snapped into full alert.
“Okay, boys,” she chirped at them. “Now it’s off to the Ram’s Head to meet my friends.”
“You mean those two Chinese girls you were talking with earlier?” Braswell asked, with just the hint of an insinuation in his voice.
“Nah. I’ve never seen them before this evening. I mean some mids from my company. You coming?”
“How long are we supposed to put up with this crap?” his partner growled, not quietly enough, under his breath.
“This is the duty, Neil. You knew that going in. Now suck it up.”
Just as they were about to leave, the door to the Conversation room creaked open again, and the barrel-chested young man stepped out. When he saw Emily, he hurried across the lobby, calling to her.
“Excuse me, Miss….”
The sight of her, flanked by two large men in dark suits gave him some pause, and his enthusiasm for whatever he had to say seemed to wane.
“Can you give us a minute, guys?” she said, and gestured to the glass door she meant them to wait on the other side of. Once they had complied, she turned to the young man. “I’m all ears.”
He shuffled his feet and looked very resolutely at the ceiling, perhaps seeking some misplaced courage up there. Finally, having found his voice again, he said, “I liked what you said in there. I’ve never seen you here before.”
She reached out her hand, a gesture he understood better than Diao Chan had. “I’m Michiko Tenno. And you are…?”
“Oh, sorry, Dave Bajo. It’s just that we don’t get a lot of midshipmen at lectures, and I’ve ne
ver seen one stay for the question period.”
“I guess it’s a topic that interests me, though I didn’t much care for the lecturer’s answer to my question. I mean, he just seemed to be playing with words.”
“I think I know what you mean. Listen, do you want to get a drink, or coffee or something?”
“I’m headed over to the Ram’s Head to meet some friends. You can come along, if you like.”
“You mean, like, other midshipmen?” he asked.
“Yeah, but don’t worry, you’ll be welcome as long as you like country music.”
“I think I can take it if you can. What about your bodyguards?”
“These two,” she said with a nod. “They’re not protecting me. I think they just want to see what sort of trouble I can get into.”
~~~~~~~
“You know this is bullshit, as much as I do, Ed,” Neil Padgett said. “I don’t know why you’re willing to take it from her.”
“And what exactly do you propose to do about it,” Braswell replied, watching the steering wheel vibrate sympathetically with the idling of the engine, and glancing periodically over the dashboard at Emily as she loitered, waiting to cross, at the corner of Calvert and Bladen. His partner’s complaint was of less interest to him than an intriguing speculation about her interest in the boy she just met in an apparently accidental encounter. The young man shifted his weight from one foot to the other, bashful and brave, just the way Braswell remembered feeling when he first met his wife almost two decades ago. Did he have the nerve to touch her hand? The light changed and they crossed over.
“Cuff her and bring her in,” Padgett said. “We’ll know what she knows soon enough.”
“What she knows?” Braswell snorted. “You’re lucky I wasn’t drinking coffee just then, or I might have sprayed it all over you. What on earth do you think she knows?”
“The Chinese must think she knows something.”
“So, you want to kidnap her off the street, just like that, on the basis of an uncorroborated allegation… not even an allegation, since it doesn’t exactly name her? But fine, let’s do that, let’s assume Kravitch gives us the go-ahead, don’t you remember what happened the other day?”
“She got lucky.”
Braswell nodded his head at his friend’s suggestion, then dropped his chin on his chest and peered out from under his heavy eyebrows. “Neil, I don’t think this girl is ever lucky.”
“Aw, c’mon, Ed, she’s got you wrapped around her little finger. Can’t you see that? I mean, look at us. She’s practically made us into her damned bodyguards. Here we are, following her down side streets and back alleys, and you act like there’s nothing strange going on.”
A gap in the flow of traffic allowed the young people to cross and Braswell eased the sedan up to the intersection as his partner nattered on about what they ought to do. He didn’t want to get too close, an old habit from when the people he tailed were not supposed to know it, though in this case the only person who could possibly be unaware of their presence was the boy, and even he probably knew something was up. Other than the cross traffic, no other pedestrians provided any cover, leaving Braswell and Padgett no option but to follow and observe from a discreet distance.
“Look at her,” Padgett snarled. “It’s like she’s taunting us, choosing a dark, deserted street.”
“Fine. Have it your way, but this is the job right now. In the meantime, at least two guys over there by the memorial, you marked ’em, right?”
“You think she sees ’em?”
“She made us that day.”
“So, do we move in?”
“I think we watch from here,” Braswell said. “Talk about acting like a bodyguard…”
“What’s she up to?” Padgett asked when Emily sent the young man ahead and lingered for a moment by the steps to the State Treasurer’s Office Building. “She’s talking to someone else. Step on it. Let’s get up there.”
“I think we can see all we need to see from here.”
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Chapter Seven
Violence Ensues
Since the State Assembly was not in session at this time of year, only a minimal security staff patrolled the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion and the State House. In theory, this meant three uniformed guards on station somewhere on the grounds, but in practice, probably only one man walked the circuit once an hour while the rest of the team sipped coffee in a warm basement room. Video screens showed various entry points on a rotating basis, if anyone cared to pay attention. Across the street, St. Anne’s Parish Church lay unsecured, except for the lock on the door and a low iron hoop-fence.
Emily noticed them almost as soon as her party of six cleared West Street and skirted the near side of Church Circle. McDonough’s high spirits—the afterglow of soaking up a couple of sets of his favorite music—infected the rest, and gave her an opportunity to direct them away from the trouble she saw coming. Two men in dark suits lurking under the trees on the edge of the mansion’s grounds, probably more waiting on School Street—she knew her friends would only be a liability.
“Hey, guys. Can you make sure Dave gets home okay?” she asked, though what she hoped to arrange was for this task to keep them all out of danger’s way. “I’m gonna make a little detour.”
“Hold on, Em,” McDonough said. “Stacie and CJ can do that. Maybe Zaki and I should come with you.”
“What are you talking about?” CJ asked, suddenly on high alert.
“Are we talking about something dangerous, Em?” Stacie asked. “Because we’ve got your back.”
“Not hardly, guys. I just have to take care of something, and I need a little space. So, please, just do as I ask, okay?” The expression in her eyes froze her friends in their tracks for an instant. “Take him back by College Avenue. I’ll meet you back at Bancroft. Don’t worry. I’ll just be a minute behind you. Now get going, guys,” she added in a sharp tone.
She could see that her friends didn’t like this puzzlingly urgent command, but they complied, looking back over their shoulders anxiously, as if they thought a glance might afford her some protection. As soon as she saw them clear the circle and turn down the avenue toward St. John’s, she walked briskly in the other direction, making sure the men under the trees saw her. Just as she passed out of their view, and having located a blind spot in the traffic cameras’ coverage opposite the top of Duke of Gloucester Street, she hopped over the fence surrounding the church and ran to the trees and shrubbery behind the nave. From that position she spied two teams of two, and heard the faint crackling of a radio earpiece, which might indicate the presence of a third team. A few hushed cries echoed off the bricks and cobblestones—she couldn’t quite make out what they said, though it sounded a bit like Mandarin, which she’d been studying for two years now. Of course, the nature of their distress wasn’t hard to guess.
A crude calculus worked itself out in her mind, as she peered out of the foliage like a cat: the longer they searched for her, the safer her friends would be. She might not need to confront them at all… but, if they left the circle and turned down College Avenue, her plan would have to change. As she weighed the possibilities, the best spot to confront them looked to be under a spreading Elm tree on the south lawn of the mansion, since it had good cover, and she didn’t see any security cameras. “Ironic,” she thought. “Anyone else would seek a public place, the more eyes the better. But I skulk in the hedges and strike from the shadows.” More radio chatter and one team turned exactly where she didn’t want them to go.
With some rustling of the shrubbery and a grunt, she burst from her cover in the churchyard and vaulted the fence, just loud enough to get both teams’ attention. Confused shouts pursued her down School Street—caught by surprise, men in dark gray suits gave chase—left at State Circle, her shoes slipped a bit on the cobblestones, and she sought the better traction of the sidewalk bricks. She didn’t expect to outrun them indefinitely, just long enough to duck into
Randall Court, where the absence of streetlights and enough foliage to block out the moon would make it difficult to see where she’d gone. Then she could pop out on Prince George Street, sprint the few yards to the corner of Maryland Avenue, and be within sight of the gate and the guardhouse. Everything depended on getting to Randall Court with a large enough gap to keep them from flanking her.
“Mission accomplished,” she muttered, walking down the avenue a moment or two later, with just a bit more spring in her step than usual. “And I didn’t have to hurt anyone. CJ would definitely approve.” The sound of her pursuers some fifty yards behind, cursing at the corner, offered even more satisfaction. And, of course, nothing was sweeter than tipping her hat to the DSS agents in the same dark sedan as they drove off, away from their vigil at the corner of King George Street, a little over a block from the gate. “Thank goodness those idiots weren’t camped out over by Church Circle. Otherwise I might have had to fight just to protect them.”
“Spot inspection, Midshipman,” Bauer’s voice brayed at her, and she snapped to attention.
“Yes, sir,” she said, for what else could she say? Internally, however, she kicked herself for letting her guard down. Whoever she had just eluded, and however dangerous they might turn out to be, they were not her only enemies. Even if Bauer could have no notion of the scale of the dangers she was prepared to face, he could still make himself a nuisance.
And his friends could be just as troublesome. They stepped out of the shadows near the entrance of Cumberland Court and surrounded her, Trowbridge, Caspar, Martens and, of course, Kathy Gunderson.
“Late to be out on your own, Tenno.”
“Finally, no friends to hide behind,” Gunderson said.
“This is bullshit, Bauer,” Trowbridge said.
“Shoes scuffed, cover soiled, shirt loose,” Bauer said, running through the litany of charges he meant to put in his report.
“This is too good an opportunity to waste on a report,” Martens said. “You may never find her alone again.”
“Yeah, let’s make it count,” Caspar said.
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