He paused while the chief of staff, another favored target of the sycophants because his office was in the White House and he was the president’s gatekeeper, passed by, the secretaries of Commerce and Labor attached to him like suckerfish. The pause was another small signal that Hobbs’s information was valuable. Besides which, Devereaux’s glance at his watch deserved to be answered with a gesture equally nonchalant.
“Not here,” Hobbs said, when the chief of staff and the hangers-on were out of earshot. “I think you’ll want to be sitting down for this.”
chapter
two
LIVIA
Now underhook the ankle,” Livia said, circling around and leaning forward. “No, not your hand, catch it in the crook of your elbow! Tighter! It’s not his ankle anymore, it’s yours!”
Jorge, a muscular former gangbanger and one of Livia’s brown belts, had nearly fifty pounds on Diaz, but the ankle hook instantly stopped him from lifting her more than a few inches off the mat. He strained for a moment, Diaz’s legs crossed behind his waist, then settled back into her.
“Again!” Livia said. Jorge crowded in, spread his feet, took hold of Diaz’s gi collar, and started to arch toward the ceiling. But before he could get anywhere, Diaz hooked the ankle and stopped him cold.
Livia patted Jorge on the shoulder. “Okay.”
Jorge disengaged and scooted back. Diaz sat up.
“You see?” Livia said.
Diaz nodded, but she looked more worried than pleased. Livia, who had worked with dozens of victims as a Seattle PD sex-crimes detective and who lived with her own childhood wounds, recognized what Diaz was trying to work through. Especially for trauma victims, it could take years of familiarity before the mind began to accept that a weapon would actually work. Even Livia, who had begun training in jiu-jitsu as a teenager and who in college had been an alternate on the US Olympic judo team, sometimes had dreams where an attacker would laugh off her arm bars and strangles and spine locks, or where bullets would plop uselessly from the muzzle of her duty weapon and the knife she carried would turn to rubber. When she had those dreams, she would hit the mat extra hard the next day, or spend hours at the range, or hang a cut of meat from a tree branch and slash and stab it to pieces.
“And remember,” Livia said, “you can also just open your guard. Because what does Jorge need to slam you?”
“He needs to lift me.”
“Right. And what does he need to lift you?”
“My closed guard.”
“Yes. You decide whether someone can slam you.”
Diaz looked at Jorge as though she wasn’t buying it. “Were you really trying?”
Jorge laughed. “órale jefita, I almost gave myself a hernia.” He stood and started heading toward the door, shrugging off his gi top along the way. “Okay, ladies, gotta run. Promised the little one a bedtime story.”
“Thanks for being a good attacker,” Livia called after him. “And for sticking around after class.”
Jorge stuffed the gi top into a gym bag and smiled. “Anything for you, Livia.” He pulled on a tee-shirt, stepped into a pair of flip-flops, and slipped through the door, pulling it closed with a loud thud behind him.
The room was suddenly silent. A half hour earlier, the mats had been crowded, the small space reverberating with the shouts of twenty women students and of the three men who’d stuck around after their MMA class to serve as attackers. But now it was just Livia and Diaz.
Livia sat. “You’re getting the hang of it. But if you want it to mean anything, you have to train with men.”
“I just trained with Jorge.”