It would do, for now.
* * *
When she finished her survey of her new office, she rode the Metro under the Potomac to Arlington. The day had started out gloomy and cool, and by the time she got home, a light mist had moved in, just enough to freshen her face as she walked to her apartment complex.
She changed into a sports bra and briefs, pulled on a tissue-weight rain suit with a hood, and went for a four-mile run on Four Mile Run Trail. Halfway along, she diverted into a wooded park, walked to a silent, isolated depression in the trees. She often visited the place on her daily runs, and sat down on a flagstone.
There was noise, of course; there was always noise around the capital—trucks, cars, trains, planes, endless chatter from people going about their politics. The woods muffled the sounds and blended them, homogenized them, and when she closed her eyes, the odors were natural, rural, earthy, and wet. In five minutes, her workday had slipped away, the personalities, the paperwork, the social tensions. In another five, she was a child again, with only one imperative: stay alive.
Another five, even that was gone. She sat for twenty minutes, unmoving, until a drip of water, falling off a leaf, tagged her nose and brought her back to the world. She sighed and stood up, brushed off the seat of her pants, and made her way back through the trees. She’d never decided what she was when she came out of the trees and back to life. Not exactly relaxed, not exactly focused, not exactly clear-minded, or emptied, or any of the other yoga catchwords.
Where she had gone, there was nothing at all.
She was a piece of the rock, a piece of a tree, a ripple in the creek.
There, but not Letty.
* * *
Two days later:
The DHS agent was a sunburned overmuscled hulk who dressed in khaki-colored canvas shirts and cargo pants and boots, even in the warm Virginia summer, topped with a camo baseball hat with a black-and-white American flag on the front panel. He had close-cut dark hair, green eyes, a two-day stubble, a thick neck, and rough sunburned hands. He yanked open the Range Rover’s door and climbed in, as Letty got in the passenger side.
He looked over at her, pre-exasperated, as he put the truck in gear. “I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but I’ll tell you what, sweetheart,” he said, in a mild Louisiana accent, “I didn’t sign up to train office chicks how to shoot a gun. No offense.”
His name was John Kaiser and he was a forty-seven-year-old ex-Army master sergeant and a veteran of the oil wars. He slapped reflective-gold blade-style sunglasses over his eyes, like a shutter coming down.
Letty sat primly in the passenger seat, knees together, an old-fashioned tan leather briefcase by her feet, a practical black purse in her lap. She was wearing black jeans and a dark gray sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled up. She said, mildly enough, “I thought you signed up to do anything Senator Colles asked you to do.”
“Colles isn’t my boss: Jamie Wiggler is.” Wiggler was the Homeland Security inspector general. “I signed up to do security. This isn’t security.”
They left her apartment complex and drove west out of Arlington, mostly in silence, except that Letty took two calls on her cell phone, listened carefully, and then said, “All right. I can do that,” and hung up. After the second call, she took a red Moleskine notebook out of her purse and made a note.
“Do what?” Kaiser asked after a while.
She said, “What Senator Colles asked me to do.”
Kaiser shook his head and looked out the window at a convenience store, where a line of locals sat smoking on a concrete curb outside the restrooms. He said again, “This is bullshit. I’m supposed to be doing serious stuff.”
“Chris isn’t punishing you,” Letty said. “You’re not doing much right now. Wiggler told me you’re back from North Carolina, waiting for another assignment. He thought you could run me through the range. If you didn’t like it, you should have told him so. I could have gone with somebody else.”