Choppy Water

20

Sykes felt a little sick to his stomach. He had been fantasizing about being in bed with her, but he wanted no part of a woman who wasn’t attracted to him as a man. She could still be useful, though; she was bright, brave, and willing to take risks. Maybe she would even turn up some information from those Justice files.

Elizabeth went back to her office. “Do you have an Alka-Seltzer?” she asked her secretary as she passed her desk.

“Sure,” the woman said, digging in a desk drawer and coming up with a packet.

Elizabeth dropped the two disks into half a glass of water, then watched them fizz. She drank down the bubbly stuff, burped, and rinsed the glass. Nearly instant relief from the stew, as promised.

She opened her safe and found the key to the secure file room, where old papers were kept. She went to the B drawer and looked for Barker, Holly, then took it back to her desk and started at the beginning. It made interesting reading.

Holly had been raised on Army bases in the States and in Germany. Her mother died during a flu epidemic in Germany, when the child was eight. When she was in high school her father had written to a Florida congressman, requesting an appointment to West Point for his daughter, enclosing a transcript of her high school studies. He received a negative form-letter reply, so young Holly joined the Army, excelled in basic and advanced training, and enrolled at the University of Maryland, which offered a degree program for serving soldiers. She got her bachelor’s degree in two and a half years, then applied for Officer Candidate School and was rejected. Her father wrote a letter to a man he had served under, who had known Holly as a teenager on the Army base in Mannheim, and who, by then, was a brigadier general. Holly was duly accepted into the next class at OCS.

Upon graduation, at the head of her class, she had applied for Intelligence but was passed over and offered the military police. In the MPs she consistently received outstanding fitness reports and was promoted as quickly as the rules allowed, rising to command an MP company, then, as a major, to executive officer of a regiment. There her progress ended.

She was drugged and raped by the colonel who was her commanding officer. She filed a criminal complaint, along with another young woman, a sergeant, who had suffered the same experience with the man. The colonel was found not guilty by a panel of his fellow officers, and Holly received an unwanted transfer to a transportation company. It was then that she had read, in a law enforcement magazine, an ad for an assistant chief of police in a small Florida town, Orchid Beach. She applied and was hired. She excelled, as she had in everything she had ever done. A year later, her chief died, and she applied for his job. She got the job on a trial basis.

As chief she became aware of possible criminal activity at a real-estate development where all of the homeowners had questionable backgrounds. She contacted the FBI, who took over her investigation. But she had continued to work on it almost to the exclusion of everything else. An agent of the CIA turned up and helped her: first, to break the case without the help of the FBI, and then to join the Agency as a raw recruit sent for training to Fort Peary, known as the Farm.

She progressed through the CIA, becoming an assistant to the then deputy director, Lance Cabot, and later to Katharine Rule, who later had become Katharine Lee and the president of the United States.

Now, after two terms as Kate Lee’s secretary of state, Holly Barker was the president-elect of the United States.

But something small in her record caught Elizabeth’s eye. The colonel who was charged with her rape had retired from the Army and was hired as the chief of police in Orchid Beach, while Holly was still serving in that role on a trial basis. She must have been furious, Elizabeth thought. But then, not long after his arrival in the small town, the colonel committed suicide.

Elizabeth got on her computer and began researching the colonel’s case. All the evidence in the case supported suicide as the cause of death, except the absence of a motive. Holly was soon given the chief’s job. A suspicious person, as Elizabeth was, might think that Holly Barker had a perfectly evident motive for murder, and the skills to leave no evidence at the scene. She did, however, have an alibi; she had been having a drink at a local bar with another police officer. Easily arranged, Elizabeth thought, if the other officer shared her opinion of the dead colonel.

Elizabeth began checking on the history of the officer who had provided the alibi: killed in the line of duty two years later, while investigating a case of domestic violence, well after Holly had left for her CIA training. Dead end.

Elizabeth closed and locked away the file, feeling relieved that she had found nothing to sully the name of a woman she admired. Still, it might stir up Sykes.