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Situation Room, the White House

Typically, Yardley enjoyed meeting the president.

Ada Williams had a presence that filled every room she was in with easy warmth punctuated with intelligence and gravitas.

Yardley was fascinated by how she managed to invite her colleagues to bring their best selves to the table, encouraging collaboration while still maintaining the personal force field necessary for America’s first Black woman president to command.

And she mixed a mean old-fashioned.

In ordinary circumstances, the tense mood in the Situation Room would have fired up Yardley’s delight with strategy as she sorted through the subtle power dynamics and social hierarchies at work.

This was the type of once-in-a-career gathering her granddaddy called “a quilting bee,” and on any other day Yardley could have counted on her central nervous system to be as relaxed as a lizard on a desert rock.

She was the Unicorn in large part because she paradoxically enjoyed a wrench tossed into the works. Her brain held plans B through Z in reserve like a full house in Vegas.

The Unicorn had not arrived, however, to solve the problem of KC Nolan. The Unicorn had tossed her rainbow mane at Yardley and insisted she deal with this disaster that she had so spectacularly caused.

KC was a spy. Yardley was a spy.

The world was still in danger because today’s mission had failed.

She was still broken up with the only true love she’d ever had, but now she sat across the table from the president of the United States of America, who had undoubtedly been briefed about all of this, including everything Yardley and KC had said to each other less than an hour ago, possibly accompanied by photographs or video.

Yardley suddenly remembered she’d thrown a wig at a portrait of Officer Byron Davis, an unsung hero of the Cold War whose quick thinking avoided a nuclear disaster. This fact would be dutifully recorded in her file, waiting for declassification in some unknown future.

She bit the inside of her bottom lip to stop herself from bursting into tears, because her dry self-talk was not working .

The five stolen minutes in the locker room at Langley during which she had choked on stormy sobs, curled up in a ball on a locker room bench, thereby startling another operative as they came out of the showers, had been insufficient.

She needed a landscape big enough to take her sorrow, shock, and bitter disappointment.

She required a moor. Or a heath. Or the shore.

A very big cliff over all three where her sobs and screams would be taken by the wind.

She stole a look at KC. Her jaw was tight, her beautiful auburn hair stark against her pale face.

KC did not sit in her chair like she’d never been invited to a table like this.

She sat in her chair like Tabasco. She was five feet of coiled muscle with the kind of mind shining behind her eyes that made people not want to be the first one to talk, just in case they weren’t as smart as they thought.

She had lighted into her seat like one of those small, compact birds of prey that could dive toward its target at a hundred miles an hour, talons first. No one in the room had managed to look straight at her yet, as if attracting her attention meant certain brutality.

Yardley’s heart . How absolutely ludicrous it was to believe they could work together, assuming this meeting wasn’t some sort of dramatic sacking that would result in exile, when everything she had ever loved about KC were the same things that made her Tabasco.

Yardley was very neatly fucked. Truth was a stiletto in her heart. She swallowed so that she had room in her throat to breathe.

“Everyone,” the president said. Her voice dissipated the tension with genuine power. “Let’s begin.”

It was the first briefing Yardley had ever sat through that she struggled to give her full attention. She half listened as the president and CIA director Michael McLaughlin tag-teamed their way through the background on Project Maple Leaf. Mostly, Yardley watched KC.

I guess we’ll never really be sure what was real and what wasn’t.

She squeezed the hands in her lap into fists.

“Kris Flynn.” The president looked from Yardley to KC.

“An Irish national with a legitimate job in network security and, it seems, a side gig in digital weapons development, has seemingly coded a sequence capable of unlocking and disrupting digital communications and information transfer between systems as huge as a city’s power infrastructure and beyond.

Certainly, we can appreciate the implications.

How a weapon like this could harm vulnerable people or potentially—”

“—destabilize democracy.”

Everyone looked at KC, because she had just interrupted the president .

She was leaning forward, her forearms stacked and balanced on her crossed legs.

Yardley recognized this as her scary deep-listening pose.

“The demonstration in Toronto managed to fuck with the grid and some of the medical infrastructure. Concerning, but chaotic. It didn’t inspire a lot of confidence or respect.

But what Flynn was holding on that thumb drive—intel that I decrypted yet was not invited to review or analyze—must have been impressive enough to motivate a contact with Devon Mirabel in broad daylight.

And now here we are, at the White House.

” KC didn’t take her eyes from the president.

“Clearly something about the situation has changed.”

Gramercy cleared his throat meaningfully in KC’s direction. KC ignored him. The president answered the stunned silence that followed with a small smile. “A very concise summary of a rather complex global threat, Ms. Nolan. Particularly given what I’ve learned this morning.”

KC didn’t waver, but from Yardley’s angle she was able to observe the slight stiffening of her upper spine.

“Madam President. I work in the basement at Langley. I’m not even officially assigned to Maple Leaf. Tell me, what am I doing in this room?”

KC said this with what anyone else would hear as polite confidence, but Yardley had spent a lot of time analyzing the smallest shifts in KC’s tone, hoping to avoid an argument or see a way in to fixing one, and she could hear KC’s fear.

Interesting.

What else had Yardley missed?

“I understand Flynn is not unknown to you, Ms. Nolan,” the president said. “In fact, I’ve just learned that the two of you have a significant history.”

Yardley’s middle dropped away, replaced with electric anxiety as she waited for an explanation.

Unbidden, one of her granddaddy’s stories hijacked her attention.

He’d been at a party in Saint Petersburg, dealing with a new asset.

His most trusted colleague, Levi Petrov, who also happened to be the godfather of his children, had secured the woman as his asset because she gave the agency access to the director of the KGB.

The asset was agreeable to Yardley Senior’s plan to sneak away with her during the party to see the chairman.

Too agreeable. But Levi was known for his deft handling of assets, so her granddaddy had ignored his gut.

He followed the asset to the kitchens and down a hallway, where she said the chairman had a secure office.

At first, he was confused when they encountered Levi, who had been tasked with distracting the minister who was hosting the party.

The gun in Levi’s hand, pointed at her granddaddy, cleared up the confusion.

That had been Yardley Senior’s first encounter with a double agent, and the agent was his very best friend. It took weeks for him to devise an escape. When he arrived at a safe house just on the clear side of the Iron Curtain, he was near-starved and raging with fever.

Yardley didn’t pray as much as she should, but she started praying right then, watching KC’s face as the president waited on her to speak.

“I met Kris Flynn when I was thirteen years old.” KC’s voice was matter-of-fact.

Easy. “Well, I met her online, not in person. We never met in person. But we were both essentially unsupervised, and we had been entertaining ourselves with computers for as long as we could read. We got to know each other in a chat room we called”—KC raked one hand through her hair—“um, the Daisy Dukes.”

There was a surprised huff that might have been laughter from Atlas. KC sent a very discreet glare in their direction. “Like I said, we were thirteen . We wanted to save the planet. It was supposed to mean we were, I guess, dukes for the daisies. Protectors.”

Another huff.

“Look, we barely knew what dukes were, and I’m pretty sure I didn’t know we were referencing a character in short shorts from a long-ago television show we’d never heard of. At the time, it sounded very cool.”

“We’ll trust you on that,” Gramercy said, without a speck of amusement.

“Continue, please,” the president said.

“We did things like send memos from local governments to large cities telling them they were required to initiate a recycling program. Once, we hacked into the Orange County public works project database in California to create a work order so a construction team repaired beach-safe trails instead of spreading asphalt at a state park. Stuff like that. Stuff kids thought would make a difference. From there—”

“Did it?” the president interrupted.

“Did it what, Madam President?”

“Make a difference?” The president smiled.

KC blinked, and Yardley watched the color come back to her cheeks. “I hope so. I mean, we didn’t have a way to get a lot of confirmation our, um, seeds were planted.” KC got redder. “That’s what we called a completed mission.”

Now Atlas didn’t even try to disguise their laugh. Yardley sat back in her chair. This was getting less scary and more interesting by the moment.

“We were teenage computer jockeys, and we meant that we were planting daisies. We had no other referent. Come on .”