He held up his first shoe and tapped the glob of sediment onto the dirt.
“You don’t think a brain-eating amoeba was floating in any of those ponds we were swimming in, do you?” he teased. “Tobe honest, I was out here to do a good deed, not to have my gray matter turn into Swiss cheese. You know?”
“Hey, you okay?” Hawkeye asked, sitting on the tarp, to peel off his mud-covered shoes. “You look a little shell-shocked.”
Dakota rubbed a hand over his heart. “Yeah, don’t know. This is a new sensation for me.”
Chapter Three
Dakota
Monday
Monday morning, Dakota stepped out of his cab at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing on 14thStreet, slid his tie neatly in place, then buttoned his navy-blue jacket.
Dakota found that when he calculated the time and money he spent looking for and then paying for parking, it was a better deal to take a cab.
That, and hailing a cab with his phone slipped into the Faraday sleeve in his briefcase, helped to keep Dakota’s movements out of someone’s database.
Honestly? While his department did a lot with geo-tracking to hunt the bad guys, it was equally simple and becoming more accessible for the bad guys to find and pinpoint those who were trying to stop them.
The risk of doing his job grew exponentially year over year.
And from that risk, recruitment became more difficult for the various alphabets, as agents knew how easily their families could become targets of a warning or retribution.
Dakota would admit that he weighed that risk into his relationship calculus. As a result, he played the field and didn’t commit to exclusivity. Some of that was because he traveled for long periods where he had to be no-contact, some of that was to keep the women safe so there was no bull’s eye pinned to their back, but part of it was also that Dakota had not yet met the woman who made him feel like he could say, “Yes, I’ll change to a desk job so that none of my professional baggage will hurt you.”
Ideas like that had been circulating in his system since yesterday’s race, which probably had something to do with his date with Rose today.
Dragging his phone from the bag and checking for calls, Dakota considered Rose for a moment. While Dakota had been in Colombia, he’d realized she never really came to mind. And when they were out together, their conversations were becoming strained. Smart lady, quick-witted, and funny, she also had a solid wall up, and that might have the texture of guilt on its surface. Maybe she was already seeing someone else, where it clicked, and she started to feel she wanted to focus her attention elsewhere. Good for her. He’d broach the topic with her at lunch and see what she wanted to do.
As he walked down the sidewalk, Dakota was grateful that this crap weather had held off an extra day. While Mondays were always a slug when they were cold and gray, yesterday’s race would have seen fewer spectators if the sky had been spitting sleet.
The icy drizzle started with pings on his nose and in his hair. Not enough to pop his umbrella, but since the damp would make his wool suit smell like a wet dog, he did it anyway.
He strode past the line of tourists waiting to take a tour of the printing presses and the sheets of true-blue—well, green—currency rolling off the line.
Dollah, dollah bills, y’all.
It was rare for him to show up in these offices. Dakota was usually out in the field hunting down international counterfeiters, mainly working out of Colombia and Peru, where most of the U.S. counterfeit dollars originated.
Interestingly, he’d come across fifty- and hundred-dollar bills coming out of a state-sponsored program in North Korea. There, the currency was near perfection. Those North Korean bills were almost indistinguishable from real U.S. currency,even by currency machines. Though they couldn’t fake their way past a counterfeit-scent sniffing K9, right now, the Secret Service’s primary defense. Stopping North Korea wasn’t something the Secret Service had figured out how to do yet, so they didn’t talk about it much. Or at all.
For security reasons, when Dakota worked in states across the U.S., he often borrowed space at a field office. But he liked to steer clear of them as much as possible. The human brain is an amazing thing. It could make subtle adjustments to how a person dressed, spoke, or moved their body to meld with the institution. It was a survival technique.
At his first job for Uncle Sam, working for the Navy, Dakota learned to pay attention to the minutiae of local norms so his brain could translate local gestures into his own body language, helping him blend in. And if that didn’t work—if Dakota didn’t come off like a local—well, it gave his body such a wide-ranging body language accent (for lack of better term) that he’d be viewed as a mutt, and not say a member of the elite forces trained to a specific gait and posture by the United States Department of Defense.
But here he was right in the belly of the beast, Dakota dragged the door open and turned to shake his umbrella and collapse it.
Today, it was time to check in with one of Dakota’s oldest and closest friends, Jasper Lee. They’d been buds since grade school. Their life paths had lined up in parallel and eventually landed them in basically the same job. The wool suits they wore were a long way from the BDU, sand-covered torture of Coronado.
Dakota badged himself through the side door and headed right for the elevators, stepping into a mostly-filled car just as the doors were sliding shut.
Since his jog had lasted longer than usual that morning, Dakota had missed breakfast, and he hoped there would be a hot pot of coffee when he reached Jasper’s office.
Yeah, yesterday had disabused Dakota of his ideas about how fit he was. He’d thought he was in pretty good shape. He’d even looked into signing up for the Iron Man this year. But since he had to use the afterburners to keep up with the Cerberus operators yesterday, Dakota thought that maybe his racing contests weren’t pushing him hard enough.
He needed stiffer competition.
