Rootless. Not as rootless as she’d been while starving and freezing high in the Hindu Kush, but not anchored either.

  Now Kimberlee, whose help she needed, stood solidly poised on her life’s next step. Thinking back, Kimberlee had said she was running, but it had seemed more whimsical than real. Dilya knew she was going to be an astronaut. Everybody knew that.

  But there had been that conversation.

  State senate worked out for Obama.

  Dilya had agreed and they’d talked about the steps he’d taken, and which would and wouldn’t work for Kimberlee. But they’d still been college juniors at the time, and it all felt academic. Not so much.

  Dilya managed to stay in the background. Only one reporter had been on the ball enough to try for a follow-up interview with her. She was too old a hand to reveal anything important yet gave the impression that the reporter alone in the whole world had her exclusive view of life at the White House.

  Give them the social tidbits and only the best will notice that you never said anything. Again, Miss Watson was right.

  Rover after rover left and returned. Most made it to the finish within the eight-minute time limit. Those who couldn’t were sent on, but required to use the bypass route at each remaining obstacle and received no more points.

  Yet without fail, each who crossed the line—even the two who were towing their rover by the front axle with the broken front wheels in the passenger seats—were welcomed to the finish as heroes. They might collapse from the strain of the run, but not until they crossed the finish.

  Each and every time, she was reminded of Miss Watson’s instruction.

  Think in teams, not individuals. It is my one great failing, don’t let it be yours.

  Dilya watched Kimberlee helping a team across the line who’d clearly suffered a bad rollover out on the course. They were scraped and bloody, an angry rash on one’s arm and the other with a bad limp. But they were smiling.

  As were the photographers who were following with their big lenses.

  Dilya needed to build a team.

  Kimberlee cheered up the battered team exactly as she always had for their circle all of the way back in high school.

  Or did Dilya already have a team?

  7

  “No message or anything?” Kimberlee dropped some peanuts into her Dr. Pepper and listened to the merry fizz inside the can. The glass case surrounding the Apollo 16 capsule felt cool against her back after the long day in the sun.

  The park had emptied with the end of the competition. Tomorrow they’d be back for award ceremonies and a big party. For now, she and Dilya had retreated into the closed Saturn V Museum while the groundskeepers disassembled the course. The vast hall, normally filled with hundreds, echoed with only the two of them and a dog, parking their butts on the floor at the farthest end.

  Dilya chose to eat her peanuts rather than drink them. “Nothing. There four days ago, then gone as if she’d never been.”

  “Can’t you ask⁠—”

  “Who?” Dilya voice rose in frustration. It sounded like a slap in the cavernous Saturn V Hall. The rocket had reigned as the tallest and most powerful ever built for over fifty years. This one was made of test modules and mockups. Parts hung from the ceiling with the big first and second stages resting in steel cradles, all in a line—longer than a football field, end zones too.

  Kimberlee really hadn’t had that much to do with Miss Watson. Or didn’t think she had. Instead it was…

  “Hey!”

  “What?” Dilya tossed a couple peanuts to Zackie who caught them in the air. She made a whole spectacle of crunching and chewing each nut that was fun to watch.

  “All that stuff you said to me.”

  “What stuff?”

  “Like when I was choosing colleges and courses. You always had all this advice. Was that you or her?”

  Dilya stared a little too fixedly at the Lunar Excursion Module for landing on the Moon. This was a good model, far better than the mockup at the center of the lunar crater pit outside.

  “Dil-ya…”

  “It was good advice, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but you’re avoiding the question.”

  Dilya shook her head. “I honestly don’t know. She can plant an idea in your head without you even knowing it. Like the Inception movie only for real. She was so stealth—and I miss her so much.”

  Her Dr. Pepper forgotten, Dilya pulled her legs up to her chest and buried her face against her knees. Zackie curled up on the toes of Dilya’s shoes.

  Kimberlee pulled her into a hug but didn’t know what else to do. Seeing Dilya go fetal was a new one. Curled up tighter than an armadillo.

  Dilya had always been the strong one.

  The Chef’s Club had been a cockamamie idea Valentina had cooked up, almost literally. The tall, blonde valedictorian was the perfect girl of high school, complete with the lovely accent inherited from her mother and father, the Defense Attaché at the French Embassy in DC. Tired of all of the peer-believing worship from the girls who had clustered about her, Valentina had struck out in a new direction.

  She recruited three others as uncomfortable with in-the-box thinkers as herself. Then she’d come up with an out-of-the-box idea to make them think differently. Every month they’d reached out to a new restaurant and asked to spend a weekend shadowing the kitchen chefs. Even Trevor, the only one of them who could really cook was amazed at what they learned. It wasn’t only food; it was class and culture and personal histories of places they couldn’t have found in DC. But they did.

  The Chef’s Club. The secret society of dissatisfied misfits.

  Until they’d talked their way into the White House kitchen and met Dilya. A Uzbekistani war orphan, adopted by a Special Operations Forces helicopter team. A resident of the White House itself, who traveled all over the world with the First Family, with successive First Families. She was even the protégé of a secret spy hidden in the basement, which was beyond cool.

  They’d inducted her that weekend and formed a new clique at school.

  Kimberlee held Dilya tighter.

  Valentina had remained the leader, she herself was the voice. Trevor was the steadfast one and Jimmy the nerd. But Dilya had been their strength. They’d gathered together in the lunchroom and the outings to various restaurant kitchens. But over the years they’d spent far more time discussing, debating, and breaking down any idea that came to hand.

  Kimberlee still missed it. Five high school kids convinced they could fix the world if they just thought about it hard enough. Politics, food supply, energy distribution, one of Trevor’s recipes. It didn’t matter what, they chased it.

  Dilya had begun slipping some of their ideas into the Oval Office, much as Kimberlee had slid a few into her own father’s ear. Senator Jerome Walker had proposed more than one bill with Chef’s Club ideas in it, brought up over dinner and dropped into a conversation.

  But Miss Watson?

  How was she supposed to help Dilya find Miss Watson? Leave her campaign? The numbers said that she was polling solidly—very solidly, though she was keeping her hopes in check.

  Her hopes.

  How had Miss Watson known to give her a complete library of Presidential debates? They’d become her recreational reading. Recreational? Ha! She’d consumed them, could quote whole passages of Lincoln-Douglas, Kennedy-Nixon, right up to the madness of more recent contests.

  Somehow Miss Watson had known of her most secret desire, to sit behind the Roosevelt Desk in Oval Office as President one day.

  That day of the interview. Four years ago and it still stood out as a shining moment in her life.

  Dilya had convinced the President to let them ask him questions for a full thirty minutes, right there in the Oval. Whose idea had it been to let her sit in the chair? Had she asked? Was it Dilya or Miss Watson somehow suggesting to Dilya to set that up? That brief moment felt so real that, even sitting here on the hard floor with her back against the Apollo display case, she knew that was the reality she wanted.

  Only because it had been a childhood dream could Kimberlee be sure that Miss Watson hadn’t actually planted that idea in her head as well.

  And once more she was back to the books Miss Watson had given her. She was a librarian. A librarian of the most comprehensive library of spy craft perhaps anywhere—she certainly had several pithy observations to make about the quality of the CIA’s own, much larger library.

  “Her library.”

  Dilya didn’t respond.

  Kimberlee shook her. Shook her hard enough that Zackie growled at her.

  “Shush!” she said to the dog. “Snap out of it, Dilya,” she said to her friend. “The library.”

  Only after she accidentally shook Dilya hard enough to bang her head on the glass and glare at her did Kimberlee stop.

  “Think. Her library. Where did it go?”

  “Gone. With her.”

  “Ding!” Kimberlee wanted to shout, but it was hard to shout such a silly word with appropriate sarcasm.

  Dilya and her dog looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.

  “With her. Did she ever not have a plan in place? Did she ever not know who was coming there to her office? Nobody could get that library out of there, except her. Even if they did, the teapot? The Snoopy dog biscuit jar? Where did that collection go?”

  8

  Slapping her hands to her mouth didn’t muffle the yelp that shot from her mouth to echo down the entire length of the Saturn V rocket.

  A moment ago, Dilya had lost her mother all over again. The ridiculously small sound of the Makarov PMM pistol that had punched such a small hole through father’s and then mother’s foreheads, ringing once more in her ears until it was the only sound in the world. Only in nightmares had she ever returned to that high mountain valley to watch the two men kill her parents.

  It was weird, she didn’t know the murderers’ names. Her adoptive mother did, for she had killed them in turn to stop a war, but it wasn’t the sort of thing she’d ever dared ask about. It was a closed chapter best left behind them.

  But Kimberlee was right, and she’d never seen it.

  “So, she’s out there still, somewhere,” Kimberlee sounded as confident about that as she did about almost everything. No wonder she was polling so high, she spoke honesty from the heart.

  “In trouble,” Dilya began piecing it together. “But out of the White House by her own choice. But why leave no clue for me?”

  “Maybe she knew they were coming for her and didn’t want to chance it. Maybe because she knew you’d figure it out on your own.”

  Dilya looked at her friend, “But I didn’t. You did.”

  “Hey, what are friends for?”

  Sun Tzu’s maxim, ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’ A haughty Miss Watson sniff of disdain. Utter hogwash, child. Nothing is more powerful than a group of friends working toward a common goal.

  9

  Dilya was gone when Kimberlee awoke.

  They’d talked most of the night. Some of it about old times, some of it about their friends from Chef’s Club and where they were now. A lot about Kimberlee’s possible routes to national office.

  Kimberlee had remembered that she’d once seen Trevor having tea, no one drank anything else around Miss Watson, with her. It had been in a small cafe-bookstore close by the Hay-Adams Hotel where his mother was head chef.

  It had been late when she’d tossed off the memory, thinking nothing more of it.

  Not until Kimberlee found the note tucked inside her pajama pocket.

  Off for some T. I’ll vote for you. D.

  Kimberlee rubbed her thumb across the note. It was silly, but she could feel Dilya there in the letters.

  She was going to find Trevor and discuss his teatime with Miss Watson. Off to gather the next piece of the chain to lead her to Miss Watson.

  Then Kimberlee read the note once more and began to laugh.

  Dilya was a legal resident of Washington, DC. She couldn’t vote for Kimberlee to enter the Alabama House any more than she could for the US Senate.

  But she could certainly vote for her as President.

  “Well,” Kimberlee tucked the note away where she’d never lose it, “that’s one vote. Only eighty million or so to go.”

  Her course now lay clear before her. She wondered how long until Dilya’s did.

  PART TWO

  THE LIBRARY TRAIL

  1

  “Not so normal, huh, Zackie?”

  In reply, the Sheltie gave her a sad look from inside her carrier. Neither of them were used to traveling this way.

  For Dilya’s first nine years, travel had been on foot or in the back of a dusty farm truck with tools, animals, or produce during harvest season. All part of being poor in Uzbekistan. But it was okay there, because everyone she’d ever known was poor. It was their normal state.

  Three years of traveling with the American military as an adopted war orphan meant she’d never had to think about where she was going or how she’d get there.

  Then from twelve to nineteen—as the First Nanny and later also the First Dog Sitter—she’d gone where the President had gone. More importantly, she’d gone the way the President had gone: Marine One, the Presidential motorcade, and Air Force One.

  Dilya and former First Dog Zackie were now cut loose from the whole apparatus. Four days ago she’d flown from Washington to the First Family’s farm in Tennessee aboard Air Force One—then simply left. A crisis had arisen and she had no choice. Rather than trying to stop her, the First Lady had given Zackie to Dilya and sent them away with her best wishes.

  Together, she and the former First Dog were rapidly discovering aspects of American culture she’d never imagined—like how big it was from a train car.

  “I’ll get you out soon,” she hated lying to her dog. They’d traveled from Tennessee down to Huntsville, Alabama to ask for help from a friend. That hadn’t been so bad. From Alabama to Washington, DC, was twenty hours of horrible. Next time she didn’t care what it cost, she wasn’t going coach. With a sleeping compartment, at least she could let Zackie out of the carrier.

  “We need a car.” She’d never thought about that much—transportation had come with the job. And living in the heart of DC had made a car redundant—though she was a good driver. Training didn’t get any better than Reese Carver, the lead driver of the The Beast, the President’s limousine. In high school, Reese had even helped her finagle training for all of her Chef’s Club out at the Secret Service’s James J. Rowley Training Center.

  The Chef’s Club. Maybe they could help her.

  It originally had four members, she was the fifth. They had all been clique leaders in high school: debate, athlete, social, and nerd. But they’d grown tired of those narrow views and formed a new social group—their own.

  As part of breaking out of their norms, they’d added Dilya for reasons that still bewildered her. Working and living at the White House since Junior High, she’d been the ultimate misfit in high school even by DC standards. Yet for the last two years of school, the five members of the Chef’s Club had become inseparable. At least until college had sent them off in a dozen directions—well, four actually. She had remained in DC and attended Georgetown in between her responsibilities at the White House.

  Zackie whined at her from her carrier.

  “Right. That does it.” Dilya had memorized the train stops out of habit—she’d been taught to always be prepared—and she knew the next big town was less than ten minutes away. Seven minutes on her phone and she had her model ordered from existing stock at the dealership.

  Two hours later, she and Zackie slid into their new British racing-green Hybrid MINI Cooper and were once more on the road to DC. There were definite advantages to having all of her expenses paid by the government on top of the salary that the First and Second families had paid her for the last eight years. She’d never spent a dollar she didn’t have to. And saved every penny.

  And she’d looked up the law. Living in the White House and overhearing all that she did, haddn’t quite earmarked her investment strategy as insider trading. It was a public building after all.

  2

  Trevor Nolan had done it.

  Sort of.

  He’d spent his high school summers, when he wasn’t at soccer practice, working in this kitchen. During those summers, he’d slowly risen from dishwasher to mise en place. For the months between junior and senior year, he and three others had entered the Hay-Adams Hotel’s kitchen while DC was still dark. Together they’d prepared all of the ingredients needed for the day. A slow path from washing vegetables, through grinding spices, to actually cutting the vegetables and cleaning the fish—though none of them were ever allowed to actually cut the fish into portions.

  Mother might be demanding, driven, and a borderline psychotic, but she was also the head chef at The Lafayette inside the Hay-Adams Hotel. A Michelin star might continue to allude her, but there was no beating her address—directly across Lafayette Square from the White House.

  It was also the only time in his life he ever saw her. He didn’t know why he’d kept coming here, Dad had left long ago. A DC cop, he’d long since remarried and they’d made a great home for Trevor in the process. Yet the kitchen drew him back into his Mom’s sphere time after time.

  Last month, after three years training in Paris, Trevor had only intended to come home for a week or so while he’d sorted out where he wanted to go next. After nailing Le Cordon Bleu’s Grand Diplôme de Cuisine et Pâtisserie course, he’d worked as a kitchen slave in three Parisian two-star restaurants for six months each. Three years abroad was enough. It was time to climb out of the dungeon; he wanted to work somewhere better than troll level.

  New York. He’d planned on heading to New York after catching up with some of his old soccer mates in DC. Except Mom’s grillardin had broken his leg while waterskiing on Chesapeake Bay that first weekend after Trevor’s return.