And he had thought the French were tough to work for. He’d never cooked on the line for Mom before and now knew better.

  “Three dover sole, two filet, and an Amish chicken,” she called out the last as if it was beneath her—probably because it was her sous chef’s recipe. Still, a three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar order from the grill alone didn’t strike him as scoff-worthy. He already had three orders down and wouldn’t have enough open burners for another thirty seconds. Not if he wanted to get the timing right so that everything finished at the same moment, permitting clean service to the table.

  Sure enough, at twenty-three seconds, Chef Mom swung by his station. “The order isn’t down yet? Jesus, Trevor. Get it together.”

  “Yes, chef!” He hadn’t called her Mom since his sixth birthday, which she hadn’t attended but instead sent a chef to make hazelnut crème brûlées for all his six-year-old buddies who wanted chocolate cake with a major load of icing.

  His response went unheard as she’d already moved on to harangue Margo over the state of her black truffle crab gnocchi orders at the next station.

  His phone buzzed as he began plating the prior orders. He was too well trained to let it break his rhythm and he emptied pan after pan onto a wide variety of stoneware. As soon as the expediter grabbed them he queued up the next set of plates under the warmer.

  No meal at the Lafayette would ever be left to cool and fade past perfect under the infrared lights, they were only for pre-warming the plates.

  He risked a glance at the text message.

  Horse butt.

  From an unlisted number but that didn’t mater. It had been three years since he’d last seen that same message, but only one person could have sent it.

  Trevor failed to cover his laugh.

  His mother, attracted by his reaction like a food critic to a lone fish scale on their plate, snapped at him, “You have no pans down.”

  The expediter had already whisked away all other evidence of his work.

  “I don’t know why I ever bothered having you, Trevor. You’re a waste of space.” She nodded toward the stack of empty sauté pans. “Get your ass in gear. No special dispensation for being my son or having some fancy diploma from Cordon Bleu. Not in my kitchen.”

  Horse butt, his phone automatically refreshed the message.

  “Yes chef.” He intended to reach for the pans he needed, he really did.

  But his hand snagged the tie on his apron as he stuffed his phone into his back pocket.

  As if his hand had a mind of its own, it didn’t stop there. Once it had begun untying his apron, it finished the job. He folded it neatly, watching his hands with some surprise, as they set it on the work ledge along the front of the grill.

  Chef-Mom’s glare heated up faster than an empty copper Mauviel pan.

  He doffed his immaculate white chef’s jacket. Folding it neatly as well, he rested it atop his apron.

  “You can’t leave in the middle of service, Trevor Nolan. Now you just⁠—”

  He pulled out his phone again, now that his hands were once more under his control, and tapped the screen awake to see the message.

  “I should have done this long ago.”

  Then Trevor turned it to face his Mom.

  Horse butt.

  3

  “I don’t know what came over me.”

  Dilya didn’t speak, of course—she didn’t very often. But she’d met the former Mrs. Nolan, which saved Trevor a lot of explaining. The current one, Trevor’s stepmom, was light-years nicer. DC cop tough, had to be to keep up with Dad, but awesome anyway. He needed to remember to tell her that more often than he already did.

  “And, yeah, I really did show her your message with no explanation. I then grabbed a packet of tartare-grade Kobe beef and walked out.”

  Zackie was happily working her way through the treat.

  “That’s probably a hundred-dollar snack for the First Dog. Guess that’s my severance pay.” And the chances of Mom ever speaking to him again were probably worse than none. He couldn’t decide how he felt about that. Relieved or plain old sad? A strife-ridden segment of his life now had the door firmly slammed in its face. But knowing his Mom was a cast-iron bitch and accepting it were too different challenges.

  Horse butt.

  Dilya and Zackie had been sitting in their normal meeting spot, on the lawn of Lafayette Park directly opposite the horse butt of Andrew Jackson’s statue. It placed the North Portico of the White House to their left and the Hay-Adams to the right.

  Tourists were drawn like magnets to the south edge of the park to photograph the White House. Locals crisscrossed the park with determined strides, iced coffees, and a minimum of chatter. It was a great place to sit on the lawn—often they were the only ones in the whole park not on the move—and talk as anonymously as if they were in a secret chamber. Today their spot was near perfect. The first days of September had abated the summer’s heat but still promised many more, glorious beneath the arch of the blue sky. The white marble buildings of DC appeared etched against it like the finest sugar lacework on a black forest gateau.

  The two of them had used the park a lot during high school because it was so convenient for both of them.

  “I guess this is a bit less convenient now that I’ve burned the bridge with Mom.” Oh. My. God? Or About freaking time? Nope, he still had no idea which.

  “Is it okay if I say about time, Trevor?” Dilya’s voice was as soft as she looked. Long ruffly brown hair, darkish skin, and vibrant green eyes that saw everything.

  “Yeah, I guess.” After all, Dilya was the smartest one in a group of overachievers, so she was probably right.

  “My adoptive family are the ones I call Mom and Dad. My mother and father were shot dead when I was nine.” Which reminded him that Dilya might look soft, but was pure steel inside.

  “Really? Sorry, I didn’t know.” How could he not know that about her?

  “I never talk about it.”

  “Dilya, you hardly talk at all. But when you do, it’s always so damn interesting.”

  She didn’t respond as a trio of flash teenagers eased by in crop tops and Lycra shorts so short that even the DC midday heat didn’t justify them. Not that he was complaining about the view.

  “Zackie isn’t First Dog anymore,” she said it so softly that he almost lost it under the trio’s inane chatter about some band he’d never heard of. He was only twenty-one, for crying out loud, what was up with that?

  “I don’t think that’s the kind of position you can get unelected from. Maybe an act of Congress, but that seems rather extreme especially for the current group of lunatics under the Capitol Dome who can’t agree on a lunch order. What did you do, Zackie?” At being addressed, the Sheltie rolled onto her back asking for a belly rub. He gave her one.

  “The First Lady gave her to me when I quit my job.”

  “She gave you— Wait! Like quit the White House?” Dilya was such a fixture there it was hard to imagine the building without her. “Got sick of it after, what, your third administration? President Matthews once and two terms for President Zachary Thomas, right?”

  “No. I loved it.” She was staring very fixedly at the horse’s butt. So much so that Trevor finally understood what she was actually doing was very carefully not looking at the White House.

  “When was this?”

  “Three days ago.”

  “Holy crap, Dilya. And you’ve been letting me ramble on with a blow-by-blow of Mom’s insanity? Are you okay with it?” All he’d done was call his own mother a horse’s butt in her own kitchen and walk out. Dilya had been kicked out of the White House.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m okay. But I didn’t have a lot of choice.”

  “You didn’t have any choice about quitting? The President threw you out but gave you his dog?”

  “No, I quit on my own. And it was the First Lady who let me keep Zackie.” Dilya had taken over the belly rub once Trevor stopped.

  Zackie appeared to both hum with pleasure and fall asleep at the same time with all four paws in the air and her head laid back upon the grass.

  “Why did you quit?”

  Dilya finally looked away from the horse’s butt and turned to face him for the first time. “Tell me what you know about Miss Watson.”

  “She’s your friend, or mentor, or whatever.” The Chef’s Club had met with her once in the deepest basement in the White House. The old woman was an ex-spymaster who maintained a library of spy craft. She had served their group fine tea and homemade butter cookies in an unlikely elegant sitting room behind the battered steel door of Mechanical Room 043. Dilya had been her protégé as far as anyone in the Chef’s Club could guess. The next great female spymaster? Jimmy had tried labeling her the NGFSM but it hadn’t stuck.

  “I need to know what you know.” Dilya’s typical mood rarely emerged from completely serious but never before with this heavy directness.

  “Is this some kind of test? You said we weren’t supposed to talk about her.”

  “No, Trevor, it’s not a test. She’s gone missing. I had to leave the White House to try and figure out what happened to her.”

  “Gone missing? Like, kidnapped?”

  Dilya shrugged uncertainly before looking away to stare at the sleeping Zackie. “Her office is barren. Not empty, barren. She’s gone. Her entire library is gone. The sitting room. All of it. Kimberlee said you once met her for tea here, above ground.”

  4

  Dilya could feel the change in Trevor’s interest the moment she mentioned Kimberlee. He’d had a huge crush on her in high school. If they’d ever actually gone out, she’d never seen any evidence of it. It was perhaps a little weird that the tall, handsome, soccer team captain—who could have any girl he wanted—had focused on the feisty, hyper-driven, debate-team-captain. The senator’s daughter from Alabama.

  Kimberlee appeared to have never noticed, which was impossible. But it was also Kimberlee who Dilya had met with in Huntsville two days ago and who had sent her to see Trevor about Miss Watson.

  She’d known exactly where Trevor was. Which said what about the two of them?

  Dilya hadn’t even realized that he’d returned from Paris yet.

  “The teas,” Trevor didn’t ask about Kimberlee. “I’d almost forgotten about them.”

  “Teas plural?”

  “Sure. All through senior year. I’d get a note every couple weeks to appear at one DC tea room or another. She said the exposure would do my palate good.”

  “What else did you talk about?” And how hadn’t she known that one of her closest friends had meetings with her mentor?

  “Soccer, especially the problems with American soccer. A lot of schools were scouting me pretty hot and heavy. A couple of the pro teams were too. But she pointed out that soccer was a tough sell in America. It doesn’t get much airtime here in the States because there isn’t enough time for ad breaks. TV networks tried to change the rules when the World Cup came here in 1994 to allow for more ad breaks. In American football, they can do micro ads between downs and ad breaks when teams change the field, during time outs, and a whole lot more. Pro and college soccer, with two forty-five minute halves and no real breaks in the action is a tough sell here.”

  “And Miss Watson knew about all that?” Because Dilya certainly hadn’t. She saw a couple of people she knew from the White House come out the North Gate and start across Lafayette Park. She shifted her lean so that she was behind Trevor when their eyes might have glanced this way. Then they were gone. It was okay that she was here, but she didn’t want to be distracted by idle greetings or have to explain why she was in DC with Zackie while the First Family was in Tennessee.

  “Can you tell me something she didn’t know about?” Trevor craned around to look at her. She sat upright once more.

  Dilya had to admit that she’d never run into anything. But Miss Watson had only ever served two teas in her office: Murchie’s #10 black tea before three in the afternoon and a fine decaf green mint tea afterward. Trevor was implying she was a tea aficionado. And she’d never once mentioned sports of any kind in Dilya’s presence.

  “Looking back, I guess those afternoon teas are probably what sent me down the path of chef rather than soccer. And not merely chef, but the Grand Diplôme at Le Cordon Bleu. Oh, and at each tea, she’d have the host give me a couple of dessert recipes, then quiz me about them at our next meeting. How many times had I made them? What would I change? How? Why?”

  Dilya tried to see where this was leading but had no idea how it could help her find Miss Watson.

  “Did she have a favorite?”

  “Ching Ching CHA,” Trevor spoke without hesitation. “It’s over on Embassy Row in Georgetown.”

  Dilya had no idea what it meant or what her next step might be. At a loss, she looked at Trevor. “Want to go have some tea?”

  5

  “Uh,” Trevor looked at the slick little MINI Cooper. It was so new that it sparkled. Then he looked in through the windshield at the passenger seat. “I think there’s a bit of a problem.”

  Dilya looked at him over the roof of the car. “Really? I bought the four-door version for a reason.”

  Trevor laughed. Did Dilya even think of it as rude? Probably not. Though Dilya didn’t miss much, so maybe it was all her idea of an ironic joke. Zackie was definitely people to her. She opened the driver door and Zackie bounded into the car, across the driver’s seat, and landed in the passenger seat—where a plush dog bed was buckled into place. It had four high raised sides and a thick bottom that raised the Sheltie enough to stare at him through the window without having to stretch to see. Was Zackie smirking?

  Well, that tells you where you rate, Trevor. He opened the back door and climbed in behind the dog.

  He’d hardly been in a car since high school. There wasn’t a lot of use for them in Paris, especially not when working the kind of hours he'd been.

  “They told me to take it easy until the motors are broken in.” She punched a search into the nav system as she spoke. He could have told her how to get there but he wasn’t fast enough for the speed of Dilya’s thoughts.

  “Motors? Plural?” That sounded like a good excuse to buckle up quickly.

  “It’s a hybrid. The electric motors on each wheel make it nice and punchy.” Then without a sound, Dilya went from parked along Lafayette Park to whipping her way through DC afternoon traffic like a NASCAR driver.

  That’s when he remembered that they’d all been trained by a former NASCAR racer turned Presidential chauffeur—and Dilya had been the best of them.

  She started with whipping a U-ie onto Pennsylvania Ave.

  “Hang on, Zackie,” he whispered as she whipped around five of the eight spokes of the Washington Circle rotary, and punched the gas out to M Street. Except the engine ran so quietly that it must still be in electric mode. She punched the volts? Amps? He was a chef and had no idea.

  Zackie sat in her plush front seat throne with her head happily stuck out the window. He was glad to see that Dilya had snapped a leash to her collar. On Wisconsin, she chucked another sharp U-ie and pulled up alongside a tiny parking spot. She took her hands off the wheel and the car backed itself in as neatly as could be.

  “I’m still alive, right?”

  Dilya laughed, she actually laughed. “You never did really get the hang of DC driving, did you?”

  “Not like that.”

  6

  She’d never been to Ching Ching CHA, hadn’t ever heard of it. Dilya found that seriously disturbing. A piece of Miss Watson’s past…well, she’d had decades and decades of a past before Dilya was born. But to have this piece of recent past elude her felt as if she stood on a sinking dinghy.

  Every minute that she slowed down, Miss Watson slipped one step further away. How could she help a person she couldn’t catch up to? Worse, a person she knew so much less about than she’d thought.

  Miss Watson had given Kimberlee her personal collection of Presidential debates, going all the way back to the Lincoln-Douglas debates—the Senatorial race that Abraham Lincoln had lost. The gift had inspired her to enter politics rather than apply to be an astronaut.

  Kimberlee had also given Dilya the clue to try and follow the library to find the person. Miss Watson had known something and managed to smuggle her spy-craft library out of the White House without anyone the wiser—including Dilya.

  Trevor, on the other hand, had been led to tea houses to train his palate and orient his thinking toward a different future, despite the soccer scholarships schools had offered him. Dilya couldn’t see how this was relevant to anything.

  Ching Ching CHA was about the least impressive storefront Dilya had ever seen. It had a narrow front among a long line of businesses crowded against the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal—which had never reached the Ohio River even in its heyday, now a century gone.

  The dark wood fronting looked old and in need of a good sanding and varnish. Ching Ching CHA – a Chinese tea house may have once been painted in gold where it was carved into a black signboard above the door. It commanded a bare four yards along the shaded brick sidewalk. The bright flowers, curbside tables, and ridiculous statuary of the next door Italian restaurant only added to the shabby impression.

  “Seriously, Trevor?”

  He nodded and held the door for her.

  A dim corridor led deeper into the building, which opened up into such a glorious space that Dilya couldn’t catch her breath.

  Two stories above, massive skylights let the daylight shine in. It shone down on white painted walls, dark-wood-trimmed arches, and little tables for four surrounded by elegant chairs in the same rich varnish as the grand arches. There was a raised platform area with low tables for having tea at floor level. A small kitchen filled the air with rich scents and rows of earthen jars painted a deep red were lined up on shelves.