"Tell the guys to leave the chairs where they are. Come at three. Bring yourselves and the flags."
He laughed. "Yes, Chief."
That title always made her smile. Vanessa had retired as a chief petty officer, an intelligence specialist whose career had been largely invisible to the public. Marcus had known her during a joint assignment when an operation overseas went wrong in a way no mission plan could have anticipated. Four members of his team had been cut off after their extraction route became unusable. Vanessa's job had been to interpret fragments of information arriving from several sources, decide what was reliable, and put the right warning into the right hands quickly enough for it to matter.
She had done it while the operations room argued over competing maps. Later, Marcus told her that her patience with the evidence had mattered more than anyone's courage in the field. She always answered the same way: the people doing the work had kept one another alive; she had simply helped them find the road home. Marcus disagreed. That disagreement had become a friendship built on trust, long phone calls, and a shared dislike of speeches that exaggerated their own importance.
Another message appeared, this one from Captain Sarah Mitchell. Don't make a fuss over me today, Vanessa. I mean it.
Vanessa typed back, Too late. There are centerpieces.
A moment later came the reply: I trained you better than this.
Sarah had been Vanessa's commander during some of the hardest years of her career. She was exacting, skeptical of shortcuts, and incapable of remembering a birthday without an assistant reminding her. She was also the first senior officer who had noticed Vanessa working through a fever after an assignment, ordered her home, and insisted that competence did not mean pretending to have no limits. Years later, when Vanessa lost her mother, Sarah had quietly taken care of an entire week's duties without expecting thanks. Vanessa remembered every one of those ordinary acts of loyalty more clearly than any award ceremony.
By ten o'clock, Vanessa was at Grand Harbor Mall with an event badge around her neck and a messenger bag full of cables and printed schedules. The mall sat close to the waterfront, a sprawling complex of pale stone and glass with a central atrium three stories high. Water ran down a decorative wall behind the fountain. Escalators crossed the open space, and sunlight from the skylights lay in wide rectangles on the polished floor. Harrison Fine Jewelry occupied a corner overlooking the atrium, opposite a cafe and a row of high-end clothing shops.
The fundraiser stage was being assembled beside the promotional screen, a rectangular display so large that a person standing beneath it looked like a small figure in a painting. Blue banners hung above the chairs. A table for scholarship applications stood beside a display featuring former service members who had become teachers, nurses, engineers, and small-business owners. None of the photographs showed a dramatic battlefield scene. Vanessa had insisted on that. She wanted visitors to see the lives veterans were building, not only the dangers they had survived.