Dilya's Christmas Challenge Page 2

  “That’s nice,” Dilya finally acknowledged that Miss Watson had friends. It would be nice to have one of her own, who was her own age. But she could count the number of seventeen-year-olds who worked in the White House on one finger. And the number of people who actually lived here on one hand: the three members of the First Family, the rotating watch officer with the Nuclear Football (the launch codes and radio that were never more than a hundred meters from the President), and herself when both her parents were out of town. Which was surprisingly often: her father Archie off consulting and Kee on a training mission, or a live one, with the Hostage Rescue Team.

  She didn’t mind though, not really. When she slept at the White House, she lived in the same small apartment that Emily Beale had occupied when she’d been a chef here a long time ago. Dilya had seen how good a fighter Major Beale was—even Michael from Delta Force had said the major was especially good. She so wanted to be like her: really smart and totally lethal.

  Dilya had hated her looks in her early teens because short girls with Uzbekistani dark skin and riffled hair would never be tall and blonde and bright like Major Beale. Once she’d understood that it wasn’t the appearance that mattered, she’d forgiven her heritage and focused on what else she could learn.

  “You present a fascinating problem, child.”

  “I don’t mean to.” For half an instant she wondered if Miss Watson was referring to the broken Thomas Sheraton table in the East Wing, but decided that was silly. Not that she wouldn’t know, but that she wouldn’t care. Then Dilya was sorry she presented a problem, because it meant she was doing something imperfectly that must have come to Miss Watson’s attention.

  “What have you learned in your expeditions today?”

  Fridays were generally quiet, especially in the weeks before Christmas. The decorators had been through at the beginning of December and turned the White House into a winter wonderland. How could everyone ooh and ahh over it? It reminded her too much of her freezing walk over the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan when she’d been a child of ten. She tried not to look too closely in case she imagined her parents’ blood spattered on the snow as it had been when they’d been murdered shortly afterward.

  Still, she thought of a few things to tell Miss Watson that she heard lately. In the beginning, she wasn’t sure if she should share things with the old woman. But then she’d managed to eavesdrop on a surprisingly frank conversation between Miss Watson and Emily Beale regarding the risks of a new White House intern—who was dismissed almost immediately afterward. There were now few things she held back. Because if Emily trusted Miss Watson, so would she—mostly.

  Miss Watson nodded in surprise at the passing remark between two of the cabinet secretaries about “coal futures.” Yet another thing for Dilya to now research the meaning of the next time she was online.

  “Let’s have some tea,” Miss Watson rose to her feet.

  3

  Dilya knew which hidden trigger to press inside the bookcase’s shelving to release it so it swing aside.

  Miss Watson let her do it herself. The heavy cases were on silent rollers, but they still required force to move—something Dilya did so easily and that she herself now had to work at.

  The bookcase folded aside, opening a doorway into her inner parlor. In sharp contrast to the outer library, this was a warm and cozy space. The rich Oriental rug, white-rose wallpaper covered with photos of history’s greatest female spies, and the comfortable armchairs before the marble-mantled fireplace was often all that kept her morale up.

  She eased into the armchair as Dilya went about making tea and setting out cookies that she herself had baked last night. It was her one solace, a skill she’d learned years ago. She’d learned to cook to endear herself to the men she was spying on, but she’d always baked for herself.

  When everything was set out and served, they drank a while in silence. The Harvey and Sons chamomile from Egypt was very floral, but the taste was incredibly smooth and lulled her nerves after even the first few sips.

  She looked across at Dilya and tried to think how to teach this girl the lesson that she needed, the lesson that she’d never learned for herself. Yet Emily had done it. How?

  Miss Watson had become caught in a trap of her own making. Emily had appeared to take her advice to heart. So, to ask how Emily had learned what Dilya needed—how to value the team above independent action—would have undercut her own advice. It was crucial knowledge, she knew it by her own lack. She’d always undervalued the importance of people in her life as anything other than targets and potential threats.

  When Emily accepted the amazing woman she already was, then she would truly step into her power. She hoped that Emily did it soon so that she’d still be alive to watch.

  Yet Dilya needed…

  “Tell me about your friends.”

  Dilya’s face revealed no telltale expression as Emily’s had. Dilya was almost perfectly unreadable. Not chill, but so self-contained that she didn’t reveal anything of who she was. It was startling to realize that though she was so pretty, she wasn’t beautiful. It was because the girl kept herself locked away so safe behind her mystical green eyes that her features appeared slightly lifeless.

  Oh, she could appear animated at a moment’s notice, but this blankness was her normal, silent self.

  “You have no friends.” Miss Watson didn’t make it a question.

  Dilya didn’t argue.

  And there was the difference between herself and Emily. Emily had garnered a team, a family, and a circle of friends so loyal that it might take her years to understand their true depths. The only reason that the wives of the White House’s leaders—who were so dependent upon Emily—didn’t become jealous, was because Emily Beale had won them over as well with her immense integrity. And as the coming years of friendship mellowed the awe they held her in, their true friendships would grow.

  Her own friends? All except for a very select group of fellow librarians thought she had died fifteen years ago. And her closest friends might indeed be Emily—who she’d only met once in person—and this young girl watching her so carefully.

  That was the different path Dilya must learn to walk.

  “I’m sending you to school.”

  “I already go to school.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “It’s the weekend and my high school is closed, but you know that. Which school?”

  “The White House kitchen.”

  Dilya actually let enough emotion through to blink at her in surprise.

  “Saturday at nine a.m. And you aren’t allowed to leave early.”

  Miss Watson was very pleased that she was able to finish her tea before Dilya even thought to take another sip of her own.

  4

  Dilya had been in the White House kitchen any number of times, though not nearly as often as visiting Chef Clive in the Chocolate Shop.

  Chef Klaus was terribly strict, far more likely to explode with German epithets than to deliver praise. She knew he tolerated her presence, but she’d failed to make him smile even once. He was a tall, spare man, far above her own five-foot five. He seemed to look down at her like a stooping vulture. His tall chef’s hat often hanging directly overhead when he was scowling down at her.

  This morning, he was in “a mood”. She’d heard the pastry chef and soup chef making a joke that if Chef Klaus was ever not in “a mood” the kitchen would freeze over. Only when, three months later, she heard a cabinet member saying he would agree with a new policy when hell froze over, did she understand the chefs’ joke. She also knew from listening to the others that he was immensely respected. Whether his kitchen created a plated five-course dinner for two hundred guests or a sandwich for the President to eat in the Oval, the kitchen ran with the same clockwork precision.

  He was thumping down bags of flour and sugar. Crashing mixing bowls against one another so hard that she was surprised they didn’t break, even if they were steel.

 
“Es ist verrückt! Warum heute must my pastry chef be sick? Someone tell me why?”

  “He caught it from his son,” Dilya ventured. She liked Chef Emile, who still slipped her choice pastries like she was a little girl. “He brought the cold home from his kindergarten class.”

  “Eh? Oh, Dilya.”

  “He must be very sick to not be here, chef.”

  “So. Today you are my assistant?”

  “It was…” She didn’t think that Chef Klaus would know about Miss Watson. “I heard there was school here today. I thought I’d come learn.”

  “What? Someone who acts as if I have something to teach them instead of just doing my commands? Gut! Gut!” He waved a hand at the pantry. “Bring me butter, five pounds. Molasses, cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, ginger—crystallized, powdered, and fresh. Well don’t stand their looking so surprised. Schnell! Schnell! And take them with you.” He waved a hand over her shoulder. “Oh, ja. Eggs, we must have two dozen to start,” he stomped into the walk-in refrigerator to fetch those himself.

  “Don’t forget the butter while you’re in there,” she called after him.

  “Now she thinks she runs kitchen.” At least that’s what it sounded like. She didn’t know enough German to be certain. She committed it to memory to look up later and see if she was right, “Jetzt glaubt sie, sie leite die Küche.”

  She turned.

  Four kids were standing in the doorway, frozen in place as if they’d been cast in ice like the rest of the White House’s horrid winter wonderland nightmare.

  Everybody in the school knew Trevor, he was captain of the soccer team. He was tall, with dark straight hair and very good-looking. He was standing just a little too close behind Kimberlee. She’d seen Major Henderson do it when he thought his wife needed protecting—as if Major Emily Beale ever needed anyone to do that.

  Kimberlee made up for average features with a cheery personality—she was an Alabama senator’s daughter with medium skin similar in darkness to Dilya’s, but a very different hue. She’d dyed her wavy hair with a blonde so bright it was almost gold. It reminded her of the thin stripe of blonde that her adoptive mother Kee wore in own dark hair, to remember a dead friend. The color choice made her like Kimberlee even if she was one of the school’s super-popular crowd.

  She didn’t really recognize the other two, though she thought she’d seen them around. A tall, serious blonde girl and a boy about her own height with messy brown hair that needed a comb. He was the one scanning the kitchen as if he was cataloging everything in the room against some internal image. He’d clearly done some research before coming.

  “You run the kitchen?” The tall blonde asked.

  Well at least she wasn’t going to have to look up the translation of Klaus’ comment.

  “No, but I guess Chef Klaus needs someone to order around. Let’s get moving; he doesn’t like delays. Nicht hier!” She tried to imitate his gruff tone. It actually earned her a laugh.

  She had their names by the time she’d shown them where the spices were, though she had to think to remember that the fresh ginger would be in with the other root vegetables.

  Trevor, Mister Soccer, was indeed following Kimberlee around.

  Kimberlee didn’t seem to notice, though it seemed obvious. She was also head of the Debate Club that had just taken down Georgetown University’s freshman debate team.

  The quiet blonde was Valentina—“But call her Val,” Kimberlee had stuck in. Once Dilya heard her name she remembered all of the details. Val was the daughter of the brigadier general stationed at the French embassy as the Defense Attaché. She was also the valedictorian who was taking every advanced placement class on the planet. Well, not every one, because she wasn’t in Dilya’s Government Affairs, American History, or Political Science. And if she was taking a language, it wasn’t Russian or Mandarin. Val was a science-and-math nerd’s science-and-math nerd.

  “Trevor’s the best cook,” Val said in that soft voice of hers. She looked a bit like Emily Beale, but she didn’t sound at all like her. Too gentle.

  “Mom runs kitchen at the Hay Adams Hotel. If you’d met my mom, you’d know I couldn’t help but learn.”

  “Sound kinda defensive there, Trev,” Kimberlee winked at Dilya. “But because Val’s French, we made her be the president of the Chef’s Club.”

  “The Chef’s Club?” Dilya let her guard down for a moment. Miss Watson wanted her to spend the day going to school with a Chef’s Club? She didn’t even know that her high school had a such a thing.

  “Yeah, the four of us are the whole club, unless you want to join?” Mr. Observant Jimmy made it a little funny. He was the misfit in this group of misfits.

  “Ha!” Dilya figured that response would cover a lot of ground. Joining wasn’t something she did. Of course she could cook. The chow cooks at the secret Night Stalkers base in Pakistan—where she’d lived after Kee rescued her at age ten—had been her source of food. As soon as she’d figured that out, she’d made friends with them and in turn they’d taught her to cook—and turned a blind eye whenever she secreted away a bit of dinner in case life went wrong again. She’d eventually managed to observe the food locker combinations and had no longer needed to hide food under her cot.

  She’d also watched Emily Beale cook. Often, when there was no mission, Emily would make a special meal for her crew. Dilya had never helped, but she’d watched and done her best to memorize each step.

  “King of war games,” Kimberlee offered another of her asides, nodding toward Jimmy.

  “Not war games. They’re strategy games.”

  “Guns, tanks, spaceships with nuclear weapons?”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy admitted and tipped his face down just enough for a long chunk of wavy brown hair to slip over his eyes.

  “King of the war games,” Kimberlee summed up.

  Kimberlee might not know the difference, but Dilya certainly did. Her mother was a sniper, the ultimate in tactical warfare. And her father was a leading geopolitical global strategy consultant to the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “Why do you cook?”

  But Chef Klaus returned from where he’d been called away to consult on a soup before Jimmy could answer her question.

  “Today we’re going to start with learning how to a sharpen a knife,” Chef Klaus did his looming vulture thing over them. “Then if you somehow manage to master that task, I will teach you how to peel ginger.”

  5

  An hour later it seemed they were no closer to satisfying him than when they began. Trevor was the closest with Val as a near second—she finally had graduated to a mere sniff of disdain before he blunted her knife’s edge on a steel and told her to try again.

  “I never knew there was so much to just sharpening a blade,” Kimberlee whispered sadly after her latest effort was blunted and returned with an outright scoff.

  Then Chef Klaus focused his ire on her. “That’s not a weapon of war you’re wielding there, Miss Dilya Stevenson. It’s a tool of art.” And with a single stroke he wiped out twenty minutes of painstaking work. She’d had about enough of this.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Dilya glared at him across the table. “My first knife was a KA-BAR 11-7/8” knife. But I was only ten and the leather-wrapped handle was too big for my hand. So my mother bought me a Cold Steel Recon 11-3/4” Tanto point with a black DLC coating over a VG-1 stainless blade. That is what I learned to sharpen.”

  Klaus stared down his long nose at her.

  “Es ist hier?”

  “Jawohl.” She’d heard Val use that as a strong affirmative.

  With a tip of his head, he sent her to fetch it. On her return, she considered doing many things, but common sense had prevailed and she handed it, still in its sheath, across the steel table where they sat lined up on their stools. The members of the Chef’s Club didn’t even pretend to be sharpening their knives, instead watching her avidly. She tried to ignore it, but wasn’t having much luck.

  Chef K
laus tugged the knife free—on his third try. It required a strong pull and it was easier if the sheath was strapped to a body part. When he glared at her, she was careful to show nothing.

  After inspecting the blade carefully, he stepped to the cutting board and dragged it lightly across one of the overripe tomatoes they’d been trying to slice. It slid through the loose skin without a wrinkle and created a slice so clean that the tomato might have still been fresh and firm.

  He wiped it carefully with a cloth, replaced it in the sheath and returned it to her. She made a show of strapping it onto her thigh over her jeans. It wasn’t the sort of thing to be left lying about. She had a small combination knife safe in her room. The Secret Service had made her leave her sidearm at her parents’ house.

  “Do you know how to use that blade?”

  “I’ve been trained by my mother,” Dilya offered him her best smile. “But I haven’t had a reason to use it…yet.”

  “I could almost like you, Miss Stevenson,” Chef Klaus condescended before waving for them to return to their sharpening.

  “Super cool,” Jimmy whispered.

  Which might be the first compliment she’d ever received from a classmate in the two years she’d been in the States and going to a real school.

  “You really know how to use that?” Trevor asked as he once again began working his blade in a swirl of vegetable oil on the slab of black sharpening stone. It didn’t sound like he doubted her, more like she’d surprised him.

  “Her mom is a sniper on the Hostage Rescue Team,” Val answered for her.

  Dilya could only blink at her. She’d thought she was invisible at school—as invisible as was possible in such a group of DC’s overachiever kids. School hadn’t mattered to her, but it had been important to Kee and Archie, so she worked hard to get her A’s…and to not be noticed.