The President's Henchman by Joseph Flynn Page A

course.”
    “One or two,” Sweetie answered.
     
    Welborn Yates sat in his White House office transcribing his audiotaped interview with Colonel Carina Linberg into a cryptic shorthand a rocket-scientist friend at the Air Force Academy had taught him. Later, he’d enter it into a password-protected file on his personal laptop. Only when the president asked to see it would he decrypt and print out the file.
    He wasn’t sure that he would include the fact that he was trying very hard not to fall for Colonel Linberg. Honesty on that point might call his objectivity into question.
    The colonel hadn’t come on to him, not in any obvious way. That would have raised his suspicions immediately. It was just that she’d been decent enough to talk to him like he was a human being and not just a wet-behind-the-ears junior officer. Or an antagonist who was out to get her.
    “At first, I just liked Dex’s looks,” she told Welborn over coffee and a raspberry croissant. “He’s a handsome man, gorgeous, really, in his Navy blues.”
    Welborn sipped his own coffee without interrupting. He’d asked her how she came to be other than professionally involved with Captain Dexter Cowan.
    “I’ve felt that way a time or two before,” she said. “I guess it’s only natural for a woman in my profession to like men in uniform. Some of them are so damn handsome.”
    She paused to look at Welborn, as if really seeing him for the first time. Her eyes seemed to say, “You should know, you’re one of them.”
    The conversational opening was there, but Welborn declined to take it.
    Colonel Linberg continued. “But nobody ever sent me head over heels before until Dex. All the more so as I came to learn he was more than just a pretty face. He’s knowing, funny, considerate … and, sorry to say, a damn liar.”
    “He told you he was single?” Welborn asked.
    “He did.”
    “And by his own admission he didn’t wear a wedding ring.”
    “No, he didn’t. And not for a very long time, if ever. Women know what to look for: skin that’s pale because a ring has shielded it from the sun. Or simply an indentation where the flesh has been compressed as it continues to expand elsewhere.”
    She glanced at Welborn’s left hand as it held his coffee cup.
    “You don’t wear a ring, probably never have.”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “Dex’s hand is just like yours.”
    Welborn tried not to read anything into that.
    “At some point,” he said, “you and the captain began to see each other outside of work.”
    “Six weeks after we began working together. Physical tension had been present from the start, and by that point it was pretty unbearable for both of us. We both had to be careful at work, of course. Our jobs call for a high degree of focus and sober judgment.”
    The colonel laughed again.
    “That was the rationalization we used for going out the first time. We needed to dispel the tension so we could do our jobs better. We’d learned by then that we’re both very ambitious people, and our joke was that if he was going to make admiral, and I was going to make general, we’d have to get all this unspoken personal stuff sorted out pretty soon.”
    Colonel Linberg sipped her coffee.
    “Dex said we wouldn’t have to worry about talking out of turn because we both knew all the same secrets. So I said why didn’t we go out for a drink?”
    “You extended the first invitation?”
    “Yes … Hasn’t any young woman ever asked you out, Lieutenant?”
    There was an undertone of challenge in her voice.
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Then you know there’s nothing improper about it.”
    “No, ma’am. Nothing at all.”
    “Dex told me that first night that he was divorced. Not separated, divorced. He told me before we left the bar where we’d had drinks, before we went to the hotel.”
    “Do you remember how many drinks you had that night?”
    “Two,” Colonel Linberg said with certainty. “I never have more than two. I learned long ago