Later, after she cajoled Jesse into the shower, Mia checked her phone. There was a text from Britt Swenson, asking for Sebastian Rios’s email. Oh Lord, Mia thought. This can’t end well. Then she texted Britt with the email and finished getting ready for the luncheon.
* * *
The guest speaker for the Wall Street Veterans’ annual summer luncheon was Major General (retired) Jaclyn “Jackie” Gaile Collins, sometimes referred to as Jackpot by her warfighters (affectionately and otherwise), former head of the U.S. homeland intelligence command, current deputy director for science and technology at the Agency, decorated combat hero, West Point class of 1977, wearer of an oversize West Point class of 1977 ring, noted military gender pioneer, proud political moderate, and prouder mother of two.
“Impressive,” Jesse said, reading over the general’s bio on his phone in the cab to the luncheon. “The minefield stuff in Vietnam—she’s legit. How’d you get her?”
“Her daughter’s at Lehman Brothers,” Mia said. “Easy ask.”
“What’s with the nickname, though. Seems—sexual?”
“Nothing like that. When a ground raid finds the enemy target they’re looking for. Jackpot. As a colonel, she transformed the process for commando missions. Figured out how to work networks bottom-up instead of top-down. Went from a hundred raids per year to three thousand. Turned spec ops evergreen.”
Jesse nodded, then flared his nostrils. “Agency spooks, though.”
Mia rolled her eyes. Tribal fights in the army, tribal fights on Wall Street, tribal fights between government agencies, they were all the same. Before she’d gone back-office and moved to corporate compliance, she’d earned her stripes in investment banking, the front lines of money. Seventy-, eighty-hour workweeks, where careers could be made in minutes, and broken in half that. Same with entire accounts and capital portfolios that she’d tried desperately to remember were people’s livelihoods, people’s dreams. College educations. Retirement funds. Small businesses. It was hard, though. The game was the game. And the game left little space for contemplation. Contemplation meant time, and time meant money, and money meant everything—not just everything to the banks, or to the slick-suited creeps trying to sleep with a Tucker granddaughter, or to the bull statue tourists took pictures with because, hah hah, it had testicles. Money meant everything to those dreams she’d been charged with seeing through. That meant something, Mia knew. Even if it usually felt like nothing at all.
She’d never expected to end up in the family trade. She’d gone away to Dupont in the alien south to do something different. She’d found it with ROTC, and then the army. Then she’d volunteered for the wrong mission and it’d all been taken from her. C’est la guerre, she told herself anytime she felt the spider legs of regret crawling into her thoughts. C’est la guerre.
The dark thrills of combat could never be replicated, Mia believed that, but the military had its similarities to finance. The firm hierarchy and structure, for one. Having to prove herself in a world of brash young men, for another. Resolve and will trumping that brashness over and over again, for yet another.
Mia did miss investment banking sometimes. But she didn’t long for it.
Finance was in Mia’s blood. War lay in her bones.
She’d been looking out the cab window, mind adrift. Jesse tapped against the partition to bring her back.
Mia followed Jesse’s nod and grin. Someone had carved FREE ABU ABDALLAH into the partition plastic. “Jackpot should be alerted,” he said.
He was trying to play with her, but Mia shook her head. The terror chieftain’s trial at the World Court had become a daily spectacle. Like a lot of Americans, Mia wished the Volunteers had just killed Abu Abdallah the night of the raid and been done with it. A hell of a time for them to discover courageous restraint, she thought.
The cab moved north along the city’s main park and dropped off Mia and Jesse in front of a square Victorian building with high gables. The board had asked Mia about the Yale Club for today and she’d played coy. She’d called in that favor before. But the new recession had complicated her family’s relationship with some people at the club. Her father insisted it would blow over. Mia wasn’t so sure. Whatever hard line separated business matters from personal, the crash had snapped it clean all over the city.
The luncheon room overlooked a small rock garden and screen doors on the sides let in a warm midsummer breeze. Mia and Jesse had arrived in time—barely, she noted—and after a quick hello to some of the other junior board members, they took their seats as near the podium as Mia felt appropriate. New paperbacks of the general’s The Soldier and the State covered the tables like confetti. Mia guessed she was one of the few who’d already read it. People in finance loved books, and loved getting their books autographed. Reading those books, though, was something else.
A waiter took their orders. Mia made conversation with an asset manager on mimosa number three. He’d been a submarine officer in the 1980s. After the Cold War ended with the Russian Revolution but before the Palm Sunday attacks. Mia knew how to deal with men like this, when to ask a question and when to laugh, and most especially, when not to mention her own combat record. From the corner of her eye, she saw Jesse talking with a man about their age with trim dishwater blond hair and no neck. Oh God, she realized. That’s Liam Noonan. Mia began to eavesdrop. They were discussing the revised Warfighters Care Act. They hadn’t been seated even ten minutes.
“It’s personal for me. Once a Navy SEAL, always a Navy SEAL.” A bond trader for a boutique firm, Noonan never failed to mention his background when he appeared on cable television. “I’ve had friends sent to rehabilitation colonies who are still there. I’ve had friends sent to colonies who received treatment and returned to society, whole and healed.”
“So you’re okay with the new legislation?”
“Hell no. Big government always makes things worse.”
“But there’s stories about drug companies experimenting on colony vets.”
“Media garbage. More bureaucracy won’t do a thing. We need quick and thorough solutions. Only a free market can provide that.”
“Sounds like someone has colony stock options.” Mia bit her lip to keep from smiling. Jesse rarely talked politics. He didn’t even vote. G-men needed to be above the fray, he thought. But the report on the colony experiments had roused something in him. Mia had heard him mumbling at the television about it. “I saw on the news that fourteen percent of new vets are sent to colonies now. That’s big money.”
“The tribunals have explained. It’s medical.”
Jesse didn’t seem to hear that and kept pressing. “And what about the International Legion? Those poor bastards only get citizenship if they pass a tribunal. Way harder than the medicals here, right? That’s one way to keep the ranks full.”
“It’s about us! Not them!” Noonan slammed his fist on the table. The stock options dig had landed. “I’ve shed blood for the homeland. What have you done?”
The hair on the back of Mia’s neck rose. She could almost feel Jesse considering punching out the bigger man’s larynx. Men are so stupid, she thought, maintaining eye contact with the still-jabbering asset manager while patting Jesse’s leg under the table. That seemed to help; his body slackened at her touch.