Looking at Cronkite now, Natalie felt her chest go tight with sadness. At the memory, and at her consciousness of how far she’d strayed from her dad’s ideal. She had been nothing like dogged in pursuit of the truth, nothing like stalwart in the face of tyranny. Everything she’d learned tonight—about the Colombians and the pipeline—had been right in front of her all along. But she’d been so caught up competing, chasing scandal to advance her career that it had stopped her from chasing down the story that mattered.

Well, that was going to change.

Natalie looked back at James and flashed to an image of him shirtless, then chastised herself to focus on the business at hand.

“Hey, can I ask you a question?” she asked. “Does everyone in DC know that Karima is from the GlobalCom family? Why doesn’t anyone talk about it?”

James shrugged. “I suppose because it’s understood. And no one wants to do anything that would risk losing GlobalCom’s ad dollars.” He looked up and grinned at her. “Or the party invites.”

“I only went to her party to develop sources,” she said defensively.

“Okay.” He laughed, then looked back at the computer. “I’m going to try a couple other options, see if we can get another angle,” James said. “Want to come see this?”

She felt a flush of warmth as she moved to stand beside him. After a moment, they were looking at crisp clean images of what appeared to be a body of water.

“I’m not sure how much this will tell us, but this is a fleet of private satellites,” he said, pointing at the images. “You can’t move them, they operate in always-on mode. Still, we can get a time-lapse picture of what’s been happening the last few days in the ocean.”

There was more tapping and James whistled. “Whoa. That’s crazy.” He pointed to a bunch of dots in the ocean. “You see these formations?”

Natalie nodded yes.

“So odd,” James repeated, almost to himself. He started typing, and over the satellite image, he pulled up a document. The title read, “US Naval Forces Southern Command, Fourth Fleet.” He started scrolling through documents. Finally he stopped on one.

“SouthCom announced a MAGTAF last week,” James said steadily, as if this meant something to her. “They’ve got ships from the Fourth Fleet moving to SouthCom’s area of operations to conduct regional security training.” He gave her a puzzled look. “Strange, right?”

She raised her eyebrows in surrender. “I have no idea what you just said.”

“Oh sorry. Military speak. Basically it means we’re doing a naval training exercise in the Caribbean Sea. They’re moving some big ships there.” Now he toggled back to the satellite image. “You see the dots? They’re US ships. Surface ships. All stationed off the coast of Venezuela,” James said.

“Okay,” Natalie replied, wondering at the implications.