I drop my iPhone on the floor, think, Tom, Tom, Tom, as I grab it and pick it up.

CHAPTER 4

WITH MY iPhone finally firmly in my hand, I see the name on the screen.

BRUNO WENNER

Damn, of all times.

Bruno is a major assigned to my unit, the executive officer to my boss, Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Denton.

The phone keeps on ringing.

I should let it go to voice mail, but Bruno’s a good guy who’s backed me up and helped me along in navigating the increasingly bureaucratic world of an eighteenth-century organization adjusting to one very challenging and strange twenty-first century.

I slide my finger across the screen, bring the phone up to my ear.

“Cornwall.”

“Oh, Amy, glad I caught you,” Bruno says. “You at home?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tom and Denise okay?”

I clench my jaw and say, “They’re fine, sir.”

“Of course they are…I just sent you an email, and just to reconfirm, your meeting is on for oh-eight hundred tomorrow.”

“The meeting…”

Right now about 90 percent of my body and being—the other 10 percent focusing on breathing, heart beating, so on—is wrapped up in one thing, and one thing only.

Bruno sounds concerned. “You know, the meeting with Warrant Officer Vasquez? From the CID? To interview you about…well, what happened in Afghanistan two months back. The incident with the prisoner.”

Afghanistan.

Like a stone-and-dirt avalanche, the memory of the “incident” pours over me. The grueling hours interviewing a captured Taliban member who shouldn’t have been in the government-controlled territory we were supporting. The grin, the joking from the prisoner…his utter assurance that nothing would happen to him, especially with me—a woman!—in charge of his questioning. The heat, the sand, the dust that got into everything, the messages from on high demanding to know why the Taliban member was there, what I was going to do about it, what I was going to learn. Come on, Captain Cornwall, we’ve got lives depending on your skills. Get to it!

Yeah. Right up to the point where I went to pick him up in his cell for another go-around and found him huddled in the corner, blood and foam around his nose, lips, and beard.

Dead.

On my watch, under my control.

“You sure, sir, oh-eight hundred?”

“That’s right, Amy.” His voice lowers. “Just so you know, the colonel is increasingly going apeshit over this matter. So far it’s been kept out of the news, but the more people know about it, the better the chances it’ll get leaked. He really wants you to…cooperate with the CID officer as much as possible tomorrow. To nip everything in the bud.”

And relieve my superior officer of any troubles from his superior officers, I think.

“Okay, Major, message received,” I say. “I’m on it, sir.”

“Good,” Bruno replies, almost in relief. “Amy…this could be a career-ender. Or worse, if your meeting tomorrow doesn’t go well.”

Yeah, I think. Worse means exchanging my usual uniform for a brown, heavily starched outfit at Leavenworth, joining other prisoners who are in there for rape, murder, drug trafficking, and, at last count, two for treason.