Treason by Newt Gingrich, Pete Earley Page A

up on the bunk bed. “We could be a family then.”
    â€œFor right now,” said Brooke, as she covered Jennifer with a wool blanket, “the two of us are all we need.”
    Brooke tossed the trash in a container and returned her unopened milk carton and uneaten Payday to the mini refrigerator. After dimming the safe room’s interior lights, she took a seat in front of a dozen monitors and checked the digital recorders that were linked to motion detectors outside the farmhouse. If an intruder had been watching Jennifer through the upstairs window, he might have tripped one of the hidden detectors, which would have activated a recorder. Brooke checked the machines. Nothing.
    Jennifer must have imagined seeing a man
, she thought. How many nights had Brooke been awakened by a sound and mistaken a shadow for an intruder?
    A camera showed two SUVs from the private security company turning off the main blacktop onto the mile-long driveway that led up a hill to the farmhouse.
    Brooke and Jennifer had moved into the green-trimmed, white clapboard Victorian three months ago. Built in 1893, it was a few miles north of Berryville, Virginia, a rural town best remembered because Confederate colonel John S. Mosby, the “Gray Ghost,” had raided a Union supply train there during the Civil War and escaped with much-needed supplies. The farmhouse was surrounded by ten wooded acres and was off the beaten path, which is why Brooke had bought it. Her role in helping save a U.S. ambassador in Somalia and stopping a suicide attack in Mogadishu had given her an unwanted high profile. It had also made her a priority target of the Falcon’s. Some forty million television viewers had watched a documentary on the Al Arabic network about her heroism in Somalia. She’d been fêted at the White House after she’d returned. Moving with Jennifer to the outskirts of sleepy Berryville had been a way to retreat from the spotlight.
    The monitors showed the private security guards arriving outside. Six men and two women exited from the two vehicles, splitting into two teams. One began searching the grounds. The other typed a code into the house’s front door’s digital lock and began sweeping each room.
    A movement on a different monitor caught Brooke’s eye. A familiar truck was turning into the driveway. Sergeant Walks Many Miles was also responding to the alarm. Miles had rented an apartment in Berryville to be near them. She would wait for him before opening the safe room door.
    He parked his weather-beaten Ford pickup next to the security guards’ vehicles and hurried up to the front porch. He was wearing the Marine Corps standard combat utility uniform (MarPat), better known as camo, with its dark green woodland design. From the day they’d first met in Mogadishu, Brooke had found him handsome. He was slightly under six feet with a muscular build that came from hard labor and daily runs as well as lifting weights in a local gym. Sergeant Miles enjoyed getting his hands dirty—repairing his truck or an old Indian brand motorcycle whenever he had downtime, which was rare. Some weekends, he did construction work for a friend. She liked his rugged looks, which included a broken nose—a testament to his violent childhood on the Crow reservation. His abusive, alcoholic father had regularly beaten him until Miles had become strong enough to knock out the old man and leave him bleeding on the kitchen floor. Being punched as a defenseless child had taken away any fear that he might have felt in high school when a gang of local white boys taunted him with racist slurs. He’d refused to turn away and had won more fistfights than he’d lost. The Marines had been his ticket away from the reservation, although his roots were still planted deep there. Now in his early thirties, he’d mellowed, but he remained a man whom other men instinctively knew would not shrink from a fight, a man who