snap beans, limas and rice, fall-off-the-bone baked chicken, pan gravy, and Inez's audacious desserts. Those in the group who had sworn off meat and dairy were spoiled just as well by her vegetable lasagna, baby asparagus so sweet it would make you cry, and her tofu garlic teriyaki stir-fry, and dips, chips and fruit plates dripping with natural fructose nectars.
Inez put down love hard in the kitchen, the way Marlene put down her prayers... and J.L. put down security with authority, no less than Carlos and Shabazz put down weapons check, and went over security again. This was home; every. one contributed their best, their all, and invested heavily, mightily with their hopes. Damali looked across the table at Carlos, so glad he'd agreed to hold the news about the fawn. They all needed one night to say thank you privately, too.
Absently munching and just feeling the mellowness of the vibe that surrounded her, Damali picked up on a strand of conversation that she really hadn't been listening to. What was being said wasn't all that important, what was being felt at the moment between everyone was paramount. If things could just stay this way ...
"Yeah, I know," Dan said. "International travel right now sucks for getting the band through all the security measures - even with our special connections. Like, they've even gone so far as to ban books on flights at Heathrow, and we'd been negotiating to do London as a major stop."
"Maybe we're going about this all wrong," Carlos finally said, leaning back in his chair with a stretch. "We wanted to do concerts in the twelve hot zones so our people could pick up our tracers, right?" He waited until everyone nodded. "But we've got typhoons sweeping China, and we did Tibet already. Teams there know us. We've done Sydney under deep cover circumstances, but we hit 'em hard there, so our ground forces are strong all the way to Melbourne. We got South America covered - got back in Brazil, even though we lost a squad."
Carlos fell silent for a moment, and leaned forward. "It's gonna be hard to go into India, with the bombings picking up, just like we can probably get into Japan easier than North Korea right now, due to the nuclear standoff drama there. From Japan, though, we can go down through Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, but just like India and Pakistan, the political tensions are making it hard to move or gather people there...don't want to put innocents at risk for a Bali event happen at a concert." Damali watched her husband's logic hold the group in thrall and just the sound of his voice as he dissected the problem calmly, resolutely, without tension, just stating the facts, talking with his hands as though envisioning it in his mind in the air, then moving dishes around on the table so could see it in their minds, too, was melting her where she sat.
"We've been to the Motherland," Carlos said, glancing at each face on the team, "but Africa is so huge that we need to break it into like three or four zones to get the word out, and the Sudan is crazy-hot right now. The Canadian-Greenland and Mexican teams, as well as the Central American and Caribbean Guardians know us from Morales. We just came out of the South Pacific, while we were in Tahiti, and our U.S. teams all the way up through Alaska got us on lock from all the cross-country battling over the years."
"So, where's that leave us?" Shabazz asked, rubbing his belly and leaning back in his chair.
'Tokyo, Moscow, Delhi, London, Rome - just because of the Vatican, for a nice worldwide spread . . . Ireland for the standing-stones community," he added, looking at Heather, "Gambia . . . But I see nobody mentioned the obvious."
"Where, Antarctica?" Rider said with a wide grin.
"Oh, he got jokes," Mike said, laughing and unbuckling a notch on his belt.
"Yeah," Dan said, running his fingers through his hair. "You know that's why the Covenant is meeting. The Middle East is hot, we know the deal with Iraq, Afghanistan, Turkey - the region ... so many troops from so many nations, pulling our Guardians to our signature there will be asking for a tragedy. One false move by any side of the equation and it'll pop off another whole wave of insanity. But now, with Israel and Hezbollah squaring off, trading missiles over Lebanon, Beirut,