Chapter 338

We had an excited conversation on the way home about having babies in the house. Vicky and Ching Lee were making list of the things we needed to do tomorrow to bring the boys home. That was so easy to say, "The boys, our boys," it brought me teary eyes just thinking about it.

When we got home we cleaned the house from top to bottom; we dusted every nook and cranny there was. I even changed the heater filters, putting in the latest kind that removed everything; mold spores, lint, and pollen, fine dust – everything!

The girls made up the cribs; each boy was going to have his own. One my mom gave us; it had been Jake's, then mine. The other had been Jenny's. We bought completely new mattresses, side bumpers and linens for them.

There were boxes of sterilizers, baby bottles and breast pumps. They were dug out ready to be cleaned if Jenny wanted to use them. After watching the connection between the boys and her I was sure the only thing they were going to get any time soon was the real nipple - any time and any where they wanted it.

Tomorrow - until Jenny called - it was back to the grind. The Rapid Response team had lost three days of outside training because of the weather. I called Bob and asked if he knew anyone who could remove the snow from the roofs of the four block buildings in the compound so we could use it right away. Jake and Dad could use the front-end loaders to move the snow outside the fence.

To their dismay, they were going to spend the rest of this week in the gym training and in class. The state department was sending a team to give them a crash course on diplomacy, policy and procedures. In ten days they were going to Morocco to swap the entire JBG team there.

Our electronic investigative team (EIT) had been up and running a week now. Robert and Burt had taken on matters, the Morocco attack and the political debate. To that, I had added a third.

My Washington closed door inquisition with the intelligence committees had been postponed two weeks on Wednesday because of the storm.

Eric and Frank both dropped hints that the committee was digging to see if we had any advance knowledge of the attack because we were so well prepared for it. Eric also indicated that the panel was going to be loaded with other intelligence groups.

"They are looking for why JBG was targeted - what you knew and how - that the intelligence group did not," Eric stated.

I asked both Robert and Burt to devote a day or so to researching the terrorism attack against JBG to see what kind of information they could dig up that I could use in my defense.

I was able to give them a head start. I had both the cell phone number that was blown up in the van and a list of all the numbers that it had called in and called out. There were also some email addresses of North African origin that came in a state department info dump that I should not have received a day or so after.

The Feds tried to recall it after they realized it had been addressed improperly, but Cindy had already printed the packet seconds before it disappeared from our system.

Robert was working aggressively on the three groups that were planning trouble for the independent debate. From updates I was getting, they had already infiltrated all the leader's emails, text and cell phones and had set up continuous monitoring of all three. The other was digging into the Morocco incident and making progress.

Cindy had assigned administrative assistant Brooke Haywood full time to the pair to put everything together in a form we could use. It was a totally stand-alone office not connected to our mainframe or our internet. Brook kept us up to date with emails. She was also putting together everything need for the first meeting.

Friday morning all of us went to the gym offices. It had been four days since any of us had sat down behind our desks and there was a pile of things to catch up on.