She had taken a second sedan from the airport, changed into jeans and a plain navy windbreaker in the back seat, and carried with her the three boxes she had specifically insisted on bringing personally.
Those boxes mattered.
One held official briefing books and inspection summaries that had not yet made it into the outgoing command’s sanitized welcome packet. One held anonymous complaint files from sailors, civilian workers, and a chaplain who had begged higher command to look at Blackwater’s culture before somebody got badly hurt. The last box held her own things: a framed photo of her parents in Pensacola, a brass compass that had belonged to her father, a coffee mug from her last command in Pearl Harbor, and the leather notebook where she wrote things she did not trust anyone else to remember.
She could have had an aide carry them.
She never did.
