She couldn't understand what the President thought he was doing. "Do you know?" she asked her old dog, Moffu, as the two of them drove west toward the open area behind the university campus. As soon as he told the country he had lied, it was all over. The Republicans would impeach him. Until then it was just his word against hers, and the Service would always back him up on that.

"He's just another male," Moffu replied without interest. "You know how they are." She struggled up from the passenger seat and rested her muzzle on the dash. "What are we doing now? You should be at work this time of day."

Peggy pulled the car off Junipero Serra and scowled unhappily at the raw dirt path that streaked the hillside. Was Moffu up to it in her condition?

"I'm taking you for a walk, girly. We're taking the day off. It will be fun. You're right, I know," she persisted, "But why didn't he keep his fat mouth shut? And then after he said that stuff on TV, why did he have to cross us all up and admit that he was lying all that time? Doesn't he know how it will affect his daughter?"

Beside her, Moffu stood silently, leaving Peggy's questions without answers, as she did so often these days. "You're just going to have to accept it, Peggy. It's part of our job. Are we there yet? I was just going to take a nap." She curled and lay down again. The old dirty white shepherd was nearly 12, watery black eyes gauging least resistance in all things. Peggy reached over and pulled at the wool on Moffu's hip. "Let's go, girly. It will be good for us."

Moffu slumped through the door of the Volvo and stood waiting for her leash. "Remember this place, Moffu? I brought you here before." That had been at the beginning of the fall term, when Chelsea had returned to the campus, and Peggy had celebrated the ending of the weeks of advance work that attended the arrival of the President's daughter in this same way, with a long walk with her old friend.

Today's escape had a different feeling, a needed day stolen selfishly away from service to the country and the first family. She had woken depressed, with the sense of waning days, an understanding deeper than a veterinarian's bleak diagnosis. Peggy looked down at her friend with pity. "Sometimes it's important to take time for yourself, Moffu."

"Sure, if you say so, Peggy," Moffu said. "Let's go, then." The shaggy white dog began to lumber toward a remembered opening in the fence that skirted the hills.

"What am I going to do without you around to talk things over with, Moffu?" Peggy sighed. In a very real way they had grown up together. During the same period when Moffu transformed from fuzzy pup into broad-chested adult Peggy had gone through college, the service academy, thrown herself deep into her work in Washington D.C.

"Are you going somewhere?" Moffu asked uneasily. "You aren't going to leave me with those people again are you?"

It had never been convenient to have a big dog like Moffu while she was in college, but Mom and her new husband Donald were always too busy. They never had the time to take care of her right. The situation got worse in grad school and during the advanced training programs that followed. But finally things had slowed. She had bonded well with the beast during the years that they worked in DC. The Secret Service had been a good career.

The tricky work at the Jordanian embassy had given her a reputation for sensitivity—the time spent staying organized at home after hours made her seem a master of detail. Every evening Peggy had talked things over with Moffu as she and the dog navigated the two-mile loop in their Virginia suburb.

These days things had become difficult again. There was so much responsibility when you were protecting the members of the First Family. She just didn't have the time for the daily walks anymore. And Peggy could see now that Moffu was tired. She would not remain with her much longer.

"Peggy, for Pete's sake. Pull yourself together," Moffu said. "There's still time." Peggy wiped the tear of sentiment away, embarrassed. The Stanford hills simmered straw bright in the afternoon sun beneath a cool blue pacific sky. Peggy pushed her tinted shooting glasses up to cover her blinking eyes. "OK," she said. "We're ready." She touched the button and the Volvo bleeped.

Peggy was happy that Moffu had had the chance to meet Chelsea. The President's daughter was really a fine young woman, shy but conscious of her need to find her own way in the world. Not relying on her parents to show her the proper path. Peggy grimaced with sad laughter at a sudden memory.

"You weren't too sure about Slick Willie's kid, were you, Moffu?" The dog had been conked out on the mexican blanket laid across the couch when the Secret Service escort pulled up to the house Peggy had leased in the Stanford Terrace. Miller had come in first, his nose wrinkling as he registered his disapproval of the canine smell within the house. He had been doing his Kevin Costner imitation, pinched eyes piercing straight through Peggy. Peggy sighed, thinking about it. The important thing was that Miller was committed to the common goal of protecting the first family. So he was a silly prick. What difference did it make, really? He was just another male.

Anyway, Moffu had ignored Miller and Angwin as they scissored swiftly through the front door, looked up blearily at Peggy, and risen to trot challengingly straight for the first daughter. Miller's hand had moved perceptibly closer to his holstered gun. "What did he think you were? A sleeper agent for the Islamic Jihad?"

"What's his name?" Chelsea had inquired. "Hello, Moffu." Moffu had accepted the back of the girl's clean wrist at face value, slathered it thoroughly with a single lap of her tongue. Chelsea had giggled.

"You would think that since I graduated only five years ago it would make me more sympathetic to her, wouldn't you?" Peggy reflected. So often she found that she had to hold back when she was talking to the young student. The girl had no problem with working hard—good study habits seemed to be an instinct drawn equally from her attorney mother and her father, a confessed policy wonk. In Chelsea, however, it was as though the will to excel flowed without direction or discernible current, a shallow floodplain across which the child walked with disappearing footsteps.

"You need to give the rest of us a break once in a while," Moffu grumbled as they began to trudge uphill. "We're just teenagers."

"Compare the way she acts to me, though," Peggy told Moffu as they started up the asphalt road past the automatic gate. "At Chelsea's age I had everything planned except how to take care of a big old dog. Knew I was headed for the White House detail. Knew if the Secret Service didn't work out what I would do instead. What was that, anyway? Oh, yeah. Crack the corporate glass ceiling. Don't think I couldn't have done it."

"Let's go back now. I'm tired." Moffu seemed more interested in a signpost smell where the paths crossed. She sniffed blindly into the branches of a purple and green thistley bush, recoiled as the vegetation spiked her inquiring nose.

"We can stop here for a minute," Peggy allowed. "Why don't you rest while I make a quick call." Well. I could get another job and I can get another puppy. Peggy pulled her telephone out of her knapsack and hit the dialing directory. "This is Peggy Ames," she told the girl. "I just wanted to be sure you could reach me. Right. Okay. Peter Miller is. But call me anyway if anything unusual happens." She folded the instrument and pushed it back to the bottom of the bag, registering the heavy presence of the holstered pistol as her hand traversed the distance.

The part of the walk that Peggy liked best was ahead. The steep stretch of rutted road seemed harder for Moffu, but after they emerged from the dappled shade of oak trees they found themselves angling toward the bare sky at an easier slope. Below them the southern reaches of Palo Alto and Mountain View, the Silicon Valley, edged the bottom of San Francisco Bay.

It gave you a funny feeling the way that the empty hillside contrasted with the sprawl below. Like so much of California itself, a once overmastered humanity rising to the challenge of nature. "It must have been beautiful when there was nothing here," Peggy told Moffu. And smiled as she patted the old dog's back. It was a phrase that several million state residents had spoken at least once, she felt sure.

When they came around the hairpin in the road that led to the highest slope of the hill, Peggy stopped again and let Moffu rest some more. She pulled the water bottle from the pack and took a small squirt, dribbling more liquid down within reach of the dog's eager tongue. It was getting hotter as the sun rose high.

Now they faced west, toward the radio astronomy installations that Stanford had littered across the landscape in the days of big science. Today the greatest threat to the virgin landscape was student housing. The big dish tilted toward some galactic source, the smaller equipment arrays pointed upwards to the afternoon sun.

Peggy had heard that Sally Ride, the first U.S woman astronaut, had run these hills when she had been teaching at Stanford years ago. Someone to look up to. She wondered how it must be for Chelsea, to have the heroes of your life so omnipresent, yet so obviously tarnished.

How did they go about picking the interns in the White House these days anyway? Monica Lewinsky? Peggy had never met her but she didn't seem either very pretty or very smart. Well, maybe that was the moral of the story. If there were any morals to the story.

"I'm tired," Moffu repeated. She laid down facing the way they had come.

"Well, I don't blame you a bit," Peggy agreed. It had been a mistake to make Moffu climb such a steep hill. There would be no need to complete the full circle to the far side of the campus. In a few minutes they would go back to the car, back to the house, and she would try again to make the dog swallow her ration of pills. She dropped the leash and slid down beside Moffu, cherishing the dog's close presence.

The moment was pierced by a thin electronic chirp, and Peggy reached without thinking into her bag again, irritated as much by her conditioned response as by the interruption. "What's up?" she asked harshly. It was work.

"There's been an explosion on campus. Mr. Miller asked that you be contacted. They're moving her to one of the collection points"

"Which one?" It could mean anything. Peggy was on her feet, spinning around to look at the red-roofed campus, the tinny instrument pressed hard to her ear, a finger pushing the other ear closed so she could concentrate. "What's her location?"

"Twenty-three." That would be three-o'clock from the imaginary line that ran straight west through the university, 200 yards out from the Hoover tower. Right. Chelsea would be in Anthropology.

"Was it a bomb? What kind? Was there damage?" She looked down, thought she could see something, smoke or motion in the foreshortened cluster of buildings that lined El Camino Real. No sign of emergency vehicles yet.

""Eighty-seven. One of the athletic buildings. We don't know for sure yet, but we don't think so. Shouldn't be a problem, Mr. Miller said. But he told me to call you."

It didn't add up, not if he was moving her. "Tell Miller to call me back. Tell him inside three minutes. Tell him not to do anything until he talks to me." If, hypothetically, it was some kind of far-right action then a bomb might be a way to flush Chelsea and the Secret Service into a more exposed position. Otherwise, why blow up something that lay between the classroom and the house?

Peggy clipped the phone shut and put it back in the bag. She pulled the gun out, snapping it open, checking the rounds. Moffu looked at the weapon warily. "Are you going to shoot that thing again?"

"Moffu, listen. Chelsea is in danger. I'm going to have to go on ahead. You'll be all right. I'll leave you the water. Someone will come to take you back home."

Miller still hadn't called. The stupid fuck-up. He thought he was some kind of super agent ever since Ken Starr had told him what he was really doing while he picked his nose in the west wing.

Peggy held the water bottle out to the dog again, but Moffu didn't respond. "Come on, doggy. For me."

She could hear a whine of high tension deep in her ears. "Be ready for nothing, be ready for everything," she murmured to herself.

"I'm ready now." Moffu struggled back to her feet, dragging the untended leash as she resumed the uphill course.

"I'm sorry, Moffu." Peggy waved her hands in helpless despair. "This time you can't go." She leaned forward and took up the leather strap, looking around. There was a square cyclone fenced enclosure around the base of a radio mast a few dozen yards away. "This way, girl."

Peggy unhooked the clip from Moffu's collar and pushed it through the fence, through the looped handle of the leash. "I'll be back as soon as I can," she promised. She tipped Moffu's head back, tried to pry her jaws open with the fingers of one hand while she aimed the squirt bottle with the other. If the old dog had ever really spoken before, she was close-mouthed now. Moffu allowed her pink and black gums to be exposed but kept her teeth stubbornly together.

Finally Peggy gave up. She found a depression in the cement pad and unscrewed the cap of the bottle, pouring a small puddle of fluid into it. "Drink, Moffu."

The phone had still not sounded.

"I should just…kill her." Peggy thought in desperation. "So she won't suffer any more." The thought was stupid and shocking. "Moffu. Stay here." She shrugged her arms through the straps of the knapsack.

"I love you, Moffu," she said. The dog did not reply. She had not moved when Peggy turned a hundred yards on, running backwards and away.

They had walked far enough that Peggy thought it was a better call to try to head for the campus on foot rather than return to the Volvo and drive. Just barely. She felt her body strain as it tried to ratify her decision, legs carrying her windmilling arms down the road where it crossed a dry draw, slowing unbearably as she crawled up the far slope. The crow never flies uphill.

She was gasping unexpectedly, as though she was short of breath or something. She came abreast of the big radio dish, wondering how she would be able to make it all the way. She was grateful when the phone slung in the bag behind her back finally sounded. It was Miller, finally.

"We're on our way to the airport. Estimated thirty-five minutes. I have clearances for a flight-plan to DC. Highway Patrol is going to run a break through San Mateo. We'll get you on a commercial flight this evening." The agent's voice was cocky, decisive. She could hear a babble of voices behind him.

"Wait, Miller." Peggy tried to think. "It's a bomb? What do we know about it?"

"Something exploded. Over by athletics. Don't know what it is yet, but I'm calling a scram. It's between us and home base."

"That's what I'm thinking. It could be nothing or it could be a mousetrap. Miller, you need more intelligence. Don't move until I get there and we can figure out what's going on. Dig in, secure the building and let the situation stabilize. Have you hardened your perimeter yet?"

"Uhn-uh. You're TDY, Agent Ames. I'm calling this one. We're out of here. Chelsea's freaked now. We need to get into the air." Miller was purposely not answering her question. "Just a minute, please, miss." Peggy could hear Chelsea's voice behind him.

"Mr. Miller. Mr. Miller. What's going on? Who's that you're talking to?"

"I'm trying to find out, ma'am." Miller said away from the phone. "I'm going to have to ask you to calm down, please, ma'am."

"I'm calm, Mr. Miller. I just want to know what the fuck's going on!" Chelsea's voice was scathing, even from a mile and a half away. "We really need to decide how to avoid this kind of thing in the future. A bunch of yahoos bursting in on my class pointing guns at people and getting everyone stirred up. It's so embarrassing. I want it to stop."

"Miller!" Peggy shouted into the phone. "Let me talk to her." One way or another Miller was determined to screw it up. Either by walking them into a crossfire or by undermining the confidence of the first family.

"Chelsea, this is Peggy Ames. Fine, thank you. Chelsea, Agent Miller has identified a threat on campus. This is not a drill. You need to do whatever he tells you. Do you understand? Good."

"I'll be there as soon as I can. Agent Miller is going to keep the detail there until he's sure it's safe, and then we'll be heading to the airport and on back to DC. It's almost the weekend anyway. Are there any clothes or study materials you need from home? Okay, we'll have someone pick that stuff up."

She could see the traffic on Junipero Serra now. But she needed to hang up and get moving. "Get that security sphere in place," she ordered Miller. "I'll be there inside of fifteen minutes. Get someone over to the house to pick up Chelsea's things. Oh. And Miller. I need a favor. I had to leave Moffu up here on the hill. Send someone up here to fetch her."

"Jesus Christ," Miller exploded. "You and that silly dog. Where the hell have you been today, anyway? Did you sign on permanent, or is this all some kind of part-time internship for you?"

"Miller…" Peggy said warningly. "Moffu's old, all right? She's sick. I had to take the day off to spend time with her. I'll be there in less than ten minutes."

"We'll take care of everything," Miller agreed shortly. He cut the connection, leaving Peggy looking blankly at the instrument unfolded in her hand. She wouldn't look back again. Instead she replaced the phone in the outside pocket of the knapsack and pulled the tabbed straps deliberately tight against her shoulders. ‘ssssss…" she said through her nose. She let her vision fix on the rock-studded path thirty feet ahead of her, pumped up into a long merciless stride.

She must have looked like some robot. Maybe the female version of Arnold Schwartzenegger's terminator. Later Peggy found she could picture almost nothing beyond the shocked expression on the faces of the couple she encountered at the base of the hill. The man looking uncomprehendingly at the contact card she shoved into his grasp, the woman nodding dumbly at Peggy's hurried explanation. "Emergency. Can't stop. Dog tied to fence." She knew she wasn't being clear, but there was no time. No time.

Miller was right. And Moffu, even old and infirm, would surely have agreed. There was no excuse for Peggy's absence. Anyone else would have been on station or on call when there was a breaking event like this. "I was only doing it for you," she protested.

She knew what they called her behind her back. The dog lady. As if she had ever had any choice. "You were doing it for yourself," she heard Moffu's answer ring in her ears.

The downhill slope propelled her into a sprint and she shot across the expressway, her arm raised, palm out, pressing the oncoming cars to a halt, scissoring over the curb at the far side. Everything was so much further than she remembered.

Somewhere far ahead and to the right she could hear the wail of emergency vehicles ahead. An ambulance. Now the Stanford campus had become arrayed like an obstacle course, the brick buildings barriers, each walkway and service road a potential cul-de-sac. All drawing her away from Chelsea and the anthro building.

"Miller, I'm outside the gym now. There's no external damage. It looks like a false alarm, after all. They're bringing out one of the campus workers on a stretcher. He's sitting up and talking to them. It looks like some kind of minor accident."

There was a long electronic silence. Peggy's beating heart stopped to listen. "A little late for that," Miller said remotely. "We're in the can."

"I told you to wait. Goddammit. I told you not to move."

"I told you I was in charge. You said yourself it felt like a mousetrap. We did the right thing."

"We'll find that out later," Peggy snapped. "Let me talk to Chelsea again."

"No." And once again she was holding a lifeless phone.

It turned out that the man who had been pulled out of the facilities room had been welding up the seam on a fuel tank for his weekend fishing boat. "No gas in that tank for two years or more," he kept saying.

Did they know that? "I want a picture of the boat," Peggy told the team. "Check the guy out anyway. Check out his kids and his brother-in-law." After an hour she went on over to the anthro building where Chelsea had been in lecture with 75 other students. "Was anyone here here when they moved Chelsea out?" she asked in a big voice. There were a couple of class-members still hanging around. "Would you mind having a word with our de-briefing officer?" Details. And with the word a shock of steel guilt ran stiff up Peggy's spine. "Oh my God."

"Did they find my dog up on the hill?" she asked the girl in operations. "Miller said he was going to send someone up. Okay. Thanks anyway."

"Can someone give me a ride?" Moffu would never be able to forgive her. The Secret Service agent who drove her up to the base of the hill started to get out of the car when she did, but Peggy waved him back into the vehicle. "My own car's right there," she said. "We'll be fine."

There was a crusted star of evaporation where she had poured the water. The leash was still threaded through the cyclone fence. But there was no old dog attached. This time Moffu had not waited. "You said someone would come." Alone, looking out on the same vista that had seemed so soothing earlier, Peggy cried.

There was no way the Secret Service could help her now. "Moffu!" She shouted down the southward slope, stopped and waited for a response. In years past you could expect a dog that had heard a far off call to come to you, but after they were old and sick you didn't know any more. Peggy wondered whether she should move or stay still, decided to move anyway, knowing with complete certainty it was the wrong decision. She walked as far as the radio dish, calling downhill into every valley and slope, straining to see meaning in the underbrush that lined the drainages.

How can my job be worth having if it forces me to abandon my oldest friend? What good is loyalty if it isn't returned? She would have to figure out a way to locate the couple she had passed on the way down, post signs at every entrance. But what if no one had taken Moffu? Could she have worked her own way free somehow? The questions pounded forth endlessly, unchecked and unanswered.

Afternoon shadows had slipped across the hillsides, bringing darkness to match her gloom. When Peggy could no longer see she gave up and trudged down the asphalt track to her car across the expressway. There was no dog there either, no note on the windshield. She creaked the Volvo home, looking everywhere

She didn't expect the dog to have returned to the house, and Moffu was not there. Why would you go back to a person who had let you down like she had? No, it was clear Moffu was gone for good. She would have sensed Peggy's traitorous thoughts, accepted the need to take her own path. By now she could be anywhere. Peggy fought the impulse to get back in the car, drive out to 280, intercept the old white dog trying stubbornly to make it across against traffic.

"Mom? Are you there? Pick up if you are. Mom, Moffu's gone. I don't know what to do. I had to leave her out in the countryside and when I got back she had run away." Peggy stopped talking and hung up the phone as the message ended and recording began. Well. Fine. No problem. She would ditch the government job, start working as a security consultant. Make her living shielding rock stars and South American dictators from their friends and enemies. Why not cash in for once?

Maybe losing Moffu was the best thing that had happened to her. It was the dog's last, wise counsel. Time for her to grow up, finally. Peggy wandered through the emptiness of her rented house, folding a newspaper she had somehow left open on the breakfast table, adjusting the lights and turning the television on and then back off. There was nothing really keeping her here. She could be gone in a matter of days. She turned on the computer, wrote a short, terse e-mail, a letter of resignation. She would follow up with a note to Chelsea tomorrow. It felt good to make things final.

She remembered suddenly that she had promised to gather Chelsea's study materials. She called in, scheduled a courier pickup, and walked the narrow brick pathway to the student's apartment behind the house, waving the surveillance team back.

Moffu was stretched across the sisal doormat, in the shadow of the columned porch. She turned an eye to Peggy as she came up the steps.

"Is Chelsea okay? I came as fast as I could."