She’d adopted Rose’s idea for Clark. They stayed in their home, because nothing compared with the Vice President’s Victorian home…except the White House, of course. But she made the first Friday of each month an occasion with “naked chef” dinners, though the food was all catered of course, and an entire night of sex. It had become a cornerstone of their rather active sex life. For an older man, his stamina was very pleasantly impressive.
However, when Clarissa saw who was calling, she excused herself from the dinner table.
She could feel the senator eyeing her, but Miranda Chase of the NTSB was a true wild card in a world that ran best on predictability. Clarissa preferred that neither of the Ramsons overheard until she knew what this was.
Clarissa knew one thing as she locked herself in the suite’s bathroom, checked herself in the mirror, and answered the phone.
“Where’s the crash this time, Miranda?”
“There isn’t one.”
“Are you stealing another plane?” That was still a major embarrassment. Clarissa had offered only minimal support to a mission led by Miranda’s team last year. Against all odds, they proceeded to pull off one of the greatest intelligence coups in recent years, and the CIA had gotten absolutely no part of it. Everything they’d captured had been compartmentalized inside the NRO. The Director of National Intelligence had backed them up—and Clarissa got nothing.
“Not exactly. Further information is classified.”
Crap! Experience had taught her that Miranda was a true stalwart, and gave away absolutely nothing under such conditions.
“I need a passport.”
“You don’t have a passport?”
“Of course, I have a passport. I never know where a crash is going to be, or where the NTSB will need me.”
Clarissa closed her eyes for a moment. Talking to Miranda was like walking into a goddamn minefield. How many different ways could Miranda call her an idiot without ever changing her tone?
She knew about Miranda’s absurdly logical autism, which meant that none of what she said was passive-aggressive. It only felt that way—every damn time.
“You need a passport,” Clarissa approached the topic carefully.
“Yes.” Miranda didn’t say anything else. Wouldn’t think to.
“Not for you.”
“We already established that.”
Clarissa sighed. “Then for whom?”
“I need it in the name of Tasia Flores. We need it to be delivered to the FedEx terminal at Taipei Songshan Airport in eleven hours and forty-three minutes.” She then read out a social security number.
“An actual US citizen? That shouldn’t be a problem.” Damn! She didn’t have any useful agents in Taiwan at the moment. Clarissa tried to think of who she could get there fast enough to find out what was going on—and came up blank.
Her chief of station at the American Institute in Taiwan, the only semi-official diplomatic channel the US had there, was an institution. He’d been there forever, was completely reliable, and had all the subtlety of a rock. How in the hell he’d survived so long in the CIA was beyond her. Probably because Clark and the others before her couldn’t be bothered to replace him. Just as she hadn’t.
There was a whispered conversation in the background.
“Oh. It will apparently need a new photo. We’ll send you the photograph to use right now.”
Clarissa waited, but Miranda didn’t say anything else. Finally, Clarissa pulled the phone away from her ear to look at it.
Miranda had disconnected without another word.
Then her phone buzzed sharply.
Clarissa tapped to open the image—and was staring at the face of Colonel Vicki Cortez.
She had to sit down on the toilet before she fell to the delicately inlaid tile. What was it about men and sex on cold tile? Maybe Rose would know, because it certainly seemed to be a male fantasy and Rose was an expert in those.
She knew it was just shock that was sidetracking her.
Clarissa forced herself to look at the picture again.
Early in her career, when she was still a field agent, she’d crossed General JJ Martinez. He was just Air Force, after all. She was fast-tracking her way into the hierarchy of the CIA.
In response, he’d sent no note.
No report to her supervising officer—she’d been ready for that.
Instead Clarissa had received a visit from then-Lieutenant Vicki “Taser” Cortez. Not once had she raised her voice. Hadn’t said a goddamn word other than introducing herself. The little Latina looked like she was twelve and didn’t even come up to Clarissa’s armpit.
She’d been about to ask how the fuck Cortez had gotten through security at Clarissa’s CIA black site in the heart of Afghanistan.
Before she could, the Taser had pulled out a phone, snapped a photo of Clarissa faster than she could blink, tapped a few keys, then turned the phone for Clarissa to see.
It was Clarissa’s face. And she was standing in front of a torture victim. She twisted around and saw the bastard Javan’s battered face close behind her. She’d looked back at Cortez’s phone.
Clarissa’s face.
A high-profile torture victim on full display.
A simple caption: Black Site operator, CIA agent Clarissa Reese.
The address of her safe house. Even the license number of her car.
It was an e-mail, addressed to the Al Jazeera news site.
She’d be dead within hours of it being sent. Assuming her CIA bosses didn’t get to her first.
Still not saying a word, Cortez had simply turned off the phone—without sending the email—and walked away.
It was the only time in her entire career that Clarissa had stared Death directly in the face, and it looked exactly like the woman’s image now on her phone.
In Ramson’s hotel suite bathroom, Clarissa managed not to puke up the plank-grilled Pacific Northwest salmon with baby asparagus, though it roiled in her gut. Mostly she resisted because she was suddenly too weak to stand up from the toilet and face it.
Clarissa could deal with Miranda. But Taz?
She knew two things for certain.
One, Colonel Vicki Cortez was absolutely and positively dead if anyone thought to ask her.
And two, that Clarissa was going to expedite the passport for one “Tasia Flores” as fast as the CIA could manage, with no questions asked.
By the time she returned to the living room, Senator Ramson was gone.
Rose shrugged, “I think it is going to just be us ladies tonight. He was called away.”
“Did he say why?” Clarissa sat back at the table. It was always a pleasure to have some time alone with Rose Ramson. It was just what she needed tonight.
Rose sipped at her wine before replying. “He was being a little more cryptic than usual. Something about a meeting with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the President about Taiwan.”
Clarissa wished she was still in the bathroom so that she could put her head between her knees until at least some blood had returned to her brain.
54
Taz still held her intercom headset in her lap after Miranda took her picture and sent it to whoever. She turned to Mike, who slid one ear of his own headset aside and leaned close.
“How long does it take?”
“To do what?”
Taz glanced toward Miranda, “To stop underestimating her.”
Mike laughed, “The twelfth of never.”
She could believe that easily enough.
Mike’s kind of skill with people or Holly’s fighting speed could be underestimated. But, while impressive, they were the sort of skills that, once understood, ceased to dazzle.
Miranda? Maybe not so much.
Jeremy had some of that, but mostly because he was so humble that he was easy to overlook. Humble? Or maybe he simply didn’t know how good he was?
There was no question that he’d saved her life at the airshow when the thick section of bul
let-proof helicopter windshield had shattered her chair moments after he’d dragged her out of it. Yet he hadn’t said a word about it, might not even realize how exceptional his reaction had been to sweep both her and Miranda to relative safety underneath that table.
Taz caught Jeremy’s attention and tipped her head down the long cargo bay.
He didn’t get it.
She held two fingers dangling down and made a walking motion.
She could see him say, “Oh,” though she couldn’t hear it without the headset. It made everyone who was still on the intercom turn to look at him as he unbuckled, stood up, and then was almost thrown to the deck by the cord of his headset.
He carefully removed it as others laughed, then joined her.
Not a whole lot of secrets in this crowd.
They walked toward the rear of the empty cargo bay on non-slip flooring along side-by-side tracks. Between them lay a slippery surface of large ball bearings for the cargo-handling system. It was the first time they’d been alone together since the short walk from Miranda’s island hangar to her big house, and she didn’t know quite what to say.
“Thank you for saving my life.” It sounded awkward and stilted, especially as she had to practically shout it over the engine’s roar, but she didn’t know how to fix the way it came out.
“When?”
“At the airshow.”
“I did?” Then he shrugged. “Okay, you’re welcome, I guess.”
If he hadn’t done it consciously, that meant that he’d tackled her and Miranda to the ground from instinct.
“You’re a very odd man, Jeremy Trahn.”
“I’ve been told that before.” His grimace said quite how often, but she hadn’t meant it that way. She couldn’t think of how to fix that either. Nothing in Taz’s history had taught her how to deal with a “nice” person.
They reached the back wall of the cargo bay, a blank vertical surface.
Turning, they walked back toward the group.
“How does everyone know the Zhang Ru guy?”
“It was part of a classified mission, our first one with Miranda.”
“Classified?”
“Yes, everyone on this team is cleared Top Secret or better. That’s why we get the really strange military crash stuff.”
“You’re cleared Top Secret?”
Jeremy just nodded. As if that was somehow normal.
Then she looked again at the group they were approaching. Andi and Holly were both former Special Operations, so they made sense. Miranda had mentioned her parents had been in the CIA. Mike must have some strange background that she knew nothing about. And Jeremy…
“What do your parents do? Are they still alive?”
“Sure. Engineers at Microsoft. Sister, too.”
That didn’t strike her as a group that needed high levels of clearance; then she remembered some of the flight simulation software the Air Force used was written on top of Microsoft Flight Simulator, so maybe. Jeremy’s comment that he might be able to fake it and fly her away from Miranda’s island because he’d flown flight sim games so much, actually fit.
“Back to Zhang Ru.”
“I never saw him before, but I think that Miranda solved a crash for him once.”
“For a general on the Chinese Central Military Commission?” She came to a stop at the big cargo door just forward of the wing. She peeked out the tiny circular window set in the door. Nothing much to see except the sun sparkling off the Pacific Ocean. Blue. “Why was he here?”
Again a Jeremy shrug. Wherever Miranda said to go, Jeremy went without question.
She would never… Except she’d done precisely that for nineteen years for General Martinez. He’d taken her anger and honed her into a weapon.
Miranda had taken Jeremy’s…what? His passion? And honed it into…excellence?
Sure, right up to the moment when Taz had crushed it out of him aboard the Ghostrider.
He’d been Miranda’s supporting Chinook helicopter until, as Mike said, Taz had broken one of his rotor blades.
At least that was Mike’s version. Taz was less sure. She might have hurt Jeremy, but he was the one who’d solved the MH-47G Chinook’s crash at the airshow—almost as fast as it had happened.
Somehow Jeremy had…grown up.
That was it! Matured from the overeager boy she’d met, but still so reliable that Miranda utterly depended on him.
But it was as if Mike and Holly couldn’t see that.
So, Jeremy was Miranda’s right hand. Mike was her people skills. Holly and Andi, in addition to being her muscle, were her structural and rotorcraft experts.
“What the hell am I doing here?”
Jeremy quirked a half smile.
“What?”
“Well, a part of me wants to give you a real Miranda answer: You’re standing in a FedEx 767’s cargo bay.”
Taz snorted at the joke. And once she’d started to laugh, she was finding it a little hard to stop. Of all the ludicrous reasons swirling through her brain from Holly and Mike’s threats to the twenty-eight hours and nineteen minutes she’d spent with Jeremy, mostly aboard a stolen Ghostrider gunship, it was the only one that she could actually relate to.
“There’s that laugh again,” Jeremy’s smile had changed, gentled.
“What laugh?” But she knew. The one she hadn’t found until she’d joined the hotshots. “This one’s a little different, Jeremy.”
Her laugh before with Max had been a lot less close to the hysterical desperation she felt now.
“But thank you for the reminder. Every little bit helps.” She reached enough over the ball bearing track to hug him briefly, but that was too strange. Too real. She pulled back.
When it became clear that neither of them knew what to say next, they returned to their seats.
55
Jeremy donned his headset into the middle of Holly and Mike telling Miranda about Mei-Li’s information.
“I don’t understand,” Miranda spoke up. “What do we have to do with her plans to destroy either General Zhang Ru or the Central Military Commission?”
“They need to fucking go down for the things they’ve done! Purposely crashing a Chengdu J-20 is one thing, but threatening the lives of the pilot’s family to force him to do it? That’s just one of a hundred obscenities that Mei-Li told us about.” Taz’s laugh was nowhere in sight. She sounded viciously angry instead.
Jeremy was less comfortable with this version of her.
Mike made a patting motion and Taz threw herself back into her seat.
“Okay,” he offered one of his smiles. “That’s the opinion of our F-35 Lightning II fighter.”
Taz’s dark skin flushed even darker as she stared down at her clenched fists.
“Think of it this way, Miranda.” Mike turned to her and made a globe shape with his hands. “Think of your spheres of influence, except work them from the inside out.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. A crash is best understood from the outside in. Weather and terrain first. Then define the outer extent of the debris field, thus restricting the scope of the investigation. Then, only after proceeding through the debris field and the crashed aircraft itself, do we approach your specialty of human factors. That’s what makes sense.”
Mike didn’t have a quick answer.
Jeremy wondered why he would push against something they all knew so well; it was the way that Miranda had to approach a crash in order to understand it.
Oh, but not always. Jeremy remembered a few times when—
“Miranda, remember the outer meta-sphere concept. The one on which you can temporarily attach conjecture of plausible causes of a crash without confirming or discarding ideas until more facts were found to support or break the hypothesis.”
Miranda’s shrug looked more like a chill, despite the well-heated cargo space.
“I have never been comfortable with that methodology of investigation. But,” Miranda sighed, “I understand you
r meaning.”
“So,” Jeremy played with the idea for a moment, “Ah! Rather than thinking from the inside out, what if we add one more sphere?”
“Another one?”
Jeremy nodded reluctantly. “It might be useful in situations like this. What if we add a ‘Causal’ sphere? One that exists outside the bounds of the factual inner spheres or the conjectural meta-sphere.”
He could see Miranda’s frown of confusion.
How else to explain it?
Mike’s shrug said he didn’t know either.
Taz was still staring at her clenched fists. Something about Mike’s F-35 comment had really upset her. He’d likened Taz to an F-35, which didn’t seem right at all. She was…
The card game!
He yanked it out of his pocket and fanned the deck as well as he could. Not all pretty and even the way Mike would, but it was close enough.
“These are all airplanes.”
“And rotorcraft,” Andi chimed in.
“And rotorcraft,” Jeremy conceded.
“Though inside the Night Stalkers, we often refer to them as airplanes anyway. Just don’t call them choppers, those are motorcycles for riding across the American West.”
Jeremy waited to see if Andi had more to say. He hadn’t known that about rotorcraft also being called airplanes.
She flapped a hand at him to continue, but he was less sure about her smile.
“Some designs…” he paused, but Andi didn’t add anything more “…are better, some worse. Some are better at one thing than another. Have more or less crashes. And so on.”
Miranda nodded for him to continue.
“What if we had another deck? Call them…Missions for now. Like solving Zhang Ru’s Gyrfalcon crash. Stealing that satellite. Stopping Taz and General Martinez.”
Taz glanced up at him through her thick hair.
“There are even types of missions: crashes, combat, and I guess that you might call this one diplomatic. The ‘causal sphere’ is the sphere of the world out beyond the crash—but related to the crash. And we’ve just been dealt a diplomatic mission by Zhang Ru. He is effectively giving us a J-20 for reasons I don’t begin to understand. But Mei-Li’s information tells us that there’s way more behind this. I have no idea what, but it will probably be important before this is all done.”
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