“How did I get so lucky as to marry you?” Clark tugged at the corner of the towel that she’d rolled tight above her breasts. A towel that barely reached past her crotch. The Secret Service agents’ consistent indifference was getting annoying.
“Do you want me to tell you?” She kept an arm at her side, trapping the tucked-in end to tease him. Clark smiled as he slid a hand down to her hip.
“Yes,” he nuzzled her breast just above the towel’s line while his free hand slipped under the towel’s lower edge.
“The truth?” she dug her fingers into his hair, knowing how much he liked that.
“Yes,” he groaned into her cleavage as she guided him there.
She was half tempted to do precisely that.
Clarissa had not started sleeping with him to get promoted to being the youngest CIA department head and finally the youngest CIA director in history. That she was fully capable of doing on her own.
She’d done it to make sure that no one else took advantage of the possibility. He’d been far too vulnerable after his wife’s death, so when the opportunity arose, she took him as a lover to block the bitch from the East Asia Desk. As if. Clark liked built, athletic blondes, not narrow-hipped, analyst brunettes—even cutthroat ones.
And she’d—
The hand from below and mouth from above finally freed the towel. She let it slide off one breast but not the other, forcing him to more effort to fully expose her.
—married him because he was the absolute best chance for her own path to the White House. If she was going to fix the world, she needed the Oval Office. She’d start by smearing the Russians and the Chinese right off the face of the planet. It wouldn’t even take a war to do it. She had all the plans, just not the power to implement them.
“You got me…” she arched her chest against him because he was definitely a breast man, “…because I couldn’t help myself, Clark. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you.” At least the second part was true: he was obviously useful. That he’d eventually been trainable to being one of her better lovers was a surprising perk.
“Really?” That stopped him long enough to look her in the face.
She dumped another scoop of water onto the rocks. The flash of steam made the sweat slick on their skin. She knew Clark’s weaknesses.
“Really. But you were still married then, so I had to wait.”
“Yes. Poor—”
“Shh,” she tugged his face back to her breast. “Don’t think about her, think about this instead.”
“You always take care of me, Clarissa.”
“Always, honey.” She dumped a final cup of water to steam on the rocks, then lay back on the wooden bench, knowing her body would glisten.
He knelt on the wooden floor and rested his cheek on her stomach. But she could tell he was hesitating. In the early days he’d only been interested in sex, but she’d slowly trained him that this was the time to talk about his day, especially what he’d heard from others.
“Is there a problem with the governors?”
She felt his slight headshake.
“What is it, honey?”
“I was just thinking about a phone call from Sarah.”
It took her a moment to remember that Sarah was the new National Security Advisor, not some unknown lover. If she kept herself on a tight leash, then goddamn it, Clark would as well.
He began turning his attention to her body.
“What did she want?”
Clark traced a finger around and around her breast, slowly circling inward as if he was still a teenage boy testing the limits of what he could get away with. It was annoying, but she’d learned that preemptively moving his hand onto her breast broke the moment. She let him have his play.
“Anything interesting?”
“Yes, actually. Roy is considering a realignment of Middle East policy along the lines I’ve been suggesting.”
“That’s wonderful news.”
He hummed happily, “I thought so, but I wanted your opinion on it. I gave them several basic scenarios, but I thought you and I could work those to make them more serviceable. It’s time we stopped being so short-sighted in Southwest Asia.”
“Anytime, honey.” And if she didn’t need the bastard to get her into the White House, she’d break his stupid neck right here!
As he moved his mouth to follow his hands to her chest, she fought to control her rage.
Now it all made sense—a terrible and awful type of sense.
When she’d become the D/CIA last year and studied asset allocation throughout the Middle East, it had no discernable pattern.
Clark had been shifting deep-cover assets for years, the kind that couldn’t be replaced quickly, because he was so fucking naive. He only wanted to neutralize America’s enemies—as if that was possible—not understanding that they needed to be destroyed!
A decade ago, the big three powers of the region had been in place, so ready to be aligned with the US until—
Had that been partly Clark’s doing?
The Arab Spring had been botched in Egypt, breaking the US foothold there.
He latched his mouth on her like a suckling child trying to drain her life energy.
Turkey’s “duly elected” dictator had slowly soured on the US to such an extent that the only easy solution at this point would be a nuke up his ass. Maybe not literally, but the asshole really did need that.
Clark slid his hand down between her legs to cup her hard.
The last superpower, at least by fucking lame Middle East standards, were the Saudis.
And Clark wanted to give them up, too!
Clarissa latched her hands on the edges of the wooden bench to keep from clawing at him.
She needed the power.
His desperate need to feed his ego by changing everything that worked.
She needed the Oval Office.
He ravaged her body with his mouth and hands as if he could control her too.
She drove against him to prove her power to defy him.
“God, Clarissa! You’re incredible!” He gasped it out, then redoubled his efforts.
If her release could destroy him, let it!
It blasted through her as powerfully as the time she’d first understood that Clark Winston was her path to true power—to the White House—while she’d fucked him in the D/CIA’s chair.
She had to remember that she needed him.
Clarissa curled up her body so that Clark would think he’d overwhelmed her and wouldn’t try for intercourse as well. It wasn’t hard to fake; he’d become an exceptionally fine lover.
Not today though. She didn’t know if she could keep herself from harming him today.
Tomorrow she’d be calmer. By then she’d have a plan to fix this.
Because Vice President Clark Winston was her path to the White House.
But once she was in, his days were definitely numbered.
That completely clarified her path.
First Lady wasn’t acceptable.
She had to be Vice President so that she could step in when he had…a brutal heart attack?
Twenty-one months to Inauguration Day.
And when Clark’s heart failed, she would have the nation’s and Congress’ sympathy and could drive through her agenda before they had a clue what hit them.
“I like that smile,” Clark kissed her and looked terribly pleased with himself for granting her such intense satiation.
Twenty-one months.
No, nineteen months until Election Day. Once they both won…
14
Taz woke before Jeremy, but the exhaustion still rippled through her as she stayed nestled in his arms. She’d never had a lover who was a cuddler, even in their sleep. It made her want to laugh at the strangeness and laugh again at how good it felt.
She risked opening one eye. The orange glow around the edges of the window curtains said that dawn was fast approaching.
The team house had become a h
ome, of sorts. Ten minutes from the Tacoma office, it overlooked the waterfront at Gig Harbor in southern Puget Sound. Mike and Holly shared one room, she and Jeremy another. Andi had the one that used to be Holly’s, and Miranda occasionally stayed on the spare bed.
Not last night. The very second that Andi had landed the helicopter outside the Tacoma hangar, Miranda had raced to the Mooney M20V prop plane and disappeared back to her island as if the Devil was after her ass. She’d been in such a rush that she hadn’t even said goodnight to anyone.
Something must have been really pressuring her autism during the investigation at the opera house, though Taz had no idea what. Yet another thing she should have kept track of.
Taz had thought she was ready to lead an investigation team, even through Jeremy, but she wasn’t. Never before had she really appreciated what happened on Miranda’s team.
Having everyone acting only when asked had exposed just how complex an operation even a simple investigation was.
She’d been run ragged, both mentally and physically, trying to cover all the points that Miranda and the others did through instinct or ingrained practice.
Her boyo had neither of those and was a long, long way from running a team on his own. Especially at Miranda’s level. The Cessna 208 Caravan in the opera house was trivial compared to her typical specialty in military crashes.
Her boyo?
They’d been lovers ever since her resurrection from the supposedly dead. For three months she’d let herself drift along with him. That’s all she typically did in a relationship anyway.
The work was fascinating. She’d spent a career striving to get military aircraft built to spec—which she usually managed—and somewhere near budget—which never happened.
Now Miranda had given her a chance to see the million ways aircraft could break and to understand how they worked.
The problem was Taz had no idea how she herself worked. Browbeating a defense contractor or humiliating an avaricious flag officer were skills she understood.
But at the opera house crash site, she’d been on the hop all yesterday trying to create cooperation. Trying to build a team—rather than find its weakest link and break it, which had been her typical assignment for General Martinez.
And it nearly had broken the weakest link—Vicki Tasia Flores, the Taser, “Taz” Cortez. Changing back to her birth name had altered nothing.
She had no practice being the weakest link. Jeremy’s skills were…breathtaking. In hours he’d ferreted out the cause of the Caravan’s crash.
She kissed his shoulder and rested her head there without waking him.
The answer hadn’t been aboard when he did his inspection, yet he’d found it.
There was nothing wrong with the plane.
The pilot had made no mistake.
Jeremy had found the answer in that nothing was wrong. Even while perched destroyed on the opera house grid.
Two of the passengers sitting in the cabin had recorded the crash on their smartphones. Everyone had studied the feed that showed the pilot’s action in detail, playing it over and over, trying to interpret his actions.
The only words captured were, “Pull up! Pull up!”
But the pilot’s profile showed it wasn’t him doing the yelling. In the entire ninety-seven seconds of flight—from Boeing Field, then up and over downtown Seattle—he remained calm and controlled. No obvious problem until the last fifteen seconds.
And until the very last second, he’d been working the problem.
It was the second video that had revealed what that problem was.
The second passenger, seated on the opposite side of the rear cabin, had clearly been panicked. Their camera control was much poorer, swinging chaotically in ways that the plane’s motion didn’t warrant.
Most of it was a useless blur.
But Jeremy had found three frames, each several seconds apart that, when combined, had explained the crash.
The Cessna 208 Caravan was FAA-certified for one pilot and nine passengers. It had eleven seats. One passenger could either sit in the cabin or in the copilot’s seat.
A passenger had sat in the forward seat.
They had carefully tucked their carry-on by their feet and trapped it to the side with their knee. Just after takeoff, the passenger had pulled it out to retrieve his own camera and then tucked his carry-on back down. In doing so, he’d also snagged its slender strap over the steering column.
The pilot’s and copilot’s steering wheels were physically linked to move together—exactly the mechanism Jeremy had been inspecting while lying upside-down in the pilot’s seat.
But with the strap trapped by the passenger’s foot, it had pinned the steering wheel forward.
The frames showed in succession the increasing strain as the passenger became more and more panicked and braced his foot and leg harder and harder against the strap.
A blurred fourth frame revealed the knapsack, floating free, untangled, then flying out the missing windshield as the opera house grid’s rope lines had abruptly arrested the airplane’s flight after smashing through the tower’s side wall.
The pilot’s efforts to pull back on the wheel enough to climb safely had been fruitless.
Jeremy had explained, “Once I confirmed the elevators were still functional even after the crash, and I heard no failure of the engine in the two camera-phone recordings, I kept thinking about that crash in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.”
“The C-130J Super Hercules on October 2nd, 2015,” Miranda had nodded with an “of course” tone.
Mike and Holly had both looked as confused as she was, but Andi had nodded as well.
“I was there at the time. The pilot propped a night-vision goggle case behind the steering wheel to keep the tail section’s big elevator flap raised to help the crew to offload his cargo. They departed at night and never saw that the case was still resting there on takeoff. They couldn’t push in the wheel to descend.”
“Exactly,” Jeremy had declared. “The Caravan’s pilot couldn’t pull the wheel out to level the flight. Yet he’d know that the plane had been fine a minute earlier as he’d just departed the airfield requiring exactly the same action. His front-seat passenger changed that in mid climb-out directly over downtown Seattle with the strap of his knapsack. He killed them both.”
It seemed so simple in retrospect, lying here with Jeremy’s arm curled around her waist as he snored quietly in her ear.
Yet in order to solve the Caravan crash yesterday, it had taken coordination with hospitals, taxi services who had taken several people home, and getting an airline to delay a departure until they were able to interview the passenger who’d had the raw nerve to want to fly home on a different carrier the same day.
The tasks had been endless. Evidence gathering and tagging. Interview coordination of the flight-line technicians at Boeing Field. Tracking down the plane’s service log. The constant hectoring by the Opera House staff about the removal of the plane and granting structural engineers access to assess the damage.
And as much as she’d hated to do it to him, she’d made sure that Jeremy was at least aware of every single step that the team did.
After the day was all done and they’d crawled exhausted back to the team house, she’d been ready to curl up under the covers. But when she came out of the shower, Jeremy had been sitting cross-legged on their bed typing furiously on his laptop.
Together they’d gone over every step of the investigation, creating a spreadsheet guide to future investigations.
If Jeremy was anything, he was tenacious.
And he’d also been tenacious about keeping her at his side these last three months. Not just as lover, but as someone he trusted.
Maybe for now that was enough.
She rested her hand over his bare belly and let herself slide back to sleep.
15
The not-quite-yet-an-association of Southern governors’ dinner had been encouraging, and had delayed her departure u
ntil past eleven.
Clarissa had carefully tested the waters about female candidates—which shouldn’t be a goddamn question, but was.
She also led others into conversations about the roles of couples in government. The governors had run with the topic, saving her from directly asking about families split across two offices. Kentucky’s husband was a federal judge in the same state. West Virginia’s wife was launching a campaign for the House of Representatives in two years.
There had also been two divorces over similar issues, one of the women claiming it was because she’d made the state senate while her husband had still been a struggling councilman. The other because his state representative wife had fallen in love with another woman.
The final tidbit that Clarissa had confirmed was that the governors of both parties were very favorable to having a woman on the ticket, if it was the right woman.
She’d ended up chatting with Arkansas’ governor at length about exactly who were the power players within the party. He did try to make himself sound more important than she knew he was, but she could write that off because he was also trying to get up the Second Lady’s skirt. As if.
Mr. Arkansas didn’t stand a chance. He’d never be repeating Bill Clinton’s path into the White House. But while he might not be a power player, he certainly knew who was.
Clarissa had taken a car from Camp David, leaving Clark protesting on the stone walkway under the maples.
An hour later, at midnight, she’d entered the lowest subbasement of the New Headquarters Building on the CIA campus at Langley, Virginia, and spent the rest of the night with the cyber twins, Harry and Heidi.
The primary signal remained uncracked by the supercomputers over at the NSA.
“It feels like Saudi Arabia,” Heidi had muttered while hunched over her console. “Why can’t I prove that?” And that had really pissed her off.
But one thing Heidi had been right about.
The chatter around it was continuing to grow…rapidly.
16
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