Swap Out!

by M. L. Buchman

Jeffrey, you did something amazing here. Terrifying, but amazing. Now, if you’d only followed it outside the box. The problem was not how to hide your soil emulsifier, but rather, how to control its dosage and its secret. Yes, it’s the old “poison is in the dose” adage. Too much is a weapon of devastating potential. But the right amount is a cure.

  How do they control the morphine dose for a hospital patient? A little drip that can’t go past a very low, preset limit.

  Look at the back of this file. I figured out how to incorporate your emulsifier into my drought-resistant plants. It only works for the reach of the plant’s own root system. When the plant dies the emulsifier degrades. The soil will turn back into dust in ninety days unless it’s replanted.

  Cycle the crops with our special seeds, and you have healthy, drought-resistant, wind-resistant farming. And you can’t back engineer this little chemical factory. How you unraveled that bit of Mother Nature’s tragic magic is one of the greatest dumb luck leaps I’ve ever seen, and I don’t care how good you were.

  If you doubt me about how well it works, check out the test fields listed. There are over thirty of them. Don’t worry. Not a single minute of the actual design work was done by anyone except me.

  Why get you back in the picture?

  First, it’s your tragic magic, buddy boy. It should be yours to make the final decision on.

  Second, ask Amanda about her secret vice. On second thought, don’t. She’s far too good at keeping secrets. She has an archive recording of every single show you ever made. Every one. From the Pillsbury Bake-Off on up.

  Third, you need family, buddy, always did.

  And last, well, I hope she’s sitting there with you, our little Ashlyn needs family, too. Though you may have a chore convincing her of that.

  All the best, and Jeffie, remember that there but for the noodles go I.

  Phillip

  CHAPTER 106

  Identifying the helicopter still bothered Stephen Richards. He had the photo up on his wall screen. It was smeared from the speed of the helicopter, wobbly from Anders’ unsteady hand, and all the problems of a low-resolution, cell phone camera at dusk. Even with computer enhancement, you couldn’t tell exactly what it was. No more than they’d been able to identify it by its shadow against the Chicago nighttime traffic. Similar, but that’s as close as it went. It was similar to a canceled Skunkworks project, but those two craft had been accounted for, visually checked. Mark Anders had been his best aviation craft expert but probably wasn’t in a mood to be helpful.

  There was something lethal about the machine and Mark was lucky to have survived. It had landed on the Aon Center in Chicago and two men had died. A full Alpha team of twelve men had disappeared in the wheat fields of Ohio, only to turn up on the roof of the Columbus Dispatch’s newspaper building, at least bits and pieces of them. He’d found out there was a note that they deserved a hero’s burial for dying in the service of their country. It was going to be a hell of a headline.

  Maybe there were some things that weren’t worth pursuing. Maybe that helicopter was a curse on everyone who came in contact with it.

  And now he couldn’t reach Anders or Team Yankee. They’d entered the New Hampshire farm but that was the last he heard of them. It would be best if he hadn’t lost an entire second team. The people who thought they were in command were getting itchy.

  That was it.

  He’d wager the team was fine and the problem was snarled up in the mess at Special Operations Forces. Someone was blocking his orders. Once Richards found out who it was, he’d have President Tom Grant feed them their own innards. Richards had better get on the ball and reopen communications. There was a lot of work to be done and done fast.

  The plane twisted abruptly to the right.

  Stephen was nearly thrown from his chair. Would have been if the seatbelt had been on a bit looser or the wheelchair’s wheels weren’t latched properly in their grooves.

  He signaled the pilots. “What’s going on up there?”

  “Sorry, sir. We were sliding up to the refueling tanker. Then he peeled off and we almost ran into a helicopter.”

  “Well don’t do it again.”

  “Yes sir. We don—” This time they nosed down abruptly and the seatbelt cut savagely into his waist as he floated free of his chair.

  He called up for a forward view as soon as he could reach his keyboard without his arms floating up.

  “There’s nothing there.”

  “It was a second ago.” He called up the radar. Nothing in the area. “Look at your radar. We’re in clear space, captain. Do not do that again.”

  Then he saw it. Monstrous. A giant insect practically perched on the nose of his aircraft.

  The captain didn’t flinch this time. It hung like a nasty wasp, right off the nose of the plane. And the worst of it was, it was flying backwards. The pilot was staring directly at them from a hundred feet away. Nose to nose at near enough two hundred miles an hour.

  It was Mark Anders’ phantom helicopter. It had to be.

  “Captain,” he spoke softly, “get us away from that thing.” It carried a curse he didn’t wish to test.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The captain turned and twisted the controls. Up, down, sideways. The damn bug slid and dodged right with them, never moving out of the way.

  Then Richards spotted the radar. It was blank, showing clear sky.

  “Captain. Look at your radar. It is an illusion, it doesn’t exist. No one is that good a pilot. I suggest that someone is playing an optical trick on us. Fly through it.”

  “Through it, sir? It could be stealth technology. Looks strange enough to be.”

  “Damn it man, I’m sick of repeating myself every time. Fly through it.”

  The engines roared awake as they accelerated from the low speed maintained during refueling. The distance closed. The helicopter maintained its distance at first, but soon they would outrun its maximum speed, especially flying backwards of all silly circus stunts.

  They were gaining on it. It slid in with its nose held high to keep it moving backward. Soon it was so close that Stephen cowered back in his chair even though he was staring at a projection rather than his plane’s actual windshield.

  Almost there. Almost. They’d be through it in a second, though it looked damned real.

  And then it touched. He could hear the thud and feel the shudder through his chair as the helicopter skids landed on either side of nose. The forward camera showed nothing but the rivets of the underbelly and the bolts of the skid supports.

  Then inexorably, the plane shifted. He could feel the tilt in the floor, as the helicopter began to push the plane’s nose downward.

  A voice boomed out. Not over the radio, but directly through the skin of the fuselage.

  “Land this plane or I’ll land it for you, permanently.”

  An order, in the voice of a woman.

  The pilot must have waved an acknowledgment. In an instant, the helicopter was gone and the plane buffeted horribly, the top of his laptop slamming shut and nipping the ends of Stephen’s fingers as it did so.

  The pilot regained control and headed down.

  He reached for his cell phone. He had to let Tommy know. Even if he couldn’t get them out of this mess, the President must have a chance to protect himself.

  “No service.”

  They were jamming his phone. He knew there was other equipment on the plane, radios much more difficult to block. Radios that would still work. He should react, attack, maneuver, but no clear option leapt to mind. The secret was uncovered, the genie out of the bottle. That was the premise that had made the whole operation work. Tom Grant and Stephen Richards had run the country, practically run the world. But secrecy had been the key to their success.

  No longer. But Stephen Richards knew President Tom Grant and how s
mooth he was. Grant would try to find a way to pin it all on Richards so he could slide smoothly into the next four years in office, the way paved with Richards body driven into the mud if needs be. Stephen knew better than anyone Tom Grant’s lack of loyalty. So why had he been giving his?

  The thought was startling and he had no good answer. He’d always simply followed Tom, always in his shadow. Tom had found him useful, had him unravel other team’s football strategies, get him elected, get him his wife. And in return?

  Maybe Stephen was done for and maybe not. But for once he would let the cards fall where they would. For once he’d be his own man, not the President’s shadow, and he’d see what that was like.

  And either way, whoever took the fall, both or neither, the operation was exposed. It was over and done.

  He put the cell phone down, folded his hands, and watched the scene unfolding before him.

  In moments the radar showed they had entered a flying phalanx; two dozen helicopters were now flying escort on his aircraft. Stephen Richards looked one last time to the cockpit’s forward-looking camera.

  Two dozen Black Hawks. Every one with its weaponry aimed directly at his plane in case he tried to escape. SOAR had really rolled out the welcome mat to escort his downfall.

  Oddly enough, it was a relief. Enough of a relief he wondered if he’d ever stutter again.

  FIFTH COURSE

  JUST DESSERTS

  THE THIRTY-SEVENTH HOUR

  CHAPTER 107

  First Lady Lindsey Grant had never understood when people complained about the pressures of playing hostess. It came so naturally to her, perhaps it was one of those things that had been built into her genes. Her tea parties had been the hit of the Malibu Beach Progressive Preschool and her birthday parties had been every teenage girl’s dream. It wasn’t that they were extravagant, it was their perfection that wowed everyone. Each person’s welcome gift had been small, elegant, and exactly what the person wanted but didn’t know they wanted.

  And part of the joke had been that her mother was a terrible hostess. By eight years old, Lindsey was planning her parents’ corporate banker parties. By twenty-eight she orchestrated her Boston blue-blood husband’s functions as he worked his way through the Massachusetts Senate on his way to the White House.

  Tonight was no different. The British Prime Minister would remember a perfect evening at the hands of his gracious host, the President of the United States. If all went well he’d see little or none of the First Lady’s influence at work behind the scenes.

  The atmosphere had been easy to set, casual and comfortable. She’d had Mother Tina start a rowdy game of Gin Rummy with the speechwriters and a few other top-level staffers. They were laughing around the divan. Secretaries of Agriculture and Defense were interfering from the sidelines. The Minority Leader and the Speaker of the House were embroiled in a mighty battle of checkers. The retiring Vice President leaned heavily on his cane and gave advice to both sides freely which they equally freely ignored.

  Charlie, James, and Ricky were flirting with the British PM’s fiancé Felicity, the Australian supermodel. She was sassing them back as well as she was given, holding her own with the Chief of Staff, the Communications Director, and the head speech writer. They were three very smart men, not too shabby. She could get to like this woman.

  Felicity had dressed meticulously in a Vera Wang dress that took her mere physical beauty and turned it into elegance. The soft folds of corn-silk satin done in black and gray suggested but did not flaunt the woman within. Her Australian accent was a smooth surprise every time she spoke. Her quarter-dark, Aboriginal skin would have looked fake, too perfect, had not the woman behind the eyes and the smile shown through so clearly.

  And she cradled, like a newborn kitten, her gift from Lindsey, the late Richard Feynman’s personal copy of Newton’s Principia Mathematica complete with doodles down the margins. A perfect gift for a brilliant professor of astrophysics. She’d told them the gift was from her husband, but since he didn’t know what it was even after it was revealed, that secret was out. Lindsey was crowing inside even as she’d insisted it was no effort at all.

  No word had leaked out about her divorce filing. For twenty-four hours it had stayed quiet, but it would probably break tomorrow. She definitely wanted to be around to see her husband’s expression when that happened.

  The President and Prime Minister William Masters were arguing about the advantages of American football versus rugby. William had played scrum-half and her husband, funny, she didn’t even think of him by name anymore, was his own college’s star quarterback.

  She’d started them into a debate on whether the evolution of football’s quarterback from rugby’s scrum-half had, in this case, created an improvement. However passionate the PM was about the superiority of rugby, he still tightly held the football signed to him by the entire team of last season’s Super Bowl-winning Washington Redskins. This gift her husband understood, but would never have thought to give.

  The balance was good. The feel of the evening’s flow was building nicely. Thirty minutes until the procession and dinner, she’d tucked some nice surprises in there as well. Tonight would be smooth. The President was a master of the one-on-one and that’s what this night was all about. He’d wanted to talk about the China issue, but she’d convinced him that the PM was here to show his lady the perks of marrying him, not to discuss politics. Keep it fun, keep it light, then everything else would fall into place.

  The phone in the pocket of her Versace jacket vibrated once. It took all her control to not jump in response. There was no second ring.

  Once she was sure that no external change would show, she sipped her chilled Harp Lager, the only beer at this event, and considered. Should she go and meet her latest guests elsewhere? Her absence might be noted after more than two or three minutes.

  But that was not the request Amanda Peterson had made. The last time they’d spoken, Amanda had been putting Clarice on the helicopter to Pease Hospital. She’d asked Lindsey as First Lady to grant Amanda passage to the residence. Lindsey had slowly unraveled most of why, but she didn’t have it all yet.

  “Three passes at the gate, cleared to the residence. Mr. and Mrs. Carr. Daughter Bethany.”

  And it was easy to guess that one of the passes was for Amanda, another for her daughter Shelley, though impossible to believe. Who “Mr. Carr” might be was the greatest puzzle. Unless it was the chef?

  Patience.

  Amanda and Phillip had led her through the subtleties of political nuance many times, as they had made her their spokesperson for change: pro-environment and pro-people. They had made her the voice of the renewable-energy generation and the spokeswoman for several stunning disease control strategies. EMS had allowed her to be the voice that called for the death knell of three of the most insidious forms of cancer.

  She owed EMS and Amanda. She would greet them as they entered and let come what may.

  CHAPTER 108

  Jeff had not worn a tuxedo in a dozen years, not since his disastrous first day of wedded hell. And he’d sworn he never would again.

  Yet with Mandy on one arm and Ashlyn on the other, how could he resist? Especially when crashing a party at the White House.

  Not that anyone would be looking at him.

  Mandy had chosen a perfectly-tailored black sheath dress with a delicate sash of white chiffon accenting her trim waist. A single string of her grandmother’s pearls had been all the adornment necessary to make her glow.

  Shelley was statuesque in shoulderless, sleeveless, skin-tight red. She’d fought it every inch of the way toward the mirror, and then acquiesced in a moment. The dimpled smile, one he remembered so well on a much younger girl, had lit the room. Her last complaint of having nowhere to hide a weapon was wiped away by a reminder that if she tried to bring a weapon into the White House, Mandy would kill her, right after th
e Secret Service was done with her. Her abundant curls, though gathered up, had escaped to form a cloud about her face.

  If that Bobby Stenman were here, he’d be even more stunned than when Shelley had finally landed the Comanche and climbed down to check on Clarice. He’d been rendered speechless as he watched her check her friend and her mother. This red-clad beauty at a reception in the President’s private residence would definitely blow the Lieutenant’s circuit breakers.

  Jeff knew why they were here, as “Mr. and Mrs. Carr and daughter Bethany,” and it gave him the willies. The only way he managed was some inner male need, that Mandy had insisted on pointing out to him, to protect his frail female companions. Being conscious of his male conceit did not make it more palatable to his ego. Ashlyn had offered to take him through the hand-to-hand combat course in the silo to demonstrate precisely which of them was frail.

  Maybe he’d concentrate on protecting Mandy.

  Two immaculately-attired footmen awaited them when they stepped off the elevator at the head of the marble staircase. The footmen inspected their invitations with a degree of care that struck him as more than necessary. They’d already been through this twice at the main gate and the front entry.

  He glanced at Ashlyn and she nodded infinitesimally. This was a Secret Service detail, the very best of the best she’d informed him. He drew himself up wondering if he looked even remotely like a respectable citizen who wouldn’t be voting for the other guy. Mandy patted his hand where their arms were tucked together.

  Relax. Right. That had been her main instruction. It was out of his hands now. He had a role, but the lead was not his. His was a minor part in tonight’s pending drama, though crucial to the moment.

  If he was right. Please let him be right.

  They swept forward together, though he hadn’t noticed any signal to start moving. He barely noticed his limp as they entered the central living room.

  “We overdressed, mother. I told you so.” Ashlyn hissed out through gritted teeth.