Lady Liberty

by Vicki Hinze

  Maybe it was the journalist in him, the training on ethics he had learned at home and had reinforced at Marcus Gilbert’s knee. Or maybe the reason had nothing to do with journalism but everything to do with that damn spark of idealism in him that wouldn’t die. His inbred penchant for fairness, a commitment to truth, and Sam wasn’t so sure looking in the mirror without those things would be easy for any man, much less a man who still saw reflections of that fresh-faced kid he once had been.

  Whatever the reason, at this point, Sam couldn’t call Sybil Stone a traitor—or deny that she could be one. Whatever she was passing the old man in those envelopes concerned Sam and, he had to admit, intrigued him. This Dean business concerned him, too. Kenneth was away from home because he was piloting Sybil Stone’s plane. Now his family had been abducted by pros. The two events had to be connected.

  When Sniffer turned into the Herald’s parking lot, Sam decided what he had to do. “Drop me off at my car, will you?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Sam switched cars, cranked his engine, and then pulled out his phone and dialed a number he had memorized years ago. A man answered, his voice thick with sleep. “Cap, it’s me, Sam.” He stared through the windshield, wishing he had already unraveled this damn mess and knowing in his gut he had just scratched the surface. “We need to talk.”

  “Now? It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Captain Dean’s family has been abducted, it looks like your favorite politician could be involved, and she might be committing treason.”

  “But she’s dead—”

  “Is she dead? Do you have verification on that?”

  “The White House has never gone to the press on a death without verification.”

  “Does that mean they didn’t this time?”

  Cap paused. “Give me fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll be waiting.”

  The next morning he’d had a bitch of a meeting.

  Cap left the White House and got into his waiting limousine. “Back to the office, Dayton,” he told his driver, then raised the privacy glass between them. Cap had relayed Sam’s credible evidence against Sybil and the events at the Wall, but the president hadn’t reacted as Marlowe had hoped. Rather than launching an investigation, he’d scoffed. The misguided ass was bat-blind when it came to Sybil Stone, and he had been angry at Cap for merely raising the possibility of her committing treason. He hadn’t believed it or even considered it possible. But this was far from over, and whatever blinded Lance to Sybil Stone’s flaws didn’t really matter. Sam would get hard evidence of her treason and bring it to Cap. And when he did, Cap would take it public and shove the truth down Lance’s throat.

  The chat with Richard Barber hadn’t gone any better. What he’d said seemed distant and unimportant, and yet Cap sensed a warning in it that had him sweating bullets. Maybe Lance’s questions hadn’t been as innocent as they had seemed. Maybe he hadn’t believed Sybil was capable of treason, but he felt someone close to him was capable. Combining Lance’s questions and Barber’s hints, it was pretty clear that someone had breached security at A-267. Cap went stone cold. Had Lance learned about the key? Could he believe Cap had committed treason?

  He should have reported the damn thing. But he hadn’t done it then, and it was too late to do it now. Putting the key in his safe and not investigating had been a huge mistake. He had to salvage this situation before it cost him the nomination. The question was, how?

  Traffic backed up. Dayton tapped the steering wheel, watching the light and the cute brunette in a Volvo in the next lane. Cap debated, then called Austin Stone. He designed the security systems for the damn things. He would be able to tell Cap if the key was to an ICBM launch system. As soon as Barber had mentioned a terrorist attack, Cap had known the two matters—the ICBM terrorist attack and the key—were connected. Thankfully, Barber didn’t know about the key, or he would have already connected the two and Cap would be sunk.

  Austin answered the phone on the third ring. “Stone.” “I need your advice.” Traffic was moving again. “Can you meet me at my office?”

  “Sure. I’ll be right over.”

  “Thanks.” Cap disconnected the line, hoping to hell he wasn’t compounding one error with another. But finding out what the key fit was critical. God help him, it really could have come from Gregor Faust or PUSH or any of the other seventeen terrorist groups now claiming responsibility for taking down Sybil Stone’s plane.

  Cap had considered it. He had even let fear convince him that Faust, the most dangerous of the slimy bunch, had set him up, and he’d made it easy for the man to do it. But Cap hadn’t really believed it. His speculation had just been one of those worst-case scenario nightmares you weave in your mind that scares the hell out of you but is never real.

  Except for this time.

  Faust choosing Cap made perfect sense. He was slated to become president. Faust would let him—then use the key connection between them to blackmail Cap. A U.S. President with direct ties to Ballast? He’d be impeached before the ink on his arrest warrant dried.

  Clammy all over, Cap broke into a cold sweat, feeling worse than in any diabetic sugar crash he had ever suffered. How could he ever explain not reporting a key from Gregor Faust?

  This entire problem was Sybil Stone’s fault. If she had demanded her security staff do its job well, then no one would have been able to plant a bomb on her plane that could explode and there wouldn’t be this mess of the key to bury. Once again, her ineptitude had put him in a bad position. Damn her. Damn her straight to hell.

  Chapter Ten

  Friday, August 9 First-Strike Launch 40:00:00

  Hell had to be like this.

  The Florida swamp wasn’t all fire and brimstone, but it was definitely a place where those condemned to being in it suffered abject misery.

  Crashing down from an adrenaline high, Sybil stared at Westford’s back and wrung out her jacket hem, chiding herself for not sucking it up and focusing on her mission. The truth was, she was exhausted, and like everyone else, when exhausted, she gave in to moments of weariness and feeling overwhelmed. The weather wasn’t helping.

  They had walked all night, and she had insisted Jonathan take back his coat, which meant she had been soaked to the skin and chilled to the bone ever since. The persistent rain had pelted her goose bumps nonstop, and every prick stung like a stab. A couple of hours ago dawn finally had broke and ushered in muggy heat, but the rain still hadn’t stopped. Neither had the bugs. Mosquitoes and some kind of gnats constantly swarmed them. Her bites had bites. So did Westford’s, which had her thinking godawful thoughts about wicked mosquito-borne diseases, like the West Nile virus and eastern equine encephalitis.

  God, she was miserable. Tired and sore, and her poor feet would never be the same. And hungry. Good God, but she was hungry. And scared to death. Scared they wouldn’t get back to Washington in time to prevent the Code One threat from causing widespread devastation and destruction. Scared her favorite warmongers, Peris and Abdan, would leave the Grand Palace without a peace agreement, go home, and start blowing each other off the map. Scared the terrorists would find her and Westford and kill them and the briefcase would be lost in the swamp forever. And scared Westford would notice she was scared and she’d be forced to admit it out loud. He had a habit of making her look at things about herself that she’d rather not see, and once she admitted the fear out loud, it would be strong and real, and it would sink its talons into her so deeply that she’d never again draw a breath free from it.

  Don’t let it win, Sybil. You’ve beaten insurmountable odds before and you can do it again. You have to do it again. You’re responsible for their lives. You can’t let them down.

  She stiffened her spine and scanned the terrain, determined to find something that didn’t strike her as hellish. Near a creek, cranes sat perched on low-slung limbs and dipped for minnows, and on the bank, a beautiful red hibiscus bent nearly horizontal, struggling to find sun. When she retur
ned her gaze to Westford’s back, she grudgingly admitted finding the most hellish thing of all. If she had to be miserable and scared stiff—she swatted at a bug breakfasting on her forearm—couldn’t she at least be too scared to notice that she hadn’t forgotten how good a well-built man looked when he was caught in the rain and his clothes were hugging his body?

  Ridiculous, unacceptable, and damn neurotic thoughts, Sybil. This isn’t a man; it’s Westford, for God’s sake.

  The stupidity in that remark had her muffling a groan. What woman wouldn’t notice Westford? But, by God, she had been trained from the cradle to deal with extreme circumstances, and she could deal with him. Okay, so he had earned her admiration and respect, but until she was out of public office, neither of those things made him any less off-limits than any other man. She’d given the president her word. That made any and all men off-limits. Not that she wanted a man, with or without limits. Especially a man she hated liking who made her feel and see things she didn’t want to feel and see, and who got to her. After the ordeal with Austin, what woman in her right mind would want that? She wanted her career. Just her career. In it, she mattered. She made a difference. But Westford’s kisses, and him holding her… Okay, okay, she’d liked it. Hell, she’d loved it. But he was definitely off-limits; any relationship between them had disaster written all over it.

  The briefcase bumped against her thigh, a nagging reminder. She wanted her country, the people counting on her, to be safe. That’s what she had to focus on accomplishing.

  With renewed determination, she checked the sky. Dark clouds, heavy with rain, and no signs of a break. “Does it always rain here?”

  “No, we just ran into a band from the tropical storm,” Westford said without looking back. “It’s stalled out until midday. Maybe a little longer.”

  Responding to that great news with a groan she didn’t bother to muffle, she stumbled over a tree root, slipped in the slick mud, and went down on one knee.

  Westford lifted her back to her feet. “Wait.” He blocked the noise with his cupped hand at his ear. “Incoming.”

  She stopped beside him and waited, absently plucking off bits of bramble and leaves clinging to his shirt and tossing them to the ground.

  Jonathan smiled at her, and the light in his eyes was the nicest compliment she’d ever received. Swearing she wouldn’t do it, she smiled back.

  “Maybe you’ll get this. I don’t.” He deciphered then relayed a portion of the radio message.

  She deciphered it. “Cap Marlowe met with David this morning. He stepped on the seal on the floor in the Oval Office.”

  “That I got,” Jonathan said. “But what does he mean about the eagle, olive branch, and arrows?”

  “Normally the eagle’s head points to the olive branch. By Sunday, it could be changed to one where the head points to the arrows. It’s a symbol. The U.S. is at war.”

  “Cap feels we’ll be at war by Sunday” Surprise flickered over Jonathan’s face. “But how the hell could he know that?”

  “Good question. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer. Neither does David.”

  The wind picked up and communications shut down. “Maybe when the feeder band blows over he’ll have one.”

  Hoping so, she started walking.

  They moved on and soon picked up the rhythm they’d held most of the night. Walking in the dark hadn’t been easy. Only God knew what had been out there walking with them. At least during the day, she could see what she was stumbling over and what was about to attack her. That planted second thoughts in her mind. Maybe the darkness had been a blessing.

  “How are your feet holding up?”

  They hurt like hell. Bruised, scraped, and cut from sharp stones and twigs and roots, and some kind of little round stickers that kept poking through Westford’s socks and jabbing into her soles. “We can’t stop anymore. We’ve got less than forty hours.” She avoided mentioning her mincemeat feet. He’d insist on carrying her, and she knew by the set of his shoulder, he had been hurt more than he had admitted in his parachuteless landing. “As soon as we get the Code One resolved, I’m going to take a luscious hot shower and then soak in a bath for a sinfully long time.” Until every muscle in her body stopped burning and she didn’t feel boneless any more. Maybe then she wouldn’t be tempted to tie knots in her knees to stay upright. “And then I’m going to eat so much lasagna and garlic bread I’ll speak Italian.”

  “You already speak Italian.”

  “Latin, French, and Spanish. No Italian,” she corrected him. “You’re welcome to join me in the feast, West-ford. We’ll single-handedly stabilize the pasta economy. After we eat, we’ll drink wine and celebrate our success on the mission, and maybe we’ll drink enough to forget being rain-sodden and weary and—and …”

  “And what?” His voice sounded softer, gentler.

  She shrugged to hide the hollow ache in her chest. “I was going to say until we get past the pain of mourning our dead. But that will take longer, won’t it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It will.”

  “Do you think they suffered?” A knot wedged in her throat, and she couldn’t seem to swallow it down. She hated the vulnerability she heard in her voice, but she had been responsible for those people and now they were dead. She’d failed to protect them, and wondering if they had suffered was driving her insane.

  He stopped and turned back to face her. “I imagine the shooting scared them, but the explosion—well, it was over fast. They didn’t suffer, Sybil. Truthfully, they probably never knew what hit them.”

  She looked up at him, blinking hard to hold back tears that had come out of nowhere. “I thought that, and I’d hoped hearing it would make me feel better.” Her chin trembled, and she clamped down, stiffened it. “Why doesn’t it make me feel better?”

  Empathy and understanding shone in his eyes. He cupped her jaw and dropped a chaste kiss to her forehead. “Because they’re dead and we’re alive.”

  Survivor’s guilt. Just as she’d had when her parents had died. “Yes.” Westford understood. And he felt what she felt. Because that comforted her and it shouldn’t, and because right now, when she needed to remain self-contained to be effective and she needed comforting, she pulled away, jerked a branch, then let it go, triggering memories of those who had died. At least they had been blessed with families and friends and people who would mourn them. She didn’t have a family. Not anymore. “Westford, if we had died with the others, who would mourn you?”

  “No one.” He started walking.

  Her chest tight, she stared at his back and followed. “Are your parents dead, too?”

  “My mother is dead.” He didn’t look at her. “My father’s in jail.”

  “Jail?” That surprised her. Westford was a stickler for law and order. She had assumed he’d gotten that from his parents, but apparently not. “I’m sorry”

  “It’s one of those things, Sybil,” he said, decidedly uncomfortable. “My mother used to say my father marched to a different drummer.”

  Interesting choice of words. “What do you say?”

  “I don’t. Tobias Westford wasn’t a man I could look up to and respect. He never bought what he could borrow and never borrowed what he could steal. I haven’t seen him in twenty years, but I keep tabs on him.”

  A top-secret security clearance made that essential. “We can’t choose our relatives, and mine were no better. My mother never had a clue who I was or what motivated me.” No one in her life had understood her, and damn few had even tried, including Austin.

  Westford grunted, definitely skeptical. “What motivated her?”

  “Money” Sybil grimaced. “Hardly flattering, but true. She was a good woman, in her own way. We were just very different kinds of people.”

  Jonathan paused beside a tall pine to get his bearings. “So you were closer to your dad, then?”

  “Actually, I wasn’t. I loved them both, but Dad … well, I think I always disappointed him. No matter what
I did, he expected better.”

  “You gave him better.”

  She pegged Jonathan with a nonplussed look. “He expected more.”

  “So who would mourn you?”

  “Gabby” Sybil swatted at a mosquito feasting on her cheek. “The first time I met her, I knew we’d be friends forever.” A flash of that meeting in the college dorm replayed in Sybil’s mind. “She’s a complex woman with a good heart. She would mourn.”

  “Yeah, Gabby would,” he agreed. “David would mourn you, too, Sybil.”

  “That’s different. He’s my mentor, and as much as I care about him, he isn’t family”

  A squirrel jumped from one tall pine to another. It seemed crazy, especially for a woman her age, but it hurt in a thousand little ways to be orphaned. She hated not being anyone’s little girl anymore.

  “It would have been nice if your parents could have been there for you during the divorce.”

  Boy was he off the mark. “I’m glad we were all spared that.”

  “Catholic?”

  “No, wealthy” She kept her gaze fixed on the ground. “My family doesn’t do divorce. In divorces, you divide property and assets. That’s not acceptable.”

  “Would you have done it—gotten divorced—if they had still been alive?”

  “Positively. They would have made me eat dirt the rest of my life, but nothing could have stopped me from divorcing Austin Stone.”

  Westford pursed his lips, thoughtful, and for a split second something resembling guilt flashed in his eyes. What brought that on?

  He stared off in the distance. “Maybe Gabby would mourn for me, too.”

  That surprised her. “Are you and Gabby close?”

  “We talk,” he said. “Well, she talks. I mostly listen.”

  “That’s Gabby.” Had she been playing her matchmaker-from-hell routine with him, too? God, Sybil hoped not. The thought chilled her.

  They had met while Westford was guarding Sybil and occasionally had talked on the phone. Apparently they still did. Maybe she knew why he had transferred and left Sybil. “Considering what we have to do”—she glanced down at the briefcase that bumped her thigh with every step—“I’m glad we’re alive. But we won’t be for long if we don’t pick up the pace.”