Lady Liberty

by Vicki Hinze

  “David, you know that’s not true. Which is why, if we live through this—” Oh, God, just thinking the words had her chest in a vise “—I’m going to resign.”

  She had been afraid Austin would pull something underhanded, which is why she had refused to sell him the stock. But never in her wildest dreams did she believe he would jeopardize an entire country. Her ex was a murderer and a terrorist. If she didn’t resign, the public and the Senate would demand it. Only a coward would put David Lance in that position, and she couldn’t just follow her mantra—Say what you mean, and mean what you say— when it was easy or convenient. She had to live it all the time—including now.

  “We’ll discuss it later, if we successfully resolve the crisis.” David dismissed her offer. “Peris and Abdan’s premiers are still in Geneva. I doubt anyone else could have managed to keep the warmongers there.” He wiggled a finger in her general direction. “They were both extremely upset by the news of your death, and they’re elated to hear you’re still alive.”

  “They’re good men.”

  “They’re ruthless men.”

  “Being ruthless has its value, David.” She hiked her chin. “Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps a nation’s people alive and safe.”

  “That kind of insight is why you’re vital to my administration.” David slid toward the edge of his seat. “I know we’re in serious trouble, Sybil, and that Austin played a huge part in causing it. I can imagine how much knowing that upsets you, but the bottom line is Austin is responsible for Austin, not you.” He stood up. “I’m lifting your ban. Commander Conlee made the recommendation for your protection, but you don’t need it. I have complete faith in your integrity. Our hands are tied here until we get a match on the DNA, or until it occurs to Austin that he’s going to die with us. But I have an urgent project for you to handle.”

  “Of course.”

  “Phone Peris and Abdan. The timing can’t get any better. They’re both receptive and ready for peace. A call from you will get them moving.”

  He wanted her to resume negotiations now? “All right.”

  “I haven’t lost my mind,” he assured her. “Unless I miss my guess, very soon now we’re going to need excellent relations with Peris and/or Abdan.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re going to have to convince them that the Peacekeeper missile they believe is targeting them really isn’t. You’re the only person on the planet they might believe enough not to launch a preemptive strike.”

  “But the missile isn’t targeting them.”

  “You’re right. But humor me, and prepare them anyway.”

  “Is there something going on I don’t know about?”

  He shook his head. “Just a hunch.”

  Sybil walked to the door, paused, and looked back at him, her heart in her eyes. “Thank you, David.” He’d know she meant about the resignation.

  “My privilege.” He nodded to lend weight to his words, then motioned to her feet. “Why the sneakers?”

  She grunted. “I’m not picking up Jonathan’s habits. My feet are swollen. These are the only shoes that fit.”

  David slowly studied her face and the bruises. “Are you really all right?”

  She had to be honest; he had that look, signaling he was getting one of his infamous hunches. “Physically, yes.”

  He held her gaze, and empathy filled his eyes. “Ah, I get it now.”

  “Get what?” What had he seen or imagined?

  “I think you’ve picked a lousy time to realize you’re in love.”

  Boy, had she. “Is there ever a good time?”

  “Probably not,” he conceded. “It always knocks you on your ass.”

  It did. Hard. “I need to modify my promise,” she said, her apology in her voice. “I don’t stand a prayer of a chance at keeping it, David. I tried denial, but it didn’t work. Nothing worked.”

  “Didn’t for me, either,” he confessed. “Consider it modified.”

  Agitated, she swept a hand across her forehead. “Can we save this conversation for later? I’m anxious enough right now.”

  He swallowed a chuckle. “It’s love, not an execution squad, Sybil.”

  “You have your frame of reference, and I have mine.” She cracked the door open, then paused again and squeezed the knob until her knuckles ached. “If we don’t find a way out of this, you evacuate no later than eleven.”

  “We’re going to find a way out.”

  “Eleven, David.”

  Their gazes locked, and all her fears on what that evacuation meant reflected back at her in his eyes.

  David stuffed his fists in his slacks’ pockets, and nodded. “Eleven.”

  First-Strike Launch: 04:55:12

  In an isolated A-267 office, Austin Stone backed away from the computer terminal. His chair squeaked, and he tilted his wrist to see his watch through the overhead light’s glare. The bastards thought they were clever, and they were, but he was brilliant and nobody’s fool.

  He stood up and then paced the narrow room, desk to door, door to desk, again and again, silently cursing Commander Conlee, Lance, and Sybil.

  Always Sybil. Interfering. Overpowering. Emasculating.

  He curled his fingers into fists at his sides. But not this time. This time he was going to overpower her. This time she would fail and feel the loss. He still had time to make a flight—any flight, anywhere.

  Sam Sayelle had failed him just as magnificently as all the others, but that, too, Austin could repair. He lifted the phone receiver and dialed.

  “Ground Serve. How may I direct your call?”

  “Clayton Rendel, please.” Austin stared at the computer screen. He’d bypassed the engineers’ filters and firewalls. They had meant to block his access to the system. Fortunately, he had also considered that they might try to do this, and he had programmed in a back-door access. They had discovered he was online with them relatively quickly and had locked him out. But in the interim, he had implemented the program that provided an escape. The launch could be aborted—if they found Cap Marlowe’s key.

  You should tell them where it is, Austin.

  His mother’s voice, nagging at him. Tugging at a conscience he no longer heeded. They knew he was involved in creating the crisis and had assumed a covert posture. The program now could abort the launch, but only with the key, and only if he wanted the launch aborted. If the evidence against him proved sufficient to result in his being sequestered in Leavenworth, he would rather be dead. And if he had to die, he would rather not die alone. He would take as many others as possible with him—including, of course, Sybil.

  “Rendel.” He finally came on the line.

  Austin turned his attention back to the phone, again choosing his words carefully to avoid Home Base complications. “Sam Sayelle.”

  “Yes, sir,” Rendel said. “Within the hour.”

  “Excellent.” Satisfied that Rendel had accepted this call as the one from Sam Sayelle authorizing delivery of the media packets, Austin glanced at his watch. The press would have four hours to crucify Sybil before the launch. Personally, Austin would have appreciated more time for momentum to build, but four hours were better than none. And under such conditions, minutes could seem like lifetimes. “Thank you.”

  Before Rendel could respond, Austin hung up the phone. Sam would be blamed for sharing the manufactured information on Sybil. And every major network would air it as fact, naming Sam as their source. He would lose his credibility, his job with the Herald, and then, along with the rest of them, his life.

  And until the moment she drew her last breath, Sybil would feel the burden of guilt and responsibility. She would know she had caused the crisis—it was her fault and she was to blame. She would know that Austin held true power. That she had battled him, and he had beaten her.

  She would know he had won.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Saturday, August 10 First-Strike Launch: 04:55:12

  Jo
nathan met Sybil in the hall outside the room where she had offered President Lance her resignation. She looked pale and weary, and maybe a little dazed.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  She looked up at him. “No.”

  Jonathan’s heart sank and the tension coiled inside him ratcheted up. Had the president accepted her resignation, then? Jonathan refused to believe that. David protected, and he never ran from a fight. Jonathan could ask her, but she looked as fragile as the china his mother had “saved for good” in the dining room they never used, and making Lady Liberty crack wasn’t on his list of preferred duties.

  They walked out the door. The moon slipped behind a cloud and its light all but vanished. Near the limo, he motioned to Mickey to stay put in the driver’s seat, then opened the door. Its hinges creaked. Sybil got in, and Jonathan followed. “Where to?”

  “My house.” Her voice thinned. “It’s empty of potential traitors.”

  “To the residence, Mickey,” Jonathan said, transmitting simultaneously to Home Base through his headset. “And when you get a minute, the door hinges back here need a couple shots of WD-40.”

  They were halfway to Embassy Row before she said another word. “David refused to accept my resignation, Jonathan.”

  Thank God. The limo paused at a red light. A Toyota packed with teens stopped beside them, their radio blaring and beating a drum solo in Jonathan’s head. “Of course.”

  She glanced over at him, her eyes shining overly bright. “I hate him,” she said softly. “I know I shouldn’t hate anyone but, God forgive me, I hate him.”

  Austin, not Lance. “The man’s made your life a living a hell—personally and professionally—and he’s tried to kill you. You’re human, Sybil.” This was one time when words didn’t get in the way. She needed them. “I know you feel guilty, but you’re not responsible for what he’s done at A-267, or to the staff on the plane, or to Dean’s family. Feeling guilty is pretty human, too. Yeah, I’d say hating him is normal.”

  She laced her fingers in her lap and tucked her chin to her chest. “I’ve hated him a long time. Since before I found out about the vasectomy”

  Before then? Jonathan thought he knew her well. He thought he had learned all there was to know about her, and he was certain he understood her better than anyone else. But he hadn’t known about the reason for the divorce, Cap’s confrontations, or this. She still held her secrets.

  “I tried to love him. I really did. But I couldn’t do it. I respected him as a scientist but not as a man, and I worried about him being so bitter he would do something like this. Austin never has been the paragon of support he publicly professed to be. He has a deep-seated bias against women— especially self-reliant women.”

  “He’s a power vampire. He feeds off of others. Draining them makes him feel stronger.”

  “He’s a thorn.” She leaned her head back against the rest, propped an arm against the door, and sighed. “Remember that old saying, if you want to know how a man will treat his wife, look at the way he treats his mother?”

  “I’ve heard it.”

  “I should have paid attention to it. Austin hated his mother. I don’t mean he didn’t like her. I mean he hated her. If I’d paid attention to that saying, I could have spared myself a lot of years of hell.”

  “There’s no sense in beating yourself up over things in the past. You can’t change them.”

  “I know.” She sounded devastated. “Some men put their wives down publicly. So far as I know, he never did. But he made up for it privately. He had a cruel, vicious tongue, Jonathan. And he loved nothing better than humiliating me with it.”

  “Sounds twisted.”

  “It was.” She swiped at the vent, directed the air flow away from her face. “He used to beg me to ask him for help or to ask him to do things. I rarely did. I thought maybe my asking would make him feel needed and significant.”

  “I take it, it didn’t.”

  “No.” She let out a little laugh, but there was no humor in it. “I’d ask, and he’d refuse to help. It didn’t matter what the request happened to be—it could be something as simple as getting me a cup of tea—but he took great pleasure in refusing. Then he’d badger me into asking him for something else. I hated him for that. He was cruel, Jonathan. I know what he did wasn’t abuse in the horrific sense of what some spouses live with on a daily basis, but I lived in fear of him publicly humiliating me. For as long as I can remember, he threatened to before every social function we attended.”

  “Hell, I’d hate him, too.” Jonathan retrieved a bottle of water from the minibar. “It rates as abuse in my book.” He pressed his hand atop hers, stroked the backs of her fingertips. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

  “I’m not. I guess I should be, but I’m not. It made me stronger and wiser.” She turned on the seat to face him. “Strong and wise enough to know that the minute he realizes he can’t fly to Beijing tonight, he’s going to kill himself and everyone else with him.”

  “We thought he would save himself.”

  “We were wrong. When all the pieces came together in my mind, I saw this through his eyes. The truth is, he hates me more than he loves himself.”

  Jonathan thought back to the swamp, back to her fear of dying without ever having been loved, and that context made what Austin had done and was doing to her malicious. It was also untrue. She wouldn’t die unloved. Jonathan might wish he didn’t love her—that would be easier on her—but he did. He’d known it in his heart since he had threatened to kill Austin and asked for the reassignment off her detail. But in his head, he had only accepted it. When he thought he had lost her in the swamp, he felt love sneak up on him and knock him to his knees. Sooner or later, he supposed, loving each other would sit well on both their shoulders—provided they survived the night.

  “If we don’t find a way to stop the launch, David is evacuating at eleven. That should be long enough for him to get to safety, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah.” Had she heard something in the briefing that left her no choice but to abandon hope? “Are you giving up on the rest of us?”

  “No. It’s a precautionary plan. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid.”

  He lifted their laced hands to his mouth and kissed her knuckles. “There you go, acting human again.”

  “Jonathan.”

  “I know, Sybil.” He held her hand against his jaw.

  “No, you don’t.”

  Mickey pulled into her circular driveway and parked the car, and Jonathan looked over at her. She looked a breath from tears but serene, too. He didn’t understand the serenity.

  “I have something to say to you.” She swept her hair back from her face. “Odds are I’ll screw this up. It’s been a long time since I’ve allowed myself to think about things like this.” She clasped his hand in both of hers. “You’ve been good to me, Jonathan. Better than good. Your support’s never wavered—not even during the divorce, when I was the brunt of as many tasteless jokes as Clinton’s intern.” She paused, aligned her thoughts. “I don’t think I’ve ever told you how much that meant to me. And I know I’ve never told you how much you mean to me.”

  She’s talking to you as her guard, not as a man, Jonathan. You caught her at a vulnerable time earlier. She doesn’t love you. How could a woman like her love you? She has everything. What could you give her that she doesn’t already have without you? Just keep your mouth shut, or you’ll make an ass of yourself—if you haven’t already

  Certain his conscience had a better grip on the truth than his heart had, he nodded.

  Sybil blinked hard, let her gaze rove over his face. “It’s really hard for me to say this. The selfish part of me is afraid of being here without you, but I have to face it.”

  Without him? What the hell was she talking about? “Face what?”

  Her eyes glossed over, sober and serious. “When David evacuates on Air Force One, I want you to go with him.”

  And leav
e her to face whatever came alone? No way. No damn way. “No.”

  “Jonathan, listen to me—”

  “No, Sybil.”

  “But David is going to need you. When he comes back here, facing what he’ll find …You have to be here to help him through it.”

  “No.” Jonathan clenched her shoulders. “I promised I wouldn’t leave you until this is over. I’m sticking to it.”

  “I’m asking you to go.” Tears slid down her face. “Please, Jonathan, for me.”

  He couldn’t help himself. He leaned forward, pressed his forehead to hers, and got a grip on his emotions. His heart was racing, his blood pounding through his veins. “I left you once. I can’t leave you again.” He leaned back, looked into her eyes. “Even for you, I can’t leave you again.”

  He didn’t love her. Sybil’s breath caught in her throat. He respected and admired her, but he didn’t love her. He never said he loved her. If he loved her, he would go.

  Jonathan opened the limo door, closing the subject, and Sybil stepped out, worn but not defeated. She’d have to bring the matter up again later, after she got David to intercede, and after the Peris/Abdan phone conference. Grimacing, she again cursed Austin and Gregor Faust for putting them in this position and keyed the front-door lock.

  One way or another, she wanted Jonathan on that plane.

  First-Strike Launch 03:51:01

  Gregor Faust stared at the A-267 monitor. “Do we have verification of the DNA delivery to Marlowe?”

  Patch nodded. “Jean brought the package to the hospital. She also planted the taps. We have audio in his room and a wire on the phone.”

  Gregor looked at the countdown board. Three hours, fifty-one minutes, and one second until the launch. “Apparently the senator has decided to die rather than suffer the humiliation of exposure.”

  “Some leader.” Patch grunted. “He’ll let the damn missile detonate to protect his stupid reputation, knowing it’s going to kill him. What kind of leader wouldn’t abort the launch?”