Ghostrider: an NTSB-military technothriller (Miranda Chase Book 4)

by M. L. Buchman

“No. I wasn’t asking that.”

  “Oh,” Miranda could feel herself wilt a little inside.

  “I was…” Jon paused, then laughed. “Okay, yes, I’d love to have sex with you again. I also like you, Miranda, very much. I’d enjoy spending more time with you.”

  “Oh, okay then.” She’d like that too. “I’m going to go now.”

  Without any more confusing words, he pulled her hard against his bare chest and held her tight. Her nose was slightly crushed against his breastbone, but the rest of it felt very nice and she let herself be held. After a moment, she realized that he would want to be held back so she slipped her arms around him. They stood that way for a long minute with his cheek on her hair and her nose smushed against his breastbone.

  Now she knew what urge had driven her from the bed, and where she had to go.

  70

  Miranda wasn’t sure where Holly had gone. Her sheets were still on the great room couch, but she was nowhere to be seen. She couldn’t easily imagine her being in Mike’s room, but his door was closed and Mike usually slept with it cracked open.

  All the cars were still out front, so, however much Holly had declared it to be impossible, Mike’s room was where she must be.

  To get to the airport, Miranda borrowed Holly’s Corvette—which was almost as fun as a jet—and was soon racing her F-86 Sabrejet east across the country at just below the speed of sound. She flew high, at 45,000 feet, and caught up with the sunrise shortly before descending into Washington, DC.

  A taxi delivered her to CIA headquarters and the pass issued by Vice President Clark Winston, when he was still the director here, gained her admittance. She only ever visited two places at the CIA.

  The first was the Memorial Wall. Rows of simple silver stars, each smaller than her palm, were mounted on the white marble. Each represented an unnamed agent killed in the line of duty; one that could not be acknowledged in normal ways for security reasons.

  Director Winston had pointed out which stars were her parents—dead on TWA 800. They’d been undercover to plan the earliest expansions of US drones for clandestine operations into the Middle East theater. Their acknowledged employment by the CIA would have caused problems with the Israelis and Arabs alike, so they’d received stars despite dying on a domestic disaster en route to that task.

  She rubbed her fingertips along the edges of both stars, but couldn’t feel her parents. She didn’t know the CIA agents that her parents had been—a role she hadn’t even known about until last year. They weren’t here. Now that she understood that, she’d never have to visit this spot again.

  The pass from Clark also permitted her entry into the central courtyard, a small parklike area that lay between the Old and New Headquarters Buildings. Most people hurried down the connecting corridors to either side that linked the two buildings and formed the east and west boundaries of the courtyard. Perhaps at lunchtime on a sunny day there would be people here.

  Just past sunrise, the area was empty.

  The courtyard had two broad paths, a fountain, and areas for comfortable seating.

  But for her, the courtyard was dominated by the sculpture tucked out of the way in the northwest corner.

  Miranda turned left and followed the broad path to Kryptos.

  The enigmatic bronze sculpture held a significant role in her past. It stood eight feet high and sixteen long. It was in a horizontal S shape, like a rippled piece of paper stood on edge. Its entire surface was cut out in hand-sized letters through the thick bronze. Four panels, each of which contained a secret code.

  She and her father had spent many happy hours attempting to unravel them. It was well after his death when the solution to the first three was published—the fourth remained unresolved. And there were rumors of a fifth, a codified encryption that would only be revealed after the first four panels were solved.

  Miranda ran her hand over the surface. Her father had commissioned a three-foot-tall replica for their home garden on Spieden Island. It seemed that Sam Chase still hovered there every time she sat out by it to watch the birds flit about the feeders her mother had placed all around. It was always a place of peace for her.

  Standing at the real Kryptos was different. Here their mutual visits had been separated by decades, but they had both stood right here. In an odd way, it made her feel more connected to him than in the garden where they’d sat together so many times.

  There she’d been the child.

  Here they’d both been adults.

  But she couldn’t place her mother. Their relationship had been so different from her and her father’s. She loved her mother, she remembered that, but the connection was dissociated from her memorial star, from Kryptos, even from the garden at home, though she’d often tended it while Miranda and her father had contemplated their copy of the sculpture.

  No, her father was here…but not her mother. She was—

  “What are you doing here?”

  Miranda turned and had to look up.

  Clarissa Reese, the Director of the CIA, stood five-foot-ten, without the high heels. She wore a sleek summer dress of white fabric that seemed to shine in the morning sunlight.

  Aggressively white?

  At Mike’s advice, Miranda had been practicing associating emotion to color, and, though the dress itself wasn’t severe, aggressively white seemed appropriate. It had a nicely fitted top and bell quarter-sleeves that emphasized Clarissa’s strong shoulders and bust. Then, from a wide white belt at her trim waist, it belled out slightly down to her knees.

  Her white-blonde hair, while still back in its typical long ponytail, was less aggressively (that word again) slicked back than usual. It was actually the softest look she’d ever seen on Clarissa.

  “My father loved Kryptos. I needed to come visit it.”

  “Oh.” Clarissa fell silent.

  Together they watched the sun shift through the hundreds of holes that the letters formed.

  “I come here sometimes to think and…” Clarissa trailed off in a way that Miranda now understood meant that she didn’t want to finish the sentence.

  Is that what she herself was doing here? Miranda wasn’t sure. It didn’t feel as if she was thinking more or harder in the presence of Kryptos than she did at other times. In fact, her thoughts felt quieter here that in most places. The final panel of Kryptos was far too complex to be solved by staring at it. And she had no other role here at the CIA.

  “Perhaps…” And Miranda herself trailed off, the incompleteness of her own sentence curiously unsettling, yet strangely appropriate.

  “Perhaps what?” Apparently incomplete thoughts bothered Clarissa as well. Miranda pulled out her notebook and noted down that it was possible there was some previously unconsidered degree of commonality between herself and Clarissa. But she’d think about that at another time.

  “Perhaps…” Miranda considered after tucking her notebook away, “I come here to feel rather than to think.”

  Clarissa turned to look down at her but Miranda kept her eyes on the puzzle that was so much a part of her past.

  “I can feel my father’s presence in this place even though we never stood here together at the same time. Not even in the same millennium, as he died when I was thirteen in 1996.”

  “You miss him?”

  “Terribly. I loved him very much.”

  The silence stretched so long that Miranda finally glanced at Clarissa, who seemed to be staring at nothing at all.

  “You’re very lucky,” Clarissa finally whispered.

  Was she? For thirteen wonderful years, she’d had parents who loved her. They weren’t around much and never for long when they were. On assignment as CIA agents she now knew. Working together as a team, and leaving her to be mostly raised by Tante Daniels.

  But the moments her father was home had shone so brightly that they overshadowed the rest.

  Until his death.

  Had she been lucky?

  Holly’s parents had disowned her. Mik
e never spoke of his as if he’d been born the day he joined her NTSB team. Jeremy’s parents loved him, though they were also confused and disappointed by him.

  Rosa’s and Pierre’s had both been very close.

  What little Jeremy had said made it sound as if Taz’s mother had been a very hard woman. Colonel Vicki Cortez’s effect on Jeremy had been profound, but he wasn’t speaking about it, which, she supposed, was the most surprising thing of all.

  “Yes, I was lucky.” Miranda turned but Clarissa was gone.

  She turned back to Kryptos as a sparrow flitted to a landing inside the center letter of the eighth row of the second panel. A Q, which, when the panel was decrypted, was a D in the word BURIED.

  “Very lucky,” she told the sparrow before it chirped at her brightly and flew off.

  71

  Flight TWA 800 had departed JFK airport at 8:19 p.m. on July 17th, 1996, after a long, hot delay on the tarmac. At thirteen thousand seven hundred feet above the Atlantic Ocean, a stray spark in a mostly empty fuel tank had created a massive explosion in the sky that sliced the 747 in two.

  In the largest and longest NTSB investigation in history, ninety-five percent of the debris was recovered from the depths of the continental shelf. The main fuselage was entirely reconstructed, one tiny piece at a time, until the investigators were able to trace the exact cause, and make numerous safety recommendations. Some of those safety measures would be implemented on every commercial airliner and military plane throughout the world. The death of her parents and the other two hundred and twenty-eight people aboard had gone on to save innumerable lives.

  The critical eighty feet of the 747’s main fuselage, a long, open-ended, twenty-one-foot-four-inch-diameter tube, had been installed in the NTSB Training Academy’s lobby as a practical model for teaching students about such a complex investigation. Every piece that had been recovered was there: sections of the hull’s skin, the bits and pieces of the fuel tank, decking, and seats. Even most of the Plexiglas windows and overhead bins had been recovered and placed correctly.

  Miranda had barfed violently in the bathroom before every visit she’d had to make here during training.

  Not this time.

  This time she sat in the foremost recovered seat on the left-hand side, Row 8, Seat B, one in from the hull. The bright room lights shone in through the rounded windows, the two open ends of the fuselage section, and a thousand cracks in the plane’s reconstructed skin: a mosaic of light.

  Seven rows, an inch under thirty-four feet, ahead of where she sat had been her father’s seat 2B. The first-class section had been blown off the front of the plane and had fallen eighty-three seconds down to the sea. Not relevant to the explosion itself, it had not been retained and put on display here.

  Yet, he had sat there, all those years ago. Flying to his next mission with Mom beside him. Perhaps they’d even been discussing their plan for Miranda to follow them in a week after her horse-riding camp was done.

  She shifted to the leftmost window seat, 8A, directly behind 2A.

  And there she was.

  Mom.

  As if her ghost had just been waiting for Miranda to finally come to this exact place and ride with her for a moment.

  Mom had been no taller than Miranda was now. They had also shared a slender build, though her own eyes had come from Dad, and her face from some long-lost relative.

  Miranda remembered Mom more clearly now. The quiet center to her father’s drive. It was Mom, not Dad, who had sat with her for so many hours, teaching her the complex tasks of daily life. The clues regarding how to interpret people and situations. The strategies of how to unsnarl the onslaught of information that came at her in every waking moment.

  She blinked in surprise.

  Not just Mom.

  Miranda had known that Tante Daniels hadn’t started as her governess, only becoming so after her parents’ deaths. Nor had she just been the babysitter whenever her parents traveled that Miranda always thought she was.

  Tante Daniels had been her therapist.

  From her and Mom, Miranda had slowly learned the skills that came so easily to other children: dressing, controlling emotions, even how to eat.

  Though her mind had thrived under Dad’s constant challenges, she never learned to do more than tolerate his effusive hugs. Or Tante Daniels’ gentle ones.

  But she could remember losing herself in Mom’s.

  The hypersensitivity of her youth had made a full hug intolerable.

  For years she’d resisted all human contact. But Holly’s hard grabs—calling them hugs was too gentle a word—and Jon’s embraces of a lover had proven they could be good as well.

  But when she had leaned sideways into Mom’s one-armed hugs, that was when she’d felt the most secure. She’d forgotten about that, but in those moments was when the world had been…perfect.

  Miranda closed her eyes and leaned ever so slightly to the side, just thirty-three feet and eleven inches behind seat 2A.

  Mom’s memory was here.

  But…she wasn’t.

  Maybe Mom’s and Dad’s ghosts had finally flown elsewhere together.

  Miranda sat up straight and looked ahead. Perhaps it was time for her own flight to begin.

  Miranda Chase will return!

  Meanwhile, try this for a dangerously foodie action-adventure:

  One Chef (excerpt)

  Dead Chef #1

  Marianne Rimaldi scooped a scant teaspoon of the Gran Marnier chocolate ganache and drizzled it atop the single bite of truffle cheesecake. The perfect final bite for the meal she was creating.

  A glance at the competition clock.

  Two minutes.

  She plated three more desserts for the judges. The television cameras filming Kate’s Kitchen from Hell hovered close by—two on her, two on her competitor as the final seconds ticked away. One glass-eyed lens had an angle that showed the cameraman wasn’t focused only on the food.

  Precisely according to plan.

  Marianne needed the win on America’s most popular cooking show, which meant winning over at least two judges. More than that, she lusted after that Kate’s Kitchen “Golden Knife” stamp of approval on her career, which required all three judges. For that she wasn’t above applying other…ingredients.

  The heat of the competition kitchen—the flaring burners and blinding stage lights—had “forced” her to pull at the cross-shoulder buttons of her confining chef’s jacket which now hung half open. She wore a loose-necked satin blouse beneath, no bra. She’d chosen an emerald green to contrast with the fire-red of the winner’s jacket that she hoped to be awarded at the end of the show. It also stood out well against her unadorned ash-black jacket of a contestant, but she wanted the red.

  However, mere party tricks wouldn’t work on the show’s main judge.

  Marianne had to capture Kate Stark’s attention. With her, nothing would count except the food itself.

  Kate Stark, the blue-eyed goddess of television food on the nation’s most popular cooking network, was also founder and perennial judge of the show. Always front and center on the final panel.

  Deep down Marianne didn’t want to just win Stark’s vote, she wanted to impress the hell out of her. She’d sell her soul to the Devil if needs be; it was Kate’s Kitchen from Hell after all.

  Don’t think! Focus on the food…but don’t forget the theater.

  Marianne was slightly built, so even the least view down her blouse from above was a very revealing one. She bent over her dessert plates and the satin draped away from her body allowing a deliciously cool ripple to course down her front. Her build might be far less substantial than the one that had made her mother such a success on the “wrong” side of Hollywood. But she’d certainly watched her mom and learned what sold. It had been an educational upbringing, if not a typical one.

  Three judges.

  Two of them were easy.

  The guest taster was Zania in the role of the “every person’s”
palate so necessary for engaging an audience. Someone for the viewers to identify with, among all those professional chefs. Of course her palate was about the only thing on Zania that wasn’t extraordinary.

  Zania was the hottest new Hollywood starlet—who Marianne would bet was a closet butch. It wasn’t too dangerous a bet because Zania’s mother worked the same side of Hollywood as Marianne’s and word got around of what really happened after the bedding was rumpled in erotic film.

  During her intro, Tinsel Town’s hot new box-office draw had announced she was centerfolding for Playboy next month in the same sultry breath as promoting her new tight-leather, sci-fi thriller movie. Marianne knew that anyone who pegged Zania as an airhead had a nasty surprise coming; she absolutely knew how to market herself. In all ways.

  However, hinting to the actress that there was a chance of some woman-on-woman bonding that would allow Zania to prove just who was the “ultimate female among women” offered real possibilities for leveraging the star’s vote. It definitely looked as if she’d bought into Marianne’s careful seasoning of her performance with hints and suggestions.

  Marianne’s own tastes however, were for the second guest judge; the professional chef.

  Harold Merritt, with his Michelin-starred Chicago’s Merritt restaurant, was both very handsome and notoriously single. Win or lose, she’d make a point of chatting him up after the show. All that broad chest and short dark crew cut gave him a deliciously tough look; she could find many uses for him outside the kitchen, or in it—a little oil, two bodies, maybe some chocolate sauce…

  A careful peek from behind the screen of the jet-black dyed bangs of her blond hair revealed Zania and Harold were staring hard at their monitors of the show’s live feed rather than gazing benignly over the competition kitchen floor. Their attention was right where Marianne wanted it. On her.

  The head judge was a different problem.