White Top

by M. L. Buchman

  Her driver was pulling up to the house at One Observatory Circle when she noticed something strange.

  “Where are all the agents?” Normally, the grand Queen Anne Victorian house that served as the Vice President’s home had several agents and a dog team in clear view.

  “The Vice President’s detail has been dismissed, ma’am. For another week or so you will have a full Second Lady detail just in case there is an unanticipated collateral risk to your safety. After that, you will be granted the detail due to a former Second Lady and it will be the CIA detail taking over your primary security.” His tone was so carefully neutral that she wondered if he was enjoying that slap in her face as well.

  She wilted against the seat as the driver pulled up to the front entrance.

  She had sold her fucking prime-location condo in Foggy Bottom because Clark’s coattails into One Observatory Circle and then the White House were supposed to be reliable. She’d liked that condo and would be hard-pressed to replace it with the way the DC housing market had exploded over the last two years.

  And she hated Clark’s place out in Poolesville, Maryland. Why anyone would want to live where the number one-rated attraction was a farm stand was beyond her. She’d dump that the minute the will came through. Thank God they’d amended those, so it was one thing to not worry about. It was about the only thing not to worry about.

  However, as soon as there was a new VP, she’d be homeless. Maybe before then, if Roy Cole was feeling stingy. Maybe tomorrow if that asshole in charge of Homeland Security was being his usual self.

  A sole agent awaited her on the porch. Two more would be out on the grounds, but that was all.

  “We’re so sorry for your loss, ma’am.” At least he sounded sincere.

  About the loss of Clark probably; she knew there was no love lost on her account.

  She was too numb to even address him as he held open the front door for her.

  It clicked shut behind her.

  Clarissa made it across the hardwood foyer floor, tripping over the white oriental rug that covered most of it, then navigated up the three-turn flight of stairs and into the master bedroom. She stripped off the remains of a fifteen-hundred-dollar power suit and her favorite ankle boots, which had cost another twelve.

  She spent a long time just holding them as she stood naked in the bathroom before she actually looked at them.

  Damaged beyond any repair.

  All of it.

  Only by clamping her teeth hard on the side of her tongue did she avert that judgment extending to all her plans. It was better to focus on the pain.

  She dumped the whole mess in the garbage and stepped into the shower. She turned it to scalding hot, the way Clark liked it.

  Then, very slowly, she eased it down to a humane temperature.

  It was one thing too many.

  As the stink of a shattered, low-lifer Walmart washed down the drain, Clarissa could finally give vent to her emotions.

  She screamed rage at losing her entire world today. She screamed until her throat was past functioning.

  Clarissa curled up on the shower floor too exhausted to even notice the tears of sorrow spilling down the drain as well.

  52

  “You must be exhausted,” Terence held open the door and Miranda steadied herself on the door jamb as she crossed the threshold.

  “I slept…” then she remembered that she’d managed just one hour last night, in a different time zone. Terence would not be pleased to know that she’d fallen asleep at her desk. He always talked about the importance of sufficient sleep during a crash investigation—which seemed to be the only time she couldn’t manage any. “…some.”

  “This is far better than a hotel. Thank you, Mr. Graham,” Jeremy looked around as if he was entering a palace, not Terence’s home.

  “Haven’t you ever been here before?” Miranda typically stayed in the guest bedroom whenever she was in DC.

  Terence chuckled as he ushered the others in. “I never bring students here, or other investigators. This is my home away from the NTSB. Just you, Miranda. You needed a quiet place to learn. Besides, when you came along, my kids had just left for school and I was glad of the company.” She knew he rarely mentioned his wife, who had walked out on the family years before.

  “I always liked it here, Terence. It feels like a second home to me.” And it did, even more than the Tacoma team house. Miranda settled into the chair that had been hers on so many evenings, a wingback covered in a cheery sweet pea print. The wear marks where she’d sometimes have to rub her hands over and over on the arms to maintain her control were still there, now worn as smooth as silk across the heavy brocade.

  Terence’s armchair had been replaced by a luxurious cordovan red-leather recliner since her last visit. That bothered her, so she didn’t look at it too closely.

  “What was she like?” Mike settled on the sofa beside Holly, Andi dropping beside her. Jeremy was in the last chair, with Taz perched upon one arm.

  Terence looked at her for a moment, and winked before turning to the others.

  “She was a brilliant mess.”

  The others laughed, but Miranda was unsure how to interpret it. Terence’s winks had always been an indicator that he was about to tell a story, and she was too tired for that tonight. But now that she’d sat down, her body buzzed with such exhaustion that she doubted she could stand.

  “On the first day of class, she knew my accident reports better than I did. In fact, she knew everyone’s better than they did. Much like you, Jeremy, in that respect. Except she had already analyzed the best and worst aspects of each of us inspectors’ various…quirks and developed her own best-case report structure. You’ve never varied from that, have you, Miranda?”

  “Was there a reason I should have?” She tried to find the motivation to pull out a notebook in case he had revision suggestions, but even her hands seemed to be asleep.

  “Not a one.”

  That was a relief. She decided that if it was okay to let sleeping dogs lie, it was probably also okay to let sleeping hands do so as well.

  “She knew more about reporting than any of you will ever learn—including you, young Jeremy, so don’t get cocky when you get your own team.”

  And there it was.

  Jeremy—leaving.

  Someone new—joining.

  She woke her sleeping hands and placed them over her eyes.

  But she could still hear Terence.

  “A pilot, materials and aerospace engineering degrees…all of that knowledge. But she had no order to it. It would all just jumble up in her head whenever she faced a new training scenario. At first, our time here at my house was working out that sphere system that she uses to approach a crash.”

  She tried shifting her hands to her ears. The sounds of their voices dropped closer to a genial murmur.

  But now she could see again.

  Mike’s head tipped back in laughter.

  Jeremy’s hand clasped in Taz’s with all of the excitement of heading his own team.

  Miranda wasn’t going to lose just one person—she was going to lose two!

  And what if someone else left?

  Everything changing.

  Why did everything have to change?

  Didn’t people like them understand the cost of change on people like her?

  If they would only—

  Andi was squatting down in front of her chair.

  Miranda cried out with relief.

  “I think we need to get you into bed,” Miranda half read her lips as her ears were still covered. “How long did you sleep last night?”

  “An hour? Except I didn’t mean to say that.”

  Andi took her wrists and tugged her to her feet. It was awkward as Miranda decided it was best not to let go of her ears, but they were soon standing.

  “I’m so sorry, Miranda.” Terence’s voice was deep enough that there seemed no point in still covering her ears, it rumbled right through.


  “You and Andi take your usual. You don’t mind sharing, do you?”

  Miranda shook her head. As long as she could get away, she was past caring.

  Andi was looking at Terence with an expression that Miranda needed her notebook to interpret, so she let go of her own ears and looked it up as Andi guided her stumbling up the stairs.

  “Horror?” she asked Andi.

  Andi’s mumble sounded like, “Close enough.”

  Then Miranda saw her familiar bed and didn’t remember anything else. Not even getting into it.

  53

  “Miranda?” Jeremy’s voice was fuzzy with sleep.

  “Shh. Don’t wake Taz.” Miranda kept her voice low. She’d been trying to sneak past them on the living room’s sleeper couch.

  “Too late,” Taz whispered. “What’s up?”

  “Go back to sleep. I’m heading in to the NTSB office.”

  Taz’s phone glowed for a moment in the darkness. “At five a.m.? You thought of something, didn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “But the idea of something is there anyway, isn’t there? We’re coming with you,” Jeremy declared as they both climbed off the bed and dressed quickly. The couch was soon once more a couch, and they were out the door.

  “What did you think of?” Jeremy asked as Taz drove them toward NTSB headquarters.

  “I just said I didn’t. I think we need to start with the recorders and the videos, then work our way through the whole thing.”

  “Mike and Andi worked on the videos and did the interviews last night. Should we wake them?” Taz had her phone out already.

  “No,” Jeremy stopped her before she could. “It could take a couple of hours to transfer the flight recorder data if there was any heat damage. The outer cases didn’t look bad, so they should be okay, but there was a fire, so there could be melted solder connections or even cracked chips or a shattered board. That can all take a while.”

  Miranda was impressed. Jeremy had thought of the people, which was more than she’d done.

  She’d simply had the impulse to go into the office and get to work.

  Jeremy had leapt past her and thought about the fact that, in addition to being exhausted, the others might not be needed for perhaps several hours.

  Maybe he really was ready for his own team.

  Taz drove, stopping briefly at a just-opened coffee-and-muffin drive-up, then parked them under the NTSB headquarters building.

  As they carried their to-go cups around to the front door, Miranda couldn’t help smiling up at the back side of the International Spy Museum. The wall had been covered with seven story-tall rows of narrow light-and-dark panels that were in no obvious pattern. But it had just enough regularity to imply that it had been intentional.

  A code.

  Rather than being a highly publicized public relations challenge for the eventual opening of the museum when it was finished, the museum’s designers made a crucial miscalculation—the code wall directly faced the NTSB headquarters across L’Enfant Plaza. Within a day of the contractors finishing the installation, the NTSB techs had solved the wall’s code and tweeted their finding to the Spy Museum—and the public.

  Once you thought to break it into eight-bit binary word groups, it was easy to read. The light and dark panels indicating zeroes and ones respectively. Except for two possible errors that may have been intentional as they still hadn’t been changed—induced errors were a common enough cryptographic practice—it read: All is not that it seems at the spy museum.

  Every time she saw it, it reminded her of all those years working codes with her father. Her first set of blocks were simple numeric substitution codes. If she arranged them as 13-9-18-1-14-4-1, then rotated them all a quarter turn, she got her name from their relative positions in the alphabet. She’d learned how to spell by the increasingly complex code groups he’d provided to her.

  He hadn’t started her on ASCII, hex, and binary until she was seven. Or working on the Kryptos sculpture until she was eight. She patted the tenth Kryptos notebook, tucked in with her others.

  They were the first ones into the lab. Then she remembered it was a Sunday and they were likely to be the only ones in the lab all day. That was a relief.

  Jeremy sighed happily.

  “What?” Taz asked him.

  “I’ve always loved this set of rooms. You can process anything here. I’ve only been able to assess the absolutely intact recorders at our Tacoma office. Here, everything from long-term saltwater exposure to medium-high fire damage can be addressed. It’s just brilliant.” He stroked the equipment lovingly.

  “Is this where you’d want to work?” Taz’s voice became even softer.

  Miranda checked her emoticon notebook surreptitiously: worry? Taz’s expression matched, but Miranda had no idea why.

  Jeremy tipped his head to one side, then the other. Finally shaking it, though his expression matched sad…mostly.

  Taz’s now was unquestionably relief, though Jeremy didn’t seem to notice.

  “Yes but also no. I love the lab work. It’s what I always figured I’d be doing once I joined. But in a weird way, you spoiled me for computer lab work, Miranda. The puzzle of the field is far too fascinating. Once Terence sent me out to you on that Groom Lake crash, I’ve never wanted to come back. Now I want both.”

  Unsure how to interpret any of that, she turned for Andi, but she wasn’t there. She was probably still asleep in the big bed in Terence’s guest room, curled so close to the other edge of the mattress that it was surprising she hadn’t landed face-first on carpet. At a loss for what else to do, she turned to Taz.

  “Should I be apologizing? Or…”

  “What? No!” Jeremy spoke before Taz did. “You showed me such a bigger world than the lab. So much bigger,” and he took Taz’s hand.

  She rolled her eyes, but didn’t let go.

  “Okay.” Miranda didn’t know what else to say. “Could you please pull out the recorders?” She’d woken trying to guess at the heat effects on the recorders and had been unable to go back to sleep.

  Jeremy went to the safe where he’d locked them last night on their way back from the wreck. He pulled the two devices they’d recovered from wreckage last night and set them on the steel-topped workbench in the middle of the room: the combi—combined cockpit voice and flight data recorder—and the quick access recorder’s drive.

  They quickly removed the cover on the combi’s electronics section that gathered the data and fed it into the hardened recorder module. No data was stored in this section, but the heat of the fire had cracked and melted several of the boards.

  That meant that the chassis was cooked and unrecoverable without even needing to test.

  They both donned gloves and static-dissipation grounding bracelets before disconnecting the recorder itself from the ruined chassis.

  Four Allen screws freed the data module from the chassis. It was more soot char black from the fire than the usual alert orange. The connection cable protruding from the bottom was partially melted as well, which said the fire around the recorder was hotter than she would have expected.

  They pulled off the baseplate and peeled off the thick foam insulation layers to expose the circuit board. Three by six inches and covered in memory chips, it looked okay visually.

  Jeremy showed Taz how to use the visual and X-ray microscopes to check that none of the solder connections had reflowed with the heat and that none of the chips had fire cracked.

  “Even with chips that were submerged for a long time in the ocean, we can get most of the data every time. Fire is a different problem. This container is rated at a minimum of thirty minutes in a two-thousand-degree-Fahrenheit fire, and sixty minutes at five-hundred degrees. But we didn’t see the fire and have no clear measure of how long the recorder was exposed. That worried me. But see, the solder all looks clean. And no chip browning or cracking. It means we should be able to read the data without any delay.”

  Miranda h
ad never been interested by this stage of recovery process, so she would simply trust Jeremy.

  Once they’d crossed from the Chip Recovery Lab into the Data Recovery Lab, she felt much more at home.

  She double-checked the model of the recorder, then pulled a pin cable and a brand-new chassis from the shelf. With the new cable installed, they were able to plug the chassis into the main rack.

  “Um, we have problem.” Jeremy had slid into the computer station’s chair while she’d been hooking it up.

  “What’s that?”

  “We don’t have a configuration file for the HMX-1 helicopters.”

  Miranda could only blink in surprise. Every manufacturer was supposed to send the configuration files for each aircraft to the NTSB. A large airliner recorded over a thousand different parameters into the recorder. Without the data map, there was no way to know which binary words were, for example, air speed and which were the status of the starboard economy-class toilet’s smoke detector.

  54

  Colonel Blake McGrady glared down at the steel table and could only rub his forehead.

  The HMX-1 hangar was buzzing with the second shift change since he’d declared the lockdown.

  Spread across the table was every single emergency air generator from all three models of the White Side aircraft: the retiring VH-3D Sea Kings and VH-60N White Hawks, and the new VH-92A Superhawks, including the ones he’d flown during the President’s recent tour.

  He waved everyone away except for his crew chief.

  “Are you sure, Whalen?”

  “Yes sir,” his crew chief answered with no question in his tone. “We confirmed it with the manufacturer’s rep. There’s nothing nonstandard in any of these units. They’re absolutely what they claim to be. We even fired one from each class of aircraft and they behaved exactly per spec. No overheating. No HCN. Absolutely stable for their entire thirty-minute life cycle. Nothing produced except oxygen and salt.”

  “Bloody hell!”

  “Yes sir. We’re tearing down the complete air system on each bird, but still nothing out of the ordinary.”