White Top

by M. L. Buchman

  Blake hadn’t heard anything except Tamatha’s voice.

  “You can’t just ask her to come listen to her dead husband like that,” now Holly’s voice had less of an Australian accent than he himself did, coming from Maryland.

  “Why not? She’s the most likely person to be able to pick out any words.” She listened for a moment. “Besides, she’s on her way.” Miranda set down her phone.

  Holly opened her mouth again, but Mike stopped her by resting a hand on her arm.

  Even from the back of her head, Blake could tell that she was glaring at Mike.

  “Christ on a crutch. I was hoping we were done with the bitch after last night.” Holly slumped in her chair. “Fine, whatever. Do it up, Miranda. I’m listening.”

  And without any other comments, Miranda did. As if nothing had happened.

  She must have started well before the crash. Other than a steady low rumble that was placed in the notes as “engines idling”, there was nothing for five long minutes. He was so used to that sound in the cockpit that he’d never have thought to note it down.

  Then, on the CAM track, a massive wiggle showed up and scrolled toward the center of the screen as the clock advanced. When it reached the line in the center, the President’s voice boomed out over his headphones.

  “Damn sharp helo you’ve got here.”

  “Brand-new just for you, Mr. President,” Tamatha replied without hesitation.

  His headphones tore at McGrady’s ears as he kicked up out of his chair and stumbled backward. They came free and thunked down onto the floor.

  “What the hell!” He could see that smile Tamatha wore as easily as most people wore a shirt. No slur in her voice. It felt as if she was sitting close beside him in a cockpit at this very instant.

  Miranda looked at him in surprise. Then blinked once. “I didn’t think to warn you that the voice recorder retains the last two hours of information as I assumed you would know that. So, precisely one hour, forty-six minutes, and nine seconds prior to the crash and final power off, the President was boarding Marine One.”

  Bloody hell!

  “Sorry,” he picked up the headphones and pulled his seat back forward. “She just sounded so…alive.”

  “She was.” Again, Miranda stating the obvious as if to a child.

  “Can’t we just skip to the crash?”

  “We don’t know if there is any evidence of earlier problems, or sounds of tampering with the aircraft. It is best to listen to all of the available evidence.”

  He looked down at his screen as he tried to collect himself.

  There were notes there now.

  08:15:03 CAM President Roy Cole (PRC): Damn sharp helo you’ve got here.

  08:15:07 HOT-1 .?: Brand-new just for you, Mr. President.

  “I recognize Roy’s voice personally. Can you confirm that the second voice is Captain Tamatha Jones?”

  He nodded.

  On his screen the .? changed to Capt. Tamatha Jones (CTJ).

  “Are you ready to continue?”

  He absolutely wasn’t, but these were the last two hours of his top officer’s flights. He nodded again, unable to do much more.

  Bracing himself to listen did nothing to help as they continued.

  Holly was right, this was going to be much harder than escorting Tamatha’s corpse out of the crash site.

  61

  “Can someone tell me why we haven’t heard anything from them?”

  Drake was surprised that the President hadn’t bulldogged his way out of the PEOC yet. Instead, he was steaming under Agent Danziger’s “stay safe” mandate and getting ready to take it out on him and Sarah. Oh joy.

  There was no doubting the who they hadn’t heard from.

  They’d had reports from General William Macy’s AIB site team. Because of the surprisingly intact nature of the helicopter, they were already reporting a better than ninety-nine percent material recovery. Apparently all they were missing was the rear rotor, a third of the main blades, and one of the windshields. Even now, CNN was showing the heavy-lift team, moving the battered and smoke-blackened helo onto a flat-bed truck.

  Colonel McGrady of HMX-1 had called in during his brief flight into DC to report that all of the other HMX-1 aircraft tested clean. His conclusion that it was an inside job was not unreasonable. He’d also outlined the steps he’d ordered to begin that aspect of the investigation.

  It was that report that had Agent Danziger keeping the President locked in the PEOC. An assassination that was an inside job was the worst case scenario.

  The Secret Service had already supplied the FBI with a list of every authorized person on the Vice President’s and the Governor’s flights as well as everyone at Camp David.

  Both groups reported hourly on their progress with file reviews and interviews.

  The CIA’s assistant director had done the morning’s intelligence briefing, including a list of possible threat matrices from their computer team.

  Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had been high on the list.

  And still there hadn’t been a peep from Miranda.

  “Maybe she’s sleeping in?” Sarah suggested.

  Drake managed to not laugh in her face. “You’ve never seen anything like when she’s on a crash investigation.”

  “So call her.”

  “I tried twice,” then he shrugged and hit redial on the conference room phone.

  “This is Miranda Chase. This is actually her, not a recording of her.” She answered on the first ring.

  “Good morning, Miranda. I tried calling you a couple of times.”

  “Probably while we were in the Chip Recovery Lab and Data Recovery Lab. They’re isolated with full Faraday cages to avoid interference with the electronic data recovery—hence the names of the labs. No cell signal can get in. If you’d called on the landline, you would have gotten through.”

  “But I got through now.” He decided that mentioning he’d had no idea that the NTSB was where she’d gone wouldn’t be constructive. Though perhaps he should have guessed.

  “We have a split team now. Jeremy is leading the Data Group Recovery. I’m working with Mike, Holly, Colonel McGrady, and Clarissa in the Listening Room to transcribe the audio from the recorders. This room does not have a Faraday cage as we are no longer dealing with isolating electronic signals.”

  “Clarissa is there?”

  “Yes, Drake. She’s assisting with picking out the Vice President’s voice from the background clutter. Her familiarity with his voice is a great advantage.”

  Drake whistled in surprise.

  When Roy looked up, Drake just held up a hand to hold off questions.

  “How long did he survive?”

  “We haven’t gotten that far yet. We’re only at the landing at Camp David four days ago. And even if we do find his final spoken words, we won’t actually know how much longer he survived as he wasn’t wearing a heart monitor. Though, if he survived until the fire, and happened to be breathing in at the moment of the explosion, an autopsy should reveal charring in the lungs commensurate with a five-hundred-degree fire—that is the burn temperature of hydrogen, though there were impurities in the air, such as the hydrogen cyanide, that could skew that. That’s centigrade. It would be…nine-hundred-and-thirty-two-degrees Fahrenheit. Though I suppose the ultimate effect would be little changed even if there was an unlikely temperature swing of even a hundred degrees. Centigrade or Fahrenheit.”

  Sarah blanched white and the President looked grim.

  “Keep us posted, Miranda.”

  “Could you be more precise about that?”

  Drake couldn’t help smiling. “If you find anything that… How about if you just give me an hourly report?”

  “I’ll call next at 11:17.” And she hung up the phone.

  Sarah gave a half laugh of surprise.

  “Don’t worry, you’ll never get used to her ways. But they always work.” Then he turned to the President. “Whatever we think of her, Clarissa
Reese is there.”

  “And why is that particularly significant? You were actively surprised, Drake.”

  Drake wished he didn’t know. “I’ve done two of those, Mr. President. Listening to the tape of the dead’s voices. Sitting in a safe, clean room, with a cold Coke on the desk, and debating if one particular sound is an anomaly, or a final grunt of extreme pain the moment before death. It’s a brutal task. I have no idea how those people do it. It’s one of the reasons that they rarely release the actual recording, only the transcript. Those tapes of the 9/11 crash of Flight 93 in Pennsylvania, that they had to release for the trial of one of the planning conspirators, took a horrendous toll on the families.”

  Drake noticed the President’s continued interest.

  “It’s no secret that I don’t trust Clarissa Reese. Yes, she’s proving to be an exceptional CIA Director. But what she’s doing right now, that’s hard. Damned hard.”

  The President nodded, keeping his thoughts to himself as usual.

  62

  “Who was that?” Clarissa circled a finger for Miranda to hit replay.

  Over the last hour, their communication had actually become surprisingly easy. For each time she spun her forefinger in a circle, Miranda would back up five seconds.

  A pinching motion, and Miranda sliced off sections of background noise, such as the engine.

  Three circles this time. Fifteen seconds. And a pinch.

  The sound replayed.

  “Clark: You wanted to meet with me?” She echoed his words aloud.

  They appeared on the screen almost as fast as she spoke them. Miranda, the only one here with ears as sharp as her own, must have concurred or she wouldn’t have typed them.

  “Unknown person:” she continued to echo what she could barely pick out of the background despite all of the noise cancelling. “Perhaps later in private, Mr. Vice President. I will be at—or maybe on—your convenient disposal.”

  She watched as the ? of an unknown speaker proceeded the transcript words.

  “Damn it, McGrady. Why didn’t you people put in a cabin mike? It’s fucking hard to pick them up on the open cockpit one.”

  “HMX-1 provides executive transport. We specifically do not eavesdrop on high-security conversations of our transportees.”

  Clarissa wanted to slice at him. To keep slicing. Clark had died in his squadron’s care.

  Something about that Marine-stiff facade, showing not one iota of outer emotion, made her want to poke and prod until she found the cracks.

  But Rose had been emphatic about how Clarissa must behave during any aspect of this investigation. And that didn’t include sparring with a Marine Corps colonel.

  “Ruddy peculiar syntax,” Holly spoke so softly that Clarissa wouldn’t have heard it if she hadn’t been sitting right next to her.

  On her arrival, Clarissa had dropped into the chair between Holly and McGrady before she remembered how much she couldn’t stand Bitch Holly Harper. At least she didn’t have to hide any of her true feelings from Holly—the hatred was completely mutual.

  She looked back at the words on her display: Perhaps later in private, Mr. Vice President. I will be at/on(?) your convenient disposal.

  A chill far deeper than the excessive air conditioning cut into her.

  No one else was reacting to the phrase.

  Then again, only she and Holly had been in the Middle East War Zones. And—

  “Oh fuck me dead,” Holly’s whisper was even softer this time.

  Too bad it completely confirmed Clarissa’s worst fear.

  “We have to call the President.”

  Miranda looked puzzled. “It isn’t 11:17 yet.”

  “Trust me. Call him.”

  63

  “Go ahead.”

  “You’re on speakerphone,” Miranda had learned to always announce that. It still didn’t make sense to her that the opposite wasn’t also required, for politeness sake, to announce that a call was private. But she knew that was true.

  “So are you,” the President replied.

  “I’m sorry to call before 11:17, Roy, but Clarissa insisted that you’d want to know. I do feel bad about that.” Only after she said it did she realize her error.

  Drake had initially asked her to call with any updates. For clarity…for her sake?...he’d amended that to hourly.

  So perhaps it was okay.

  If so, she should just proceed.

  “While in flight from One Observatory Circle to Camp David, an unidentified person spoke with the Vice President about a private meeting. Clarissa feels that the unusual syntax of the reply is sufficiently pertinent to bring to your attention. It reads: I will be at—or perhaps on—your convenient disposal.”

  “Shit!” Drake’s voice. Apparently he knew what it meant as well.

  Clarissa nodded at the rightness of that even if neither she nor Holly had explained what had upset them.

  That made Miranda feel better about calling. Not that she wanted to upset him, but now the importance was confirmed.

  “Danziger!” Drake called out loudly enough to hurt her ears.

  “I’m unfamiliar with that word, Drake.” Too late she recalled that the head of the President’s Protection Detail had threatened her in her own home just yesterday morning. She’d spent the last two hours straining so hard to pick out every word that she hadn’t thought about connecting a word to a person.

  “It’s not a what, it’s a who. Hold on.” Drake didn’t mute the phone as he continued speaking. “Danziger. You had someone on the Vice President’s flight who speaks clear, even fluent English, but slipped into an inverted syntax, possibly Arabian.”

  “There’s the Vice President’s assistant. He’s—”

  “It wasn’t Avi,” Clarissa called out. “I know his voice. Besides, he’s Indian, not Arabic. And he’s from Cleveland. Get your— Sorry.” She looked as if she was biting her tongue painfully hard.

  “She’s right, mate,” Holly chimed in. “Which is a really nice surprise, Clarissa. Well done, you. Danziger, get your shit together. Arabic, not Ohioan or Indian.”

  “Was he still on the flight for the return?”

  Miranda searched for a metaphor of what Danziger sounded like…but all she came up with was “an angry agent.” Like an angry…dog?

  “We haven’t gotten that far yet. Do you always snarl like a dog?” Miranda decided that she was rather proud of her metaphor. No, she’d used the word like so it was a simile not a metaphor. Yet it accurately aligned with his attitude on three separate occasions in just twenty-four hours: at her home, aboard the E-4B Nightwatch, and now on the phone. It was rare to discover statistical significance when assessing human interactions.

  There was a sputtering sound from the speaker that sounded like a…sputtering sound. Maybe she shouldn’t push it.

  Holly stood up out of her seat enough to reach over the intervening desk and held out her hand.

  Miranda high-fived it, making her feel better about the secondary metaphor-attempt failure.

  “What was that for?” Miranda could hear Clarissa whisper to Holly.

  “She nailed a simile.”

  Clarissa turned from Holly to stare at her for a long moment. Miranda could feel it, even if she kept her attention on the computer screen.

  Then Clarissa also rose to her feet and held out her hand.

  Clarissa had never done that before, but Miranda high-fived her hand as well.

  But she looked pleased when Miranda had, so she must have done it right.

  Miranda hung up the phone and replaced her own headphones.

  When the others were ready, she pressed play on the next segment.

  64

  Danziger had the VIP guest lists up on the screens in the PEOC conference room. He hated to involve the President at this level, but the man was insisting and he was The Man.

  The inbound and outbound trips rarely matched. Both the Main Man, as Danziger had always thought of him, and the VP were so
heavily scheduled that it wasn’t abnormal for someone to fly out to somewhere and catch a ride on Air Force One or Two for a thirty-minute meeting in a six-hour flight, then jaunt home from the next port of call.

  Twelve passengers on the Superhawk. Minus four: VP, chief assistant, the colonel with the nuclear football, and the head of the VP’s protection detail. He’d known the VPPD for ten years but reluctantly put him back on the possible list. In fact…might the VP have poisoned his own aircraft for some reason? Shit! He’d have to look at everybody.

  He also cursed himself for the remark about Avi. He’d been Clark’s right hand since the week after he’d ascended to the Vice Presidency. He knew damn near everything about the man, including having personally done the security clearance interview with his parents—at their home in Cleveland.

  The prep for a global trip had been horrendous, and the trip itself beyond brutal. He’d spent seven years of his life keeping the President alive, but it had never been this hard.

  He should release the President from the PEOC, but it was easier to control his security here. Given the chance, he’d lock the Main Man in here for the rest of his term. And then recommend they do the same to whoever succeeded him.

  Not an option, no matter how stretched he was personally.

  He’d already been over these lists several times, as well as lists of everyone else who’d been near the Vice President, his home at One Observatory Circle, and Camp David in the last month.

  “Mr. President. I think it’s time for you to…” He hadn’t looked at the in- and out-bound guest list on Marine Two side-by-side before this.

  “Time for what?” President Cole asked.

  Danziger had been about to release him back into the White House at large.

  But there was a difference between the two lists.

  Only one name had been on the out-bound flight, but not on the return. Marine Two had flown to its doom with a single empty seat. And the missing passenger had taken a midnight drive back to DC rather than waiting until the morning.