White Top

by M. L. Buchman

  Clarissa felt a chill. “Eight, maybe ten.” One of which was Senator Hunter Ramson who’d given her the idea, even flown to Brazil with the former Vice President as part of the setup. The man would sell her soul for a dollar the second that he slipped out of Rose’s control.

  And Hunter had just slipped out of Rose’s control!

  Over breakfast on the One Observatory Circle’s veranda this morning, Rose had been furious about something. Though she wouldn’t say what despite Clarissa pushing.

  The pieces began connecting in her mind.

  The Middle East chatter from two nights ago, the Arabic voice on the Marine Two flight, the attack on Clark…

  Hunter Ramson was a dead man!

  Except she couldn’t. With Clark gone, Clarissa needed Rose’s help.

  Shit! Shit! Shit! Sh—

  “I’m sorry,” Cole dragged her attention back to the room. “For that reason alone, you wouldn’t make it through the interim vetting and approval by Congress, never mind the general election. Unless you’re planning a coup, you’ll have to let that go.”

  Clarissa caught Drake’s hard stare.

  “Jesus, Drake. I’m not a certifiable idiot who wants to kill off democracy and become the next dictator of a global superpower. Nor am I some lame-ass Russian former KGB agent or Chinese megalomaniac. People like that shouldn’t be kept out, they should be taken out with a fucking bazooka. It’s just that we need a President who understands the true power of clandestine operations. We at the CIA know how to deliver results in this asymmetric world.”

  His head tip said that maybe he believed her and maybe he didn’t.

  “Go to hell, Drake.”

  “Already a given,” the President answered before he could.

  Drake shrugged that the President might be right.

  Clarissa couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled up. It was all so fucking absurd.

  The others all looked at her as if she’d finally lost it—and maybe she had.

  “If this is how government really runs, we’re in so much trouble.”

  The President’s smile said that he fully agreed with the joke.

  “So who are you going to choose to run this nut-hatchery once you’re done, Mr. President?”

  “That’s easy.” Cole hooked a thumb toward Sarah.

  “You what?” Sarah’s voice squeaked.

  Her protests were buried as first President Cole’s laugh, then her own and Drake’s overwhelmed Sarah.

  Clarissa hated that Sarah Feldman was a good choice. But she was.

  And if Cole could half-convince Clarissa herself that vying for the White House was untenable, he’d eventually convince his National Security Advisor to fill the vacant VP slot.

  She kept it light with relief for one key reason: Cole hadn’t said anything about taking away the CIA directorship. And the CIA was an amazing weapon for punishing those who had killed Clark.

  At least she still had that to look forward to.

  Besides, she had the first inkling of an idea that she wanted to run by Rose.

  75

  Miranda had insisted that they complete the data and audio review, but there had been no more surprises. Now that they knew the source, everything had followed completely predictably, right down to the final explosion sequence.

  “I knew it! I knew it!” Jeremy did a victory dance. “The three-explosion sequence was the only option that fit all of the facts: interior explosion, the ignition of the long fuel vapor trail from the front entrance, and finally the ANJF of fertilizer and jet fuel.”

  Taz leaned back against one of the wall audio panels with her arms crossed, smiling hugely as she watched Jeremy.

  Miranda recognized the look.

  It was the way Mike and Holly sometimes looked at each other, at least until they caught themselves.

  “He’s ready, isn’t he?”

  Andi sat beside her. “He is.”

  Miranda covered her eyes for a moment. “This is so hard.”

  “It won’t happen today, Miranda. You can ease into it. But even you can see that for Jeremy to keep growing as an investigator, he’s going to have to lead his own team.”

  “Like I do, by letting others do the actual leading,” she nodded toward the happily oblivious Taz.

  “Yes and no. You and Jeremy both lead. None of the rest of us can do what you two can. You lead by example, then the rest of us come along to help make it easier for you.”

  Miranda thought about that.

  Her team hadn’t exactly made it easy, but they’d certainly been essential in making it possible.

  And without Jeremy?

  She’d miss him, but their skills overlapped so much that his loss wouldn’t be crippling, merely tragic and uncomfortable.

  There was one more hard thing she had to do, especially now that she was in Washington, DC.

  “Would you do me a favor, Andi?” If anyone could make this easier, it would be Andi.

  “Sure, what?”

  “Come with me.”

  Andi looked at her in surprise, then asked carefully, “Where?”

  Miranda closed her eyes again.

  Somewhere even harder than losing Jeremy and Taz.

  76

  “Strictly domestic?” Cole asked over lunch.

  Clarissa set down her BLT. Here it came, shutting out the CIA…and her. The Presidential dining room off the Oval just fit the big walnut dining table. Lincoln stared down at her thoughtfully out of The Peacemakers portrait made two weeks before the end of the Civil War and three weeks before his death.

  “No, Mr. President,” Clarissa stated before anyone could support such a ridiculous idea, though it took her a moment to remember how to support it. “The chatter out of the Middle East. And it was definitely tied to the instruction to ‘burn the fields’ that we intercepted. This was clearly a conspiracy between a foreign state actor and the defense contractors. We need to track those links. They’ll be very well hidden, both domestically and overseas. I’ll be coordinating our investigation in cooperation with the FBI.”

  At least them she could tolerate.

  “So you don’t think Ahmad was an innocent? He died aboard that helo.”

  “Maybe he was an innocent and they sent him in to try negotiating with Clark but that defense contractor jumped the gun. Even if he was an innocent, indications are that his country wasn’t.”

  President Cole nodded. “Okay. Keep me posted on that. Drake, what’s the latest on…”

  Clarissa’s attention drifted long enough to miss the rest of the next question.

  She was still here.

  She was still the D/CIA.

  Her husband was dead. She was about to lose her home. The Presidency now lay out of reach.

  But she was still here.

  Finally able to once more pick up her sandwich, she began to listen as Drake and Cole discussed how to better control the defense contractors going forward.

  Half a glass of iced tea later, she was able to make an addition to one of Sarah’s suggestions.

  By the end of the meal, she felt more normal, other than her hair constantly slipping forward over her shoulder.

  77

  “You’re kidding.” Andi rubbed her eyes, but the view didn’t change.

  Miranda shook her head.

  “Wouldn’t you prefer Holly or Mike to be here with you?”

  Miranda shook her head again.

  “Why me? And don’t say it’s because I’m the calm one.”

  Miranda look at her imploringly, but didn’t manage a word.

  “Okay. Okay. It doesn’t matter. It’s me. Let’s do this.” The last time Andi had been through these doors was leaving through them six months ago. She’d been hustled out on an emergency call to assist Miranda’s team and had never come back.

  The NTSB Training Center in Ashburn, Virginia, had been a thirty-mile drive from the headquarters building. She tried to remember who she even was back then.

  “I w
as so angry. So…lost.”

  “You were?” It was the first words Miranda had spoken since she’d given Andi the address in the car.

  “I was recovering from PTSD—barely. I’d lost my career as a pilot and I was sure I’d never find myself or any dreams ever again.” And that was a kind description of the mess she’d been on the outside. On the inside she’d been much worse. The black fear of every passing moment had loomed like an apocalypse. Funny, she wasn’t sure when that had faded away.

  “This place and Terence’s house were my second home.” Miranda smiled at the building as if it was a puppy dog rather than a sprawling two-story brick edifice.

  As if to prove her point, the moment they walked through the front doors, the matronly receptionist looked up and exclaimed in surprise.

  “Miranda! I didn’t know you were in town. Are you coming in to teach a class this week? I don’t remember you on the schedule. I’m on vacation next week to go see my new granddaughter in Atlanta, just came in today to make sure everything was ready for my fill-in.”

  “Hello, Priscilla. No. I’m just here for a visit.”

  “I’ll call the director for you, though I haven’t seen him today. Does he know you were coming in?”

  “No,” Miranda managed, then looked a bit panicked.

  Andi turned to Priscilla. “We saw the director last night. I expect that he’s sleeping still.”

  “You saw… Oh dear.” She press a hand to her heart. “In Frederick. I’m so sorry. Has there been any progress on the investigation?” Only inside the NTSB would that be more than an idle question.

  Even though Miranda was moving deeper into the building, Andi lagged for a moment.

  “With her on the job?”

  Priscilla smiled as she glanced after Miranda. “She did another one, did she? Never seen anything like that girl. I remember the first day she came here twenty years ago. A spook of a little thing, you couldn’t even say boo around her. Of course I still had my hair color and figure back then.” She patted her curly white coif and winked that her figure had probably been all big curves even back then.

  Andi tried to imagine Miranda, who called the President Roy and could walk into a Marine Two wreck yet keep her focus so absolute, could ever be described as spooky.

  “I’d love to stay and hear more, but…” Andi nodded toward where Miranda was most of the way down the long hallway.

  “Shoo, Andrea. Glad to see you doing so much better.”

  Andi didn’t even know she’d made any impression. She tried to speak but had no idea what to say.

  “If you want to keep up with that girl, you best run, sweetheart.” Priscilla waved her away.

  Andi nodded her thanks, then just turned and sprinted down the long corridor.

  Miranda had come to a stop at the end of the corridor as if she didn’t remember how doors worked.

  “Are you okay?”

  Miranda shook her head.

  “Can you tell me why we’re here when you’re strung out from exhaustion and two back-to-back investigations? Are you trying to out-do some opera heroine? Some prince here that needs beheading?”

  “I’m beheading dragons.” Miranda didn’t even react to using a metaphor. It had been barely a whisper.

  “Like Xuanlong sitting on the opera stage?” Andi leaned in closer.

  Miranda just kept staring at the door, then spoke even softer, “My personal dragon.”

  Andi looked at the door sign: Practical Lab.

  She knew that the vast warehouse space was littered with wrecks—the remains of real ones used for training. Several were scattered remains to simulate a debris field. An intact Huey helicopter and the long fuselage of a twenty-nine-passenger BAe Jetstream 41 turboprop. And—

  Oh gods! She was an idiot.

  Now she knew why they were here.

  “You need to do this?”

  Miranda nodded tightly.

  “Okay.” Of all crazy things, she’d asked Andi to be here because she was the calm one. The one person Miranda could feel calm around.

  She took Miranda’s hand, which was ice cold, and wrapped it in the crook of her elbow, then left her hand covering Miranda’s fingers.

  “Let’s do this.”

  She pushed a foot against the door and shoved it open.

  78

  Miranda hadn’t been here in a year and nineteen days. A quick glance showed that nothing had changed. No new wrecks, no old ones removed.

  She headed for the northeast corner where the largest wreck dominated the space.

  The shattered middle hundred-foot section of the 747 that was once the most famous crash of them all.

  “Can you believe that there are people who don’t know about TWA 800?”

  “Twenty-five years is a generation,” Andi reminded her.

  “I remember the day it exploded.”

  “Because your parents died aboard this flight.”

  “Yes.” And somehow Andi’s simple statement made her feel so much better.

  “Your life changed that day.”

  It had…and it hadn’t.

  It was the day she’d discovered the one great passion of her life—aircraft crashes. She’d become obsessed, a natural enough tendency for an autistic anyway.

  Aircraft were perhaps the most complex machines humans had ever built, spaceships being but the latest extension of that trend. The puzzles were fascinating. And with each improvement, as the simple problems of flight were resolved, the generational changes became even more complex. It was a challenge that would never stop.

  “Why was it so important to see it today?” Andi had stepped away to look at the rows of seat fabric draped over wooden frames outside the plane. Each had been matched to its original position inside the plane so that the investigators could map the shape of the explosive shock wave that had killed their occupants.

  “Tomorrow we’ll be headed back to Seattle. Or perhaps another incident. And this wreckage is being decommissioned.”

  “It’s what?”

  “They’ve decided that it’s time to recover the warehouse space and put it to other uses than studying a fifty-year old plane that was destroyed twenty-five years ago. I probably won’t ever get to visit it again.”

  “That’s…huge.”

  Miranda appreciated that Andi didn’t ask how she felt about it. She rarely knew how she felt about anything, least of all anything to do with her parents or this plane.

  And it was huge. Both personally and in physical reality.

  She decided against asking if that might be a metaphor. If it was, the tattered remains of the plane were so big and so…sad that she didn’t want to know. Imagining her sorrow to be this big might crush her.

  Miranda look at the ragged mass, the skin patched back together from a thousand pieces. “Trans Wo” of the “Trans World” logo was readable between the first deck and upper deck windows.

  Ahead of that, the nose cone hadn’t been attached. It wasn’t relevant to the crash itself, so there was no reason to include it in the training center display.

  Great rips of missing skin revealed glimpses of the interior structure.

  “It looks like ‘Trans Woe’ the way the R is broken off.”

  Miranda had never noticed that. She’d spent hundreds of hours studying and later visiting this wreck, and Andi had found something new.

  “Transcend Woe? Seems like a good message to me,” Andi continued.

  “It is a good message,” Miranda agreed. “Have you done that, Andi?”

  “Hey, what’s with the hard question? Seriously, though. I miss Ken, he was a great copilot and a dear friend. I miss my old career. But doing what we do and working with you has been a huge gift.” Andi went silent for a moment, took a deep breath, then turned to look directly at her. “I really like working with you.”

  “I feel the same,” Miranda turned back to the plane and watched it sleeping there. Was it comfortable in sleep or would it be happier when it had bee
n fully recycled and shredded?

  “No, Miranda. I really like being with you.”

  “Is your voice strained? It sounds strained.”

  Andi gave one of her half laughs that told Miranda there was a joke somewhere that she’d never find.

  “What am I missing?”

  “Miranda, how do you…feel about women?”

  “I like women.”

  “I mean as in a girlfriend.”

  “Doesn’t friendship count as being girlfriends? You called me girlfriend at the wreck site in Frederick, Maryland.”

  Andi’s look went dark, like a lightbulb that had gone out, “I guess so. Sure.”

  Miranda pulled out her notebook and flipped to the emoticon page. Andi didn’t look sad, exactly. Nor angry. Maybe frustrated. Or… “I can’t find your emotion on the page.”

  Andi walked a couple paces away and scrubbed at her face. “Can we just forget I said anything?” She kept her back turned.

  “You know how bad I am at that?”

  “I do,” Andi’s shoulders sagged. Then she squared them up and walked back to face her directly. “Okay, I’m gonna be brave because, goddamn it, I was a Night Stalker pilot and we have a motto.”

  “Death waits in the dark.”

  “I was thinking of the other one.” Andi’s laugh lightened her face considerably, which was a relief.

  “NSDQ. Night Stalkers Don’t Quit.”

  “Yes. That one. Therefore, I’m going to ask you to believe me that if your answer is no, there are no hard feelings.”

  “The answer to what?” Miranda was sure she’d missed an important fact but couldn’t imagine what.

  “Miranda, I like women as partners, not men. And,” she took a deep breath, “I find you very, very attractive. The more I get to know you, the better I like you.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “I know you were with Jon. But I wondered if you ever thought about being with a woman as a partner?”

  “No.” At least now she knew what the question was. Solid footing.