Daniel shoved some of the Greece plan toward the other end of the table, and one of the ushers had a place set even before the President had tucked her chair in beneath her.
“If you don’t kiss her good morning, I will.”
Daniel finished his swallow, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and did just that. Reveled for just a moment in how soft her lips were. Knew enough about her now to feel both the bright smile and the nervousness beneath. He squeezed her hand in encouragement, a gesture quickly returned, before he returned to his seat.
“We were just taking a quick look at the EU bailout plan for Greece. They dropped twenty billion Euro, twenty-five billion dollars, and it appears to finally be working six months later.”
“Now if only the same thing could work in a U.S. market, Mr. President.” Alice offered brightly as someone set a plate and sandwich down in front of her.
The President sighed. “The previous administration dropped half a trillion dollars, and mostly it shuffled the balance of problems around. Mitigated the worst of the disasters, but we’re still a long way from a solution.”
Daniel offered the President a nod. The President had known that Alice would be nervous and chosen a neutral topic to allow her a moment to land. Walking in on the middle of being the subject of conversation… Not good. Really not good.
And the President continued until Daniel found himself able to enter the conversation as well. For twenty minutes or more, they explored general topics while simultaneoulsy working their way through the lunch spread before them.
After they’d set plates aside, and the ushers had swept them away, he could see Alice clearly had something on her mind.
He nodded to her and she smiled back at the encouragement.
“I actually came to see you last night for a, ah, another reason.”
# # #
Alice took a deep breath, thankful that at least the President showed a steady hand. No wry glance at Daniel. No roll of his eyes.
Daniel, on the other hand, should never get near a poker table. He had progressed through a dozen shades of red and twice as many stages of awkwardness since she had invited herself to lunch.
“Good.” Somehow, there’d been a whole conversation between them, all wrapped up in one, single word. Guy speak was so strange. Maybe that’s why her father had never spoken. Could never even get his one word in edgewise past his wife.
Clear your head, Alice. Back to business.
“I have a theory. And it’s a little on the completely whacked-out side of possibility.”
The two men nodded in unison, sharing a neat sense of accord. The President waved the ushers out, and the door behind Alice closed with a discrete click.
“I presume we’re discussing North Korea.”
She nodded to the President. Right. These two could talk about twenty different countries a day. She, however, was only paid to care about one at the moment.
“Who are you planning to send to the meeting?” She’d decided to cast aside any lingering doubts about whether or not there would actually be a meeting. It had been someone else’s task to determine the efficacy of that original request. Her task was to decide what to do about it if it was real.
The problem was the backcheck to verify the situation, however in the world that was done. The response hadn’t come through the same channel. The first had been a simply encrypted message, just sufficient to stop prying eyes, but not requiring the NSA to crack it either. The message had passed off to an NGO. Some Non-Governmental Organization that had been granted a three-day pass into North Korea to test for mercury in the coastal waters. They’d come out with a message in hand.
“Daniel has suggested Vincent, the deputy ambassador to the U.N. I was more inclined to Elisa, the Assistant Secretary of State. We never got much past that. Why?”
Alice sipped at her iced tea to buy a moment to collate factors, but they didn’t change. The backcheck had come from the conductor of the Sea of Blood Opera Company at a carefully staged performance in Paris. An abruptly scheduled event, very reminiscent of the 1972 North Korean circus ensemble who had stormed Paris the week before Nixon went to China.
“We could send somebody military, that is if you think that’s more appropriate.” Daniel’s idea.
“I believe,” Alice rolled her mental dice and came up double-sixes. A good backgammon roll; the same one that had landed her in Daniel’s bed last night. Which had been amazingly worth it. What the hell! Play the game! Double or nothing.
“I believe that we’re thinking too small. I think that the Vice President is the minimum you should send, but that you Mr. President should be prepared to follow immediately if not attend yourself.”
The President started to shake his head, then noticed Daniel’s silence.
Alice studied Daniel as well. In the last few seconds he’d done that mercurial shift; this time from slightly fumbling lover to most astute advisor to the most powerful man on the planet.
She could see the cogs turning. Shifting the pieces to include what he knew of the situation, and what he knew of her.
“What don’t I know?” his question came after a full thirty seconds of echoing silence.
“Methods of communication of the two messages. Personalities of the individuals who I termed the Top Six, the highest advisors and leaders in the North Korean regime.”
“The personalities I know; which is why I had difficulty accepting your initial report. Two messages?”
“Original channel and backcheck.”
“Which were?”
She shook her head. Alice wasn’t even supposed to know, but Director Smith had released the data to her when she’d insisted it was necessary to assess the request’s authenticity. Names and exact movements had been expunged from the reports she read, but there was no questioning them. However, she also wasn’t at any liberty to reveal them, not even to the President.
Again that silence. Daniel stood and walked slowly to the window and back. God! The man even moved beautifully. She could spend a day simply watching him walk about, with or without clothes.
And in addition to beauty, she realized his other blazingly attractive quality to her; Daniel Drake Darlington would have made an amazing analyst. She could she him working through the possibilities. Interpreting and discarding them far faster than she had. Of course she’d had to build up from a blank slate. He’d had a head start built by her reports and information. Still he—
A low whistle indicated that he’d reached the same conclusion she had. He shook his head in clear rejection of his own conclusions being too preposterous. Definitely the same result she’d synthesized in eight days of hard work.
But finally he turned to her and softly voiced a question, “Really?”
She nodded, which appeared to cut his knees out from under him and dropped him back into his chair.
The President turned from one to the other and finally said, “No. That’s not possible.” But drew it out in a tone revealing he too would have made a fine analyst.
Chapter 22
“I can’t believe that you talked me into this!” Daniel had to shout above the roar of the C-17’s jet engines and the air being plowed aside at five hundred miles an hour. The Black Hawk helicopter crew were up at the front of the plane. He and Alice sat about halfway down the side of the immense cargo plane.
Alice didn’t deign to answer. If her conclusion was right, and the Supreme Leader of North Korea was the one requesting the conference with the American government, then the President had to be ready to appear on a moment’s notice.
Daniel’s afternoon had been immediately hijacked from all other considerations. Added to that, a second sleepless night in a row, planning and coordinating this time, left him feeling lightheaded and hazy.
Now he was flying West to verify a portion of the preparation personally.
The woman was going to make him crazy. He checked his watch. Three in the afternoon. Fourteen hours ago he’d been having a nice sit down lunch with the President, now he was freezing his behind at thirty-thousand feet. How had this happened?
“The sun hasn’t even come up yet.” Especially not the mid-winter D.C. sun. “And we’re flying West through the time zones. We won’t even land until sunrise never mind sunset. Now you want to break your own rules?”
They sat in heavy parkas on barely padded seats. They should have pulled on the flightsuits when they were offered, but he’d thought a ski parka would be sufficient. They kept the air inside the plane heated, but the metal skin of the hull sucked the heat right out of his bones.
Two Black Hawk helicopters were aboard. Their rotors had been folded over their tails and they’d been slid in tail-to-tail. The Mil Hound was nowhere to be seen and the two Black Hawks looked absolutely vicious. These were attack craft, weapons hanging to either side from stub wings. Missiles, machine guns, something they’d told him was a cannon able to fire rounds wider than his thumb at a rate over eighty times per second. He’d assumed Major Henderson was kidding, but maybe not. He didn’t seem the type to joke about weaponry.
Alice grabbed his arm and rolled his wrist toward her so that she could see the watch upside down.
“Looks like nine-thirty to me. You know, you should get a watch that has those little numbers instead of just hashy marks. It would help you read time better.”
“Another of your mother’s rules? Adjust everything around you to suit yourself?”
Some of the light went out of Alice’s eyes and she released his wrist. She drifted off to a silent place. A place he suddenly feared because maybe he couldn’t reach her when she went there.
He did the only thing he could think of and pulled the Advent Calendar book out of his flight bag.
“Now let’s see.” He turned it so that she could look at it with him. Her face aimed down and her bangs flopped over her eyes, he hoped she was looking with him.
He did his best to make it a cozy moment, despite the need to shout to be heard above the engines.
“I seem of have eaten the first page out of house and home.” He made a show of inspecting inside each of the eight pull tab windows on the first page. Sure enough, all empty. He’d described each to her on the phone, but now she could see them one by one. And they were lovely art work.
He turned to the middle page.
This image was a grand sweep of delicate art. A sleigh piled with gifts and a dozen tiny micedeer perched on a roof peak as if they did it every day. Daniel had already eaten the caramel behind the door showing where Santa’s hat had caught on a brick inside the chimney.
Around the Christmas tree, a balding but undeniably jolly Saint Hamster, in a red and white jumpsuit that barely contained his furry girth, was scattering presents from his bag.
Daniel opened day ten; a tiny drawing of milk and cookies half eaten, the nibble distinctly two-toothed. Day eleven; inside, a naughty kitten trying to peek through a child-gate pulled across the head of the stairs. Day twelve, behind a picture of great uncle Rex; the good kitten asleep in bed. Day thirteen, Daniel could finally feel Alice’s smile though he couldn’t see it, a tiny mouse behind a tiny mouse hole curled up and fast asleep in a nest of red-and-green wrapping paper.
Day fourteen; the fourteenth of December, was a tall door running right up the length of the tree’s trunk. Inside were a pair of tiny candy canes, shorter than his pinky. Somehow Janet once again knew there would be two of them together. And once again, he’d missed the addition to the calendar’s pages.
Two weeks. He’d only known Alice two weeks. It was unimaginable. Partly because he’d had sex with her, he’d never done that so soon, and also because he couldn’t imagine a day when he couldn’t at least speak with her. How had she become so important so quickly?
Daniel handed one of the candy canes to Alice and took the other himself. As they peeled off the plastic, they looked inside the calendar window to see a different version of the tree. Smaller, standing still in the woods with its companion trees. Somehow it looked to be asleep wearing a little nightcap of snow, and it had a dream bubble reaching up into a starry sky of being a real Christmas tree someday when it grew up.
“So, do you taste like a candy cane?” When Daniel brushed her cheek, she looked up at him with a slow reluctance. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t ask anything. He simply kissed her. Long and slow and deep, reveling in the taste of her. The feel of her.
He pulled back just a little and nodded. “Yep! Alice and candy cane. Knew that was a winner combination without even guessing.”
Her smile thanked him for not pushing. The eyes, those amazing hazeled eyes, he wished he could borrow a bit of elf magic and wipe them clear of whatever bad memory still lurked there. She held his hand tightly in hers, and leaned her head on his shoulder.
Daniel leaned back against the hull of the aircraft, feeling the vibration become a part of his body. With the Advent Calendar across his lap in one hand, and Alice’s fingers wrapped warmly in his other hand, Daniel could feel content. As if he were in the right place at the right time.
He rested his cheek on Alice’s impossibly soft hair, closed his eyes, and let the exhaustion of a pair of sleepless nights take him under.
Chapter 23
Daniel tried to assess him, but the man was so totally non-descript that Daniel never would have noticed him on the street. Now they sat in a small restaurant at Skagit County airport, which sat in a far corner of Washington State.
“Captain Smith,” the man they’d flown across the country to meet smiled with a bit of chagrin, “My real name, I promise.”
Captain Smith of the Canadian Special Operations Aviation Squadron. SOAS was one of those spec ops groups that almost no one had heard of. They weren’t Delta or SEAL or SAS, but they were impressively effective in their own quiet way. Daniel had read the reports carefully when Beale had recommended he contact them.
He and Alice, Majors Beale and Henderson, and Captain Smith sat upstairs in the restaurant looking out over parked private planes and the sleepy runways. At the far end of the room, a half dozen vacant tables scattered across the space between them, sat the two Black Hawk crew chiefs, Tim and John.
No one else. The waitress had returned downstairs to fill their various breakfast orders.
Almost lost in the rainy haze, dull gray against the gray-green of the moss-covered fir trees, the C-17 transport lurked on an unused taxiway at the back of the airport. The flight crew had remained there as a standing guard. The flight engineer was downstairs getting some breakfasts to go for them.
No scheduled flights bounced through Skagit, not until the tulip season. The waitress, recognizing them as obvious out-of-towners, had regaled them with stories about the local farms which supplied ninety percent of the nation’s tulips. The wall was hung with dozens of colorful photos offering mute testament to her statements about the number of sight-seeing flights in the high season. Each incongruously draped with red-and-green Christmas garlands that had seen a few too many seasons.
The two crew chiefs were sitting nonchalantly by the head of the stairs at the opposite end of their otherwise vacant dining area. Big John, the giant of the pair, was riffling a deck of cards. Tim, “Crazy Tim” Daniel had been informed, had tossed some coins on the table. Daniel had learned enough about them to know that no matter how casual they appeared, they were intently watching the parking lot out the window, listening for stray noises from the main restaurant below, and guarding each other’s back. They moved with that perfect harmony of good friends and immense training.
“Skagit County airport in mid-December,” Captain Smi
th observed. “Stone quiet and perhaps a twenty-minute flight for the U.S.-Canadian border. I find those are interesting aspects of your curious locale for a meeting.”
“Captain Nathaniel Smith?” Alice asked with surprise, emphasizing the first name.
He nodded easily.
“You flew the Sudanese mission in 2006?”
The man didn’t move. He’d shifted from a pleasant man with a light British accent to cold steel in a single heartbeat.
The crew chiefs sensing the change visibly tensed at the far end of the room. The Majors set down their coffee cups ever so nonchalantly, probably to empty their hands in case sudden action was required.
Daniel braced to interpose himself between the man and Alice. Captain Smith would be easy to remember now. The captain, so common-looking a moment ago, now radiated the chill of death.
“That was well done, sir.” Alice held out her hand. “I’d be honored to shake your hand.”
Captain Smith gingerly shook her hand as if she were a grenade about to go off in his grasp.
Daniel recognized the look, as if the Captain’s brain had just been sideswiped by a speeding locomotive. Daniel often felt that way around Alice.
The two Majors inspected the Captain more carefully, but Daniel could see by their quick exchange of looks that neither knew what Alice was referring to. He didn’t either.
“How?” the Captain’s voice was rough.
“That was approximately the same time that I was performing a departmental assessment of flight abilities of various allied Special Operations Forces operators. Your career has been, I believe ‘distinguished’ would be a fitting word. Naturally when I learned that the asset of a close U.S. ally had flown the mission, there was andeat eighty-five percent probability you had been on that flight.”
“Uh, I was commander of the mission.”
“Seventy-two percent probability. Yes!” Alice raised her hand palm out and the Captain high-fived her before he could stop himself.
Daniel's Christmas Page 9
