White Top Read online

  “That never crossed my goddamn desk.”

  “Sent to Congress by the Department of State. The Saudis are offering cash, and—”

  “I’ve got a dirty Secretary of State?” The President’s voice went cold.

  “We don’t know that sir,” Sarah said carefully, “but I have people looking into exactly that.”

  “And the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee is in the pocket of the defense contractors?”

  “We haven’t been able to prove that either but,” Sarah sighed deeply, “yes. Even though Senator Ramson isn’t chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee that has to approve the sale, he has the controlling vote there. His block controls seven of the twenty-two votes and we think there are another five he can swing on special votes.”

  “Christ! So he’s got someone dirty in State who is feeding him sales to approve on Foreign Relations so that he can sit on Armed Services and order more high-end—” Cole cut himself off. “That man is a major problem. And the results speak for themselves. More goddamn Middle East and Southwest Asia wars. Please tell me there’s another alternative?”

  Drake nodded, “Vice President Clark Winston is an old Middle East hand and he also concurs. I think they’re both right on this one. The Saudis have the second largest military budget by GDP in the world after Oman, fifth globally in raw dollars spent. Yes, they are enemies of several terrorist-spawning countries, but they combat that by pumping obscene amounts of funds into terrorism—billions. For years Clark has been saying in both classified and public reports that the US needs to rethink that relationship—not to the Saudis’ advantage. We need to stop feeding them weapons, training, and support.”

  “God damn it, Drake. That does it. I’m voting for you as the next President. In fact, you can take over right now for all I care.”

  “Be better off with Sarah here.”

  “Why’s that?” Sarah actually looked a bit alarmed, which was a first.

  “First, you’re smarter than either of us.”

  “Maybe than both of us put together,” the President grumbled.

  “Well, of course,” she went for the joke but didn’t quite carry it off.

  “Second, we’re both old warhorses who are ready to just stop. Time for the younger generation to take over.”

  “I’m about ten minutes younger than either of you.” More like a ten years.

  “See,” Drake turned back to the President, “I told you she was smart when I recommended her.”

  President Cole was never one to take long making decisions. He stared at Sarah for about thirty seconds. Long enough that any lesser person would have been twitching. The only external sign he gave was a slow tapping of his left forefinger on the back of his other hand.

  Then it stopped.

  “Okay,” he pushed to his feet.

  He and Sarah both rose as well.

  “I’m going to have the SecDef put a hold on the approval process for the Saudi arms sale. Then I am going to take a nap. Wake me ten minutes before we land with a plan of action that I can sell at the meetings. And if there’s a war, just deal with it for me, okay?”

  He closed the door behind him, giving them use of his office.

  “He was joking, right?” Sarah had only been on board as the NSA for the last seven weeks since Millard’s heart attack had forced him to retire. Drake had served the President as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the last six years.

  “Are you asking about presenting a completely new model for world policy in under two hours or letting him sleep through a war?”

  “Um,” Sarah shrugged, “either?”

  “The latter, yes. The former? We’ve got our work cut out for us. Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it.”

  Sarah didn’t look convinced.

  9

  By the expedient of ninety-three wrong turns, Andi was standing in two feet of chilly water.

  The officer had asked her to make sure the helo was locked to keep teens from rummaging around inside, which it hadn’t been. Not the sort of thing she’d had to worry about in the military. By the time she’d jogged down and taken care of it, everyone else was gone.

  The officer joined her as she tested the various lobby doors—all locked. He didn’t look put out, enjoying the chance to flirt with her. He was very nice about it, so she let him.

  As she circled behind the building looking for another way in, someone went hustling in through a steel security door. She’d managed to snag the handle before it latched, but her guide was long gone once she was inside.

  That was the first of her ninety-three wrong turns trying to find her way through the labyrinthine pathways beneath the opera house.

  The two feet of chilly water she’d plunged into was fast becoming three.

  The logjam of chairs and music stands across the only other exit was the giveaway to her location—in the orchestra pit. Under the stage when others were probably on the stage. At least she was close.

  Large copper kettle drums bobbed on the surface of the water and the whole mess was papered over with floating sheets of music turned to mush.

  And the water level was rising.

  At five-two tall, this was going to get bad very soon.

  Drowned at the opera, one tiny Chinese woman from San Francisco.

  It was a headline she’d rather not be part of.

  Through the swirling water, she couldn’t see what was happening under the forward section of the pit. Was it a smooth floor that she could traverse out into the opera house seating, or a bottomless well of machinery where she’d be pinned and drown?

  Better not to find out. She’d done enough pits of despair since Ken’s grisly death. It was definitely time to look up rather than down.

  When she did, she noticed that the underside of the stage floor had a trap door in it. It was at the front center of the pit. Over the orchestra conductor’s podium? It would have helped if she’d come to an opera before this.

  She sloshed over, testing the now thigh-deep underwater surface carefully with each step. Despite that, she rapped a shin hard on the sharp corner of the podium. Clambering up onto it, she was once again only calf deep in the rising water and could reach the trap. Andi hit the release and it swung down easily.

  Too easily. The puddle of water that had accumulated over it dumped down onto her head, soaking her last remaining dry spots—like behind her right ear.

  When it stopped and she dared to look again, she was shoulder-high to the stage floor.

  The water had slowed to a trickle as she climbed up onto the floorboards. At least it wasn’t icy. Just damn cold. Water-main cold.

  The thousands of seats watching her performance were unimpressed.

  The stage was blocked by an ugly brown cloth drape.

  There was no gap that she could see. No door to either side.

  She looked back at the seating. The water was only ankle deep before the rows of seats angled upward to dry safety. But she didn’t want to jump down into it to find another way backstage.

  There were voices on the other side of the drape.

  “Hey, how do I get in—”

  Before she could finish her shout, the brown wall began sliding upward.

  A low sandbag wall wasn’t holding back more than a skim of water across the stage. She was wetter than the floor.

  As it lifted further, she could see a strange shimmering reflection on the rippling water, like a fairy tale castle and—

  She yelped!

  A massive dragon was glaring at her as if it was ready to eat her alive.

  “You’re all wet,” Miranda greeted Andi with that perfect logic of hers.

  “I am. I was lost, but I looked up and now I’m found.” Andi resisted the urge to begin singing “Amazing Grace.” Besides, she hadn’t been that lost, at least not in a while.

  “Why did you yell?”

  “I wasn’t expecting to see Xuanlong the black dragon glaring at me.”

>   “He’s guarding the imperial palace,” Miranda turned to the dragon.

  “He shouldn’t be, he only has three toes. That makes him Japanese or only fit for a Tang Dynasty nobleman’s house. Imperial dragons have five toes. Though,” she splashed a sopping boot in the thin sheen of water on the black stage floor, “he does dwell in the depth of mysterious waters, so maybe he is in the right place. Oh my God!”

  “What?”

  Andi grabbed her head. “How do I know that? I’m turning into my grandmother.”

  Miranda inspected her carefully. “You don’t look like you’re changing.”

  “I meant inside,” and Andi decided she’d be better off with a different topic. “An imperial palace, huh? This opera about some nasty emperor? Maybe Xuanlong matches him.” Andi wrung what she could out of the front of her t-shirt. “Is he fair or vengeful? Perhaps he excels at law or combat?”

  Miranda studied the stage for a moment. “No, but he is overwhelmed and saddened by a strongheaded daughter.”

  “Like Wu Zetian—thirteen hundred years ago she became China’s only female emperor. I can’t believe everything Gram stuffed into my head without my realizing it. Does the daughter want to sit on the Dragon Throne herself?”

  “No. She just likes killing princes who are courting her.”

  “Hard to argue with the logic.” Despite her lack of interest in men, being a short, cute Asian, she’d certainly been a target. Andi did what she could to squeeze the water out of her shoulder-length hair, sending a fresh trickle of cold down her still-soaked front.

  “Why— No. Let’s not go there. What about the plane crash?”

  Miranda pointed upward.

  Andi looked up, way up. Ten stories above their heads was a massive gridwork of steel. Through the gaps, she could just make out the outline of an airplane.

  Then she could see there were people moving around up there.

  “Is that the team?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why aren’t you up there with them?”

  “Holly and Mike suggested that it was time for Jeremy to fail. So, I’m doing nothing until he asks me. It’s very…” she pulled out a notebook and flipped to her emoticon page.

  “Frustrating?” Andi suggested.

  “Yes, that’s it. Thank you,” Miranda tucked away the notebook without checking it on the page.

  Time for Jeremy to fail?

  That must mean that they were grooming him for a team leader role. She really had to start getting up earlier, she was missing too much.

  She looked aloft again. A fully loaded Cessna 208 Caravan weighed eight thousand pounds.

  “How much weight can that grid hold?”

  “I’m not sure. I think each individual pipe can hold approximately four thousand pounds. There are several specific points that can manage ten-ton point loads.”

  There were perhaps a hundred pipes. The Caravan wouldn’t have stressed the grid at all except for the impact of its arrival, though most of that shock would have been absorbed by it punching through the wall. A vast beam of sunshine through the hole lit the plane brilliantly now that she’d spotted it.

  “It’s amazing that it didn’t blast out the other side.”

  “You can’t see it from below but there are hundreds of ropes just above the grid. They must have acted like the arresting harness on an aircraft carrier, jerking it to a halt.”

  “Were there any survivors?”

  Miranda nodded, “Apparently everyone except the pilot and a passenger seated in the copilot’s seat. Several were suffering from heat stroke due to the fire but the sprinkler system kept them from being burned alive.”

  “And we’re waiting for Jeremy to fail?”

  Miranda nodded.

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  Miranda actually looked at her in distress. Frustrating perhaps didn’t begin to cover the depths of Miranda’s feelings, even if she didn’t know how to put words to them. Sidelined and unable to help on the investigation must be torture for an autistic.

  “So—”

  As he hurried by, a stagehand offered her a blanket that she gratefully wrapped around her shoulders and felt suddenly colder as all of her wet clothes were pressed against her skin.

  She did her best to suppress a shiver. Then she looked again at the airplane overhead, and at the dragon glaring at them with its one unburned eye. She led Miranda off to the side.

  “So, tell me about this opera that I’m not going to be seeing anytime soon.” Andi hoped that would be enough to shift Miranda’s one-track mind away from the crash and Jeremy to ease her worry.

  “It begins with the Prince of Persia losing his head. Anyone who would court Turandot must answer three riddles and failure is a death sentence. Then a prince in hiding…”

  10

  Taz knew something strange was going on, but she had no idea what.

  She stopped for a moment.

  She and Jeremy were the only two inside the Caravan airplane.

  No one else.

  First, Miranda wasn’t up here. Maybe she was afraid of heights. That she was both an air-crash genius and a nice person was awesome, but tracking her myriad quirks was something Taz could never wrap her head around.

  In Taz’s nineteen years as a general’s aide at the Pentagon, she had learned that being both a genius and a nice-person was actually a common pairing—pity it occurred so rarely. It was as if the real geniuses, with nothing to prove, could afford to be pleasant. It was the wannabes who were utter egotistical assholes.

  At least them she understood. Like knew like.

  She’d survived Mexico and San Diego street gangs, and even the Pentagon officers, who were simply hall thugs in pretty uniforms, by being an A-1 certified bitch herself. It had worked for her…until she met Jeremy.

  Taz looked at him again. Jeremy Trahn was mid-twenties to her mid-thirties and Vietnamese to her Mexican.

  He had a family who had welcomed her easily. Their only shock was that Jeremy had brought home a woman at all, not that she was a nine-year-older, four-foot-eleven Latina.

  Jeremy was studying the plane so intently, he’d probably forgotten she was close beside him.

  No sign of Andi either.

  Mike and Holly were just hanging back on the far end of a catwalk above the rope lines. Not doing anything. Not even talking.

  They were both watching…Jeremy.

  They were—

  “Hey, Jeremy?”

  “Uh-huh.” He was now sitting in the pilot’s seat, upside down. The two bodies were being removed from the cockpit as the NTSB team had arrived atop the grid—the passengers had already been debarked by medical personnel and were headed to the hospital with various breaks and bruises.

  They’d been incredibly lucky. Any fuel that had leaked and ignited had all dribbled through the open steel gridwork and burned the curtains and sets below rather than destroying the airplane.

  The windshields had been blown inward while breaking through the building’s outer wall. Jeremy had cleared aside the smashed chunks of acrylic and now lay with his back on the seat and his feet on the headrest. His head was out of sight beneath the dashboard. One hand had reached up and was twisting the control wheel as he inspected the mechanism behind the console.

  “Any idea why we’re the only ones working on the crash?”

  “Nope.” He kept fooling with the controls.

  “Well, it’s damned peculiar.”

  “What is?”

  She poked him in the ribs.

  He flinched, banged his head under there, then squirmed and giggled. A grown man with a ticklish spot. He was like a space alien—one who was so familiar that she found herself wanting to stay on Miranda’s team for him as much as for herself.

  “That we’re the only ones working on the crash.”

  “We are?” He scooched aside enough to look up at her from under the dash. “That’s not right.”

  “Did anyone say anything to you?” />
  “Not a thing.” He scooted out, dragging his t-shirt up to his armpits in the process.

  She resisted the urge to blow a raspberry on his smooth chest. Over the years she’d had sex when it pleased her, but she’d never had a “lover” until Jeremy. It still made no sense, but she tabled that for later.

  “Except Miranda telling me I was the IIC.”

  Taz blinked at him in surprise. “She did what?”

  “On the flight down. She asked me to be the IIC. Like a training exercise.”

  He’d taken the lead on whole sections of an investigation before, but the others had kept working. Not now. This time was different.

  So obvious now.

  Of course Jeremy didn’t get it. He was a nerd’s nerd about aircraft. As compulsive as Miranda herself.

  “Why aren’t they at least helping?” Jeremy whispered as they both looked out the missing windshields at Mike and Holly.

  “I’m not sure.” Taz wasn’t used to depending on others, except her general. And he was dead, almost taking her with him in a final act of vengeance upon the world that had taken his wife.

  “Should I ask them why?”

  Taz grabbed Jeremy and dragged him into a kiss. And the boy could really kiss. When she broke free, she gave him a hand to his feet, then slapped his nice tight ass to get him moving toward the open door at the rear of the aircraft.

  “What?”

  “That’s exactly what you should do, Jeremy. Go ask them to help you.”

  “But Miranda never does.”

  “She’s Miranda. You’re you. You’re the IIC, you need to tell them what to do.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if I asked?”

  “Right, yes. Ask for help. Go.” Taz tried not to laugh as he picked his way over the rope lines to where Mike and Holly were smiling at him.

  No, they were smiling at her.

  They would know that Jeremy would never have thought to ask for help on his own. Was that her role on the team, helping Jeremy behave like a real investigator-in-charge?

  Then she looked at Mike and Holly again as they laughed with Jeremy like friends before following him back toward the plane.