15
The accentuationof the typical disaster of a Friday evening DC gridlock, by the three-day weekend and the jet crash into a major hotel, had rippled across the city. Reports said the traffic was immobile from the Navy Yard to Dupont Circle and the Lincoln Memorial to the defunct RFK Stadium—the entire core was frozen. Ordering a car would do her no good; it could be midnight before it reached them. The airspace was indeed closed to non-military flights. And by the time she acted, any taxi that could escape had already been hired and left the area.
Some idiot with the imagination of a turnip had also decided to shut down the Metroin casethe fire caved in the tunnel on the Red Line between Judiciary Square and Union Station. Except they hadn’t shut down only the Red Line, they’d stopped the entire six-line system. Now all of DC was trapped in the heat. Someone was bound to go postal in the very near future.
Two hours after sunset, the temperature had climbed to a near record ninety-five degrees and a level of humidity that had nothing to do with measurable percentages. If she still had her driver’s gun, Clarissa herself might be the first one to take up arms againstanylikely target.
By the time Jeremy and Taz had finished the first round of their inquisition, the fires at the George were out. Nothing left to burn there, the firefight was now centered on the Hilton.
They decided to return to the site. Any attempts to stop them at the outer barriers were quickly quashed. She was chagrined to notice that the NTSB and AIB investigator badges held more cachet with the DC cops than her own D/CIA identity.
The mortally injured were gone but the lightly injured were still being airlifted out as no ambulance could move from the scene. When she headed for one of the helos, Taz shoved her past the impromptu heliport set up in the intersection.
“The only thing injured about you, Clarissa, is your morals. And they died long ago.”
Clarissa spun to strike out at fucking Taz Cortez, colonel or not. But she was simply standing there with her arms crossed, making no move to attack or defend herself.
She didn’t need to.
The lone splotch on Colonel Vicki Cortez’s record—of betraying her country to help her commander steal a two-hundred million plane—had been expunged by Presidential pardon. If she’d been born in the US, she could make a run for the Presidency, even have a fair chance of success. She’d never disobeyed General JJ Martinez by a single inch, except by surviving the final crash.
Yet the power she held over Clarissa was—
“Yes, I still have the picture, and so much more.” Taz said it softly, then turned and followed Jeremy toward the wreckage at the George.
“What picture?” Rose asked when Clarissa didn’t immediately follow.
Clarissa would rather swallow her tongue than explain. Except, with the mounting pressures of the slime molds of the House Intelligence Committee below and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Drake Nason above, who commanded the President’s ear, her position was precarious at best.
This was Rose Ramson, and Clarissaneededthe First Lady of DC.
“I crossed her idiot, three-star-general boss once, long ago. As a young agent, I ran a CIA site in Afghanistan. She showed up and took a photo, a horribly graphic one. Then walked away without a word.”
“Who were you having sex with?”
Clarissa turned to face her. “It was a black site. I wasn’t having sex.” Actionable intelligence had been extracted by torture there, at least until the pansies in DC had chickened out and thrown the CIA under the bus.
“Ah,” Rose didn’t react beyond that.
“Okay, fine. It was neatly done, but it doesn’t mean I need to like her.”
“Perhaps if you didn’t also act as if you feared her, it would help.”
“I don’t—” But this was Rose Ramson talking, the woman who missed nothing.
Clarissa sighed. Perhaps Colonel Vicki Taz Cortezdidn’trank among her greatest worries.
Focus on the present task.Holy hell, now she was sounding like one-task-at-a-time Miranda Chase.
First, she had to convince Taz and Jeremy that there were issues at hand more critical than the crash into the George. Except to them, there weren’t any. They’d believe that theirmagician bosshad the other matter well in hand.
The only way to break them free was if they satisfied themselves there was nothing more here for them. And the only way that was going to happen?
She had no idea. But they clearly did.
Before she could ask, Taz and Jeremy had led them back to the remains of the George Hotel.