19
Clarissa was going quietly mad.
She’d go noisily mad if it would do any good, but a glare from Taz had informed her how inadvisable that would be. Clarissa could still feel where that blade had rested against her throat as if it was a line of embers that continued to burn there. A discreet peek in a hand mirror hadn’t revealed any mark but she could feel it nonetheless.
When they’d arrived at the NTSB headquarters, the offices were all dark, no surprise in the middle of the night. The gaudy facade of the International Spy Museum spread most of its red glow toward the street and did little to light the NTSB’s offices across the square. This far from the core, traffic had been breaking up and starting to move by the time they arrived.
But Jeremy and Taz wouldn’t leave headquarters, not to circle the city and go out to Langley. They had immersed themselves in the NTSB recorder lab.
She’d been here only once before, to help interpret the recovered voice recorder audio for Clark’s final flight three weeks ago.
Hearing his few words captured by the cockpit voice recorder had haunted her dreams on and off since. Often she sat up alone in the darkness on the verge of calling out his name. It was becoming quite annoying and she wished that her dreams or subconscious or whatever would shut up and go away.
Walking the shadowed halls of the NTSB less than a month later echoed with ghosts and her own spiked heels.
Jeremy dove into the black box data recovery process. She hadn’t seen the early, mechanical part of the process before. What should have been exciting, or of at least consuming interest, wasn’t. It was slow, tedious, and infinitely boring to watch.
She considered heading out to Langley, but it was no better than here for what she needed to do. Also, they were less than a half mile from the White House if she was called in. Yes, this would do nicely for now.
“Where’s the nearest conference room with secure comms?”
Once she finally had enough of Jeremy’s attention to receive an answer, she turned to Taz.
“You call me the minute you goddamn find anything, Cortez, or I’ll string your boyfriend up by the balls and you by your tiny ears.”
Taz gave her the finger. At least they knew where they stood with each other.
Clarissa left Rose to keep an eye on them because she didn’t have the clearance for what came next.
For the next several hours, Clarissa escalated every operative she could. Instructions began filtering out to agents in China, Russia, India, and Iran. She also woke them up infriendlycountries: France, the UK, Japan, and Israel.
The challenge? She didn’t know what she was looking for. Had the aircraft carrier suffered a terrible accident or been attacked? Had the man who killed Ramson been a solo psychotic, a religious fanatic, or being blackmailed so they had no other option?
Without knowing anything, it was hard to know how wide to cast the nets. And some of them were one-time nets, embedded sleeper agents who, once they’d broken cover, would have to be extracted. It took years to replace those kinds of assets.
It was a risk, but she cast as wide as she could except for the sleeper agents.
But to the local informers she dangled the ultimate prize: a US passport and a lifetime income.
By the time she was done reaching out, the first influx of return reports had begun—revealing nothing of interest.