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“You know what we missed,don’t you, Drake?”
“What makes you think I missed it?”
Clarissa leaned back in her seat. Eighteen hours Brunei to London, eight more to DC. She was going to be dead in business class by the time they landed. And sitting next to Drake the whole way, she’d be a certifiable basket case as well.
“Can we not fight? Just for once. We’re stuck with each other for twenty-six hours—”
“Don’t forget the two layovers. That makes it thirty-one.”
“How would you like to be the one who ends up dead when we get there, Drake?”
“Well, if you put it that way, I think my showing up dead might upset my wife. I should warn you that Lizzy can be quite a handful when she gets riled.”
Maybe Clarissa could find a pill that would let her sleep from here to DC. Let Drake shuffle her from one plane to another like an oversized piece of carry-on luggage.
“But to your point, Clarissa, I didn’t forget that Zuocheng said the ZY-2B was designed to operate in pairs.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“What?”
“Easy. You don’t want to upset the flight attendants.”
Clarissa accepted her glass of champagne from the attendant, who did indeed eye her carefully. Thank God they were airborne and away from Brunei. She needed this and needed it badly. The bright fizz and gentle sweetness did make her feel better. Now she simply needed a good soak in the tub, fresh clothes, and a foot massage—yet another thing Clark had been skilled at. Yet another thing she’d lost when he burned to death.
She couldn’t suppress the shiver. Clark, Ramson, all of those people on theTheodore Roosevelt.Her husband, the White House… How much had she lost to fire? When she found a new apartment, if it had a fireplace, she’d have it bricked upbeforemoving in.
Drake accepted his ginger ale can and glass of ice with grace and received a pleasant smile from the pretty attendant. They always did like men in uniform.
Clarissa was about to tease him over being so lame, when the attendant placed a miniature of Johnnie Walker Black beside his glass. He quickly mixed a highball and sighed.
“Oh my God, that’s so much better.”
“That’s almost human of you, Drake. Now what the hell do you mean you aren’t going to do anything about that satellite?”
“Oh, that’s easy. I’m not going to do a thing because you’re going to take care of it.”
If her jaw could drop, it would, but it was clenched too tight to let go. “Oh, and how am I going to do that?”
He set aside his drink and pulled out his tablet computer. He searched for a moment, selected a folder, then dropped it in front of her before picking up his drink once more.
The folder had a list of PDFs.
The first was titled, “Monarch Butterfly Wing Study.”
“Are you shitting me?”
“Keep going,” Drake had leaned back and closed his eyes, though he continued to sip his drink.
Further titles were: “Low-Visibility Satellites” and “An Evaluation of Space Tugs for Deorbiting Space Debris.”
“I still don’t get the butterflies.”
“Fascinating creatures actually. Did you know that one of the most light absorbent materials in the entire world is the black areas of a Monarch butterfly’s wing? DARPA has developed a material based on that. One that is over ninety-eight percent light absorbent across the visible spectrum. You know what that means?”
