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Jeremy twisted to face her. “She what?”
“She saw it. Weren’t going to say a word, were you? Shall I cite you for withholding information from an official US Air Force crash investigation?”
“You did?” Jeremy tripped over a fire hose, only catching his balance as he stepped between Taz and herself. As if he didn’t appear to notice thejust-fucking-wither-and-dievisual daggers passing between them.
Clarissa sighed. Jeremy was always so inoffensive that she couldn’t bring herself to snipe at him.
“Yes, I saw the entire event. From the moment the C-20 rounded the Capitol Dome,” she pointed along North Capitol Street, “until, well, now.”
Jeremy clicked on a recorder and mumbled into it for a moment about the location and the date and time. Then, “Interview with CIA Director Clarissa Reese.”
“I don’t have time for this, Jeremy.”
“Memory accuracy has an alarming decay rate. Did you know that perception memory only lasts half a second? If it’s not attached to a thought, it may be completely lost after that. Short-term memory is generally acknowledged to be efficient for only twenty-to-thirty seconds. Then the brain goes through a sorting process to determine what to move into long-term memory. Long-term memory accuracy decreases at—”
“The same rate I decide that shooting you while I had the chance increases as a good idea.”
“No. No. That’s completely unrelated. You’re describing a conscious decision-making process requiring primary access to long-term memory for experiential factor-weighting of—”
“Jeremy,” Taz said it softly, but it stopped the man before Clarissadidneed to throttle him.
“Fine, whatever. But I didn’t even get to the interesting part about new facts distorting our memories of older ones. Did you know that truly severe distortions can occur during dream states, especially if the dream content overlaps real events because our brain often considers dream and conscious experiences to have equal degrees of reality when—”
“I understand,” Taz cut him off again. “But you’ve made you’re point… Hasn’t he, Clarissa?” Taz’s hand rested negligently on the CIA pistol sticking out of her vest pocket. She wondered if Taz was as fast with reloading a gun as she was with her knife. Perhaps it was better to leave that question unanswered.
“Fine. Fine! Let’s get out of their way.” The police photographers were moving into their area with a morgue team close on their heels. How far behind would the newsies be following? She did not want her face plastered on the front pages. It might not have been a bad idea to bedeadfor a while, until she could investigate if she’d been the target. With Taz and Jeremy’s arrival, that would be awkward to achieve now.
Taz shrugged as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “Nothing we can do except interviews until they finish off the fire and the site cools down anyway.” She might appear to be saying it to the thin air but Jeremy nodded in agreement after a quick glance at the still raging firefight.
Clarissa also noticed that neither of them had the decency to be sweating half as much as she was in the pounding DC heat. Or was it finally sinking in quite how close she’d come to dying in the George’s Presidential Suite?
Jeremy carefully excised a page from the back of his notebook, wrote a note on the slip of paper, then bent down to tuck it into the driver’s shoulder holster. “A receipt for the sidearm, so that the morgue teams don’t think it was stolen.”
Jeremy might be annoying but, like Miranda, he didn’t miss any technical details.
Clarissa led them through the maze of trucks and rushing rescue workers to where Rose still waited by the car.
“They’ve got questions.”
And there wasn’t a chance that she was going to let them know thatshemight have been the target and not Senator Ramson. Better yet, let them think it was a random act. An out-of-control pilot slamming into the hotel.
At Rose’s suggestion, they walked the short block into Lower Senate Park, well back from the disaster. There were benches around the Reflecting Pool there that showed off the brightly lit Capitol as neatly as the one at the other end of the Mall displayed the Washington Monument from Lincoln’s steps. From the park, they’d still have a view of the outer edges of the rescue efforts without being on top of them.
As they walked along the sidewalk, friendly as could be to all appearances, Rose made a small exclamation of surprise, “Oh!”
“What?”
“When they killed Hunter, do you think they might have been targeting you instead?”
Clarissa sighed. So much for keeping that off the table.
