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28
At the knockon the conference room door, Clarissa collapsed back into her chair. She’d lost all track of time and had nothing more to report to the White House now than after the crash.
Everything was a dead end.
“Come in.” Clarissa checked her watch.
Seven hours?
Seven hours, and all she knew was that a plane had crashed into Ramson’s suite at the George and someone had crippled a US aircraft carrier. She still had no lead on who for either one.
Rose opened the door and slipped into the room. She looked as she always did, at ease and elegant. Clarissa felt like a rumpled mess.
“Sorry. I had to get that moving.”
Rose nodded. Then she shook her head. Then nodded again.
Her coif was still immaculate. Her clothes had none of the odd soot stains that her own bore. Nor did they look as if she’d walked across half of DC in the midst of a heat wave.
“Are you okay?”
Rose opened her mouth, then closed it again.
Clarissa remembered how she’d felt after Clark had died when his Marine Two helicopter was sabotaged. The anger had suffused every thought, every moment, until she’d felt so brittle she thought she’d break.
And it was Rose who had hauled her back from the edge. Had given her a path back to sanity.
How had she done it?
Even if Clarissa could remember, it would probably be irrelevant. She had shattered on the outside, whereas Rose was showing nothing but, perhaps, shattering on the inside. The only sign that anything was wrong was herlackof vivacity through the night’s events. Rose was inevitably the center of any group she was a part of. Everyone wanted to be next to her, to be part of the social glow of the First Lady of DC.
Not now. She was painfully quiet.
“All I could feel at first was the anger,” Clarissa offered. “Clark took so many of my plans to the grave with him, it was all I could feel for the longest time.”
“I remember,” Rose’s voice was little more than a whisper.
Clarissa spotted a small fridge. All it had were bottles of water. These NTSB people were hopeless. She set one in front of Rose and returned to her kitty-corner seat at the head of the conference table. For the first time since entering, she looked at the walls.
Six large pictures were in a line. A plane taking off, a ship throwing up a bow wake, and a train blurred with its speed. There were also pictures of highways, pipelines, and bridges. The six types of accidents the National Transportation Safety Board inspected. It was actually a powerful message as the only adornment in the otherwise plain conference room of white walls, beige floor, and Formica wood-patterned table.
The NTSB were incredibly good at finding the causes of accidents. But they were also very good at moving past them because it was their job to develop answers on how to avoid accidents in the future. Or even anticipate them and recommend preventative measures.
“Maybe I don’t need to go anywhere.”
“What was that?” Rose looked up at her for the first time since she’d entered.
“Remember the day I offered you the Vice Presidency?”
“The same day that Hunter destroyed it for both of us. Thank you so much for that memory of my murdered husband.”
Rose had used some tough-love tactics to snap Clarissa out of her funk. Maybe she’d try returning the favor.
“Yep, that was Senator Hunter Ramson all over.” She ignored Rose’s glare. “But while he may have cost me the Presidency and my husband, he didn’t destroy me as well. Close, but not quite. You saw to that. I was just thinking, what’s the one thing I’m really good at, Rose?”
“Running the CIA. What’s your point, Clarissa?” It was the most life she’d shown the whole evening. She cracked open the water bottle and took a delicate sip. It was also the first time she’d ever heard a caustic tone from Rose directed at anyone. She’d take it as a sign of life.
“Iamreally good at running the CIA. Even Drake and the President couldn’t deny that. I’m not even forty yet, the youngest D/CIA in history. Think of what I could still do.”
