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43
“Didn’t seeyou at the crash last night.”
Major Jon Swift jolted back from his desk so hard that he’d have fallen off his chair if he hadn’t slammed into the filing cabinets first. It wasn’t much of an office but at least it was in the Pentagon and not some remote, back-forty posting.
However, there was enough space for him to tilt too far. The chair legs slid out from beneath him. Three-quarters of the way to the floor, the legs caught against the desk drawers and the chairback against the cabinet handles. He lay suspended a foot in the air and for a moment couldn’t figure out how to extract himself.
Looking over the top of his desk, only her head showing from his low angle, was Taz Cortez, with Jeremy and a lovely woman he didn’t recognize but who now must think him an utter fool.
“You could have waited until I Tasered your ass again before falling down.” Taz’s smirk was acid-laced as usual.
He struggled half out of the chair, which then slipped off the last file cabinet handle and jarred him to the floor—hard—crunching his elevated shin on the underside of the desk.
Jeremy came around the desk and helped him to his feet.
He pulled up a pant leg. No blood, but it was going to hurt for a while.
Then he clearly saw the third person, a statuesque redhead of uncommon beauty in a very high-end white dress. All of the beauty and class that Miranda Chase had lacked. He had no idea what he’d ever seen in Miranda to begin with. The woman was batshit crazy for sure. Unlike Taz Cortez, who was just fucking nasty.
“What are you people doing here?” Jon attempted to wrestle his chair free, but it was still jammed between the desk and the filing cabinet. He tried shoving the desk aside with his hip, and received a sore hip for his trouble.
Then he spotted Taz’s smile. She probably had a foot jammed against the front so that it wouldn’t move.
“Fine. What do you want?”
“The complete status of the Air Force’s investigation into the crash of the C-20C Gulfstream III into the Kimpton George Hotel yesterday evening.”
“I can’t give you that, you little witch. So why don’t you go back to being dead?”
Taz sighed. She reached to her side.
Jon slammed himself back against the file cabinets so hard that he briefly wondered if he’d cracked his own spine on the drawer handles.
Rather than pulling out her Taser, which she’d shot him with several times in the past, she pulled out her ID. She held it out at arm’s length until he dared shuffle forward enough to read it.
“Colonel Vicki Cortez of— Oh shit! No way!”
“Of the Accident Investigation Board. Which makes me your superior officer. So, salute, Major,” she snapped out. “Unless you want your ass busted all of the way back down to a slick sleeve.”
“You couldn’t!” Only E-1 raw recruits had no insignia on their uniform sleeve. He was an officer, goddamn her.
“Go ahead. Try me. No need to bother your Uncle Drake, I already have you on falsifying reports about Miranda. A little bird told me. By the way, the next time you see Captain Andi Wu, I’d suggest running in the other direction—fast. She’s some kind of pissed at you.”
Jon looked in Taz’s eyes and all he saw was cold death. No heat, no anger. She’d squash him like a bug without caring one way or the other.
He pushed himself to attention, ignoring the twinges in his shin and back, and saluted.
“Yeah, yeah.” Taz gave him an insultingly lame salute in return. “Now tell me everything you have on the dead pilots and who did it to them. I can already assume that they were murdered and their plane was stolen to crash into the George Hotel. I need the details.”
Jeremy was up on his toes in anticipation. All he’d ever cared about was the crash.
The lovely, ageless redhead watched him with…curiosity. No way to tell whose side she was on. Then he noticed the ring line, with no ring. A good sign. Who had arrived with Taz Cortez. A very bad sign.
Once he had his chair upright again, he called up the two pilots’ files on his computer screen, then turned it so that they could all see it.
“The two bodies we found at Joint Base Andrews were easily identified. Nothing had been taken: clothes, wallets, phones, insignia. Everything accounted for. The plane in question was assigned to a transport mission. After the crash, replacement pilots were brought in to prep another bird in the same hangar to service that mission. They found the two dead pilots in the luggage compartment as part of their preflight. Knife to the heart, slim blade so not much blood. Nothing unusual about them. Good service records, families, everything normal.”
“Okay.”
