Lady Liberty (5 page)

“No notice, diversionary route three.” She looked up at him. “Get Grace, Rich, and Charles off this flight—and anyone else we do not have to have with us to get home.” She scanned the group of twenty already boarded. “No press or nonessential staff. Skeleton crew only” She looked back at Jonathan. “Get them off fast and get the staff and press separated.” Worry clouded her eyes, again turning her irises midnight blue. “Try to delay their return to the States until Monday.”

Monday? But it was only Wednesday. “Staff and press?”

She nodded. “If at all possible. We have less than seventy-two hours, and we’re going to need every minute, ‘Hail Mary’and scrap of luck we can scrounge up to make it.”

“I’ll have to bring in the CIA,” he reminded her, an accompanying chill slithering up his back. Liberty wasn’t prone to exaggeration, and only once, during a crisis in the Middle East that had threatened to rip open barely healed wounds, had he heard her resort to a verbal Hail Mary pass. “The press will scream bloody murder.”

“I look forward to hearing it.”

That baffled him. “Ma’am?”

“They’ll be alive to scream.”

Definitely a disaster crisis.
One with long arms and a lot of potential, considering she wanted everyone kept out of the country. He glanced through the cabin. That so many had boarded the plane on such short notice didn’t surprise him. The press and staff knew Liberty’s sudden departure signaled a major development, and no one wanted to miss being at ground zero. “Yes, ma’am.” He passed the order to clear the plane to Harrison and Cramer, set up the departure delays through Commander Conlee at Home Base, and then turned his thoughts to the flight.

Liberty ordering no notice wasn’t uncommon. She routinely required three sets of flight plans and often chose
one at the last minute that she didn’t want filed through regular channels. But her choosing route three probably worried Intel, who monitored SDU details twenty-four seven, as much as it baffled Jonathan. Since the president’s call, Liberty’s every move had been swift and efficient; the woman clearly wanted to hurry. So why divert to Miami, then go north to D.C.? The captain had vetoed route one due to a line of severe thunderstorms, but route two was still open and definitely faster. If in a hurry, why add unnecessary hours of flight time? “Request for verification, ma’am,” Jonathan said. “Diversionary route three?”

“Route three verified.”

Static crackled in his earpiece radio—weather challenging communications. As chief, he could override the order, as he had the one on their departure. From Liberty’s tense expression, she feared he would. Should he override or relay?

Jonathan silently debated. During Liberty’s two years in office, he had learned what made her tick and what ticked her off. He’d seen the tiny blonde go toe-to-toe with other powerhouses and hang tough until her opponents crumbled. She won and lost graciously. He had also witnessed secret moments of uncertainty in her. Moments when she agonized over complex decisions that affected people’s lives. Moments like this one. But not once had Jonathan seen anything that had caused him to regret giving her his loyalty or admiration or—though only he, Commander Conlee, and President Lance knew it—his heart. “Diversionary route three, Captain.” He transmitted the relay. “Proceed to the taxiway secure the perimeter, and await further instructions.”

“Roger. Orders are confirmed and verified.”

Hearing the radioed response, Jonathan looked at Liberty. “Captain Dean has been notified, ma’am.”

“Thank you.” Looking relieved, she took two steps toward her seat, paused, and then glanced back over her
shoulder at him. Her gaze drifted down his black suit to his shoes and a thin frown settled between her brows. “Agent Westford?”

Her hesitancy put him back on alert. “Yes, ma’am?”

She looked him straight in the eye. “When we take off, you might want to put on your sneakers.”

He raised an eyebrow, then nodded. Few outside the agency knew that when he expected trouble he wore black sneakers. The other agents ragged him about it, and his supervisors wrote him up, giving him hell for it. But since the sneakers had been the only negative remark in his performance rating for years, he had gotten away with ignoring their reprimands.

On more than one intense occasion, Liberty had glanced down at his shoes to gauge the situation. His shoes had been their code. But he had left her protection detail eight months ago, right after his emotions had overridden his good sense and he had threatened to kill her sorry-ass ex-husband. Since most of her assignments carried high risks and global consequences, it was far too dangerous for her to have a distracted, lovesick security chief. Elevated to SDU or not, he wouldn’t have agreed to take on this mission if the request had come from anyone other than President Lance.

“Specific or general?” Jonathan asked the nature of the threat.

Worry gleamed in her eyes. “I don’t know.”

Even she hadn’t been told.

Jonathan nodded, and she walked on to her seat.

Hours crawled by, tense and expectant, but nothing remarkable happened and no word came from the lab. Jonathan leaned back against the wall and checked on Liberty. She sat midcabin, fidgeting and staring over an open file out the window, toward the terminal. She looked weary and worried. Lady Liberty wasn’t just afraid.

She was terrified.

“This isn’t right.” Sitting in Ballast headquarters’ underground bunker, Patch squirmed in his desk chair and took a look from the row of monitor screens to his boss, Gregor Faust. It had taken hours to work up the guts to voice his objection. Now, for better or worse, Patch finally said out loud what had been nagging at him for days. “It’s like we’re coming down on the Madonna.”

Faust resisted the urge to sigh only because he understood exactly what Patch meant. “Sybil Stone isn’t the Madonna. Hell, she isn’t even a mother,” Gregor reminded his second-in-command. “And if you think she would blink twice before issuing a kill order on either of us—or on anyone else in Ballast
or
PUSH, for that matter—you had better read her dossier again.”

“Reading her dossier is why I would prefer not to hurt her.” Patch glanced over at the screen monitoring her plane, parked on the taxiway at the Geneva airport. Half the force was out there, securing the perimeter, and for each officer identified, Patch knew there were three plain-clothes cops and CIA agents who hadn’t been identified. “She isn’t a mother, but she watches out for all kids. She’s predictable. You heard the concierge’s report about the note she wants delivered with the cookies and milk.” Patch couldn’t get that out of his mind.

Hell, Patch had executed kill orders on dozens of women in his time, but this one … this one bothered him and he hadn’t even killed her yet. Worse, he had no idea why the thought of killing her bothered him. Gregor was right. Lady Liberty would issue a kill order on either of them without blinking twice. Yet there was something innocent and pure about her milk and cookies. About her. And Patch flat-ass didn’t want to muddy it up.

“PUSH, not you, is going to hurt her. You aren’t involved,”
Gregor reminded him, then lowered his voice to feign compassion. “She’s not your mother, Patch.”

Patch looked over at Gregor. “I know that.” He did know it, but he had grown up without a mother; he couldn’t even remember what she looked like anymore. Maybe, in his head, he was using Sybil Stone as a substitute. Logically, she was far too young to be his mother—he had a few years on her, in fact—but this annoying attack of conscience had nothing to do with age or logic. It had to do with the woman and who she was inside. She protected kids. She was different from the rest of those corrupt bloodsuckers. “She’s predictable,” he repeated, “and sincere.”

She was. In Gregors fifty years, he had seen a lot of leaders with admirable qualities, but he had never known a leader with such a deep conviction to her principles and morals that she had to suffer from diver’s bends.

According to his mole’s deep-background research, Liberty hadn’t had an easy life. Most people assumed she had, though, since she had been raised in privilege by an old-money old-name family in Philadelphia. Her mother had never understood Sybil’s need to help others, and her father had always made her feel she had disappointed him. She had been an only child, often more lonely than loved. Gregor supposed that’s why she had risked wanting only two things in her life: a career in politics—which she had gotten—and a family to love who loved her—which she had
not
gotten.

His own early years hadn’t been so different, though many swore he had been spawned by the devil, and to his way of thinking, Sybil’s 50 percent success rate on her life goals made her luckier than most, himself included. “It would be a vast tactical error to underestimate the esteemed lady from Pennsylvania, Patch. Yet we shouldn’t give her too much credit. Not until we know firsthand it is warranted.”

“I’m not underestimating her, and I’m not questioning your authority or wisdom, but—”

“But,” Gregor interrupted, “you don’t understand my reasoning about her.”

“No, I don’t.” Patch adjusted the contrast on one of the monitors and then stared back over his shoulder at his boss. “You obviously respect her as an adversary”

For as long as Faust could remember, his survival had depended on keeping his intentions and rationale to himself. He guarded both as voraciously as he guarded his identity, yet if Patch were ever going to command Ballast, he had to understand. “I respect any and all adversaries. Underestimating them is too costly”

“Why are you willing to kill her?”

“For the same reason one kills a rattlesnake poised to strike. Death, the devastation of assets—these penalties are too steep to pay” Gregor pulled a thin brown cigar from a wooden box on his desk, snipped its tip, and lit it. The scent of heated cherry tobacco filled the air. “Liberty is a powerful woman—rare really, because she doesn’t demand support. People inexplicably volunteer their support to her.”

“She wears power well.”

“Unfortunately, too well.” Gregor squinted against a spiral of pungent smoke. “She’s doing her best to cost me a great deal of money, and she’s having significant success.” Her peace-making efforts in India and Pakistan had cost him millions in arms sales. He didn’t need a repeat performance to recognize the risks she posed with Peris and Abdan. “I cannot permit that.”

“You could have just sent her back to D.C. with an empty briefcase.”

“An empty case wouldn’t have gotten through their scanners or CIA agents, much less been delivered to Liberty. And it would have worked against our backup plan. That plan is critical, Patch. Without it we could lose mission control.”

“And Ballast never forfeits mission control.” Understanding gleamed in Patch’s eyes. “Dr. Austin Stone.”

“Exactly.” Liberty’s ex-husband wasn’t reliable or stupid. “He would have known the case was empty before it left Geneva.” Gregor rubbed at the tense muscles in his neck. “Dangerous business, considering he has the ways and means to manipulate us. If we put the screws to him overtly, he will go off the deep end and reduce this operation to his own personal mission.”

“Screwing everyone who crossed him, including us.”

“Screwing everyone he remotely
perceives
has crossed him, including us.”

Which is why the briefcase wasn’t empty and Gregor had enclosed copied contents, not originals—and why he had intercepted Lady Liberty’s blood to get her DNA.

As if a key puzzle piece slotted into place in his mind, Patch blinked hard. “You’re afraid Dr. Stone is going to manipulate the mission.”

“I prepared for the possibility. But remember,
PUSH
pulled this attack. Ballast was not involved.”

“Right.” Patch slid Gregor a knowing glance that grew doubtful. “But she’s leaving the peace talks. Peris and Abdan are more likely to kill each other than to continue negotiations without her. You’ve already won, so why does she have to die?”

“She could live.” Gregor spared the monitor a glance, saw Liberty’s plane still sitting on the taxiway “Provided Westford’s instincts are as keen as reported.”

“But what if they’re not?”

“Then shell die, and PUSH will be blamed.” Gregor shrugged his indifference on the matter and flicked his ashes into a crystal tray. “Such is the price for disseminating false information on Westford’s abilities.”

The fax line rang. Patch slid his chair over to retrieve the incoming pages and took a look. “Lab results are in.”

Gregor smiled. The first obstacle Austin Stone had tossed in Gregors path to gain mission control—obtaining Liberty’s DNA—had been cleared with minimal effort, and neither Westford nor his staff had any proof they had been infiltrated. Oh, certainly Liberty and Westford suspected they had, but they lacked hard evidence and they wouldn’t find any. Unlike Agent Cramer, Gregors men were seasoned and professional to the core.

Dr. Austin Stone, however, was another matter. He stood heads above anyone else in the secure-systems design field, but he had a personal agenda in this operation that could be problematic for Gregor. The need for Liberty’s DNA surfacing so early in the process indicated that he would be a challenge.