Page 48 of Air Force One (Miranda Chase #16)

Taz didn’t know President Feldman, but she knew General Elizabeth Gray-Nason. The catch was that Elizabeth also knew her. During her final year of working for General JJ Martinez, their relationship had been largely adversarial.

Jeremy was friends with her, but he was still in the NTSB lab going through every scrap of data in the Black Box recorders.

Miranda never should have told him to go by the book, even if Taz knew why she’d said it.

The command had unleashed Jeremy’s inner nerd.

He wasn’t releasing any information until every single word had been crosschecked by a panel in the voice lab and every data point extracted, verified, charted, indexed, and who knew what all.

Mostly it meant that neither she nor the kids had seen him in the last twenty-six hours and might not for as long again.

That also meant that this was up to her.

Much to her surprise, a quick phone call had gotten her an appointment with Elizabeth. Conveniently, she’d been at the White House. Taz left the three Chinese drinking sodas at the Old Ebbitt Grill because it was directly across the street from the Treasury Building and went in alone.

Elizabeth met her in The Situation Room.

This was Jeremy’s spot. He’d been in here a number of times advising President Cole.

Miranda, Holly, and Mike had as well. She’d been in here once.

Or was it twice? She couldn’t remember, and telling her Air Force colonel nerves to get their shit together wasn’t happening.

Once, during which she’d done her best to speak as little as possible. Now she was—

“Hello, Taz.” They traded salutes. “Take a seat. What is so important? Do you have news from Jeremy or Miranda yet?”

Instead of sitting, Taz snapped to attention. “Oh God, General. I seem to be here under false pretenses. I’m so sorry. I have no news regarding what happened to your husband or Air Force One.”

She could see the pain slash into Elizabeth.

“I’m here on another matter entirely. No wonder you agreed to see me. Again, my apologies. I’ll go now.” She saluted again but couldn’t force herself to leave. This was too important.

“Colonel Cortez. Come. Sit. Tell me why you’re here.”

Taz hesitated and Elizabeth waved her toward a seat. “I’m really sorry about that, ma’am.”

Elizabeth shrugged uncomfortably. “None of it has been easy. As you’re already here, what’s on your mind?”

Taz finally managed to sit, perched on the edge of the seat with her spine absolutely straight. “It’s about China, ma’am.”

Elizabeth waited without comment.

She swallowed hard and continued. “I have two Chinese-US citizens and a Chinese national of unofficial standing waiting at the Old Ebbitt Grill across the street. They wish to speak with the President.”

The general had the decency to only laugh at her a little.

“Chen Mei-Li, the former, uh, servant of General Zhang Ru. Chang Mui, the granddaughter of General Liú Zuocheng, co-chairman of the CMC. And Wang Daiyu. She asked to be remembered to you as the Chinese operative during the Antarctica disaster and as the personal operative of Liú Zuocheng.”

Elizabeth inspected her. “You make very interesting friends, Taz.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Do you know what they want to speak to the President about?”

Taz waved at the monitor. They were replaying something Taz had missed, the rolling over of Air Force One to sit upright in the water. Miranda, it had to be, because no one else would think that up.

Then they showed tugboats nudging it into a massive dry dock. “They didn’t say. But by the timing? That’s a fair guess.”

Elizabeth too watched the monitor as it showed the USCG cutter being nudged into another dry dock.

Its rear deck was clearly still covered with neat rows of body bags.

The weather and all the drones cluttering the airspace had been deemed too rough to safely fly them back to land. That would include Drake.

Taz didn’t know what to say, so she kept her mouth shut.

Finally, Elizabeth picked up the phone. “Felicia. Could you ask the President for five minutes of her time? And could you send Kali and a team to escort three civilians from the Old Ebbitt Grill’s bar to the Situation Room?

I expect three Chinese women together will be fairly easy to spot.

They’re unofficial, so make it very low profile and bring them in through the Treasury Building. ”

Then Elizabeth turned her back on the monitor and faced Taz. “Tell me a funny Miranda story. I need something to smile about today.”

There were so many, the trouble was choosing one.

“Well…I remember this time that Drake told Miranda to search to the ends of the Earth if needed to solve a crash. But the Earth doesn’t have ends, Drake.

And she led him round and round in circles of logic including the history of mapmaking back to the flat-Earth days and possible interpretations of the saying perhaps being rooted in the fact that the Earth isn’t a sphere but rather an oblate spheroid.

None of us could believe it was happening as they went on and on.

But I swear the general was having a great time discussing geopolitical history, geomorphology, and whether or not an idiomatic saying was required to be inherently foolish or merely must possess internally illogical reasoning. ”

Elizabeth smiled, she didn’t laugh, but she smiled.

Under the circumstances, Taz counted it as one of the best things she’d done since giving birth to Davito.

Elizabeth then told her how the first time she and Drake had slept together had been largely Miranda’s fault for almost crash-landing her jet on the National Mall in front of the White House.