What kind of a world was it, Jenna wondered, where those who had killed the man who had helped engineer a coup were considered rogue?
There was no mention of a nuclear device, nor would there be. The viewers would never get to know about this, but apparently Albert Bacon Fachearon had heard.
If not, he had at least gotten the message. One of the breaking news items confirmed that he had tendered his resignation and was negotiating his return to his home state in exchange for a pledge of no public statements.
She thought of Troy Loensch and how preposterous his tale of The Transition had once seemed: his tale of PMCs overthrowing the government.
She also thought about how her relationship with him had evolved. For the first couple of years she had known him, she had found his asshole behavior nauseating, but revulsion had turned to tolerance, and tolerance had turned to her deciding that he was not so bad after all. This realization had opened the door to lust, and the realization that — whatever his faults, and there were many — he was very not-so-bad in bed. As she had told him to his face, Troy might not always be a nice man, but he was good.
She had been wondering all day whether he had gotten down in one piece, but she assumed that he had. She had been wondering all day whether she would see him again, and she hoped that she would. She wasn't ready to allow herself to fall in love with this man whom once she had hated, but she was ready to make love again.
Jenna bought a bag of chips from the vending machine and stepped outside. The rain that had been falling earlier had stopped, and the sun was fighting to break through the clouds. She had never been in Martinsburg before, but it looked as though people were coming and going more or less as people in any small American city might do. There were SUVs with kids in car seats, and a plumber's pickup with copper pipes gleaming in his overhead rack. The U. S. government had been taken over by forces whom Jenna knew to be forces of darkness, but somebody was still spending a Saturday remodeling a bathroom.
She wondered how many of these people passing by the Greyhound depot had voted for Fachearon. What did they think of what had happened? Not much, apparently. Like Jenna, like most people, they had other things on their minds today.
Back inside, fewer people were watching the television. One group had boarded their bus, bound for Harrisburg. Others, like Jenna, had gone to visit the bank of vending machines. A few had simply dozed off.
Jenna's bus finally arrived, so she missed Layton Kynelty's address to the nation from the White House. She could imagine what he might have said. He probably paid tribute to Raymond Harris, who had been his coconspirator in this bizarre fantasy that the world seemed to accept as a matter of course. He probably said a great deal about national unity.
She was glad that she had missed it.
An hour out of Martinsburg, Jenna Munrough was fast asleep.
Chapter 59
'They were using Firehawk ID cards,' Jenna's colleague told her. 'But nobody recalls any of the names. It was chaos over there at the airport on Saturday. It was chaos everywhere. There were at least five of them. One of them was a woman, but she drove away with the others in a van when the two guys took the F-16s.'
'They just let them get away with it?' Jenna asked, silently noting how wrong the rumors of her own encounter at Reagan National Airport had become. As much as she deplored the inherent sexism in the rumor's distortion of fact, she was glad to discover that the imaginary woman had not been one of the pilots.
'Somehow they got their hands on Firehawk ID, and on Saturday, nobody was questioning Firehawk ID… anywhere.'
Even after this exchange on Sunday, Jenna's decision to go in to the Firehawk offices on Monday morning was made with great trepidation. It need not have been. The media had consulted with itself and had decided to stick with the theory of rogue Air Force pilots — male rogues — and once decided, the theory took on an unshakable life of its own.
The Justice Department, the NTSB, and even the U. S. Air Force itself launched investigations — but they sought only people who fit the profile decided upon in this theory with a life of its own.
It was strange to walk through the lobby, with its stylized aluminum rendition of the company logo, a bird's head surrounded by flames, and to hear the buzz of conversation about the death of Raymond Harris.
'Ms. Munrough.'
Jenna spun around at the sound of the receptionist calling her name. She was still a bit on edge, still expecting to be busted at any moment.
'Yes?'
'Ms. Munrough, you're wanted at a briefing in the seventh-floor conference room… um… they asked me to tell all the top management that there's a nine o'clock meeting up there this morning.'
'Thanks,' Jenna said, breathing a sigh of relief. A meeting. Even at Firehawk, home office life was a succession of meetings. The bureaucracy must go on. The king is dead — long live the bureaucracy.
She checked the time on her cell phone. She could get a cup of coffee to go and still make the meeting.
As Jenna rounded the corner going into the coffee room, she found herself face-to-face with Lucy, her friend from special projects who had alerted her to the nuclear weapon.
Lucy flashed a glance that asked, Did you have anything to do with Harris getting killed?
Jenna replied with one that asked, Are you kidding? Of course not. Did you?
Lucy just shook her head, nervous to be accused by Jenna's expression.
'Did they find the thing?' Jenna asked under her breath.
'Yeah,' Lucy said nervously as she poured her coffee. 'How was your weekend?'
'Fine,' Jenna lied for the benefit of a couple of people who came into the coffee room. 'I just hung out… did some laundry… watched a lot of television. How about you?'
'I was down at the White House on Saturday. Avoided the television, myself.'
'I know what you mean,' Jenna said, taking her coffee and heading toward the elevator that would take her to the rarefied atmosphere of the celebrated seventh floor.
The conference room was filled with all the top home office people, the department heads, and some of the people from Raymond Harris's staff. She recognized Aron Arnold, the pilot whom Harris had recently brought in from Cactus Flat as sort of a fair-haired boy.
Jenna knew Arnold's history with Troy Loensch, though he had little to say about him. She knew of their inauspicious first meeting, but that they had flown together with the HAWX Program.
The mood in the room was one of expectation. With Harris out of the picture, everyone was curious to know what the board of directors might have in mind for Fire-hawk's future.
This question was answered moments after Jenna set her cup on the table and slung her purse strap over the back of her chair.
An unassuming, middle-aged Hispanic man entered through the door at the opposite' corner of the room.
'I'm Jose Turcios.' He smiled. 'But most people call me Joe.'
With that, he went on to explain that he had been with Firehawk for nearly a dozen years, running special projects and field operations around the world.
'I'm honored to tell you,' he continued, 'to tell you that the board has named me to succeed Raymond Harris as CEO of Firehawk. They are big shoes to fill and I'm just a size ten.'
He paused for the few chuckles that came in reaction to his poor attempt at levity, and continued.
Conspicuously absent in Joe Turcios's comments was the increasingly vitriolic diatribe about the evils of ineffective government that everyone had grown used to hearing from Raymond Harris. Maybe it was that Turcios just had a different style, or perhaps it was simply that the events of the past seventy-two hours simply spoke for themselves.
'The future at Firehawk is promising, and it will obviously be a busy one,' Turcios added. 'Now that Firehawk
