Corsair

SEVEN

OVER THE SAHARA DESERT

WHEN HER FINGER SLIPPED OFF THE STRING, FIONA CURSED. She looked up quickly to make sure no one heard, even though she was alone in the private bedchamber in the rear of the aircraft. Her mother had been a strong believer in using soap in the mouth to discourage profanity, so her reaction was automatic even forty years later.

The violin was her refuge from the world. With bow in hand she could empty her mind of all distractions and concentrate solely on the music. There was no other activity or hobby that could quiet her thoughts so thoroughly. She often credited it with keeping her sane, especially since accepting the appointment to head the State Department.

Fiona Katamora was one of those rare creatures who come along once in a generation. By her sixth birthday, she was giving violin concerts as a soloist. Her parents, who had been interned during World War II because both had been born in Japan, had taught her Japanese while she taught herself Arabic, Mandarin, and Russian. She entered Harvard when she was fifteen and law school when she was eighteen. Before taking the bar exam, she took time off to sharpen her fencing skills, and would have gone on to the Olympics had she not torn a ligament in her knee a week before the opening ceremony.

She did all this and much more and made it look effortless. Fiona Katamora possessed a near-photographic memory, and required only four hours of sleep a night. Apart from her athletic, academic, and musical talents, she was charming, gracious, and possessed an infectious smile that could brighten any room.

Fiona had over a hundred job offers to consider when she passed the bar, including a teaching position at her alma mater, but she wanted to dedicate herself to serving the public trust. She joined a Washington think tank specializing in energy matters, and quickly made a name for herself with her ability to see causalities others simply couldn’t. After five years, one of her papers was submitted as a doctoral thesis, and she was awarded a Ph.D.

Her reputation within the Beltway grew to the point that she was a regular consultant at the White House for Presidents of both parties. It was only a matter of time before she was tapped for a cabinet post.

Still unmarried at forty-six, Fiona Katamora remained a stunning beauty, with raven hair as glossy as obsidian and a smooth, unlined face. She was trim and, at five foot six, tall for her ancestry. In interviews, she said she was simply too busy for a family of her own, and while gossip magazines had tried to link her to various men of wealth and power she almost never dated.

In her two years as Secretary of State, she had worked wonders around the globe, restoring America’s reputation as peacemaker and impartial arbiter. She had helped broker the longest cease-fire to date between the government of Sri Lanka and Tamil Tiger separatists, and had used her skills to settle a disputed election in Serbia that had threatened to become violent.

Fiona had shaken things up within the corridors of the State Department as well. She had garnered the nickname “dragon lady” because she had swept house at Foggy Bottom, cutting out layer upon layer of redundant staff, until State was the model of efficiency for the rest of the government.

And now she was headed for what could be the crowning moment of a remarkable career. The preliminary talks were meant to establish the framework for what was to be called the Tripoli Accords. If anyone could bring peace to the Middle East after ten presidential administrations failed, it would be Fiona Katamora.

She finished playing the Brahms piece she’d been practicing and set the violin and bow aside. She wiped her fingers on a monogrammed handkerchief and did some exercises to work out the mild cramping. She feared that arthritis was starting to make inroads.

There was a knock on the cabin door.

“Come in,” she said.

Her personal assistant, Grace Walsh, popped her head around the jamb. Grace had been with Fiona for more than a decade, following her boss from plum job to plum job.

“You wanted me to tell you when it was four.”

“Thanks, Gracie. What’s our ETA?”

“Knew you’d ask, so I spoke with the pilot. We’re about forty-five minutes out. We’ll be over Libyan territory shortly. Can I get you anything?”

“A bottle of water would be great. Thanks.”

Fiona buried herself in the stack of papers spread out on the bed. They were dossiers on all the major players expected at the upcoming summit, including brief biographies and photographs. She’d gone over them all before, committing most to memory, but she wanted to make sure she had everything just right. She quizzed herself on which ministers were related to their country’s rulers, names of wives and children, educational backgrounds, anything to make this as personal as possible.

She was most intrigued by Libya’s dynamic new Foreign Minister, Ali Ghami. His was by far the smallest dossier. Reportedly, Ghami had been a low-level civil servant until he’d come to the attention of Libya’s President Muammar Qaddafi. Within days of a meeting between the two men, Ghami had been elevated to Foreign Minister. In the six months since, he had been on a whirlwind tour throughout the region, drumming up support for the peace conference. His reception in various Middle Eastern capitals had been cool at first, but his dynamic personality and utter charm had slowly started to change minds. In many ways, he was like Fiona, and maybe that’s why she couldn’t get her mind around what bothered her about him.

Grace knocked again and stepped into the bedroom. She set a bottle of Dasani on the nightstand and turned to go.

“Hold on a sec,” Fiona said, and showed her the photograph of Ghami. “What does your woman’s intuition tell you about him?”

Grace took the picture and held it close to one of the Boeing 737’s windows. In the official photograph, Ghami wore a Western-style suit cut perfectly for his physique. He had thick salt-and-pepper hair and a matching mustache.

Gracie gave her the picture back. “I’m the wrong person to ask. I fell in love with Omar Sharif when I saw Doctor Zhivago as a teenager, and this guy has that same vibe.”

“Handsome, yes, but look at his eyes.”

“What about them?” Gracie asked.

“I can’t put my finger on it. There’s something there, or something missing. I don’t know.”

“Could just be a bad picture.”

“Maybe it’s that I just don’t like going into this knowing virtually nothing about our host.”

“You can’t have crib notes on everybody,” Grace teased gently. “Remember when you did a background check on that cute lawyer you wanted to—”

A loud, jarring crash cut Grace off in midsentence. The two women looked at each other, eyes wide. Both had spent countless hours in the air over the years and knew whatever that sound was, it wasn’t good.

They waited a beat to see if anything else was happening. After a few seconds, they simultaneously released a held breath and shared a nervous chuckle.

Fiona got to her feet to ask the pilot if anything was wrong. She was halfway to the door when the aircraft shuddered violently and started to fall from the sky. Grace screamed when the wild descent pressed her up against the ceiling. Fiona managed to keep on her feet by pushing her hands against the molded plastic overhead.

In the forward section of the executive jet, she could hear other staffers screaming as they fought the effects of temporary weightlessness.

“I don’t know what happened,” the pilot, an Air Force colonel, said over the intercom, “but everyone get yourselves strapped in as quickly as you can.” He left the intercom on while he and his copilot tried to regain control of the hurtling aircraft, so Fiona and the others could hear the tension in his voice. “What do you mean you can’t reach anyone? We were talking with Tripoli two minutes ago.”

“I can’t explain it,” the copilot replied. “The radio’s just dead.”

“Don’t worry about it now, help me—damn, the port engine just kicked out. Try to restart it.” The intercom suddenly clicked off.

“Are we going to crash?” Grace asked. She had regained her feet, and she and Fiona clutched each other like little girls in a haunted house.

“I don’t know,” Fiona said more calmly than she felt. Her insides fluttered, and her palms had gone greasy.

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. Something mechanical, I guess.” That answer didn’t satisfy her at all. There was no reason the plane should have plummeted like that with both engines functioning. It could even fly on one engine. Something else had to have caused their sudden drop. And what was that loud bang? Her first and only thought was that they had been hit by a missile, one meant to cripple the plane, not destroy it.

The gut-wrenching descent slowly started to even out. The pilots had managed to regain enough control so they were no longer in free fall, but they were still plunging toward earth at breakneck speed.

Fiona and Grace groped their way into the main cabin and strapped themselves into the big leather chairs. Secretary Katamora said a few reassuring words to her people, wishing she could do more to alleviate the fear she saw etched on their faces. The truth was that she was barely in control of her own emotions. She feared that if she spoke more her terror would rise to the surface and bubble over, like lava erupting from a volcano.

“Ladies and gentlemen”—it was the copilot—“we don’t know what just happened. One of our engines is down and the other is barely producing thrust. We’re going to have to land in the desert. I don’t want anyone to worry. Colonel Markham has actually done this before in an F-16 during the first Gulf War. When I give the signal, I want everyone to assume the crash positions. Tuck your head between your knees and wrap your arms around them. As soon as the plane comes to a stop, I want the steward to open the cabin door as quickly as possible. Secretary Katamora’s Secret Service detail is to get her off the plane first.”

There was only one agent on board. The rest of Fiona’s detail, plus a number of her staff, had been in Libya for nearly a week preparing for her arrival.

The agent, Frank Maguire, unbuckled his seat belt, paused until the aircraft stopped buffeting for a second, and switched seats so he was between Fiona and the door. He quickly strapped himself in as the Boeing lurched violently. When the time came, he could grab her and have her out of the door in seconds.

Holding Grace’s hand, Fiona started to do something she hadn’t in years: pray. But it wasn’t for their lives. She prayed that if the worst did happen and they died in the crash, the momentous opportunity of the summit wouldn’t be lost forever. Unselfish to the end, Fiona Katamora cared more about the cause of peace than her own life.

She chanced looking out the window. The terrain not far below the aircraft was rough desert punctuated by jagged hills. Not a pilot herself, she still knew the odds were long despite the crew’s assurance.

“Okay, folks,” the copilot announced, “this is it. Please assume the crash positions and hang on tight.”

The passengers heard the pilot ask “Do you see th—” before the intercom went silent again. They had no idea what he had seen, and would be better off not knowing anyway.