Campaign For Seduction (16 page)

Liza and Takashi observed the debate inside Sitchroo while Brad filmed.

Liza watched, transfixed, as always, to see the transformation that came over the senator. He was passionate one moment, presidential the next—and always fascinating. For this crisis he’d switched to full warrior mode, concerned about the safety of his people and fighting to protect them.

“States of emergency?” the senator asked. “Red Cross?”

“It’s all in the works,” Adena told him.

“Good.” Grim satisfaction bracketed the corners of his mouth. “How soon can we get there?”

Adena rubbed her chin and took a moment to think. “If we give it twenty-four to thirty-six hours—”

The senator looked uncomprehending, as though the subject on the table were an impromptu journey to the center of the earth by golf cart. “I’m not waiting twenty-four hours. We can do better than that.”

“I’m not sure we can, John,” Adena said. “We’ve got commitments for tonight.”

“Nothing we can’t cancel or reschedule,” he said flatly.

“Well, maybe, but we’ve got no idea which runways are operable, what the roads are like or what kind of security we can arrange at this point, and we don’t want to divert local resources to protect you—”

Adena trailed off, silenced by the obvious and growing irritation on the senator’s face. The staffers shifted uncomfortably and exchanged worried glances. Apparently they all thought that someone needed to talk some sense into the senator, but no one wanted to be the talker.

Adena plowed ahead and much as Liza would have preferred to dislike the woman for the rest of her life, she felt grudging admiration for her. Squaring off against the strength of the senator’s will, as Liza well knew, was no easy thing.

“John,” said Adena, taking great care to keep her voice conciliatory, “I don’t have a magic wand. I’m pretty sure the captain doesn’t have a magic wand, either. If he can’t land this plane—”

“Then you’d better find me someone who can,” he said.

Liza and Takashi exchanged excited sidelong looks. No one spoke.

Taking a deep breath, Adena tried again. “John—”

To no one’s surprise, the senator cut her off with an impatient wave. “We’re wasting time. I don’t care what you need to do. We can take this plane, or a smaller plane, or, hell, get me a blimp. I don’t care. Once we get close enough, we can take a helicopter the rest of the way in, or you can just find me a parachute. We’ve got all the security we need and we’ll cover our own costs. You got me?”

“Yeah,” Adena said glumly. Liza actually felt sorry for her because the senator’s demands were a huge logistical nightmare of the sort that was usually left to invading army generals. “I got you.”

“Good.”

The senator glanced over his shoulder at Liza and Takashi. Liza, who’d put all thoughts of their tryst firmly on the back burner for now, felt the force of that brief connection to the depths of her belly and in the lingering ache between her thighs, but then his unreadable gaze slid away.

“Tell the press what’s going on,” the senator continued, still speaking to Adena. “They probably know already, but give them the option of getting off here or coming with me. And make sure they understand that if they come with me, we’re not going to be giving interviews. We’re not going to politicize this. We’re going to make sure those people get the help they need. That’s all. Anyone who doesn’t understand that needs to get off my plane right now.”

His gaze flickered a last time to Liza, then away, and he did not look at her again. “Let’s saddle up.”

Chapter 15

“T hat’s where the house was.”

Liza’s current interviewee was an unemployed former farm-worker named Vern Stubbs. Tall but dumpy, he looked to be in his early forties and had the craggy skin of a person who spent most of his time working under a hot sun. There were big muddy patches on the knees of his jeans, and his unbuttoned red plaid shirt hung limply on either side of a dingy white T-shirt.

“Right there.” Vern pointed to a concrete driveway that ran twenty feet from the street and ended in a pile of bricks, wood and all the other debris that used to comprise a home, a life. A mangled black SUV peeked out from under the rubble, its back tires hovering a few feet off the ground. “That’s all that’s left.”

Nothing was left.

Next door was the neighbor’s untouched house, a Victorian that’d survived the onslaught without so much as a broken window or a lost shingle. Liza was about to contemplate the whims of Mother Nature but Vern spoke again and pointed.

“That was a hundred-year oak.”

To the man’s right, Brad caught the image with his video
camera as Takashi watched the proceedings. Liza tracked their movements and, gasping, stared at the remnants of something that in no way resembled a tree. It looked like a giant ice cream stick that had been splintered and stuck into the ground, jagged side up. The top of the tree, which had no doubt been leafy and green, was nowhere in sight.

Mother Nature had really outdone herself this time.

In the last eighteen hours Liza had seen the overworked coroner’s refrigeration truck picking up body after body in a death toll that had passed thirty and was still climbing. She’d seen bewildered dogs wandering the streets with their heads hanging low and their tails between their legs. She’d seen mobile homes tossed and tumbled like a set of toy cars inside a child’s pencil case.

Worst of all, she’d seen the walking dead—people like Vern who looked as if they wanted to burrow through the wreckage and join their loved ones in the afterlife.

Overhead, the morning sun blazed against the blue sky in the prettiest spring day Liza had seen in a while. A faint breeze ruffled her hair. Life, apparently, was still going on.

This man, in the meantime, would have to bury his parents tomorrow.

“Will you rebuild?” Liza asked.

“I don’t know.” His chin began to tremble. Blinking furiously, he pressed his lips together and tried to compose himself. “They rebuilt four years ago after the last one, but the damage wasn’t so bad then. I don’t…I don’t know if I have the heart for it this time.”

Pausing, Vern looked fifty feet across the debris-strewn grass to where the senator, flanked by his bodyguards and a couple of uniformed sheriff’s deputies, was talking animatedly with several other men among the wreckage of another house.

Vern’s lips thinned with simmering anger and a nasty new light ignited behind his eyes.

“Damn politicians don’t help.”

This guy wasn’t playing with a full deck. Liza couldn’t shake the gut feeling that his parents’ deaths, tragic though they were, weren’t the reasons for all of the controlled rage she was seeing today.

He’d seemed perfectly normal when she and Takashi approached him for this stand-up for tonight’s news, yeah, but the more Liza talked to him, the more the fine hairs on her forearms bristled.

That prickly feeling was never a good sign.

“You don’t believe the senator will help?” she asked. “Do you have more faith in Senator Fitzgerald or the president—”

Vern’s derisive snort struck Liza as more of a warning growl. “One politician’s as worthless as any other, if you ask me. They’ve all got an endless supply of empty promises—”

The senator doesn’t.

The words were on the tip of her tongue, but she kept her mouth shut, listened and nodded like a good journalist should.

“—and the president didn’t even come the last time. He sent the vice president.” Another snort from Vern, this one revealing the uneven edge of the man’s yellowed teeth. “And a fat lot of good he did us.”

She’d heard this bitterness before, after Katrina. More and more people were angry at their government and felt abandoned. This man was just one example.

“What would you like to see the politicians do?” Liza asked.

Vern didn’t hesitate. “Get the hell out. Every last one of them.”

That was it.

Without saying goodbye, waiting for the few last words Liza had planned to say to him or even pausing to give her the finger, he wheeled around and stalked off, disappearing around the corner of a neighbor’s house.

Relief hit Liza in a wave so strong she didn’t even bother hurrying after him to get his contact information in case the network wanted to follow up in a few months. She swung around to give Takashi a raised-eyebrow look.

“We’re going to want to give him a wide berth.”

“You don’t say. I’ve got several people lined up.” Takashi pointed to a group loitering near the perimeter around the senator’s fleet of black SUVs at the curb. They all looked hopeful and seemed anxious for their fifteen minutes of fame. “The woman from the day care center—”

“Let’s check in with the senator,” Liza said. Takashi shot her
that look again, the one that made her cheeks burn with embarrassed heat. She ignored it. “Maybe he’ll talk to the press now.”

Takashi muttered darkly—he was always muttering darkly these days—but didn’t argue. Which was good because Liza was so anxious to see how the senator was doing that she’d probably tackle Takashi and pummel him if he gave her a hard time.

Keeping their heads low to study the ground and avoid any sharp debris, they crept across the field toward where the senator was now dripping with sweat and shifting rubble to try to help a family find some valuables under that enormous pile of ruined dreams.

Liza stared at him. She couldn’t help it. She never could.

Even in his jeans, polo shirt, hiking boots and leather work gloves, the senator was still a striking sight. He somehow grew more presidential by the second, as though this crisis helped him reach his full potential.

At his urging, they’d found an undamaged runway, landed safely and been among the first outside responders. Liza still wasn’t quite sure how they’d done it, unless maybe the senator had magicked it out of thin air with the uncompromising force of his will.

Then he’d hit the ground running and hadn’t stopped since.

The press—all seasoned, like Liza, all professionals who knew their way around a disaster—could barely keep up with him. He’d talked to the mayor, FEMA officials, and Red Cross workers, insisting they could do more and do it quicker. He had time for every survivor, an ear for every distraught person within his range of vision. If he’d sat down, eaten or rested—even once—Liza missed it.

The only thing he hadn’t done the whole time was speak to the press.

True to his word, the senator hadn’t mentioned slow response times, Senator Fitzgerald’s belated appearance or—and this was a biggie for politicians—blame. He’d just helped and listened, like he was doing now. Picked through memories and debris, held hands and reassured.

As though he knew she was somewhere nearby thinking about him, the senator chose that moment to glance her way. Still flanked by bodyguards, he straightened, swiped his arm across his sweaty
forehead and, in a gesture that seemed as natural as stretching first thing in the morning, turned his head to look at her.

Liza’s heart fluttered.

God, she had it bad for him.

A good twenty feet still separated them, but she didn’t need to be any closer to know how he was. The dark patches under his eyes meant he was exhausted. The slight droop in his shoulders signified the emotional toll this disaster was taking on him. The grim set to his mouth told her that he was determined to do whatever he could—and he could do a lot—to make life easier for the survivors.

Best of all, the faint smile that touched his eyes, if not his mouth, and the new warmth in his expression at the sight of her all announced that she’d just given him the strength to get through the rest of the day. That she helped him just by being there.

In that moment, she knew.

Just as the senator caught himself watching her with his heart on his sleeve, blinked and turned away, the unwelcome realization hit Liza, a missile strike right between the eyes.

She was in love with him.

Oh, God. Oh, no.

It couldn’t be. She didn’t do relationships, so it was impossible. More than that, it was inconceivable. Also irrational, ill conceived and incredibly self-destructive.

No good could come of it today, tomorrow or ever. She had a better chance of a successful romantic relationship with a baboon from the National Zoo.

But…she was.

She was in love with him.

The terrible revelation was just penetrating her brain when she caught a flash of movement out of the corner of her eye, a streak of red that was moving too fast for any innocent purpose.

What the—?

With dawning horror she saw Vern Stubbs lunging through the scattered crowd and toward the senator, but this wasn’t Vern Stubbs, the pitiful but harmless loser who’d just lost both parents.

This was an assassin.

With a pistol in his raised hand and murder on his face.

“No.”

Screaming, Liza ran to stop him.

If only she could get there in time.

“No, no, no!”

The bodyguards were already in motion, but they were several beats behind Stubbs, and Liza knew it was too late even if no one else did. The senator’s head whipped around, and she had a glimpse of his bewildered alarm and his lips forming her name—Liza, he yelled, LIZA, as though she was the one in danger.

Then three shots rang out: crack-crack-crack—fast, just like that—and the senator’s eyes widened in surprise.

And then, even though Liza had sounded the alarm and the sheriff’s deputies were tackling a struggling Vern Stubbs to the muddy ground and wrenching the pistol out of his hand, it was too late and the senator was shouting with pain and falling to the ground in a crumpled heap.