Spector was staring at her in astonishment. “Goodness?”
Betsy started sorting through the documents on her workstation, trying to figure out what tasks she could delegate to her staff to keep them out of trouble, and to keep the flow of words up during the next three days. “See you at National, then?” she asked.
Spector said nothing, just stared at her coolly.
“Or should we drive down together?” Betsy continued.
“You’ve got a real talent for denial, or something,” Spector finally said. “This hasn’t sunk in yet at all, has it?”
“I don’t think I’m in denial,” she said. “I’m just trying to concentrate on the here and now.”
Spector grinned. “That,” he said, “is definitely a form of denial. See you there.” He stood up, took a couple of deep breaths, grabbed his military-issue aluminum briefcase, and departed.
She spent another hour delegating three days’ worth of tasks and planting emergency contact numbers. She said good-bye to Thelma the secretary, walked down to the apartment, left a note for Cassie, packed, and lugged her briefcase and garment bag down to the Rosslyn Metro Station.
Ten minutes later she was at National, wishing she hadn’t packed so much.
If she’d been hopping a Delta or USAir flight, she’d have known exactly where to go. As it was, she blundered around the place for a while. They had signs up for people who wanted to find a rest room or a baggage claim. They didn’t have any signs for people like her. It was fortunate that her good-girl instincts had prompted her to arrive almost an hour early.
Eventually, by process of elimination, she found herself at the civil-aviation wing. She trudged through a couple of commercial maintenance operations, now cursing herself for every extra blouse and pair of shoes she had stuffed into her bag. Some kind soul directed her through a door marked Staff Only, and she found herself in a waiting room manned by the same kind of Agency security personnel who sat by the elevators at the Castleman Building. Betsy was the only person there. A couple of dark-tinted windows looked out toward the apron, where a government Gulfstream jet was being worked over by its crew. Betsy recognized the construction of these windows: the same beefed-up, surveillance-proof numbers that always implied the presence of Agency people.
Half an hour later Spector came. He was followed by some hassled types from the NSA who had been helicoptered down from Fort Meade; an Army and a Marine colonel who had taken the metro down from the Pentagon, and—at the last possible minute, bringing up the rear, wiping sweat from his balding head with a dirty handkerchief and puffing on his asthma inhalers—Ed Hennessey.
A woman in a blue uniform entered through a different door, bringing an exhalation of muggy, diesel-scented air with her. Her uniform was almost calculated to be nondescript and bore no discernible insignia or name tag. “Welcome to the Kennebunkport Express. I’m your pilot. My name is Commander Robin Hughes. Please follow me to the plane. Please stay as far away as possible from the open hangar doors.” Robin Hughes had the enviable poise and self-possession that Betsy had learned to associate with women who had graduated from one of the three service academies.
They had all been chatting and even joking until this moment; suddenly, now, they became hushed and reverent. Robin Hughes turned and led them out the door and into the hangar where the Gulfstream was sitting, ready to go. The hangar’s doors were wide-open, and Betsy understood why they had been told to stay back from them; if they got any closer, a tourist or reporter standing in one of the concourses would be able to pick their faces out with a telephoto lens.
The little jet had two rows of seats. They had barely settled into them when Commander Robin Hughes began to taxi out onto the apron. This was air travel with an unfamiliar twist: no waiting. No one came back to demonstrate how to fasten their seat belts, no one hassled them about their seat backs or tray tables. Robin Hughes blithely cut in front of an outraged Trump shuttle and a slightly mystified American Airlines 757, swung the plane around to its takeoff vector, and pinned the throttles. The plane ripped down the runway and jumped into the air like a bat out of hell, and they were a thousand feet above the Potomac no more than sixty seconds after they’d chosen their seats. It was, in other words, not like flying commercial.