Corsair

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?”