Thirty-two thousand feet above the snow-slicked ridges of the Virginia Appalachians before banking sharply down the eastern fall line toward the Potomac River basin, the dark-olive helicopter sliced through an unyielding wall of freezing sleet and sub-zero downdrafts at one hundred and sixty knots.
Through the reinforced cockpit bulkhead, the illuminated needle of the Washington Monument and the floodlit colonnade of the United States Capitol pierced the low winter cloud deck like an unyielding surveyor’s plumb.
Inside the vibration-dampened VIP command cabin, the air was pressurized, clinical, and stripped of all domestic grief.
The stench of Parcel Nine—the rain, Julian Vance’s sniveling excuses as his cheek struck the hardwood, his private guards’ screeching pleas about corporate easements, and the bitter residue of eight years spent on my knees scrubbing baseboards while my daughter’s future hung by a thread—had been completely purged by the high-efficiency environmental scrubbers.
