Murder in Foggy Bottom - Margaret Truman [51]
Secretary Rock, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Wick, and Eva Young climbed the movable boarding stairs, returned a greeting from an Air Force major, and entered the aircraft. In the cockpit, the three-man crew, Air Force veterans, went over their preflight lists while ground maintenance personnel readied the plane for takeoff.
Already on board in the passenger cabin—actually a series of cabins created for specific functions: the Secretary’s bedroom, bath, and small private office; a conference room; a communications center manned by Air Force technicians; lavatories; a press center; and other designated areas—were three men. They’d removed their suit jackets and sat at the small conference table on which pads of paper, materials from the briefcases they’d carried aboard, and a pitcher of ice water and glasses rested. They stood and greeted the Secretary.
“Please, sit down,” she said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
As Rock went to her private quarters, Wick joined the men at the table.
“The Secretary’s looking well,” Mike McQuaid, special assistant on terrorism to President Ashmead, said.
Wick frowned. “She handles pressure well.”
“How are you holding up?” Herbert Shulman asked. Dr. Shulman was the highest-ranking civilian in the Air Force’s Weapons Division, which reported directly to the Directorate of Special Programs, his area of particular expertise shoulder-launched missiles.
“Just fine.”
“This should be like a minivacation for you,” McQuaid said through a small laugh. “No press to coddle.”
“I was thinking just that,” Wick said, standing. “Excuse me.” He retreated to the press center, where he sat alone. Usually, the seats were filled with journalists invited to accompany the Secretary on her many trips abroad. But this wasn’t travel as usual. Wick had spent the day fielding questions from the press about the purpose of this particular trip. Despite his programmed denials—“The Secretary is going to Moscow to congratulate the new Russian minister of foreign affairs, Mr. Orlov, and to establish a working relationship with him. That is the only reason for the trip!”—the press were convinced that Secretary Rock was heading for Moscow because of the aircraft downings, and they let Wick know they knew. Some had become testy, prompting a few angry responses from the assistant secretary. He was glad the day was over and that the plane’s press center was empty. With any luck, he’d be able to catch up on some of the sleep he’d missed since the attacks on the planes.
Elizabeth Rock was also grateful for a few moments of solitude. She stood in the private bath off her bedroom and looked at herself in the recessed mirror. This bathroom had been the subject of controversy after she’d been confirmed seven years ago. She’d taken an active role in the renovation and decorating of her office at Main State, and of the aircraft in which she would travel the world. She’d chosen Italian marble for the aircraft’s lavatory and the bath off her office, the cost raising eyebrows among members of Congress already critical of the administration’s spending policies, and journalists writing about it. Shades of Pentagon-ordered nine-hundred-dollar toilet seats and hundred-dollar ash-trays, they said. The flap eventually blew over, and Rock, sixty-four years old, widowed at thirty, with a Ph.D. in political science and a succession of increasingly important diplomatic jobs on her résumé, had her wood-paneled office and