Hostage Zero by John Gilstrap Page B

and a half after her dream job had grown to become her oh-my-God-I-can’t-believe-it job—a year and a half after American voters had voted an exciting newcomer into the White House—she still had to pinch herself from time to time.
    She’d been all over the world, meeting the prime minister of England and the Pope in Rome, the premier of China, and the president of Russia, but through it all, nothing brought the same sense of awe and raw power as sitting right here in the West Wing of the White House. The very lack of pretense—the low ceilings and time-worn moldings—only added to the majesty of the place.
    Brandy’s title was special assistant to the secretary of defense, but she knew what people thought. She listened to talk radio and knew that Denise Carpenter—“The Bitch of Washington, DC”—had christened her Defcon Bimbo. Those were just ugly words from the conservative queen of an ugly town. Harry Truman had said it best: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.
    Brandy Giddings didn’t care what people thought. Her boss, Secretary Jacques Leger, would be the first secretary of defense to stress peace over war, embrace inclusion over exclusion. And Brandy was part of it all. It was just too much to believe.
    At twenty-eight, Brandy was blessed with the looks of someone ten years younger, and the body to go with them; but what would have been a blessing in Hollywood was a curse here in its East Coast sister city. Washington was the city of Birkenstocks and minimal makeup. “Look like a dyke or die,” as one of her fellow Georgetown grads had told her.
    To hell with them. Looking hot had worked very well for Brandy, first landing her a spot on then-Senator Leger’s staff, and then propelling her into the E-Ring of the Pentagon, where the office accommodations put those of the White House to shame. While nothing trumped the greatness of the Oval, her boss’s digs were known throughout the world as the most opulent in the federal government.
    Brandy’s was a job that led to Great Things. She commanded the attention of four-star generals and forty-year career bureaucrats, and it drove them all mad. As Secretary Leger’s right-hand lady for matters not directly related to national defense, she rarely waited more than ten minutes for her calls to be returned. With official cover from her boss, she traveled the world in tricked-out executive military jets that would make corporate titans blush.
    Talk-show blabbers and late-night hosts could say whatever they wanted. None of their words could undo the reality of where she was and where they were not. When the history books were written, Brandy Giddings’s fingerprints would be there, if only through the victories of the man she served.
    Note the lowercase S in “served.” There was no romance between Secretary Leger and her. Had he offered the opportunity it undoubtedly would have been different, especially during his senate years, but as it was, their mutual loyalty was built entirely of trust and hard work. As time progressed, she’d learned to accept that as best.
    Today, as she waited in the narrow hallway outside of the Oval for the cabinet meeting to adjourn, Brandy scrolled absently through the e-mails in her BlackBerry, developing her strategy for breaking the bad news to the secretary. Their efforts to control the outcome of one very important matter had taken a bad turn, and it fell to her to keep the boss in the loop without propelling him over the edge. The roots of this particular matter reached back to the earliest days of his career.
    When her electronic leash revealed that the news had not yet improved, she thrust it back into her purse and checked her watch again. Six-thirty. It hadn’t yet been eight hours since her previous seventeen-hour day had ended. For a job that delivered so many perks, the hours sucked.
    The president had always prided himself in being an early riser, but in the three months since the New York Times had