Guard Shredded a Black CEO's Badge — Then the Secretary of Defense Walked Through the Door
Chapter 5
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Norris hesitated. He looked at Dailey, who gave a small, self-satisfied shake of his head. Norris rubbed the back of his neck. "Sir, without a credential or verifiable ID on your person, I'm going to need to ask you to wait over here until we can sort this out through the administrative office. That could take a while.""I don't have a while." For the first time, something moved behind Raymond's eyes. Not anger; something more precise than anger. "The pre-ceremony technical review begins in eleven minutes. If I'm not in that room, a 2.3 billion-dollar contract signing gets pushed. The Secretary of Defense is arriving at this building at 10:00. I need you to make a phone call or pull up a database. I'm asking you to do one of those two things before this situation becomes something none of us can undo."Dailey let out a short, derisive laugh from behind the partition. Norris started to say something.He never finished the sentence.The main doors of the Meridian Federal Complex opened with a pressurized sigh, and a column of people walked in from the street. They moved in the tight, purposeful formation of a government security advance team: two men in dark suits flanking a third who was speaking quietly into a wrist mic, followed by a woman in a charcoal gray power suit whose posture alone would have told anyone paying attention that she was the center of gravity in the room.Secretary of Defense Patricia Wren was sixty-one years old, a former federal judge and two-term senator from Ohio who had been confirmed to her current position eighteen months ago by a vote of 92 to 8. She had silver hair cut close to her jaw, reading glasses pushed up on her head, and the deliberate, ground-eating stride of someone who had not wasted a step in twenty years of public service.She was forty-five minutes early. Her advance team had called ahead; no one at the security desk had apparently relayed the message.She came through the main doors, caught sight of the lobby, and stopped. Her eyes moved across the scene with the speed and precision of a woman who had spent thirty years reading rooms: the two security officers, the tension at the partition, the shredded material on the counter, and Raymond Ashford standing in the middle of it, alone, his hands at his sides, his expression composed, but his jaw set like poured concrete."Raymond?" Her voice cut across the lobby like a bell. Not loud; sharp.