by Al Pessin
Kearsy hit the brakes.
An officer ran toward the ambulance with gun drawn and his left hand up. “Stop! You can’t come through here! GW is that way.” He gestured behind them.
Bridget reached out of the window to show her ID. “DIA. They’re expecting me at a meeting in the White House.”
“Sorry, ma’am. No one gets through without specific orders.” He turned toward Kearsy. “You have to move this thing right now.”
“I’m getting out,” Bridget said. She showed the officer both her hands. “I’m unarmed.” She opened the door, stepped down, and closed it behind her. “Thanks, Kearsy.”
“No prob,” he said. “Just don’t let them shoot me.” He turned the wheel hard left and made a slow U-Turn.
“Ma’am, you can’t be here,” the officer said.
Bridget moved off the road toward a small park and took out her phone. “I’ll get out of your way. I’m calling for authorization.”
“All right, ma’am. But walk across the park and go into that restaurant. You can’t be out here.”
“Understood.”
* * *
Ten minutes later, Bridget covered the last two blocks to the White House on the back of a police motorcycle. The chilly November air blasted her face and tousled her hair below the borrowed helmet. Holding onto the police officer hurt her ribs, and the helmet hurt her head, but she still felt a rush as she approached the West Wing entrance.
A uniformed Federal Protective Service officer waved them through the gate. Bridget saw that the unarmed marines in dress uniforms had been replaced by an assault team in dark green jumpers and body armor brandishing semiautomatic weapons. She noticed snipers on the roof, too. They were always there. But today, they were making themselves visible.
When the bike stopped at the door, Bridget dismounted and handed over the helmet. She instinctively shook her head to loosen her hair. That was a mistake. The dizziness hit and she staggered, grabbing the policeman with her left hand and her head with her right.
She felt some blood that Kearsy had missed and thought about what she must look like. Her skirt and jacket were bloodstained and coated with white ceiling tile dust. She had a large bandage on her head, and her face was probably dirty.
“Ma’am, we’ll have the doctor take a look at that,” said the intern Jay had sent to escort her. The earnest young man was running toward Bridget from a side door, his red tie flying behind him. He grabbed her arm and looked at her with what seemed like exaggerated concern.
Bridget steadied herself and brushed some dust off her suit. “I’m okay,” she lied. “Quick ladies’ room stop, then to the meeting.”
They breezed through the ID check and metal detectors, and she let the young man hold her arm as he led her along the labyrinth of blue-carpeted corridors.
In the bathroom, she wiped the last of the blood from her hair—what she could see, anyway—and splashed water on her face. She couldn’t do anything about the stains on her suit. She bent down to wipe off her shoes. She thought about Bethesda—Will, Gabby, all the bodies outside. Her ribs ached.
Bridget stared at her reflection in the mirror. She looked like she had been through . . . well, exactly what she had been through. She shook it off and turned for the door. Bridget would never go to a White House meeting, or any meeting, not looking her best. But today was not a day to worry about such things. She had come this far and was not stopping now.
* * *
“Bridget! Oh my God!” Jay greeted her as she came into the Situation Room. “You’re injured.”
“It’s nothing. What’s going on?”
“It’s not nothing. What happened to you?”
Bridget told him the short version. As she finished, the dizziness hit again. She reached out for support. “Jay, sorry, I need to sit down.”
Jay swiveled one of the leather chairs so she could sit. “Can we get the doctor over here?” he called out.
The next several minutes were a blur. Bridget tried to scan the room, see who was there, check the displays on the large screens, but she couldn’t focus. A navy corpsman got there first and knelt in front of her. She slumped into his arms and vomited a little.
“We need a gurney,” the medic shouted in the general direction of the security staff. He sat his patient up, but Bridget winced from the pain in her ribs. “She should not be here, sir,” the corpsman said to Jay.
That seemed to rouse Bridget. She was not going to let them kick her out of the Sit Room. “I’m okay. I need to be in this meeting.”
Bridget could tell that her voice sounded odd. The room moved around her. She felt the medic’s hands protecting her head as she slid out of the chair onto the plush carpet.
Chapter Five
Faraz stirred. He felt the chill of the air-conditioning on his face, the only part of him not firmly tucked in under the sheet and blanket. He licked his lips, then opened his eyes—and shut them immediately against the light of an overhead fluorescent.
He blinked a few times, and the room came into focus. The walls were beige from the floor to a wide wooden rail in the middle, then white to the acoustic tile ceiling, with air vents and lights in a checkerboard grid. There were two metal visitors’ chairs with brown cushions. A cart heavy with medical equipment stood to his left. To the right were a rolling hospital tray, a cabinet built into the wall, and a small fridge humming in the corner. He was facing the door, but rolling his eyes up in their sockets, he could see a window across the top of the wall behind him and a sliver of blue sky.
He twisted his body to get his right hand out from under the covers and wiped his face. Where the hell am I? How did I get here?
Memories flooded back. He couldn’t answer those two questions, but he remembered what came before. The air strike. The escape. The carnage at the farmhouse. He covered his eyes with his free hand, as if that would block the images.
He remembered the rescue, too. The relative safety of the village. The late-night visitors. The walk down the mountain to the landing zone. The roar of the Black Hawk. Then . . . nothing.
Curiosity got the better of him. “Hello,” he said. His voice was hoarse. No reply.
Faraz coughed and swallowed. “Hello!”
The door opened and a nurse walked in, all in white, from her old-school cap to her below-the-knee dress, tights, and shoes. She was a blue-eyed blonde, five feet two inches tall and about half as wide, with a smile to match. Faraz was out of practice at guessing a woman’s age, but she seemed older than he was—thirty-five, maybe.
“Lieutenant Abdallah, glad to see you’re awake. How are you feeling?” The nurse checked the readings on the equipment and the flow of the IV.
Faraz had not seen a woman with her face and hair uncovered in nearly a year. He hadn’t seen blue eyes or blond hair, either, and had hardly spoken to a woman in all that time. He’d also been sleeping, it seemed, for a long while, so it took him a few seconds to say anything. “Where am I?”
“Sir, you are in the U.S. Navy Lawrence T. Nicholson Medical Center. And you didn’t answer my question.” Her voice was confident, with a hint of Southern accent and a clipped efficiency that indicated she expected specific answers to specific questions.
“Sorry.” Faraz blinked his eyes to clear the cobwebs. “What was the question?”
She spoke slowly, like he was a child, but there was a tease in her eyes. “It was, ‘How are you feeling?’”
“Oh.” Faraz mentally took stock of himself. “Okay, I guess.”
“Let’s have a look at your arm.” The nurse pulled back the covers on his left side and checked the bandage covering his bullet wound. “Any pain?”
“No, actually. Thanks.”
“Good.”
The nurse continued through Faraz’s catalog of injuries, checking the gunshot wounds to his right shoulder and left side. That last was just a graze. He had been kicked hard in the chest, too, but that was . . . he wasn’t sure how many days ago. No matter now.
When she finished, she tucked Faraz back in.
“Um, and where is the Lawrence . . . whatever medical center?”
“U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.”
* * *
Bridget was in a smaller but much fancier medical facility: the White House clinic. The floor was a pattern of presidential seals. The walls were packed with high-tech medical gear and glass-fronted cabinets stocked with supplies. The plush chair where she sat was intended for the president of the United States.
The highly skilled surgeon who worked on her head was a one-star admiral. His uniform pants gave way to a white hospital coat with his rank insignia on the sleeve. The nurse was navy, too, and he passed instruments to the doctor with practiced efficiency.
“How’s it look?” Bridget asked.
“It’ll be fine,” her admiral doctor replied. “But you definitely needed more attention than you got at Bethesda.”
“They were pretty busy with more serious injuries.”
“I’m sure they were.”
Bridget saw the bandage Kearsy had applied, now blood-soaked and lying in a basin.
“That dressing was put on by an ambulance driver,” Bridget said.
“Looked like he was driving when he did it.”
“Got me here, anyway.” Bridget was silent for a few minutes while the doctor continued to close her head wound with stitches, but she was getting anxious. “Sorry, doc, but I need to get into that meeting. How much longer?”
“Well, let’s see.” The doctor patted the wound with a fresh bandage and showed Bridget that it came away clean. “You’re just about done.” The doctor took a fresh bandage from the nurse and put it in place. “All set now. But take it easy, and go see your regular doctor ASAP.”
“Yes, sir,” Bridget said.
“Stand up slowly, please.” The doctor offered his hand.
Bridget took it and stood without dizziness. “Thank you, doctor.”
“You are most welcome. I believe there’s a corporal outside the door to take you to your meeting.”
* * *
“Guantanamo?” Faraz thought he must have misheard her.
“Si. Bien venidos en Cuba,” she drawled, extending the last word to make it Cooooba. She smiled at him with perfect teeth, looking him straight in the eyes, as no woman in Afghanistan ever would.
“Excuse me?” After speaking Pashto for so many months, Faraz’s brain was not ready for Spanish.
“Welcome to Cuba, Lieutenant. And don’t worry. You’re at the naval base, not in the detainee facility.” She giggled at her bad joke. All Faraz could think was that he looked a lot more like those detainees than he did like this nurse.
“What am I doing at Guantanamo Bay?”
“You are getting the best care the United States Navy can offer. Beyond that, Lieutenant, I do not know.” She gave him another smile and reset his covers. “You rest, now.”
“I don’t want to rest. I want some answers. Why am I here? How did I get here? What the hell day is it?”
“I can tell you it’s Tuesday. The rest is well above my pay grade. But we’ve let the powers that be know you’re awake, so perhaps someone will come by who can answer your questions, or at least ‘not answer’ them from a higher level.” There was that giggle again.
Faraz started to ask another question, but realized it was useless.
The nurse filled a plastic cup from a pitcher on the rolling tray to Faraz’s right. “Here’s some water, and we’ll get you a meal. You must be starving.”
Faraz hadn’t thought about it, but now that she mentioned it, he was. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Lieutenant. We are navy, but don’t mind feeding the army now and again.” She gave him a wink, which unnerved him a little. She tied a cable with a handle and red button to his bed rail. “My name is Julie. If you need anything, push this button. See you later, Lieutenant.”
Faraz watched her skirt, stretched tight across her ample bottom, as she walked to the door. He hadn’t seen anything like that in the last year, either.
Faraz stared at the button. It wasn’t so different from the detonators they had used in Afghanistan. He took it in his hand, ran his finger along the side of the handle, pretended to push the button, and whispered, “Boom.”
* * *
Bridget slipped back into the Situation Room through a doorway behind the president’s right shoulder and took the first available seat along the wall. She saw the president in profile, and he looked terrible. She had met him a couple of times, and even in a crisis he was usually cool, confident, smiling. Not today. He looked older. His thin face was drawn. His color was poor.
The CIA director, a five-foot-five, bookish admiral, was in the middle of a brief on the Europe attacks. His laser pointer shined a series of red dots onto a screen displaying a map of greater Paris. “We had bombs at these three French military facilities. This one is a training center for new recruits. No firm casualty figures yet, but we expect that to be in the hundreds.”
“New recruits on-site?” Martelli asked.
“Yes, sir.”
The president shook his head. “Please continue.”
The screen changed to an aerial shot of Northolt Royal Air Force Base in West London, a facility used for VIP flights, including the ill-fated final takeoff of the late U.S. secretary of defense. “Sir, the Northolt control tower has fallen, and at least dozens died in explosions at a barracks and a dining facility.”
“I’ve been there half a dozen times.”
“Yes, sir.” The screen changed again, this time to a map of Central London. The admiral wielded his pointer to focus on a building just south of Trafalgar Square. “And here, a truck bomb blew the façade off RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute. Numerous casualties in the building and outside. It’s a busy area, and it was lunchtime.”
Bridget gasped. She knew people who worked there, had been there several times herself. RUSI was the British military think tank where justifications for the wars were crafted. It was on Whitehall, a half-mile-long road that connected Trafalgar Square to the defense ministry, 10 Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament, and Big Ben.
Bridget hadn’t known there were other attacks. A wave of dizziness hit, and she felt queasy. She thought she might have to leave the room again.
“Anything further?” Martelli asked.
“No further attacks, sir. Level five security is in place as you ordered at all U.S. and allied military facilities, as well as key civilian sites, especially transport hubs.” The admiral sat down.
“Thank you.” The president looked around the room, as if to see whether anyone had anything to add. He noticed Bridget. “Ms. Davenport, what happened to you?”
“I was at Bethesda, sir. I’m all right.” It seemed she had been telling that lie all day.
“Well, thank God for that. Has the medical staff had a look at you?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you.”
“Good. We need you and your team for what’s coming. Jay will brief you up.” He turned to the room. “Anything else?”
No one responded.
“Very well. This is a dark day, and it’s up to us to restore the light. It’s a multipronged response—military, intel, and especially finance. If we can stop the money, we’ll choke them to death. Now, let’s get to work.”
He stood, and so did everyone else. Marines opened the double doors behind the president, and he left with his senior staff.
The meeting broke into a dozen conversations. Bridget sat back down. Jay walked directly to her and sat in the next chair. “Feeling better?”
“Yes, thanks. And worse. Somehow, I hadn’t known about the other attacks.”
“I was about to tell you when you fainted on me.” Jay was a thin, balding, fifty-something career diplomat in an impeccable pin-striped charcoal suit who had served decades in hellholes and posh capitals. Now he ran the White House’s Central Asia policy. He and Bridget had worked together bef
ore. She knew that analysis, strategy, and negotiations were his strong points. Blood and trauma, perhaps not so much.
“Yeah. Sorry about that,” she said.
“Here.” He handed her a two-page summary of what had happened. “It’s the latest as of half an hour ago. This would seem to be the ‘strategic blow on all our enemies’ your operative warned us about.”
Bridget skimmed the top page. “Yes. I guess so. An apt description of what happened, unfortunately. I wish he’d been able to get more.”
“Me, too. But I’m glad he’s out alive, at least. Anyway, we’ll see how ‘strategic’ this turns out to be. It’s our job to make sure they suffer the strategic setback, not us.”
“Right.” Bridget felt herself slumping in the chair, as if carrying the burden of the attacks on her shoulders. She sat up straight. “I obviously missed most of the meeting. Is there a claim?”
“Not yet, but an attack of this scale could only be Ibn Jihad’s organization.”
“Automatically triggered by his death?”
“Maybe. Or maybe ordered by our surviving ‘friend,’ al-Souri.”
“Oh, shit.”
“We were so close, Bridget. Your man was so close.”
“Damn. We’ll get him, Jay. I swear we will. What do you need me to do?”
“I was getting to that. The short version is, we hit every terrorist target we can, starting today. Long term, we use covert ops and financial sanctions to shut them down.”
“Shut them down? Isn’t that what we’ve been doing since 9-11?”
“Yes. But we’re taking it to yet another new level. Well, you are.”
“Me?”
“Yes, you and Epsilon. Your success hasn’t gone unnoticed. You’re the point person for long-term intel and covert response. When the president says ‘shut them down,’ he means for good.”
“All right.” Bridget rubbed her wounded head.
“Best take care of that. First draft’s due in seventy-two hours.”
“Seventy-two hours? Not sure what we can—”
“Bridget, I like you, and I know you’re hurting, but this is a ‘yes, sir’ kind of day.”