by Jack Mars
The old man interrupted himself with a brief but violent fit of coughing.
“…compromising position, right in the bosom of a communications dead zone hosted by certain friends of ours. Not only is there the embarrassment of the discovery itself, there’s the little matter of an armed standoff between two secretive federal agencies, ongoing as of a few minutes ago, and broadcast on national TV.”
Speck sighed. He hated coming down here to talk to this man. Once upon a time, he had thought of the man as his mentor. But as the years passed, he came to think of the man a monster, a dark fiend who lurked in closets and lingered under bridges.
Even this office the man had. It was below ground level. There were no windows. The ceiling was high, but the smoke from the man’s cigarettes never seemed to find its way out. There was no airflow somehow. It smelled in here, and there was always a pall of blue and gray smoke.
“You should have died twenty years ago,” Speck almost said, but didn’t.
He sat across the wide steel desk from the old man. The desk was like a flat metallic desert. Speck could almost picture tiny Mongol hordes riding across its endless expanse. Usually the desk was empty except for the man’s overflowing ashtray. But today there was something new. A small TV monitor sat there, facing the old man.
Speck could see it from an angle. Right now it was on CNN, showing helicopter footage of a large white house perched on a forested mountainside. Numerous emergency vehicles were parked outside of the house. Men in SWAT uniforms and carrying rifles stood sentry on the porch. The sound was muted.
LIVE said the words across the bottom of the screen. Cheat Bridge, West Virginia.
“Please do explain,” the old man said.
Speck was tired, but there was no rest for the weary. Until this morning, he’d been congratulating himself, thinking that the loose ends were nearly tied off, with only Lawrence Keller left to go. He had even imagined he could afford to go home and catch a few hours’ sleep… a very foolish idea.
“There is no standoff,” he said. “I can see the TV set as clearly as you can. There was some initial confusion in the aftermath of the first agents arriving on the scene and discovering the president. Why wouldn’t there be? The men are professionals, but they were traumatized by what they found in that house. At this point, not even an hour into the crisis, there are representatives of the FBI, the NSA, the ATF, as well as local and state law enforcement agencies on the scene, all cooperating and working together.”
“Go on,” the old man said.
“The dead men in the house with the president are all Russians, men with long-term and well-known ties to Russian and other Eastern European mafias operating both here and abroad, and also with ties to Russian and Serbian intelligence agencies. One of those men stood accused of crimes against humanity during the Yugoslavian Civil War. Proper justice will never be served in his case.”
The old man nodded and took a long, nearly obscene drag on his lifeline.
“More.”
“The house is owned by a shadowy Russian businessman. The site was clearly chosen as an ingenious place to hide. Who would think to look for a Russian safe house inside an American intelligence security zone?”
“Why is the president dead?” the old man said.
Speck shrugged. “The president’s death hasn’t been announced yet. When it is, it will be announced by the White House, perhaps after a brief word from the director of the FBI. Everyone’s going to be on the same page, reading from the same script. Now, we don’t know yet what happened in that house, but we’re investigating. Maybe it was a sudden dispute among the kidnappers? Or perhaps the plan was to kill him all along, and the men who abducted him. Maybe Russian intelligence agents killed everyone in the house and then left by car. Tire treads in the dirt road will confirm that a vehicle was there as recently as yesterday.”
The old man seemed to be thinking. He became very still.
“And why did we deny the president was missing?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Speck said. “We wanted to prevent a widespread panic. We were trying to avoid a war with the Russians, and were attempting to negotiate his safe return. But the Russians were acting in bad faith.”
The old man looked at Wallace Speck. His cunning eyes were gleaming, almost glowing in the strange half light of this room. He smiled, and as he spoke his long teeth did that clicking thing which bothered Speck so much.
It was like the old man was a giant piranha. “Now there’s no way to avoid a war,” he said. “Is there?”
Speck shook his head. “No, I don’t think there is.”
“And the people of America tend to become very patriotic and unquestioning when war arrives, don’t they?”
Now Speck nodded. “Yes sir, I believe they do.”
“Then it would seem,” the old man said, and paused to allow a rumble of tiny jagged rocks to settle at the bottom of his throat, “that the sooner a war breaks out, the better.”
“Yes,” Speck said. “I couldn’t agree more.”
“Can we do that? Expedite the start of the war?”
“We can do,” Speck said, “anything we like.”
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
7:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Headquarters of the Special Response Team
McLean, Virginia
“Ah, hell,” Don Morris said.
The phone hadn’t stopped ringing in the past hour. The front desk receptionist wasn’t in yet, and they were taking more phone calls in one morning than they normally took in a week.
For some reason known only to the office telephone system, the calls were ringing here to Don’s office.
He picked up the latest call on the first go.
“Don Morris,” he said.
“Don, you made a mess in your pants this time,” a male voice said.
“Oh?” Don said. “How so?”
“You’re a cowboy, everybody knows that. And that has its place. But this isn’t the rodeo, old man. This is a team sport. You don’t invade Russia one day, and then two days later stick your knife in the backs of your friends.”
Don let the voice wash over him, trying to place it. The voice had some sort of encryption that turned it into something like a robot voice. Even so, there was a lingering remnant of an actual voice in there. He needed to get the man to talk a little more.
“Who are my friends?”
“I think you know who your friends are, Don. But you’re losing them pretty fast since you hung your little shingle out. You need to stand down, Don. Your head is in the guillotine right now. You could lose everything you have there, the SRT, all of it. What you did today… there are people who don’t appreciate it. I’m one of them.”
“I gather that,” Don said. “But I’m afraid you have me at a bit of a disadvantage. You know who I am. You even know where to reach me. But I don’t know who you are…” Don glanced at the readout on the desk phone. “…and it seems your number is blocked.”
“I intend to keep it that way,” the voice said. “But while I have you on the phone, let me put things to you very clearly. Your team is on the bench for the rest of this game. There are things going on here that you don’t know about, and you don’t need to know.”
“Like the assassination of David Barrett?” Don said.
“Funny. I haven’t seen anything on the news about that. What I’m getting is an unfolding crime scene in West Virginia. It’s still a mystery what’s going on there.”
Don shook his head. “What do you want?”
“I want you to bring your team home,” the voice said. “And as I already indicated, I want you to sit out the rest of the game. Just stay on the bench and keep your mouth shut. Things are going to move very fast now, and you don’t have an opinion about it.”
Don shrugged. Stone and his team were already en route back here. FBI forensics agents had taken over the crime scene. But about this “rest of the game” stuff…
�
��Suppose I do have an opinion about it,” Don said.
“Don, you’re a family man. You have a wife and two lovely grown daughters. I don’t really need to…”
Don felt his heart skip a beat. Until now, he had felt nothing about the person on the other end of the line. There wasn’t a man alive on earth who frightened Don Morris. This anonymous, vaguely sinister call could have been a prank by a scrawny teenager.
Frankly, Don had even been willing to believe that the Russians had abducted David Barrett and murdered him. Certainly, there was no real evidence otherwise.
But now some coward was going to threaten Don’s family? And this was because the SRT had found Barrett’s body? For one thing, it seemed to confirm everything Stone had suggested about Americans being in on this. For another, it pressed the BIG RED BUTTON inside Don’s psyche.
“Listen, you punk. I will cut your head off. Then I will reach down your throat and pull your lungs out the top. Test me on this. Do you think I’m not going to be able to find you? Think again. We trace every call that comes in here, and I will kill you for the things you’ve already said. Do you have any idea what I’m going to…”
“If you’d like to make a call,” a woman’s recorded voice said, “please hang up and try again.”
Don looked at the phone in his hand. He glanced up and Trudy Wellington was standing in the doorway.
“Everything okay, Don?”
He sighed. “Sweetheart, can you please tell Swann to reroute these calls anywhere else but my telephone?”
CHAPTER THIRTY
9:15 a.m. Montreal Daylight Time (9:15 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time)
Old Montreal
Ville-Marie
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Different country, same life.
Lawrence Keller followed nearly identical rituals almost every morning. First, he awoke from a series of nightmares he could barely remember.
He climbed out of the low to the ground, modern queen-sized bed in his Montreal flat and padded into the living room in a pair of boxer shorts and a T-shirt. He hit the remote control and CNN came on. Ah, news from America.
The flat was smaller than his Georgetown apartment, by a lot. It was on the third floor, one floor below the roof, of a two-hundred-year-old building in the oldest section of the city, just a few blocks from the St. Lawrence River.
Unlike the cabin in Vermont, Keller didn’t neglect this place. He liked it to appear lived in, so he never turned off the electricity, the water, or the cable TV. He paid a local woman to come in twice a month, clean the flat, and give it a once-over. And he flew up here once in a while and stayed for a few days.
It was convenient that everything was on. It meant he didn’t have to worry about turning it on when he got here. Which meant he didn’t have to interact with anyone. This was good. Keller had survived a long career in Washington, DC, largely by being paranoid.
As it did every morning, it occurred to him that he hated the news. He hated the voices of the talking heads. He hated how often their conversations devolved into talking over and shouting at one another. He hated the enthusiastic fake seriousness of the newscasters. Did anyone like this stuff?
Keller watched it because for a long time, it had been crucial to his work that he knew what was going on. This morning he watched it because his life was in danger, and he was hiding out from powerful people.
There might be clues as to…
Who was he kidding? He watched it by force of habit. He pressed the MUTE button as the advertisements came to an end.
The image on the screen showed a woman and a man sitting behind a news desk, both impeccably dressed and groomed, both of indeterminate age and even indeterminate race. These two were not just indicative of the melting pot nature of American society—they had actually been dropped into the pot, and had melted to such an extent you could no longer tell what they once were.
Had their forebears been slaves working the cotton fields in South Carolina? Or had they come in steerage from Europe and been processed and quarantined at Ellis Island? Had they come across the Pacific from China and built the railroads that drove the great westward expansion? It was impossible to guess.
Now there was a helicopter image of a large white house perched on a green mountainside. The place was surrounded by emergency vehicles with flashing lights. Men with rifles and wearing black uniforms stood guard near the front porch.
PRESIDENT BARRETT FOUND DEAD scrolled along the bottom.
For a long moment, Keller stared at the screen. He could not bring himself to turn the sound back on. He didn’t want to hear what the TV wanted to tell him. Suddenly, he felt lightheaded, as if his head was a helium balloon attached to his body by a string. The balloon floated, up, up, up and away.
Keller stepped backward, thinking he would sit in an armchair. He missed and slid to the bare wooden floor instead.
“Oh God,” he said.
He sat quietly for a long moment.
“They’re going to kill me.” He realized the truth of it. They were out there, right now, looking for him. And there was no way they weren’t going to find him. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but soon. There was no way to hide from these people.
Suddenly, it occurred to him that he had gotten David Barrett killed. In his mind, he saw David’s eyes bulging in terror as the men grabbed him, covered his mouth, and shot him with the Taser.
Keller had become dismissive of David over the years. It would be hard not to become that way. But on some level, they had been more than just the president and his chief of staff. They had been friends.
When Barrett decided, driven by whatever fevered imaginings, that it was a good idea to escape the White House grounds, who did he call to come and meet him? He called Lawrence Keller.
“He trusted me,” Keller said now.
Keller didn’t care that he was taking to himself. He barely realized it. He felt a great lump welling up in his throat. He had played the Washington game for so long that unspeakable betrayal was just another day at the office.
He had gotten his friend killed, and now the killers would come for him.
Across from him, the image on the TV changed. It showed the press briefing room at the White House. The podium was there. Currently standing in front of the microphones was Nathan Morgan, David Barrett’s press secretary. His face was flat and grim. He was waiting for the cue to begin.
Next to him was a man Keller recognized, but had never met—FBI Director Christopher Dunkin. Dunkin was tall, with silver hair. Keller happened to know that Dunkin was an ex-Marine with combat experience, just like himself. He was a Yale-educated lawyer, and he’d had a thirty-year career in law enforcement, including two decades with the FBI. There was hardly a man who had more credibility with the great mass of American people than Christopher Dunkin.
Keller looked down at his hand and realized it was still holding the remote control. He unmuted the TV.
“Good morning,” Nathan Morgan said. “I will start by confirming what has already been reported widely. President David Barrett has been murdered. I want to assure you that the country is in good hands. Our new president, Mark Baylor, has already taken the Oath of Office.”
Suddenly the lump in Lawrence Keller’s throat was so thick he almost couldn’t breathe. He closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see the screen.
And a moment later, he started to cry.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
11:20 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Headquarters of the Special Response Team
McLean, Virginia
“I thought it was bad, frankly.”
Luke was sitting at his desk, back at the office. He was going to have to invent a new word for exhausted. Swann was bustling around, setting up another encrypted satellite call for him. Luke was going to try Becca again.
It was crazy, considering everything that had been said, and everything Luke had done. There was no way to undo the Russian operation. More details wer
e leaking from it, and there seemed to be no way to stop the world events that were in motion.
Don Morris was standing in the doorway, impassive, big arms folded.
“Bad,” he said. “How so?”
“You saw the press conference, Don. We kept the operation secret because of the possibility that rogue elements within American intelligence had kidnapped the president, and to me that seems more likely now than ever. Not only did they kidnap him, they killed him. Within minutes of us hitting that house, the NSA and Pentagon were throwing assets in our direction. They knew exactly where to go.”
“I agree with you,” Don said. “More than you can possibly know.”
Luke shrugged. “Well, then you know what I’m talking about. The press conference was a lie. The Bureau director got up there with the White House press secretary and made it seem like it was somehow their idea that we hit that house. They didn’t mention once that the house is in the middle of an NSA security zone. They didn’t—”
“Would you expect them to?” Don said.
Luke sighed. “I don’t know what I’d expect. A little honesty, maybe.”
A little honesty.
Luke didn’t want to think too much about that phrase.
“Now we have to have World War Three so people don’t ask too many questions about what happened to the president of the United States? We just saved his daughter two months ago. I mean…”
Luke was tired. He needed to go home and sleep for a solid day. Suddenly he realized that if he kept talking he was going to start to cry. He didn’t want to do that, not in front of Don, and for some reason, especially not in front of Swann.
“Maybe they’re going to need us to ask the questions,” Don said.
“That’s going to be hard,” Swann said from the floor. “Considering the director just cut our legs off.”
Swann stood, apparently oblivious to the scowl on Don’s face. The phone he just installed was a digital device. It came with a small laptop computer, complete with fold-up screen. Swann ran through the screens on his display and input a long code.