Primary Command

by Jack Mars

  Dixon hammered the podium with his fist.

  “What reason have we been given to risk the lives of our children and grandchildren?”

  “No reason!”

  “It’s too bad they gave him that big podium to pound on,” someone said. “Next time they should give him a sheet music stand.”

  There were a few chuckles in the room. People here were in a jovial mood. The Pentagon, in the person of General Richard Stark, had predicted America could hit the Russians with impunity, and so far that assessment was holding up very nicely. In the past half an hour or so, a drone strike had incinerated a formation of Russian tanks, and the Russians hadn’t even attempted a response.

  So far.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but does Thomas Hayes look like he has a pickle attached to his face?”

  “I wasn’t thinking pickle,” someone else said.

  “Mr. Baylor,” Clement Dixon said, directly addressing the President of the United States through the TV. “Stand down from this insane course of action. Show us one shred of proof that the Russians were involved in our president’s murder.”

  “Mr. Baylor,” Mark Baylor said. “That’s nice.”

  “Disrespectful,” someone said.

  “This guy’s gall knows no bounds.”

  “He’s sticking his neck all the way out, and this time we’re going to chop it off. Wait until we release the identities of the kidnappers. People are going to run Clement Dixon out of this town on a rail.”

  Speck nodded at the truth of that, but didn’t speak. It wasn’t his job to speak at meetings such as these. His job was to hover, to listen, to collect information. The less obvious his presence, the better.

  He well knew the identities of the men who died as the house in Cheat Bridge. Of course he did. He had put the men there. All three of them were Eastern European mobsters with long-term ties to Russian intelligence agencies.

  The Russians just loved to use mobsters to do their dirty work. Mobsters were violent. They didn’t need any training. They were amoral and didn’t try to fit their actions into neat political ideologies. And they were oh-so-expendable. Speck liked using them for the exact same reasons.

  On the television screen, the next speaker had moved to the podium. The little TV party here in the Oval Office was starting to break up. That was Speck’s cue to make a quiet exit. He moved toward the wide double doors, but a woman stepped in front of him. He took in her contours. Middle-aged, dressed conservatively in a blue pantsuit, beginning to suffer the spread that afflicted so many as they aged.

  Her eyes said she was stressed out. It was Kathy Grumman, until very recently, David Barrett’s harried and put upon chief of staff. Now that David was dead and gone, Kathy didn’t fit the suit around here. Her days were numbered.

  “Wallace,” she said.

  “Hi, Kathy. I am so sorry about David. I just… I don’t have words.”

  She shook her head. “I know. It’s terrible. We’re all just trying to soldier on. Mark told me he wants to bring Lawrence Keller back on board in an informal role as an advisor. Maybe we can find a permanent place for him. He’s got the most continuity as a David person. And I have no problem with that.”

  Her eyes said she was lying. Her eyes said Lawrence Keller coming back threatened her to the core of her being.

  Lawrence Keller…

  “I think Lawrence is great,” Speck said.

  Kathy nodded. “We’re having trouble reaching him. Mark said you might know how to get in touch with him.”

  Speck put a hand to his chin as if thinking about it. “I might. Let me see if I can get hold of him. If I can, you’ll be the first to know.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

  11:55 p.m. Moscow Daylight Time (3:55 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time)

  Strategic Command and Control Center

  The Kremlin

  Moscow, Russia

  A fight broke out in the War Room.

  “It’s murder!” a man screamed. “Mass murder! The end of the world has come!”

  Corporal Gregor couldn’t tell what was going on. It was happening at the other side of the large open space. Chairs and tables overturned as desk workers scrambled to get away from it. A computer fell to the floor and its screen shattered. People shouted, as people often did.

  Several men seemed to be throwing fists over there. Military police moved from the edges of the fray into the middle of it.

  Fistfights made very little impression on Gregor. He had seen and done much worse. He looked at the video screens mounted above everyone’s heads. There must be a clue as to what had disturbed the man. Several of the screens were showing a map of the American territory of Alaska, specifically focused on the coastal city of Nome.

  Gregor shrugged. It meant nothing to him.

  He was growing fatigued. He was a big strong man, still young, but the Cheget was heavy. It pulled constantly on his arm, causing a dull ache in his shoulder and sharp pains in his elbow and wrist.

  It seemed insane to have this monstrous thing attached to him. He’d heard that the Americans had similar suitcases, with their own nuclear codes inside. They called such a case a nuclear “football.” The idea made him smile. If this thing were a ball, he would kick it as far away as he could. He wouldn’t try to kick it into the opposing team’s goal. He would kick it into the stands… no, over the stands and out of the stadium.

  “Gregor.”

  The soldiers were beating someone with the butts of their rifles now, but Gregor turned away from the fight. The defense minister had come out of the small conference room. His eyes were tired. He reeked of cigarettes and alcohol. The top buttons of his shirt were undone and his tie pulled askew. He could use a shave. The gray and white of his eight-hour beard stood in marked contrast to the black shoe polish tone of his head hair. He could be the star of an absurd television comedy. But his face was stern.

  “Come. We must leave.”

  Gregor followed the man. They left the War Room and walked down the wide corridor. There were two other soldiers with them, the defense minister’s personal bodyguards. The footsteps echoed along the empty corridor. Even with the heavy damnable football case weighing him down, Gregor sped up and quickly came even with the minister.

  “What is happening, sir?”

  “Terrible news, Gregor. Terrible news. We must evacuate. In case of war, this facility will be utterly destroyed.”

  The minister’s answer was mostly a non-answer.

  “What is happening?” Gregor said again. He said it more fiercely than he intended.

  He was already tired of the defense minister. The man frustrated him. Gregor reflected that he may have been a poor choice to carry the Cheget. He was a trained killer with battlefield experience. Life was no longer as meaningful to him as it might be to others. It was not out of the question that he would become violent with the defense minister before this crisis ended.

  The minister looked at him. Perhaps he saw the anger in Gregor’s eyes, perhaps he didn’t. Either way, he was willing to talk.

  “It is secret information, but I will tell you. Strategic Air Command and Missile Defense have gone to the Dead Hand protocol. Command and control are becoming decentralized. In the event communications with Moscow are cut off, commanders in the field are empowered to make their own choices. This extends to the launch of nuclear weapons. It is a dangerous decision. Communications are not as robust as they once were. It will be easy to make a mistake from now on.”

  Gregor walked quickly, keeping pace, trying to digest what he heard. He thought of possible things to say to this. His mind was very close to blank.

  “Why?” was all he could muster.

  The defense minister shrugged. “The Americans have attacked again, as you know. A tank patrol was destroyed. We are not prepared for skirmishes such as these. Their technology is much newer. Unfortunately, the realization has been reached that we cannot defend ourselves from these attacks.”

  Th
e older man seemed like he was ready to weep. Weep that the hated enemy had reached such a staggering position of superiority. Weep at the humiliation of the lost Cold War. Weep at the crushed dreams of a once great civilization. Weep at the futility of a thousand years of Russian history.

  “As soon as their next attack, we will immediately wipe one of their cities off the map. The small city of Nome, Alaska. Three thousand five hundred people. It will be gone within a few minutes. We will destroy it with conventional missiles launched from Siberia, but we must assume the Americans will not refrain from the use of nuclear weapons when they respond. History will show that we were not the first to launch, but if they do, then we will.”

  The men walked along in silence, footfalls echoing. They turned right down another hallway. They were headed toward the helipad.

  “It’s a cold comfort, I’m afraid,” said the defense minister.

  “Where are we going now?” Gregor said.

  “A helicopter will take us to a military airfield outside the city. Then we will fly to a deep fallout shelter high in the Caucasus Mountains, near the Georgian border. Its existence is highly classified. It will be one of the few safe places left on earth. The president himself will be there.”

  The defense minister took a deep breath, but didn’t slow down at all.

  “Pray that we make it there in time.”

  They approached the entrance to the helipad. Two soldiers stood at attention at either side of the automatic doors. Outside the doors, it was night.

  Three beautiful young women, dressed expensively in the uniform of high-class Moscow prostitutes, waited by the doors. High heels, form-fitting minidresses, fur shawls, painted faces. The doors opened and without a word the women joined the procession.

  “Sir,” Gregor said. “My family…”

  The defense minister waved a hand. “Your family will be provided for, Gregor. Don’t worry.”

  The big blades of the chopper slowly began to spin as soon as the group reached the tarmac.

  Gregor felt nothing toward the prostitutes. They were little more than girls. They had their own troubles. He could not blame them for saving their own lives, at a cost they had paid many times before for a much smaller return.

  But this callous decision for apocalyptic war was beyond the pale. And this defense minister was beyond the pale. He could dismiss the lives of Gregor’s entire family without a thought, just as long as the fallout shelter was stocked with whores, and cigars, and (Gregor was certain) the best vodka and caviar.

  How could these inhuman decisions be made?

  The service pistol was in Gregor’s free hand almost before he was aware of it. He drew the gun across his body, from the holster on the left side of his waist.

  “Sir?”

  The man glanced back at him and Gregor shot him in the face.

  BANG!

  The defense minister’s guards began to turn at the sound of the gunshot, but they were too slow. Gregor shot them both in turn.

  The girls threw up their hands and ran on their awkward shoes back toward the cover of the building.

  Three bodies lay on the tarmac, blood flowing from each of their heads.

  Gregor looked down at the defense minister.

  “Twenty-nine,” he said to the man’s ruined face.

  There was a rush of activity behind Gregor. He didn’t bother to see what it was.

  “Twenty-nine confirmed kills.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

  6:15 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

  Georgetown

  Washington, DC

  When you were Wallace Speck, the long days never ended. They just got longer.

  He sat in the living room of Lawrence Keller’s apartment in Georgetown, half-awake on the man’s couch. In his right hand, he held a 9mm Beretta, with a long sound suppressor attached. It was a good one, as silencers went. He liked to think of it as the Sound of One Hand Clapping.

  He glanced around the apartment. It really was a charming place. Victorian-era rooms, polished hardwood floors, high ceilings, very tall windows. An old, ornate radiator in the corner. The furniture was mid-century Design Within Reach. Speck recognized a few of the pieces from the catalog. He was a fan.

  The bathroom was a well-done encounter between the old and new. There was a clawfoot tub in the center of the bathroom, with a drugstore tiled floor from the 1800s. But there was also a five-foot sink and vanity, and a glass cube rain shower. Somehow, it all worked.

  Speck was wearing rubber gloves, so he felt free to touch whatever interested him. Keller had a Bose sound system with embedded speakers in every room. The whole thing could be controlled from the same remote that controlled the heating and the lights. Just sitting here, Speck realized that he liked Keller. Keller really was a clever man.

  “Where are you, Lawrence?” he said to the empty room.

  He was also beginning to understand, with a growing sense of frustration, that he had badly misjudged Keller. Obviously, the man wasn’t here. His sporty BMW was not in the narrow driveway between this brownstone and the one next door. Moreover, his cell phone had just been traced to a copse of woodland and weeds along Interstate 95 outside Elkton, Maryland.

  It appeared Keller got cold feet and had run away.

  Maybe he killed himself.

  Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. It wasn’t helpful to speculate at this moment. Wherever Lawrence Keller had gone, whatever he was doing, it had to be confirmed. You didn’t pull off an operation like this one and then leave a loose end like Keller just dangling out there.

  The damnable thing was Keller wasn’t supposed to be a loose end! Keller had been integral to the entire plot. He was the one who had sold out David Barrett. As his reward, and as a nifty little sub-narrative to better sell the overall story, he was now supposed to reemerge as a White House character. Not chief of staff, certainly, but as a trusted aide, a wise and steady consigliere with decades of experience and public evidence of the bridge between Barrett and Mark Baylor.

  But he had disappeared instead.

  Speck had been diligently tying up loose ends like crazy, and except for a few bumps, it was going pretty well. He’d been so focused on this that he had tucked Keller away in the back of his mind for a couple of days.

  He’d like nothing more than if Keller suddenly walked in here with a bag of groceries in his arm and a perfectly reasonable explanation. If that happened, he would shoot Keller in the head for causing him this inconvenience, then move on with his life.

  But that wasn’t going to happen, was it?

  As if to answer the question, his cell phone rang. He stared at it for a moment. It was a number he didn’t recognize. Normally, he would let his voicemail answer it, but Wallace Speck was a believer in omens.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  “Wallace Speck,” a voice said.

  “Go on,” Speck said. “Tell me more.”

  “How are you enjoying the inside of that brownstone?” the voice said. “Did you find what you were looking for in there? I tend to doubt it.”

  Speck shrugged. So what? If you wanted to frighten Wallace Speck, you had to bring more than that.

  “How are you enjoying following me around?” he said. “Is it exciting? Drinking a lot of coffee, are you? How’s the food? Where do you take your bathroom breaks? Or do you keep plastic bottles in the car for that?”

  “Speck, you and I are friends.”

  Speck didn’t recognize the voice. And Speck rarely forgot people. Therefore: “Refresh my memory, if you don’t mind.”

  “I worked on loan from the military, under Joint Special Operations Command, taking care of a little problem in Colombia, round about early 2001. We didn’t meet, but you were on that project. Later, there was the small matter of an airplane crash. It was a private plane. You know how those things go down all the time. A guy from Missouri, a member of the loyal opposition—”

  “Enough,” Speck said. There were things in this worl
d that should never be mentioned.

  “Okay. But you see that we’ve worked together. I was a mechanic, under deep cover. You never learned my name.”

  “I assure you,” Speck said. “I always learn the names.”

  “If that was true, you wouldn’t be alive now.”

  Speck took a deep breath. “How can I help you? I’d love to reminisce with you about bygone days at some point, but right now I’m pretty busy.”

  “You’re looking for someone,” said the voice.

  Speck nodded. “Indeed I am. I’m always looking for someone.”

  “I know where he is. He left the country, but I’m going to meet him later tonight, and collect him with some friends of mine. Friends of mine, but not really friends of yours. The man you’re looking for owns a rare recording taken at the Lincoln Memorial, of all places. Says it’s good quality, but that remains to be seen. Could be a little embarrassing, considering the things that were said and the people who were there.”

  Suddenly Speck was wide awake and alert. His heart began to beat against the wall of his chest. He could feel it in there, galloping along.

  What was Keller doing?

  “Do you want,” Speck said, “to tell me where he is?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Then why are you calling?”

  “I have a number in mind. I’ve been thinking about this number for the past hour or so. It’s a good number, I think. Not too much, not too little, but just about right. Considering the stakes here, I think you might even consider it a bargain.”

  “What’s the number?” Speck said.

  “Five.”

  “Five?”

  “Yes, five. For whatever reason, it’s always been one of my favorite numbers.”

  Speck looked at the white ceiling above his head. The man was asking for five million dollars. Things just got deeper and deeper, didn’t they? He shook his head. The mystery man was shrewd, though. It wasn’t an outrageous figure, given the situation. Supply and demand. Five million was a little bit of pain, for a lot of gain.