by Jack Mars
“I want Stone here,” Susan said.
“Susan, we haven’t even talked about Michaela yet.”
“I know. We’ll talk about her as soon as Stone gets here.”
Richard shook his head. “Okay, but…”
“No buts, Richard. I want him. So get him.”
She turned back to Kimball. “What’s next?”
“The Saudi ambassador. You summoned him. He’s waiting downstairs. We can make him wait some more, or we can send him back. You don’t need to speak with him if you don’t want.”
“No. I want to. Bring him up here. It won’t take long.”
A few minutes later, an aide showed the ambassador in. He was a portly man with dark hair. He wore a custom-made blue suit. Susan was a fashion person, so she noticed the suit. But she was also so tired, she couldn’t remember the man’s name. She didn’t care about his name.
“Madame President,” he said, and reached to shake her head. He smiled. He didn’t seem anxious in the least. Ambassadors tended not to be nervous types. He spoke perfect English. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Susan shook his meaty hand. She did not offer him a seat. They stood facing one another. Richard Monk and Kurt Kimball flanked them on either side.
“Ambassador,” Susan said, “I’m going to be very clear with you. We know that Omar bin Khalid was involved in yesterday’s terrorist attack. We want him surrendered to us immediately.”
The ambassador shook his head. “Omar bin Khalid is a member of the royal family. As royals go, he’s probably the blackest of black sheep. But our intelligence sources don’t believe he was involved in this atrocity, and in any event, we have no idea where he is. He has no official role in our government, and therefore is a private citizen. We don’t keep tabs on private citizens.”
“I imagined you’d say that,” Susan said. “So we’ll move on for now. Please relay this message to the king.”
The ambassador nodded. “Yes, of course.”
“If my daughter is harmed in any way, or if another American city is attacked, I will personally consider either one of them an act of war by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against the United States. In the event of either occurrence, we will commence a bombing campaign of Saudi Arabia within hours. We will not stop until your capital city of Riyadh is in rubble, and your entire oil-producing infrastructure is destroyed.”
The ambassador’s face hardened. “We have no control over this situation,” he said. “You cannot make these threats.”
Susan was already done with him. She waved her hand as if to banish him away, and turned to go back to her desk.
“That wasn’t a threat,” she said. “It was a promise.”
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
6:25 a.m.
Union Station, Washington, DC
Luke sat at a table near the towering great hall of the train station, a cup of coffee in his hand. He studied the cup. It was blue with Greek columns on it. He must have held this exact cup in his hand one million times. The station was just coming to life, early commuters arriving on the first or second trains of the day.
There was an ongoing disaster in Charleston, but here in DC, people were getting ready to go about their daily business. Luke didn’t want to think about it.
He had left Trudy’s place before sunrise. She was deep asleep, her hair tousled, her beautiful body half-covered by a green fuzzy blanket.
Luke hadn’t slept at all.
As he watched, an old man arrived at a high-backed shoeshine chair along the concourse and put down his heavy shine box. The man was thin with very white hair. He wore dark blue coveralls. He moved slowly, with what seemed like infinite care.
Luke stood and walked over to the chair.
“Hey, old timer,” he said.
The man barely looked at him. “Good morning, sir.”
“Can you give me a high-gloss spit-shine, like we used to do when I was in the United States Army?”
The man bent over his shine box and began removing the tools of his trade. Rags, polish, buffers. Now he looked at Luke. His face was lined and cracked. His eyes were deep set and piercing. “Like a bull polish?”
“That’s what a civilian might call it, sure.”
The man gestured at the chair. “It’s pretty involved. Might take a while.”
“I have time,” Luke said.
He climbed onto the high throne of the shoe shine chair. The chair itself was worn smooth by thousands of men sitting there over the decades. Below him, the shine man went to work. He slapped on a layer of thick paste. Luke pawed through a stack of magazines and opened a copy of Men’s Health. He skimmed the headlines.
6 Foods to Increase Your Sex Drive
7 Surprising Health Benefits of Green Tea
10 Great Wines Under $20
“What can I call you?” Luke said.
The man shrugged. “Raymond will do.”
That was funny. Most recently, he had been named Paul. Today he was Raymond. When Luke was young, the name had been Henry, or Hank. He was the man without a name, the man without a country. What could you say about someone who was a Cold War spy, who sold his own country’s secrets to the Soviets, then turned around and sold the Soviets’ secrets to the British and the Israelis? What could you say about a man who had been marked for death again and again, and yet had never actually died?
One thing you might say is he was lucky to be alive. Another thing is that he was a man with a lot of information, even now, long after he had supposedly retired, long after most people had forgotten he was ever alive.
“Well, Raymond. This is quite a job for a man to be doing at your age. Did you forget to max out your 401k?”
The man named Raymond sighed. “I guess we’re not all destined to return the rightful queen to her throne one week, then engage in piracy on the high seas and launch entire armies into quarantined hot zones the following week.”
Luke shook his head. “No, I suppose not.”
“Quite a display you put on yesterday. From zero to hero in just a few hours.”
“It’s not over,” Luke said. “We’ve got another one coming. Yesterday was the practice. But I don’t know where the big game is.”
Raymond nodded. He worked on one knee. Luke’s eyes wandered over a page of the magazine. He was too tired to read the words. Here was a photo of a bright yellow banana. Here was a restaurant plate of oysters on the half-shell.
“Do you know who Mohammad Atta was?” the shine man said.
“Naturally. The lead 9/11 bomber.”
“Good. Besides being a suicide bomber, if that’s what he was, Atta was also a Pakistani intelligence asset. Six months before the attacks, the ISI transferred a hundred-thousand-dollar payment into an account held by him. That’s one thing to know. Another thing to know, maybe the most important thing, is that when he entered the United States for the last time, he flew into Los Angeles. He was picked up at LAX by a man calling himself Lawrence Munroe. Munroe was a man with an interesting past. In the 1970s, under a different name, he was a low-level associate of Italian-American mobsters in California and Nevada, and a sometime informant for the Los Angeles field office of the FBI. In the 1980s, he was a freelance pilot running cocaine from the Nicaraguan Contras to African-American crack gangs in Los Angeles and Houston. But no matter who or what he claimed to be at any given time, he was always CIA.”
Luke smiled. He glanced up and down the concourse. “I forgot to wear my tinfoil hat today,” he said. “So are you trying to tell me the CIA and the Pakistani ISI were responsible for the September eleventh attacks? Weren’t you CIA once upon a time? Now you’ll probably tell me you killed John Kennedy.”
Raymond the shoeshine man glanced up. His eyes were full of sharp intelligence. “I envy you, Luke Stone. You live in the darkest of possible worlds, and you still get to keep your childlike innocence right until the end.”
He shook his head. “What I’m telling you is nothing is ever quite what it see
ms. These terror networks can’t exist without the intelligence agencies. Terrorists are mostly misfits and morons. Left to their own devices, half of them wouldn’t make it off the couch. They need an impetus, something to get them moving. And they need someone to protect them from local law enforcement.”
“The intelligence agencies do this?”
The old man nodded as he worked. “Maybe. Sometimes. Now, do the CIA and the NSA and the FBI want their assets committing atrocities on American soil? No, I don’t think so. What they do want is a reason. A reason to open ten million private emails. A reason to enter people’s homes at night. A reason to increase their funding, expand their surveillance, and extend their reach.”
The man’s ancient hands held a soft blue chamois. The hands worked quickly and expertly now. “Terrorist networks give them that reason. But it’s a slippery slope, because terrorists have a tendency to disappear, and situations have a tendency to get out of hand. You think things are going one way, then they turn and go somewhere else.”
“Someone knows where the terrorists are?” Luke said.
Raymond nodded. “Possible. Not guaranteed.”
“But they want something in return?”
“Indeed.”
Not for the first time, Luke marveled at the cold-bloodedness of it all. Tens of thousands of lives, possibly millions, hung in the balance, and somebody wanted something. Somebody always wanted something.
“What do they want?”
The man shrugged. “What do people ever want? Money, of course. But in this case, amnesty is more important. They want to come back into the fold. As you know, in any game, there are winners and losers. Susan Hopkins won. Now, whether she knows it or not, there’s a hunt going on behind the scenes. Her people, the winners, are using the resources of the state to track down the ones they think are responsible for the coup. The losers. It’s understandable, of course, considering everything that happened. So there have been at least two dozen summary executions in the past week. Some were right, some were wrong. But it’s starting to take on an open-season quality, and people are being driven deep underground. A few of those people have quite a lot of information at their fingertips.”
Raymond reached into the breast pocket of his coveralls and came out with a business card. He handed it up to Luke.
“When the people in charge want to talk, they can call that number. The man to ask for is Rick. If they call, they should be ready to offer a truce, and mean it. Total amnesty for all involved. Otherwise this all goes nowhere.”
Luke looked at the card in his hand. ACE Rug & Carpet Cleaning.
He shook his head. “I don’t have the ability to grant anyone amnesty. I can’t protect anyone, and I have no influence. I don’t even work for the government anymore.”
The man glanced up again. There was a wild light in his eyes. He grinned.
“Don’t you? If not, then who are these gentlemen joining us right now?”
Four large men in blue suits with earpieces walked briskly up the concourse. They were nearly identical. They all had close-cropped hair and the kind of big, muscular bodies upon which suits just never hung right. They made a bee line for the shoeshine chair. The first man to reach the chair already had his badge out.
“Agent Stone, I’m Agent Troyer. Secret Service. Will you come with us, please?”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Your presence is requested at a meeting with the President of the United States.”
“Requested?”
The man didn’t smile. “Strenuously.”
At the bottom of the chair, on one knee, the shoeshine man was already putting away his gear. His workday was over. The Secret Service men didn’t even seem to notice him. Just an old man and his shine box.
Luke glanced at his own shoes. They positively glowed. It was the brightest shine he’d had in years, except for one small area at the tip of his left shoe. That spot was still dull and lifeless.
As Luke got up, he handed Raymond a fifty. “Looks like you missed a spot.”
The old man shrugged. “You know? Even when something looks like it’s over, it isn’t. It’s never over.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Luke said.
The old man pocketed the fifty. “That’s a good idea. You do that.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
6:55 a.m.
United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC
“It’s the smallest functional battery ever built,” the young man in the Coke-bottle glasses said.
He paused, looking sheepish for a second. “I don’t want to overstate it, but it’s true as far as we are aware. Of course, we can’t know about everything being developed.”
Luke sat in a high-backed leather chair in the upstairs study at the New White House. The guy with him was probably mid-twenties. He wore a blue short-sleeved dress shirt with a white T-shirt beneath it. He wore khaki pants with some sort of mustard stain on one leg. Stylish he wasn’t.
He placed a laptop on the table in front of Luke. He stood next to the computer and pulled up an image. It was a photo of what appeared to be interlocking stacks of metal staples. It almost looked like an old-style steam radiator.
“This was taken by a microscope. The image is less than one-hundredth of an inch across. Given the way we use it, the battery theoretically has an infinite lifespan.”
“Amazing,” Luke said. A couple of aides had shown him in here five minutes ago. The kid was already here when Luke opened the door.
The kid nodded. “Amazing is right. And this stuff gets more amazing all the time.”
“Why are you showing me this?” Luke said.
At that moment, the door opened again. Susan walked in, followed by Richard Monk, a large man with a bald head, and a couple of Secret Service agents. Susan had dark circles under her eyes. Her mouth hung slightly open. Her tan suit was wrinkled. Her hair was pulled back to her scalp. She looked like she hadn’t slept in days.
“Hi, Susan,” Luke said. “I heard you wanted to see me.”
“Luke,” she said without cracking a smile. “Thank you for coming. I see you’ve met Timothy Penn. He’s a designer in research and development at my husband’s Boston office.” She gestured to the big man behind her. “This is Kurt Kimball, my new National Security Advisor. And you know Richard Monk.”
Luke shook hands with Kimball, nodded to Richard.
“Stone,” Monk said.
“Before we begin, I want to thank you,” Susan said. “Our computer models suggest you may have saved millions of lives yesterday. Certainly you saved thousands.”
“That’s good to hear,” Luke said. “I never doubt computer models, not even for a minute. Am I still excommunicated?”
“When you made calls yesterday and claimed to be working for this office, did anyone call you on it? Did anyone even blink?”
Luke shook his head. “No.”
She shrugged. “Then you were never excommunicated.”
“Okay,” Luke said. “So what’s going on? Why am I here?”
“My daughter was kidnapped by the terrorists late last night,” Susan said. Her voice made no inflection and betrayed no emotion. It was flat and businesslike. “I need you to get her back.”
The horror never seemed to end. Luke looked into Susan’s exhausted eyes. The rest of her face was expressionless. All of the pain, all of the fear, all of the sorrow… it was in her eyes.
“Tell me,” he said.
*
Timothy Penn had placed two laptops in front of Luke. He had pulled up a folding chair next to Luke’s leather one. He sat next to Luke and manipulated both screens with a laser device he held in his hand.
Susan sat to Luke’s left. Monk and Kimball stood behind them.
“Both the girls were chipped three years ago,” Timothy said. “I won’t say I was against it at the time, but I’ll admit it did seem a little Big Brother to me. Pierre insisted, so we did it. It turned out to be a very good
idea.”
“What do you mean they were chipped?”
Timothy looked at Luke like he thought Luke might be putting him on. “Well, they’re chipped. They have computer chips inside them. Like people put little chips inside their pets, so if the pet ever turns up in a shelter, it can be identified? Or you know, people with Alzheimer’s disease wear little GPS units around their necks or on bracelets in case they ever become lost?”
“Yes. I’m familiar…”
“Both the girls have tiny GPS units inserted between their big toe and their second toe on their left foot. The units are half the size of a grain of rice. The batteries I showed you earlier? That’s what powers the units. At the time, three years ago now, we believed this to be the most cutting edge GPS technology in the world. Things have moved on since then, but the units are still working, so we didn’t bother to remove them.”
Luke turned and looked sharply at Susan.
“When I became Vice President, Pierre became terrified for the girls. He was afraid that something like this would happen. We went back and forth about it for nearly two years. People like Timothy were developing this chip technology. And finally we chipped the girls. They were only eight years old. They thought they took a trip to the dentist. They don’t even know the chips are there.”
“I thought there were side effects to these things,” Luke said.
Timothy shook his head. “Not anymore. At least, not that we’ve seen. The chips are tiny. They’re encased in biodegradable plastic. We insert them in the foot so they’re as far as possible from vital organs. Most of the time, they’re in sleep mode, and send a split-second pulse every twenty-four hours, just letting the system know they’re still out there and still working. That’s why the batteries last so long. Only in the event of an emergency do we wake them up.”