Line of Succession: A Thriller

by William Tyree

  He exited the east door and walked out into the Rose Garden. Smoke was gradually clearing on the South Lawn as SWAT units replaced Ulysses soldiers atop the Treasury Building. At the edge of the Rose Garden, uniformed Secret Service pulled the crew from the M1 tank’s charred turret.

  His heart jumped as he recognized the first figure to emerge from the tank. It was Julian Speers, followed by a very alive Eva Hudson. She never had been in the Beast. It had been the decoy all along.

  Carver felt pain shoot up through his groin. He limped through it. His shoulders were full of knots and his neck was stiffening badly. He was bleeding, but he didn’t know where the blood was coming from.

  A team of ERTs met him at the lawn’s edge. Carver told them that there was a gas leak in the mansion. He told them there were armed Ulysses soldiers on the lower levels. He said that Special Agent Rios was inside and was likely in need of a coroner.

  He heard none of their questions. He felt none of their hands as they probed his injuries. He just kept lurching through the wisps of smoke that swept like dirty fog across the lawn. He glimpsed Dex Jackson, then lost him in the haze. His eyes roamed the grounds for a soft, shady place to lie down, vaguely aware that the sound of gunfire on the surrounding streets was growing more sporadic. A light breeze blew, sending a welcome chill through his blood-soaked clothing.

  The U.S.S. Ronald Reagan

  The Mediterranean

  An explosion lit up the night sky just 100 yards from the U.S.S. John Kerry, one of four destroyers floating between the Ronald Reagan and the hundreds of Israeli vessels carrying refugees. Captain White saw the flash in the distance out the bridge observation windows. Only an hour earlier, White and his direct reports had been listening to the VOA news coverage from the Lincoln Memorial. But the broadcast had been suddenly interrupted with commercial-free classic rock.

  Captain White turned the radio down as the Kerry’s CO, Commander Deke Perkins, hailed the Rear Admiral on the radio: “Fishing boat just rammed the ferry closest to us. It’s listing to stern. Tons of passengers are jumping overboard.”

  “Copy that, Kerry,” came the Admiral’s response. “Monitor and keep your distance.”

  “Negative,” Perkins said. There was a small boat circling and shooting the survivors. “This is a rat kill.”

  “Repeat, monitor only.”

  “Negative,” Perkins replied.

  “You’re disobeying a direct order?” came the Admiral’s retort. “You better get your dress whites out, Commander Perkins. I’m penciling in your court martial, son.” There was no response from Perkins, who turned the Kerry and began steaming toward the floating inferno.

  Less than two minutes later, the ship’s radio sounded again. White answered, expecting an earful from the Admiral. The voice on the other end was unfamiliar to him. “Captain White,” the voice said, “this is President Eva Hudson. I’m with Defense Secretary Jackson.”

  “Captain, the Admiral has been relieved of duty,” Dex said. “The President is directing our armed forces to provide immediate military assistance to Israel. You are to engage the Iranian air and ground units with indiscriminate force. Do you understand?”

  When White issued the directive over the ship’s PA, the crew’s elation could be heard from every corner of the ship. Operation Wailing Wall was a go.

  NINE MONTHS LATER

  Eastern Cape, South Africa

  6:45 p.m. local time

  Carver drove through scattered rain over twisting one-lane mountain roads. The rental car’s GPS was useless, and his phone hadn’t gotten signal since leaving Johannesburg early that morning. He stopped for directions often. This was not only because there were so few road signs in the rural Eastern Cape. It was also because most of the people he asked for directions had never been more than 20 miles from home.

  As night fell he listened to African pop music to stay awake. The highway became a series of mesmerizing canyon switchbacks that hugged steep cliffs without so much as a single guardrail. Ten hours after leaving Johannesburg International Airport, he got petrol in Stutterheim, a sleepy little town in the heart of farm country, and went on through the hilly, golden boondocks toward the backwater village of Kei Mouth on the eastern shore.

  The last terrestrial radio station fizzled out as he entered the former Transkei, land of the Xhosa tribe. Xhosa children bartered beaded necklaces for candy bars as he waited twenty minutes for a single-car ferry to take him across the Kei River.

  Carver entered the village two hours later. There were few services in town, and the few that existed had posted signs saying CLOSED FOR WINTER in English and Afrikaans. Business windows – all of them – were dark. Finally he spotted the sign that read BED AND BREAKFAST that had been included in the intel report. He turned down a spooky-looking street that led to a gray cement building. This was supposed to be the place. It had better be, Carver thought. He had come a very long way from Washington under completely unreasonable time constraints.

  He shut off the car engine and opened the car door. A pack of dogs raced out from under the front steps. Skinny, tenacious mutts. All bones and teeth. In the face of a hard drizzle, Carver fended these hounds of hell off with the car door, bonking their bony heads with it as they bit and tugged at his left ankle. He felt the familiar warm trickle of blood dampen his sock. Barking in the distance spared him further bloodshed as the pack suddenly broke away, howling at breakneck speed down the street he had driven in on.

  “We’re closed!” yelled a woman’s voice from the motel office. She spoke from behind a screen. She sounded American. Good. This was definitely the place.

  He unfurled himself from the car, smoothed the wrinkles in his gray suit and approached the building with his hands in the air.

  “I’ll shoot,” the voice warned.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Carver said as he measured his approach. He stood several feet from the door and could only make out a shadow in the dense screen door. “It’s Madge, right?”

  More silence. Then the voice said, “I suggest you get back in the car.”

  “Tell your husband Blake Carver is here to see him.”

  He heard her step away from the door. She returned moments later and opened it wide for Agent Carver to enter.

  He stepped inside. The house smelled of barbecue. Aside from an expensive-looking entertainment console at the living room’s far wall, the place was sparsely furnished. There were few books and no pictures on the wall except for a cheap print of DaVinci’s The Last Supper.

  Madge held a sawed-off shotgun. She looked unhappy. She had gained a great deal of weight since she had last been photographed by the CIA. Her long brown locks had been clipped into a short, unflattering cut. Madge was graying around the temples, and judging by the jagged pattern of her bangs, she had done it herself using shearing scissors.

  “Nice dogs,” Carver said. “Yours?”

  Madge didn’t smile. “The kitchen.” She pointed to the next room.

  Carver found Nico Gold sitting at the kitchen table with three kinds of meat on a plate before him. He looked much as he had when Carver and O’Keefe had first met him in the Lee Federal Penitentiary the previous year. The African sun had added little pigment to his pale skin, and the meat-centered African diet had hardly fleshed out his lanky frame. He had, however, dispensed with his eyeglasses and had dyed his hair blonde. The tattoos that had read “EVA” on both forearms were gone, replaced with a simple heart with a ribbon around it that said JESUS. He wore a t-shirt that said OBEY in stylized font.

  “Close the door,” Nico told him.

  Carver sat in the chair where Madge had no doubt been eating across from her husband minutes before. The ex-con’s face was full of dread. He had the sweet smell of alcohol on his breath. There was an empty bottle of pinotage on the table and another that was half-full.

  “Dreamed the grim reaper was coming for me last night,” Nico said. “Couldn’t shake the feeling all day. Never had a dream lik
e that before. So bad.”

  Carver said nothing. He watched Nico’s hand shake as he held his wine glass.

  “I need to know how you found me,” Nico continued. “I don’t use credit cards. I’ve taken nobody into confidence. My only bank accounts in this country are in a town 200 miles away under a different name. They draw their funds from banks abroad that have no idea who I am.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Carver said. “You were good. The best.”

  “So how in God’s name did you find me?”

  “Your eyes gave you away,” Carver said, referring to the corrective vision procedure he’d had in Durban earlier that year. “Organ theft is a bit of a problem here. The government requires that doctors document every eye that gets the surgery. The images are uploaded into a national database. Naturally, we have a script running that scans every image of every retina and matches them up with profiles on our list.”

  Nico pounded the table with his fists, bouncing the dinner plates.

  “Everything okay?” Madge yelled from the other room.

  “Fine dear,” Nico yelled back through the door. He steadied his gaze on Carver and lowered his voice.

  Nico reached for the open bottle of pinotage on the table and poured himself a full glass. He offered some to Carver, who politely declined. “I’d forgotten what a teetotaler you are,” he said. “Probably made it all the way to Africa without so much as a wink of sleep or a drop of caffeine.”

  “I’m not here to talk about me.”

  “I read about O’Keefe,” Nico said. “I’m sorry. I could tell you two were close.”

  Carver got up, pulled a cup from the cupboard and helped himself to some tap water. He drank eight ounces and put the cup down. “I don’t discuss Agent O’Keefe with anyone.”

  Nico finished his glass. “So. I guess Eva sent you?”

  “Careful. Nobody calls her by her first name now. Not even me.”

  “She’s going to hand me over to the Saudis, isn’t she?”

  “She was thinking about it. Then she read Haley Ellis’ report detailing the miraculous way that five Ulysses Bradleys disappeared from the South Lawn just in time for the motorcade to come through.”

  Nico folded his arms across his chest, looking partially validated. “Well, if you’re packing a Presidential pardon, I’d say it’s high time you whip it out.”

  “The way the President sees it, you owe her one more favor.”

  “I’m retired,” he said. “Don’t even own a computer. I’ve spent the last year learning Afrikaans and Xhosa. Madge tends to the guests during fishing season and cooks. I make repairs to the place, read books. We’re not hurting anybody.”

  “I don’t have that luxury.” Carver pulled two newly issued passports from his jacket pocket. Nico picked them up. They were American passports containing his and Madge’s real names and digitally aged photos. “We have an issue that needs tending to. Your services are required.”

  Then he pulled three South African Airways tickets from his pocket and laid them on the table. The flight was to leave from Johannesburg International Airport and land in Washington some 17 hours later.

  “This flight is tomorrow morning!” Nico raved. “We’d have to drive all night to get to Johannesburg in time.”

  Carver gripped Nico’s spindly right arm and pulled him from the table. “Good point. You’ve got one minute to convince Madge that it’s a good idea. I’ll give you ten to pack.”

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