by Joseph Flynn
Decided that wouldn’t look good. Far too timid. She had a part to play here and being timid was not included in the character description. She descended the steps from the helicopter like she owned all that she surveyed.
The first thing she saw was Jim, on his feet now, and smiling at her.
He gave her a salute and said, “Madam President.”
She walked up to him and responded, “Stalwart henchman. You’re all right?”
“You saved me.”
“You are hurt?” She turned to the Navy corpsman who was attending the fallen man she’d seen from the aircraft.
Before she could reset the corpsman’s priorities, McGill touched her arm.
“I’m not hurt,” he said. “I’ll explain later.”
SAC Kendry arrived on the run; Celsus Crogher was at her side.
The president smiled at them. “Elspeth, Celsus. Please don’t say anything to me about leaving immediately.”
“Never occurred to me,” Celsus Crogher said.
Elspeth said, “Madam President, this is still a dangerous situation.”
“I know, but I have some work to do. I’ll leave as soon as I can.”
One of the Marines who’d arrived with the president handed her a megaphone.
“We’re ready, Captain?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am. You won’t need to go far. Your voice will carry.”
The president gave her henchman a look. He understood.
The cluster of Marines notwithstanding, this was a solo act.
Harlan Fisk was taken away on a stretcher and Patricia Darden Grant filled the space he’d vacated. She looked out at hundreds of heavily armed fellow Americans who had come to tell her …what? That she’d better get the hell out of the White House? Leave town and maybe the country while she was at it? If that was what they wanted, they were going to be disappointed.
She raised the megaphone and said, “If you lay down your arms right now, I will extend to all of you a presidential pardon for anything you’ve done tonight that directly involves your presence here. I will also meet with ten members of your rank and file at the White House to discuss any problems you might have with me or my administration.
“If you don’t lay down your weapons, you will all be arrested. If any of you uses his weapon, the armed forces of the United States will return overwhelming fire. Chances are all of you will be killed.
“You will make your decision now. When I lower this megaphone, you must put your weapons on the ground. If you don’t, we’ll know you’ve chosen confrontation. I will step back and the military will take command of the situation. That’s all I have to say to you.”
Not rushing it, the president lowered the megaphone.
Many of the First Michigan Militia dropped their weapons immediately. Most of the others followed a heartbeat behind. There were three instances where hardheads had to be wrestled to the ground by their compatriots. Even so, not a shot was fired.
The Marines moved in to seize the weapons.
Squads of military police ran forward to form up the militiamen for processing and, barring any outstanding criminal warrants, for eventual release. They would have to get home on their own dollars. They would not be taking any firearms, knives or other weapons with them.
The president truly hoped they did send representatives to talk with her.
She would address any legitimate complaints as best she could.
She also wanted to know what potential enemies were thinking.
After being assured that everything was well in hand, the president walked over to McGill and asked him, “Can a girl give you a lift, handsome?”
Not giving a damn about protocol, McGill put an arm around Patti.
They climbed aboard Marine One.
Went home, hoping to get some sleep.
Unfortunately, SAC Kendry and Deputy Director Byron DeWitt joined them and said there were pressing matters that wouldn’t keep.
Pruet watched McGill and Madam la Présidente depart. The magistrate said, “What a remarkable country, don’t you think, mon ami?”
Not getting a response, he turned to see Odo was on his cellphone, apparently listening to someone speak, saying yes, yes several times and then finally au revoir.
“To whom were you speaking?” Pruet asked.
Odo said, “Père Louvel. He told me that Gabriella Casale has not only discovered Laurent Fortier’s real name, she —”
“What is the name?” Pruet asked.
“René Simonet. She has also found out where he lives, Annecy, before you ask. Simonet, I was told, has a house and an art gallery there. He seems not to be at home at the moment, but the Louvels have gathered in Annecy, and they’re awaiting representatives of other families who have lost art to For — I mean, to Simonet. The good father asked if we would care to join him.”
“At once,” Pruet said.
He took off at a trot. Odo could not remember the last time he’d seen his friend run. Assuming he didn’t mean to run directly to the airport, Odo caught up, turned the magistrate around and pointed him toward their hotel.
The Oval Office
Galia Mindel didn’t observe proper behavior either when the president returned to the White House, alive and well. The chief of staff grabbed the president and held her tight, crying, smiling and kissing her cheek. After a moment or two, McGill told his wife, “Let me know when I should pry her off you.”
Galia shot him a look, but the president told her, “We do have some business to get to.”
The chief of staff stepped back, and the chief justice moved forward to shake the president’s hand. “Beautifully handled, Madam President. I’ll be going now.”
“Thank you, Craig. I’m sorry I disturbed your sleep.”
He grinned and shook his head. “Always a privilege to see history being made.”
The chief justice departed and the vice president took her turn with the president, hugging her briefly before stepping back. “Damn, I wish I’d been there with you, Madam President. If you don’t need me any longer —”
“No, I’d like you to stay, Jean. You should be here for this briefing.”
McGill raised his eyebrows, asking a silent question.
“You stay, too, Jim. Maybe you’ll have an idea or two to offer.”
The president ordered drinks, coffee or soda, for everyone. They all took their seats around the room and DeWitt repeated what Father Mulchrone had told him. Fisk, fearing the drone attack would fail without Arlo Carsten to supervise it, wanted to go to a fallback plan, a terror attack using a truck bomb. Old school but, as they all knew, horrifically effective.
“I’ve heard of this priest,” Galia said, “if he’s the Mulchrone from South Boston.”
DeWitt said, “He is. He had a reputation as a real fire-and-brimstone guy. You toed the Vatican line or you burned forever and always.”
“If he was so extreme,” the president said, “that would explain his working with Harlan Fisk, but what turned him around?”
“He said it was a visit to his elder brother’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. Sergeant Desmond Mulchrone died a decorated hero in World War Two.”
McGill thought the devil had been at the priest’s doorstep, too, and the memory of his big brother had saved him.
DeWitt continued, “Father Mulchrone said he didn’t know if the use of the truck bomb would change the target but he didn’t think so. He said he didn’t get the impression that the planning behind the attack was sophisticated enough to consider multiple targets.”
McGill asked, “How hard could it be to go to Plan B, if you were still using drones? Seems like drones would give the bad guys all sorts of flexibility.”
DeWitt said, “They would, if you had the right personnel to operate them. Without skilled operators, though, who knows what they might hit?”
Jean Morrissey said, “Somebody did a pretty good job snapping my picture.”
The president nodded. “Th
at’s true. Jim, what do you think? Are the drones still in the picture?”
McGill said, “That’s possible, yeah. Only how will taking down Fisk and his militia tonight affect things? Maybe we bagged the drone operators with all the others.”
“Tech specialists don’t usually muster out with the grunts,” DeWitt said.
McGill said, “You’re right, but unless the drone operators are real hard cases, they probably don’t like their chances as much as they once did.”
“You think they’ll just call it quits?” the president asked.
McGill said, “If they were smart, no sure bet, they’d walk away from anything that could incriminate them. But some guys just can’t bear to part with their toys. So, my take is we still have to plan against a drone attack, but I don’t think it’s as likely as it was.”
SAC Kendry brought things back to what she saw as the main point, “Madam President, there’s no way you or Mr. McGill can go to Inspiration Hall in a few hours. Even if there was no chance of a drone attack, we now know there’s a truck bomb scenario.”
“You’re right, SAC Kendry,” the president said. “We can’t go.”
Elspeth turned to look at McGill.
“I’m going to sleep in,” he said. “Besides Inspiration Hall is filled with forgeries.”
Everyone looked at McGill, and he explained.
Turning to DeWitt, he added, “I previously asked a party I’ll leave unnamed to check on whether Hiram Busby had any construction work done on any of his homes in the past few years. Maybe the Bureau could expedite that little search. I think the original paintings Darren Drucker and Nathaniel Ransom donated to the museum are now in Busby’s possession. It would be good to get them back and, of course, not let the forgeries that replaced them be either destroyed or removed.”
DeWitt thought a moment. “It’s going to be a good trick to find the bomber’s truck before it gets to Inspiration Hall and keep him from detonating the bomb. That and find out if we’re holding any drone operators other than Arlo Carsten. I’d better leave and get to work on all that right now.” He stood and said, “Madam President, if you’ll excuse me.”
She nodded, but McGill had one more thing to say, “Why don’t you let Welborn Yates and Celsus Crogher have another go at Arlo. See if they can’t get him to be more forthcoming about the other drone operators and alternative targets for a drone attack? We still have an inauguration to consider.”
With that, DeWitt and Elspeth Kendry got back to work.
Galia said she had things to do, too.
Jean Morrissey congratulated the president on a job well done.
She gave McGill a pat on the back. Said he did okay, too.
The First Couple went back to the Residence. They were asleep two minutes later.
I-495 — North Springfield, Virginia
Rutger Bierman drove a Ford F-650 box truck southeast on the Washington Beltway. Just ahead was the I-395 turnoff leading straight into the capital. The truck was rated as a Class 6 medium-duty vehicle with a gross vehicle weight rating of 19,501 to 26,000 pounds. Gross vehicle weight included the weight of the vehicle, fuel load, passenger load and cargo.
Rutger at his peak had weighed one hundred and nine kilograms — two hundred and forty pounds. With his blonde hair, blue eyes and mesomorphic build, he’d have given Der Fuhrer a hard-on, had he been born two generations earlier. Would have fit right in with the prevailing homicidal maniac spirit of the Reich, too.
Now, though, after the pain in his middle had turned out to be pancreatic cancer, causing him to lose weight and his skin to become nearly as yellow as his hair had once been, he was little more than half the man he used to be. Sixty kilos or one hundred and thirty-two pounds. He steered the truck onto I-395. The distance to Washington was thirteen miles. Sunday morning traffic was light. Travel time would be a matter of minutes.
The signage painted on the truck said it belonged to Special Moments Party Planners. “Let us make your occasion memorable.” Six thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate detonated by an incendiary trigger device ought to make that Sunday a day no one would forget, Rutger thought. His GPS showed him the way to the location in Southeast Washington.
He didn’t know what was there. He didn’t care.
He would detonate his bomb and his cancer would be cured.
That was what Mama wanted, too. His father also would have been tickled, had he lived to see this day. Berti Bierman had been a member of the Red Army Faction, a communist, anti-imperialist group fighting what they described as the fascist German state of the 1970s and 1980s. Berti had survived participating in the gang’s assassinations, bank robberies and kidnappings; he was shot while sleeping, though, by a comrade whose girlfriend he’d been shtupping. Not quite as slyly as he thought.
That girlfriend was Rutger’s mother, née Brigitte Meisner. Since her conversion to Islam, she was known as Aalia um Asim. Meaning Aalia mother of Asim. Rutger’s Arabic name was Asim. Formally, she also should have indicated the name of the man whose daughter she was, but Otto Meisner had been born and died an infidel, and had been a Nazi to boot. So he didn’t make the cut.
Rutger thought denying Otto his due just because he was a fascist was wrong. Nonetheless, Rutger’s jihadi stepfather, whose real name he’d never learned, gave him free rein to express the violent heart of his nature. That was, after he, too, had converted. Hence the name Asim.
For public purposes, Rutger was allowed to use his birth name. To maintain his cover as a decadent, atheistic Westerner, he was also allowed to drink, smoke and fornicate. He was also provided with a free apartment and a stipend. Life was good.
To pay the toll for all his privileges, Rutger had to beat the hell out of any German skinheads who had beaten the hell out of immigrant Muslims. Thus, revenge was had without casting blame where it belonged.
Rutger carried out his savagery with exuberance. Had his mother taken another path in life, of course, he likely would have been a skinhead. Things being what they were, he got to enjoy the irony as well as the brutality.
When he was diagnosed with the cancer, he was told he would die within six months. The pain would be terrible and the only available treatments would not cure him. They would make him feel even worse. All of which made him wonder what the hell good a pancreas was in the first place.
His doctor told him the pancreas helped to digest food and produced insulin. Food and insulin, he was reminded, were required to sustain life. That was a downer for Rutger. He’d hoped he could just cut the damn thing out himself. He’d always believed the most direct and forceful approach was the best solution to any problem.
Now he was stymied. He didn’t have long to live and what time he had wasn’t going to be any fun at all. So Rutger was receptive to the idea his stepfather brought to him: It was time to strike America and become a martyr.
If he did what he was told, his death would have great meaning and his mother would get a gift of one hundred thousand euros. Rutger agreed immediately. He was told he would be driving a truck filled with explosives. He would detonate it and he’d never feel any pain ever again.
As he came within ten minutes of the best hope he could have for as a happy ending, Rutger received a call on his cellphone. The same device would be used to send the signal to the detonator for the fertilizer bomb.
The man calling Rutger said one word: Gewitter.
German for thunderstorm.
Rutger almost drove the F-650 off the road. That would have made a hell of a mess, but without the incendiary device going off, there would have been no explosion. He brought the vehicle back into its lane, checked his mirrors and saw no police vehicle behind or ahead of him. His slip in composure had gone unnoticed.
Thunderstorm was the code word to abort the mission. A scout had preceded him in an innocuous American sedan to make sure all was well. He must have seen something he didn’t like. Rutger didn’t know who the scout was but he had to assume the man wasn’t incompetent
. If Rutger ignored the warning and drove into a trap, he might be killed before he could detonate his bomb.
If he was captured, he would he have live out the miserable remainder of his life in an American prison. Mama would get no money. She might even suffer if her husband thought Rutger had betrayed the cause. No good son could have that.
There was only one answer.
He would have to blow up something else.
Something that would please his stepfather.
Shannon International Airport — Ireland
René Simonet might have thanked God he’d made it across the Atlantic alive. Instead, he trembled with rage and residual terror from the flight he’d recently exited. The mechanical problem that had delayed his departure from Montreal, the one that had taken hours to correct, had reasserted itself en route. The port wing engine had to be shut down.
The captain relayed this tidbit when he announced the flight would have to make an unscheduled landing in Shannon, Ireland to guarantee the safety of all aboard. This guarantee did nothing to soothe the fears of the fellow in the seat next to Simonet. From the man’s appearance, Simonet might have thought he was a minor bureaucrat, except that a government employee should have flown economy class. So maybe he was —
“I’m a risk management analyst,” the man said.
He said he worked for a large insurance conglomerate.
“Would you like me to tell you how much losing an aircraft engine increases the odds that you’ll not only have to put down at another airport but more likely crash into the ocean?”
Simonet said he would not like that.
Then the art thief said, trying to buttress his own confidence, “I thought all these modern airplanes are supposed to be able to fly with only one engine.”
“They are,” the risk analyst said. “Supposed to, that is. But if one engine malfunctions, would you like to know the chances the other one will, too?”
“No!” Simonet snapped.
From that point on, Simonet listened closely to the sound of the remaining engine, fearing that at any moment he might hear it falter. He looked for any sign of panic in the eyes of the cabin crew. He watched the progress line on the flight-in-motion map inch forward. Having a window seat, he peered down to confirm whether they were still above the open sea.