The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller

by Whitley Strieber

  His Secret Service buddy was right there, right in his face. “Seven minutes,” he said. “I was about to hit the alarm.”

  “I didn’t realize that you were planning to resign.”

  “I’m not.”

  “If you’d tripped that alarm, you would have.”

  He glared at Flynn. Flynn didn’t glare back. He just looked at the guy and waited until he’d looked away and dropped his shoulders.

  “I’m gonna be in the Closet Hall for most of the night. I’ll be patrolling at random. You’re not to address me again, and sure as hell not to interfere, not if you want to keep working here and avoid criminal charges.”

  The man’s lips turned up with contempt. “Criminal charges?”

  “This is a national security matter. It’s way above your clearance level. If you impede me or fail to obey my orders, you’re going to be looking not only at getting your ass torched, you’ll be facing a treason charge.”

  The smile went away. So did the agent.

  Flynn crossed into the Closet Hall and tried Cissy’s bedroom door. Also locked, which was good. Because this door opened into a common area, it had a better lock on it, electronic. Using his Slagel pick, he was through it in under a minute. The room was lit by two night-lights, one near the bed and another glowing from the bathroom.

  Cissy’s canopied bed from their Texas ranch stood against the wall opposite the windows. In fact, now that he looked around, he saw that the room was an exact duplicate of the one from the ranch, right down to the Kit-Cat clock on the wall with its swinging tail and phosphorescent cat eyes.

  She lay very still, on her back. Her breathing was shallow. She wasn’t asleep and she was armed. The weapon was under the covers, in her right hand.

  “Cissy, release the gun.”

  “Flynn!”

  “Hey there.” He stepped over to the bed.

  A smile lit her face. She sat up and patted the covers. He dropped down into the grace of her perfume. When his old buddy Mac had romanced her, she’d been underage. She wasn’t underage now.

  “How’s Di?” she asked.

  “Good.”

  “Oh, God, Flynn, what happened?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  “Flynn, I need to know or I’m going to go insane here.”

  “There’s a lot of legal issues.”

  “I signed the form!”

  “That’s a confidentiality agreement, not a clearance document. You’ve never been cleared.”

  “Flynn, we’re going to be killed, aren’t we? Or worse—like Abby.”

  The words hung between them. She knew that Flynn’s wife Abby had disappeared, and that it had had to do with the aliens, but very little more. She did not know of his relentless search for her, or the fact that he’d originally been recruited into the detail by Diana because of his tireless determination to find her.

  “Abby was kidnapped,” he said evenly.

  “By them!”

  “Who?”

  “Come on, I’m not stupid! The aliens, and now they’re here, they’re in the White House and they killed Al Doxy.” She shuddered, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Beheaded him.”

  “We don’t know who was responsible. Not exactly.”

  She threw herself on Flynn. A bitter rack of sobs engulfed her. He held her shaking body. Soon he felt himself stirring. He wished it down. But wishes don’t always come true, and this one definitely did not. His arousal made her feel more in control, and she leaned against his chest. The smell of her hair—fresh, sweet straw—filled his nostrils.

  “Flynn, I don’t want to die.”

  “I’m here to protect you, and I’m going to do that.”

  She leaned away from his chest so that she could look up at him. “For how long? One night? Two?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  Her eyes were darting indicators of panic.

  “Are they in here now? Right now?”

  He wanted to be truthful, but if he told her the truth, which was that he didn’t know, she was only going to get into a worse state.

  “Why not go back to Austin? It’s a city, so it’s fairly safe. Stay in a big condo, lower floor. There’s no public reason for you to remain here. Or your mother, for that matter.”

  “Mom’s President of the United States. She can’t take off and leave the alky in charge.”

  “Is your dad hitting the bottle again?” Bill was known to binge.

  “He’s been quoting Ecclesiastes and smoking cigars.”

  “Not good.” That was his first phase, when he had about half a pint of bourbon in him. If he kept going, in a couple more days he’d be so drunk he couldn’t move, collapsed on a floor somewhere and wallowing in his vomit. Years ago, when that had happened in the old Faust Hotel in Menard, Flynn had been the one to clean him off with a garden hose, pour him into the bed of a pickup, and drive him back to the Governor’s Mansion. (Lorna’s revenge fire had taken place later.)

  Cissy went to the sitting area across the room. He wished—he dearly wished—that she wasn’t completely naked.

  She had inherited her mother’s brains, though, and this was, he knew, a carefully crafted effort to determine if there were any seduction possibilities. She’d been expecting him in her web tonight, pretty spider.

  Part of him thought, “Oh good.” Another part thought, “Oh God.”

  Diana would say to him, “It’s not a big deal, we’re not a thing. I don’t mind.” Then she’d tear up, and that would hurt. He surprised himself, realizing how much she mattered to him. More and more, Di’s feelings mattered.

  He went to the closet and found a fluffy, flimsy robe. As he strode to the sitting area, he tossed it to her.

  She gave him a too-bright smile, experience playing at innocence. As she got comfortable in the cushiony chair, her legs opened. She was not one to give up easily.

  She hadn’t picked up the robe. He laid it across her shoulders.

  “Really?”

  He sat opposite her.

  “I’m not a kid anymore.”

  “Neither am I, Cissy. But you’re real stressed.”

  “I want you. I think about you all the time.”

  “That’s the fear talking. You think you want me, but what you really want is what I’m already here to give you, which is protection.”

  “He was my age, Flynn. So is this about kids? Am I next?”

  “I don’t know exactly how much you understand about what’s happening, but I have reason to take you into my confidence. You might be able to help us in some important ways.”

  “I know that there were aliens on that ranch near Austin, and I know that you killed them all, you and Mac and Diana. There was some kind of an underground thing there.” She paused. “When it burned…” She stopped herself.

  “Go on.”

  She shook her head. He heard her murmur, “I smelled meat.”

  He hadn’t known that she was there, not until a few months ago when the newly minted First Daughter had showed up at Diana’s town house and demanded to know what was going on. She had naively imagined that her father’s election had given her some authority. Talk about a loose cannon. It was a miracle that she hadn’t told her parents or her younger sister, Lorna, Jr., who was presently burning up the base paths at Sul Ross University in Alpine, Texas.

  Fortunately, Cissy had been afraid to do any whispering, afraid she’d get Flynn in trouble and Mac in more. The detail had done voice analysis and a lie detector test on her, then an fMRI interview. She’d passed everything, so they’d hit her with the confidentiality agreement and let her go.

  “What we’re looking at is what we believe to be an alien presence that has negative intent toward mankind.” He didn’t mention Aeon by name. “Put simply, they want Earth.”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason we would, I’d assume. Expand to a new planet, enrich themselves.”

  “You’d think they’d be more spiritual. Ethical. Given t
hat they’re more advanced.”

  “The Nazis were far more technologically advanced than any previous generation of Germans, but Bach and Beethoven were far more civilized.”

  “Why just you, Flynn? Where’s the air force, where’s the army?”

  “What do you know about Al Doxy?”

  “We used to call him Dorksy in school. He was a geek whose glasses steamed up if you so much as blew on his ear. But he was—you know—a meatball.”

  “Rich, though.”

  “Nobody cared. We were all rich in our crowd. We didn’t mingle with the toads. They, like, didn’t exist.”

  “So he showed up here. Did he say hello?”

  “He took me to dinner. Told me how important his job was. He must’ve said ‘West Wing’ fifty times before dessert came. Totally boring, and he’d gotten even more enormous. He looked like a big, droopy elephant who’d lost his trunk.”

  “Did he tell you what he did?”

  “Wouldn’t that have been illegal?”

  “Yes, but he’s dead. We can’t put ghosts in jail.”

  “He told me he was working on some kind of microwave project. Managing it.”

  “Did he ever mention any names? Mine, for example? Anything about aliens?”

  Her eyes widened. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”

  “He died because of something he knew. I’m trying to figure out what that was.”

  “There was something on his iPad in his office. ‘The United States is in danger of being destroyed, and along with it the whole of mankind.’”

  “That was there? You’re certain?”

  “I heard Dad talking on the phone about it. Trying to figure out what it might mean.”

  He laid a hand on her cheek, then drew it away. “I need to do a round.”

  “No you don’t, not really. If they come, you’ll know. Mac said you always know. You’re uncanny, he said. Also that you won’t share your secrets, or how you do your work.”

  “We’ve got people in training. To share my work.”

  She chuckled. “Not you, Mr. Huge Ego. This is your baby. Only you and nobody else.” She tossed her hair out of her eyes. “The hero’s journey, and you’re the only one on it, and that is your weakness.”

  Her voice was a melody, but the words scorched him. Was ego really why he couldn’t train anybody, and why the only person who could actually give him meaningful support in the field was Mac, a professional criminal so compromised that he’d never dare to take any credit for anything?

  “I have to go,” he said. “You will not be harmed.”

  She leaned back in the chair, exposing her perfect breasts to the room’s night glow. “Slay the dragon,” she said. “Save the damsel.” A grin spread across her face, gleaming with fear. “Save the world.” She pitched forward, stuffed her fist into her mouth, and screamed, forcing the sound back into her throat. In a house without privacy, it was what you did.

  He went to her and touched her heaving shoulders. She looked up at him and all the smiles were gone, there was nothing here but a woman in raw dread.

  “Get out of here,” she said.

  “I won’t let them hurt you.”

  “Get out! OUT! GET OUT OF HERE!”

  He spent the rest of the night in the Closet Hall. When he heard Lorna and her friend stirring, he slipped out, walking quickly off into the thin, cold light of dawn.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  FLYNN WAS becoming clearer and clearer about what he had to do. The autopsy he was about to witness would tell him more. If he was right, his plan couldn’t be revealed to anybody, not even Diana. If Aeon was watching, they were watching very closely, and the least word could reveal his plan to them.

  She would need to figure it out on her own, and he planned to leave as many hints as he dared. If she failed to understand his signals, he was heading for a hard death.

  This coroner’s facility was far better equipped than the one in the Navy Yard and, because its use would be so unexpected by Aeon’s surveillance experts, safer than Langley.

  The bodies of Al Doxy and the two medical service personnel lay on gleaming metal slabs in the freezing cold. Doxy’s head was where it ought to be, except for the fact that it wasn’t attached to the neck. One of the two kids had something in his face that Flynn had often seen in the faces of the dead, a kind of sad peace. The other one was not at peace at all. Her glazed eyes were filled with horror. Her mouth was opened as if in a terrible sort of rapture. One fist was clenched, the other a bloody mess.

  She’d been in the back of the wagon with the body, and had hammered with all her might on the doors as the vehicle filled, but hadn’t been able to prevail against the pressure of the water that was flooding in.

  She had drowned in full consciousness, slowly, breathing her last against a tilting ceiling. Had she seen her life pass before her eyes? What sort of a life had it been? Like all lives, hers was at once of little consequence to the world and, to her, a vast ocean of consequence. She mattered, if only to herself. Parents? Maybe. Boyfriend? Could be.

  She also mattered to Flynn Carroll. She mattered a very great deal, just as did all his dead. These kids now added to the tally.

  “I need an MRI of the severed head,” he said.

  “Sure, Officer.”

  Flynn wasn’t surprised at the assumption. He looked so much like a cop that even plain clothes didn’t help. When he walked down a street, perps and wanteds just faded away. And, in fact, they were right to do so. He’d started as a street cop, then a small-city detective working meth labs and car boosts, the occasional murder. His current job was still cop work, and their unit was listed under policing organizations.

  They did Doxy first, confirming that he had died of a severed spine. The massive blood loss that followed had not been a cause of death. Cut the head off, and both parts are dead within a minute, blood or no blood.

  Because this was a forensic autopsy, primary attention was paid to the cause of death, which was the cut that had severed the head. The pathologist spoke quietly and crisply, but Flynn could hear the puzzlement in his voice. The cut was about a micrometer thick. It would have been made by a garróte so thin that it could not be seen, but so sharp that it could cut a brick in half and slide through steel as if it were butter.

  “Officer, do you have any information about the weapon?”

  “We do not.”

  The pathologist straightened up. He was a young man, maybe thirty, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He said, “I don’t know of a blade thin enough to do this.”

  Flynn said nothing.

  “I’m going to list the cause as severing of the head by unknown means. Because what I’m seeing here doesn’t make sense. It’s impossible.” He turned to Flynn. “Who are you, anyway? Can you shed any light on this?”

  “Let’s get that MRI, take it from there.”

  With the head in a medical transport chest, they took a coroner’s vehicle to George Washington University Hospital. Flynn rode in the back with the chest. He didn’t need questions.

  Fifteen minutes of light traffic brought them to an ambulance entrance. The two attendants got out and took the chest between them. Flynn followed them into the Radiology Department, then down into the subbasement where the radiation facilities were located.

  There were prints on the walls of the waiting area, an attempt to make the place seem cheerful and alive. They didn’t work. All the landscapes did was remind you that you were here, not there.

  The MRI operator came out of his control room as soon as they arrived, and took them back into the facility, through a door marked with a large yellow DANGER sign and a warning that metal objects must not be taken beyond this point.

  Flynn didn’t need to ask the technician whether or not he’d ever scanned a detached head before, because he hadn’t.

  “OK, we need to get this done. I want the thinnest slices; I want to see as much detail as I can.”

  The two coroners lifted the head
out of its container, and the MRI operator promptly bent double and vomited. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I am so sorry.”

  Flynn put his hand on his shoulder. “Get it back together, get it done. Time is of the essence.”

  “But what—what the hell? What in HELL happened to this man?”

  He’d doubtless see a picture of Doxy somewhere at some point, and be left to wonder, because the story of the kid’s death wouldn’t exactly square with his head’s being separated from his body. Flynn would need a confidentiality agreement brought over here.

  He sat in the dark operator’s room watching the scan take place. For the first few passes, there was nothing. Then there was.

  “Jesus,” the technician said.

  The third pass had revealed a small pit deep in the brain. It was just above the claustrum.

  He said to the young medical examiner, “Something’s there.”

  “Could be. Can’t be sure.” He was silent for a moment. Flynn looked at the image. He wasn’t sure, either. They would need to dissect.

  In the interest of time, Flynn would have liked to have had it done here, but if he did, the story would be all over the hospital in an hour. He said, “We’re going to move to the ME’s office. Gentlemen, I’d like to thank you for your work. Another officer will be along shortly with confidentiality agreements for you to sign. This is a national security matter, and discussing it even among yourselves is illegal. Remember that.”

  The two staffers stared at him wide-eyed.

  Flynn left, followed by the young ME, who insisted on coming into the back of the truck.

  “I need to know how to document this,” the kid asked.

  “Death by murder.”

  “This wound in the brain.” He paused. “It’s not a tumor, and the MRI guy didn’t know jack shit about it. Do you mind if I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Does this have to do with aliens? Because it looks like something was in there and it got pulled out.”

  Flynn chuckled. “Are you a professional asshole or just an advanced amateur?”

  “It’s a reasonable question.”

  “It’s a ridiculous question. But don’t document the dissection.”