The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller

by Whitley Strieber

  The access door that led onto the tarmac below was open. He continued moving to ahead, watching the steward, who would greet each passenger, then turn, his eyes briefly following the passenger as he moved into the plane.

  The couple in front of him entered. The steward greeted them. In that moment, Flynn stepped aside and through the door onto the small metal platform where cabin baggage and wheelchairs were stowed after landing, and which the captain would use after he’d made his ground inspection of his plane.

  There were certain to be observers in the terminal watching the jetway, so he fulcrumed himself off the front of the platform and dropped to the tarmac, a distance of about twenty feet. He knew that he had at most a couple of minutes, probably less.

  There was a baggage wagon nearby, empty and ready to be taken back to the storage area. But he couldn’t drive it in a suit. Farther away, an old Jeep stood empty and unguarded. As he approached it, he saw an emblem on the door. It was some sort of security vehicle. He guessed that it was used for perimeter patrol.

  As he approached it, a heavyset man appeared, armed, wearing a threadbare uniform. The man ambled toward the Jeep. Flynn crouched beside it, letting him get into the driver’s seat. He slipped into the passenger’s side and before the driver could react, he found himself looking into the barrel of his own gun.

  “Understand English?”

  The man looked perplexed.

  “No? Then I have to kill you.” He cocked the pistol.

  “No! A little. What you want?”

  “Do your job. I know your route, so if you try anything to attract attention, I’ll kill you. Do you understand.”

  His eyes, fixed on the Webley in Flynn’s hand, told Flynn that he understood very well.

  As they started, the Jordanian jet began its takeoff run. For the split of a second, Flynn wished that he were on it and that all was well. Since it was rolling, however, his pursuers knew that he had slipped the noose.

  The Jeep moved across the runways to the perimeter, and began going along the perimeter fence. It was electrified and about eleven feet high, with razor wire along the top. Beyond it, there was another fence, also electrified.

  They’d been moving for maybe three minutes when police cars appeared on the tarmac, racing up and down with searchlights. A chopper swarmed overhead, then another. Huge lights glared down from above.

  The car’s radio came alive, the voice spitting with urgency.

  “Tell him nothing’s wrong.” He drove the pistol into the man’s ribs. “If they come this way, you die.”

  The man spoke into the radio, his voice calm.

  Finally, Flynn saw what he was looking for: a slight wrinkle in the chain link. Animals—dogs, probably—had dug a hole under it. They obviously came and went here regularly, and then he saw why. There were rows of Dumpsters across the tarmac, stored in a dark area near the wall of the terminal. The dogs came to steal food, and in this impoverished country, people probably did, too.

  “Now that you’ve lied to the Revolutionary Guard, you’ll have to keep lying or you know what’ll happen.”

  “I know.”

  Flynn opened the door and roll out. The Jeep moved off, and he slid on his stomach toward the little ditch, passing under the fence without touching it.

  He followed a narrow path to another such hole, and went under that.

  He was off the airport. Behind him, four helicopters were now policing the area. It was only a matter of time before they widened the search to include this barren stretch beyond the fence.

  About a quarter mile ahead, there were a few lights—a poor neighborhood, probably, jammed up against the airport.

  He was in light.

  Dropping to the ground, he realized that it was an incoming plane, its landing lights glaring. It passed over him at an altitude of perhaps fifty feet, so close that he was choked by the thick, warm fumes of burning kerosene.

  He got up and began loping toward the community, watching and listening as he ran.

  If Aeon was on the ground in Iran, they could step in at any time. They could not let him escape. He might not know everything, but he knew enough to make a start at derailing whatever plan they were in the process of executing.

  He’d escaped from them before, and more than once, and they would not have forgotten that. It also meant that they would act sooner rather than later, and he would be up against their disks, with all their speed and firepower, and technology so advanced that it could identify a man by his thought patterns from miles away.

  As he moved closer, he heard tinny music, the occasional honk of a horn, then the voices of a crowd. Soon he could see that there was a night market running. When he entered the community, though, he discovered that it wasn’t much of a market, just a few stalls, one with some withered beets, another selling rounds of bread, a third with boxes of cabbages.

  The town itself was little more than a clutch of mud huts reinforced with cardboard and discarded lumber. People moved like ghosts, too tired and starved to give the bizarre appearance in their midst of a Westerner in a business suit more than a mildly curious glance. He was careful to keep the pistol concealed. It was an old, unbalanced weapon that had seen a good half century of use. Flynn hoped that he could fire it with useful accuracy, but he had his doubts. As to speed, forget it. Pull the trigger of this old mule too quickly, and you’d get a jam. There were at least some bullets; he could tell by the weight. But it wasn’t much firepower against what he was fairly sure would be the combined might of the Revolutionary Guard, Iranian intelligence, and the armed forces. Not to mention Aeon.

  A fighter screamed past overhead at five hundred feet. For a moment, Flynn hoped that it was searching, but then it did a tight turn and came back on what he realized immediately was a strike run.

  They had guessed that he was here. But then again, where else could he be in this flat, open area?

  The people around him took no notice. They saw low-flying jets all the time.

  A flash, then a loud, echoing crack and two missiles came streaking toward the village.

  They were going to level the town.

  Flynn threw himself into the deepest ditch he could find.

  Dazzling light. Silence. Dust. Bodies, bits of furniture, fruits and vegetables speeding past. An almighty roar.

  He raised his head to see a burning hell where the pitiful little village had been. The stink of cordite choked the air. Body parts lay everywhere. A woman, naked, her skin smoking, staggered down the middle of the street.

  She may have been screaming, but Flynn couldn’t tell—he had been deafened by the blast. Children appeared, digging themselves out of the rubble of one of the huts. One of them had lost the crown of his skull. His naked brain was covered with dirt. He was grinning wildly, one eye turned upward, the other down.

  The jet lined up for another run, and Flynn could see a fat napalm canister tucked under its belly.

  He did the only thing he could: He jumped out of the ditch, ran between two ruined buildings, and disappeared into the dark. Once again he threw himself down.

  With a tornadic whoosh, a gigantic wall of fire rolled across the village. Flynn knew that he was plainly visible in its light. The intense heat of it made his clothing smoke, and the sweet-sick stench of burning napalm filled the air with choking fumes.

  Keeping as low as he could, he ran out of the pool of flickering light, angling toward what he thought must be another village. Judging from the myriad dots of light, this one was more prosperous.

  By his mere presence, Flynn had just gotten a lot of people killed, and he feared that exactly the same thing would happen if he made it to the other village.

  He could not risk that. He would not. As he moved across the open desert, conserving his strength against whatever might be thrown at him next, a thunder of low-flying helicopters rose behind him. His infrared signature would make him an easy target, but he doubted that they would want to shoot him. Their purpose had been to f
lush him out of the village, not to kill him. They would want to do more questioning—a lot more.

  If the day has been hot enough and it’s still early enough in the evening for boulders to be warm, their heat signature can offer a man some concealment against infrared detection.

  There weren’t any boulders around here. In any case, the desert was already too cold. He ran on, feeling an increasing sense of hopelessness, knowing that if he was captured he would be ruthlessly drained by the Revolutionary Guard of every last bit of information he possessed, then handed over to their new allies to suffer whatever ungodly fate Aeon might have in store for him.

  A chopper passed overhead and landed ahead of him. Another one, higher up, opened up its floodlight. Two others landed outside the pool of light in which he stood with his hands raised.

  Figures came out of the churning dust and noise. They were armed with automatic weapons, hidden behind face masks, and dressed in hand-me-down Russian riot gear. Used gear or not, he could tell by the way these men moved that he was not going to be escaping from them, not on this night, and probably not ever.

  Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be. A rifle barrel swung toward one of the helicopters. Flynn followed the direction, moving slowly, his hands still high. The men were extremely tense; he could see it in their rigid postures, in their fixed stares. They were scared of him and scared of losing him. Should he attempt to bolt into the dark, he would be caught, no question.

  He got into the helicopter. Two of the guards entered with him, one on either side. They sat silently, each with a pistol in his ribs. He could feel their bodies against his. They were as hard as metal, these two kids.

  The chopper’s wing began to thutter, and then, with a great roar and dust pouring in both doors, it rose into the ink of the night.

  Flynn sat in silence. He had retreated into himself. Next would come more torture, expertly managed and even more intricately ferocious. Like any man, in the end he would tell them everything.

  The pilot turned on a radio. They flew on, to the tune of Persian pop music, four black-clad soldiers with their captive now in a hopeless situation and trying hard not to sink into despair.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FLYNN LISTENED to the thunder of the engine, concentrating as best he could on what had to be next. His plan was to jump. If no opening presented itself, he would have to die with his secrets.

  The chopper was floating in a dark sea of sky. There were no lights below and no way to determine altitude. But it had to be more than a couple hundred feet, which was easily enough to kill a man. He gauged his chances of taking over, seeing immediately that they were poor. He could take out one guard before the other fired, but not both. He looked over at the guard on his right, who smiled—and at once Flynn recognized him from the torture chamber. He’d hung back, watching like some sort of trainee.

  Like a trainee, he kept his gun holstered.

  Instantly, Flynn got the pistol and aimed it at the pilot’s head. “Land or we’re all dead.”

  The pilot flew on.

  “I will shoot!”

  No change.

  “Does anybody in here understand English?”

  “Fuck, we gotta blow it,” the copilot said.

  The pilot turned halfway back. “We’re U.S. Special Forces. You’re being extracted.”

  What the hell?

  The guy was Iranian. So were the others. Had to be. Before they took off, they’d been speaking Farsi like natives.

  “We’re gonna declare an emergency and put you down. There’ll be a vehicle to get you to the coast. There’s a sub waiting.”

  Flynn considered. Could this actually be true?

  The second guard spoke quickly in Farsi, his voice high with what was clearly fear. His partner responded, his voice harsh.

  It sounded very much like a jailer speaking to a despised inmate.

  The next thing Flynn knew, they were landing and the second guard was pulling his gun.

  Whatever was going on here, it was not what it appeared.

  The copilot turned around and shot the frightened guard in the face. His head exploded all over the cabin.

  “Jesus!” Flynn yelled.

  “Not on side,” the copilot said.

  The pilot shouted into the radio, then shot it.

  The three who were claiming to be Special Forces operatives piled out of the chopper, pulling Flynn with them. They proceeded to shoot it up. Briefly, there was a stench of burning fuel, then one of them threw a match on it and the chopper burst into flames.

  In the flickering light of the fire, Flynn could see a Corolla, its black surface now caked with dust. Could it be the same one that had been used in Tehran? Looked like it.

  “Get the hell out of here,” the pilot shouted. “And next time, will you please knock before you come bursting through our front door?”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Yeah, well. Now sit back and relax. You’re about to see an Academy Award performance.”

  The pilot ran into the pool of burning gas, then came out rolling, his legs and back on fire. “Don’t just stand there, move your asses, I’m burnin’ up!”

  Flynn and the others put him out. He lay there, his clothes smoking, laughing and grimacing in pain at the same time. “My story will be that I nearly got burned alive trying to save my helicopter. And you got away, and why? Because your friend the spy made sure of it.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will. We gotta go back to Tehran and keep playing like Rev Guards. Wish us luck.”

  Flynn saluted. He knew of no greater honor that one soldier could offer another. The pilot got to his feet. The three of them returned the salute, and Flynn headed for the Corolla.

  He moved quickly, but not at a dead run; though it was dark, there could be eyes on him. The car was dark, too, seemingly abandoned. But as he approached, he could see a thickening of shadow on the driver’s side.

  He opened the passenger-side door. No interior light came on. When he slid in and sat down, the driver turned to him. It was Davood Ghorbani. “Let’s roll, buddy,” he said. “I’m coming out with you.”

  Flynn still had the pistol he’d taken from the guard. It felt very good to be armed again, especially in view of what he still feared was really happening here, which was that he was being played by the Revolutionary Guard in the same way an expert fisherman plays something big and powerful like a swordfish. Give it line, let it run, pull against it, tire it out.

  Ghorbani started the engine and began driving fast down a dark, two-lane blacktop, lights out. “I hope I didn’t fry your balls off, Flynn.”

  The comment was an invitation to engage, but Flynn didn’t care to do that just yet. He was thinking this thing out, and it was complicated. The guard who’d been killed could have been a prisoner slated for execution. There were a few Iranian Americans who had returned after the revolution, so the other three could have actually been more Revolutionary Guards, and Davood Ghorbani could be a clever actor. All good interrogators had an element of the actor in their personalities.

  He decided to let things continue to play out.

  “I’m MI6,” Ghorbani said.

  “Special Forces, MI6? Who else is out here?”

  “Tehran is spy heaven. The locals all hate the ayatollahs. People will practically pay for the right to help the West.”

  He decided to turn the conversation in a direction that might cause Ghorbani to reveal a little more of himself. “Do all those agencies know about Aeon?”

  “We do.”

  “Obviously, given that you questioned me about it.”

  “I was asking prepared questions, remember that. Prepared by MISIRI.”

  “What do you think Aeon is, then? Personal thought.”

  “It’s some sort of ultra-high-tech project. Biorobots, maybe. Stronger and faster than us. Maybe smarter, too. We want to know more.”

  He was a fine liar, very impressive.

&nb
sp; “You told me during torture that Iran was allied with Aeon. How could it be allied with a biorobot project?”

  “No, sir, that’s what you told me, and I’m still wondering what you were getting at. I’d love to know.”

  Flynn caught his breath as he forced himself not to pull out the Webley and blow this brilliant bastard’s head off. But Ghorbani had just slipped. Flynn had not brought up Aeon first, but Ghorbani was assuming that he wouldn’t have clear recall. A mistake. Useful, too. Revealing.

  Ghorbani was, in fact, so brilliant at his profession that it now came to mind that he might be like Louis Charlton Morris, a humanoid biorobot. Morris had been a criminal both here and on Aeon, but that was under the old regime. His side had won. If he had still been alive, he would probably be a member of their government.

  Flynn had destroyed him, but he did not think that blowing another one to pieces would be the best move, not until he was certain about what he was dealing with.

  He would play it out a bit more, see if he asked more of the wrong sort of questions. Human or not—that would decide the matter. He said, “What do you know about me?”

  Ghorbani chuckled. “Enough to understand that you’ll blow my brains out if I ask a question that makes you decide this is all another interrogators’ trick.”

  The objective of this sort of interrogation is to go beyond the uncertainties of torture so that the responses are more likely to be truthful. You gain the subject’s confidence. You become his friend—in this case, his rescuer. Then he opens up to you.

  The firmament swept down to the horizon. Somewhere out there was Aeon, hell in the glory. He kept an eye out, as always, for wandering stars.

  They drove on for hours, crossing the ancient vastness of Persia, going higher and higher into the central massif that defined the country’s geography. The villages were barely lit, the small cities were silent and looked very poor, and yet it was all touched by a mysterious beauty.

  Finally, they were through the mountains and driving steadily across the coastal plain. Morning was coming soon, suggested by the rosy glow that hugged the eastern horizon. The morning star hanging in it was so vivid that it seemed as if it would be possible to touch it.