The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller

by Whitley Strieber

  “We’re ready,” the doctor said.

  They proceeded down a short hallway to a radiology unit. Inside the expansive space, Flynn could see three different MRI scanners, a PET scanner, a CT scanner, and other diagnostic equipment, all of it the newest and the best.

  “Let’s get you going, Bill,” Flynn said.

  “First, you tell me what happens if they find something.”

  “If it’s possible to remove it safely, we do that.”

  “And if not?”

  “We’ve never had any trouble. I’ve had two pulled. Di’s had one.”

  They moved deeper into the facility. Unlike a hospital, it was entirely staffed with specialists. When there’s unlimited money, there are also unlimited resources.

  Bill was scared. Flynn could see that by his stiff, almost marching walk. Lorna, full of pills, seemed mostly interested in her distorted reflections on the looming machines all around them. Cissy’s shoulders were hunched. She was deep inside herself, and Flynn knew why. If her dad was implanted, there would be an extraction, even if it was in a dangerous region of the brain. They would cure the patient, even if the patient died.

  “You know,” Bill said, “you put a beer in my hand and you give me a good joke to tell, and I’m doing what I was born to do. You give me these history books to read, and I get all those facts in my head but they don’t stick. Close the book, and I can’t tell Julius Caesar from Big Julie.” He shook his head. “If this thing is in me and you can’t get it out, you’re gonna kill my ass, aren’t you, Flynn?”

  “Sir, we’re ready.”

  “You are, damn you. I remember you back at UT. You know what people called you? The Shadow. Remember the Shadow?”

  “I do not.”

  “‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!’” That’s you, Flynn—you’re the Shadow, and you will kill me as easily as you’d step on a cockroach.”

  “I wouldn’t step on a cockroach. He’s no threat to me.”

  “We’re ready.”

  “Daddy, get it over with!”

  “OK! Jesus!”

  When Bill was lying on the narrow pallet and was about to be rolled into the scanner, Flynn noticed that he had closed his eyes, and that there were gleams at their edges. This greedy, wrongheaded, and ill-informed man was face-to-face with the devastating power of the presidency. The lives and safety of a whole world lay in his hands, and he was nothing more than a good man with a beer and a joke. At least he knew it.

  So if his life had to be taken here, maybe his last thought would be “I understand.”

  He was deep in the scanner now, and Flynn went into the control room to watch. Lorna and Cissy sat in the back, both of them now hunched into themselves, silenced by the terror of the situation.

  The scanner began recording slices of the president’s brain. Flynn watched as, pass by pass, the images went deeper and deeper. He had studied brain anatomy obsessively, seeking to understand how the subtle, almost nonexistent electrical currents emitted by the implants could change thought. Through all of this there had emerged an understanding that the claustrum was the key. If a host could be physically approached, the implant would be guided into the white matter next to it. Aeon could do this without opening the skin, but the ones we implanted were inserted surgically. Implants in this position could not be removed, and it was in order to get at one of them that the Iranians had killed Albert Doxy.

  Flynn was so concentrated on the imaging process that he did not instantly realize that the room was filling with people. A split second later, though, he did notice. He whirled in his chair and leaped to his feet, gun braced for action.

  He found himself confronting ribbon-heavy generals, Roland Boxleitner, Director Forde, and the senator. With them were four Secret Service agents.

  Forde said, “Put the gun down, Flynn.”

  Flynn did not move. He knew that he could probably take all four agents before they’d gotten off a shot, but the consequences would be too unpredictable.

  “Mr. Carroll,” Boxleitner said, “you’re way off the reservation. We need you to put the gun down. You are no longer in charge here.”

  Flynn noticed that there was another agent lingering in the hallway. He had the football.

  The gun didn’t move.

  One of the generals spoke. “Iran fired a Sajjil-2 missile at Israel ten minutes ago. You have to table whatever this is. The president is urgently needed.”

  Once again, Flynn’s world lurched. What had been hours, even days, might now be only minutes. He stowed the weapon.

  Aeon had outsmarted him. The football didn’t matter at all. Greene wasn’t the target. They had tricked the ayatollahs into triggering the war.

  “Nobody’s faulting you, Flynn,” Forde said. “We know you’re doing your duty as you see it.”

  “Did it reach its target?”

  “It was destroyed. The Israelis have a system called Speed Wind that can intercept missiles while they’re still ascending. It worked. But now they’re preparing a launch, and the Iranians have no such system.”

  With a series of thuds, the scanner powered down. Flynn backed up, but did not take his eyes off the group. He said to the tech, “What’s the story?”

  “Normal brain. Nothing wrong.”

  Flynn took a deep, ragged breath. Another.

  Diana came to him.

  He looked at the stricken confusion in her expression and thought that this was the end, the last night of the human world.

  Bill Greene came out of the MRI scanner. He looked from face to face, blinking when he saw the crowd. “Jesus, guys, don’t tell me World War Three has broken out.”

  “Sir,” air force chief of staff McArdle said, “I’m afraid it has.”

  “We need to act,” Lorna said.

  “Somebody fill me in.”

  “In the car,” she said. “We’ve got to get back to the White House. You need to be in the Situation Room.”

  “Iran fired a missile at Israel,” Boxleitner said.

  “Did it hit?”

  “It was destroyed as it was ascending. But now Israel is preparing to retaliate.”

  Senator Glass said, “According to their war plan, they’ll raise a flight of eight missiles, all MIRVed. They will drop sixty-four hydrogen bombs on Iran’s cities and critical military areas. Our analysis of their plan shows that Iran will cease to exist as a nation, and residual radiation will mean that it will not be restored in the foreseeable future.”

  “The Russians?” the president barked.

  Boxleitner said, “They are on a war warning right now.”

  Bill locked eyes with Lorna, and Flynn thought he had never seen such hate as there was between them. Ice and knives.

  Then it hit him, a slamming wave: It was Lorna who belonged to Aeon. Not Bill at all, but her—she was implanted, and her task was to make certain that, at some point, the U.S. launched against Russia.

  Lorna said, “Don’t just stand there—you need to get back and call Netanyahu. You need to reassure Putin. You need to warn the Iranians that if they don’t run all of their missiles out and destroy them forthwith, their country will cease to exist.” She tossed her hair out of her face. She looked around. “Where’s the football?”

  Simon Forde said, “We have it, ma’am.”

  “I want it in sight at all times.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The entourage started for the door. “Boxy,” she said to the DCIA, “we need to know at once if the Russians start configuring for launch.”

  “We’re right on top of that.”

  Diana and Flynn stood watching them go, a thunder of footfalls in the brilliantly lit corridor.

  They had been left behind. No longer needed. Their job descriptions did not include managing a nuclear conflict.

  “It’s like the trains in World War One,” Diana said. “Once the Russians started mobilizing, the Germans had to start. When they started, the French had to
start. Then came the end of the old world.”

  Flynn said, “We have to get into that Situation Room. They need us there.”

  His mouth was so dry that he could hardly speak above a whisper. So far, he’d won every battle he’d ever fought with Aeon. But this was not a battle, this was the war, and it turned out that he was hardly even a player.

  Flynn saw only one way to do what needed to be done, and it needed to be carried out immediately. Lorna had to go, and he had to do it, and fast. But how?

  There was a way—possibly. When he’d heard from Morris that some sort of amplifier would be needed to activate the implant, he’d looked for and found alternate means of entry to the White House. He’d dismissed the tunnels he’d found, though. Old and disused; they might or might not even be intact.

  He and Diana watched the convoy disappear down the street, heading for the Beltway.

  “Looks like the parade’s gone by,” she said.

  “I need to be there.”

  “This is out of our hands.”

  He whirled toward her. For an instant, his whole body shuddered with rage. Then he stifled it. In as even a voice as he could muster, he said, “It’s her. It’s Lorna.”

  “It’s the Iranians!”

  “They’re just the trigger. Tricked into it by Aeon because they’re naive and ambitious. What Aeon needs now is escalation, and that is to be provided by Lorna Greene.”

  “But you don’t know. You can’t be certain.”

  “I’m certain.”

  “You were certain about Bill! What if it’s Putin? Ever consider that?”

  “It’s Lorna.”

  The Russian system worked differently from the American. In the U.S. system, it was possible for there to be direct communication between the president and the missile command centers. Thus the football. Officially, a second person had to approve the transmission of a fire order, but in fact it could be done by just the president.

  The Russians had a different system. Putin would have to transmit an order to a group of commanding generals, who would in turn transmit it to the missile command centers, where it would be sent to each individual site. It was their version of fail-safe, and it meant that an attack order from Moscow, in the absence of any sign of incoming missiles, was going to be questioned—briefly, to be sure, but questioned.

  Aeon would not take a chance like that.

  He was about to try to orchestrate the single most dangerous gamble in human history. Even if it worked, millions might die. But if it didn’t—well, he did not dwell on a possibility so terrifying that it made it hard to do the kind of calm, logical thinking that success depended on.

  They still had the Chrysler—he had been careful to keep the keys—and they headed back toward Washington. He no longer had any idea how much time they had, but he thought it must be less than an hour, and maybe only minutes. He accelerated to and through the speed limit.

  “Don’t go so fast.”

  “We need to get there as fast as possible.”

  “How can we even get in? We’re not need to know on this in any way.”

  “I’ve been working on that.” If the tunnels were intact, he thought he would probably find them guarded by some ferocious biorobots, but he didn’t tell her that. Why worry her—there was nothing she could do, and he was not about to allow her to stay with him on a mission this dangerous.

  She leaned toward the driver’s side. “How fast are you going now?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. But it did. It mattered a lot. He needed to get stopped by a cop, or he would be stopped by Aeon.

  “If you get pulled over, I’m not sure I can help.”

  He had to pass the convoy.

  “You’re going a hundred and thirty!”

  “This is a presidential car.”

  “So what—slow down!”

  At last he saw the convoy, moving discreetly along, showing no flashing lights, protecting its occupants with anonymity. To avoid being too noticeable, he passed it at about seventy. But as soon as it was out of sight, he accelerated again, once again going up to crazy speeds.

  They were bound to be stopped shortly. Had better be.

  His mind was a red agony. He’d been skillfully played. He’d never understood their plan, and now it was probably too late. An hour more was generous. The missiles could be rising right now.

  They came into some traffic, and soon were doing forty, then thirty.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered. She knew the stakes just as well as he did.

  The research he had done on the Washington underground would now either pay off or it wouldn’t. He said, “I’m going to ditch the car in Dupont Circle and go down.”

  “That old trolley underpass? It doesn’t lead anywhere.”

  “It does.” There were tunnels under Embassy Row that the intelligence agencies used to set up listening devices and carry out embassy penetrations. There were tunnels between the White House and the Capitol, the Pentagon and the State Department. And these were just the new ones. There were much older tunnels, some of them predating the city, and these were the ones that Flynn had researched and that he would use.

  There was one in particular that interested him. It came up right under the foundations of the White House and had a spur so deep that it was impossible to trace. Probably an early attempt to provide the building with running water, or perhaps it was an escape tunnel. After the War of 1812, a number of them had been built.

  Finally, they broke out of the traffic and he floored it. The powerful car surged ahead. They were maybe ten minutes out. They went on this way for three, for five minutes, snaking through a blur of slower traffic.

  A trooper pulled in behind them.

  “Now you’ve done it, Flynn, damn you!”

  He stopped on the shoulder, the Virginia State Police car close behind, its light bar flashing. The trooper got out and approached the car. Flynn slid the window down.

  “License and registration, please.”

  “This is a stolen vehicle.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s stolen. It belongs to the President of the United States and we stole it.”

  “Flynn, have you gone nuts?”

  “Sir, you’ll need to get out of the car.”

  Flynn opened the door and stepped out. With a quick, hard fist to the temple, he dropped the trooper. He caught him and slid him into the driver’s seat.

  “What in hell?”

  He got into the police vehicle and killed the light bar, then started to pull out into traffic. He wasn’t fast enough, though, and Diana opened the passenger door and got in before he could get onto the highway.

  “What in hell is this about?”

  He turned on the bar and siren, and this time when he put it up over a hundred, all he had to worry about was an occasional squawk from the radio, which he answered as briefly and noncommittally as he could.

  They’d figure it out in about three minutes, he thought, but by then he would already be crossing the Anacostia Bridge.

  “Flynn, please help me here. I need to know what’s happening.”

  “What’s happening is that I’m penetrating the White House without Aeon realizing it. Their eyes are still on the Chrysler. I hope.”

  Dupont Circle was bustling, people hurrying in the fresh breeze of autumn. As always, he especially noticed the children. Massive neutron radiation renders bodies sterile. They dry up without rotting. The great cities of the world would become a vast ocean of mummies: babies frozen in their strollers, rats in their trees, men and women and children in every posture that one could imagine, all slowly turning to dust.

  He pulled into a tow-away zone and got out of the car. Diana came with him. He blocked her with his arm.

  “You need somebody on your back, Flynn.”

  “No.”

  “Flynn, if you die—I don’t even want to think about it. You can’t blow this thing.”

  He turned to her—on her—and
drew her for a moment into his arms. Her softness, her warmth—she just felt so damn, damn good. He released her.

  “Don’t try to follow,” he said. He stepped away, moving rapidly toward the nearest opening to the old trolley tunnels. These openings were spread around the circle, almost completely unknown to the modern city. There was a group trying to turn them into an underground mall, and there were tours, but for the most part they were abandoned. The system they concealed was simple enough. Back when Washington had street rail, the tunnels had been used to pass under Dupont Circle traffic. When the trolley system had been abandoned, so had the tunnels.

  So that the various groups concerned could enter easily, there was a false lock on this hatch. With a twist to the right, it could be lifted away. When it was closed the mechanism would fall back into place, and it would appear that the hatch was securely padlocked. Unless you knew just how to open it, there was no way to use it.

  He drew the lock aside and lifted the heavy iron hatch. Entering, he pulled the hatch back down. From this side, you could slide the lock back into position with an iron bar. He listened as it clanked down.

  Diana would be trying to stay with him, he knew, but now she could not succeed. Even if she realized where he’d gone, it would take her hours to find out how to get in. By the time that happened, if it did, this would all be over. In fact, it might already be over.

  He carried an LED flashlight, a hacksaw, a small light-amplifying monocle, and his guns. Two reloads, for a total of eighteen bullets. Too bad he had no plastique but there hadn’t been an opportunity to acquire any. He had a feeling that it would be useful.

  There was a spiral staircase, iron and black with age, which shook on its core as he thundered down.

  This was the original trolley tunnel, still with its inset tracks between the platforms. He played his light briefly around the space, which was surprisingly clean and intact; it looked as if a trolley might come rumbling by at any moment. He had no time to waste, and trotted quickly down the tracks, curving around to the next station. As he ran, he counted the long, narrow drainage openings that were inset at intervals along the track. When he reached the fourth one, he stopped.