The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller

by Whitley Strieber

  Below it was the next tunnel he must take. This one was not on new maps. Who had built it was unknown. The earliest map he had found it noted on was from 1736, before the city even existed. What purpose it had served back then was a complete mystery. It had been integrated into the trolley tunnel’s drainage system by its modern builders. To enter, you had to know exactly which of many identical openings led to it, and you had to have considerable courage, because you weren’t going to be coming back the same way you’d gone in.

  He lay flat against the opening and worked his way in. Here the darkness was total, no faint light from overhead vents. He let himself down to the surface, which was damp and slick. He could no longer use the flashlight—too dangerous. The electronics in the monocle worried him, too, but his decision was that it would be the lesser of two evils. In darkness this total, the eye could not adapt.

  Ahead, he saw the long, beautifully mortised stonework of the gently arched tunnel. Was it only a water tunnel? Seeing it up close, he thought not. How had such sophisticated engineering been accomplished so long ago? Above all, why was it that it ended directly under the White House? What had the Founding Fathers, steeped as they were in esoteric secrets, known about the godforsaken swamp where they had chosen to locate their capital?

  He peered ahead into the faint blue of the amplified light. The monocle could be enhanced with the use of infrared, but that would make him even more visible. The problem was that there was so little light to amplify that he could barely see even with the monocle. The flitting shadows that he needed to see might not show up. He could be ambushed—there was no question in his mind about that.

  He listened. With infinite care, he smelled the air. Nothing but wet, cold darkness.

  He could not waste time, not another moment. He had to plunge ahead, to run.

  The sense of menace that surrounded him was very powerful. Instinct told him that danger was close, but it could not stop him, nor even slow him down. He charged on, running flat out into the absolute dark.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THERE WERE strange symbols on the walls, intersecting triangles and other, darker forms, flowing serpents and long, thin hands. Dominating them all, etched into the surface by an expert stonemason, was the pyramid and all-seeing eye that appears on the dollar bill.

  Ahead was a hatch with a wheel in it that looked as if it belonged in a submarine. If he was right about the distance, he was directly under the subbasement of the residence. It still contained air-conditioning and dishwashing equipment, but also, now, some of the new command and control systems for the Presidential Emergency Operations Center under the East Wing. Judging from the blueprints he had seen, there was enough room in the large cable conduits for him to pass through into the communications center just adjacent to the PEOC. The president, the members of the National Security Council, and the Joint Chiefs would be in the PEOC, which was secure against all attacks save a direct hit from a nuclear warhead. Flynn didn’t know if they would survive the searing wave of neutrons that would be emitted over Washington. If they did, they would wish they hadn’t. That he did know.

  The hatch was stuck. He threw his weight into it, dangling from it and pushing his feet against the wall of the tunnel.

  Two spit-and-polish marines appeared, running up from the depths of the tunnel. Their eyes glittered like metal, a sign of stress in Aeon’s biological robots.

  Flynn fired and hit both of them, but they kept coming, seemingly indifferent to the bleeding craters in their chests. He’d killed many biorobots over the years, and realized at once that these had probably been modified so that their hearts were no longer in the center of the chest.

  One of them leaped on him, but he threw it off ten feet along the tunnel. The other grabbed his head and twisted, trying to snap his neck. He got the barrel of his pistol tucked under its chin and fired. It flopped to the floor. But more came, some dressed as marines, some in fatigues or police uniforms or street clothes.

  There were too many. Every shot would count, but he didn’t have enough bullets. In the flashes from his gun, he could see them by the dozens, crowding the tunnel, and more coming up from below, their eyes gleaming like empty diamonds in the frantically questing beam of his flashlight.

  They also had guns, and worse—some sort of gas that was causing him to become disoriented while not affecting them.

  The firefight evolved quickly into a tumult of flashes and whining bullets, and he knew that one of them would hit him at any moment, and then this would be done.

  There was a searing flash, followed by pulsating silence. Flynn knew instantly that they had detonated a stun grenade. But why? They were having more trouble with it than he was.

  For an instant, in the beam of his flashlight, he saw a figure coming up the tunnel at a run.

  It was impossible.

  She waded in among the reeling creatures, firing into them as she came. She leaped over corpses, fisted or pistol-whipped any still moving, and descended on him like a Valkyrie.

  The defenders withdrew in disarray, but he knew it would be for only a moment, just until their adaptive programming could overcome the shock that they had taken. They were programmed to take damage from bullets and knives, but clearly not from stun weapons.

  “Let’s do this,” she said as she reached up and grabbed the hatch wheel.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “You left scuff marks. I followed you in.”

  He’d underestimated her again. Bad habit. “Glad you’re here,” he said.

  Together, they tugged on the wheel. One of the biorobots got to its feet and Flynn blew it away.

  They tugged until they were in danger of ripping their muscles from their bones. But in a situation like this, pain did not matter, damage to oneself did not matter. All that mattered was getting up into the building.

  “We need something to push against!” Diana yelled.

  “Keep on.”

  “My arms are breaking!”

  “Do it.”

  There came a clicking sound, then another.

  Then nothing.

  The wheel moved. Then more. Then stopped again.

  Something leaped on Diana’s back. He took his right hand off the wheel, drew the gun, and fired. What looked like a sheet of skin flopped away, briefly visible in the darting beams of their flashlights. An instant later it was back, some kind of new design, a throbbing, muscular mass, vaguely rectangular. There was no head, there were no eyes, but it was covered with seething hairs, apparently its sensory apparatus. It surged up her legs faster than a snake. It was bleeding, though, from his last shot.

  “God, get it off!”

  “Stay still.”

  It had reached her face. It was enclosing her head. She got an arm free and began convulsively grabbing at the thing. Flynn took out his knife, itself a terrible weapon, a man-killer with a microscopically sharp, superhardened blade.

  Cutting into the thing was like cutting cartilage, not muscle. It was hardened against just this sort of attack. The knife was not going to be effective.

  Diana went to her knees. She began to convulse. Her efforts to pull the creature off her face became disorganized. She was suffocating fast.

  The only thing left to try was to get the barrel of his pistol up under it and fire, and hope that somehow broke its grip and left Diana alive.

  Her light was lying on the floor, and as he thrust the gun into the thing, pressing its barrel up between her left leg and the throbbing muscle, he stepped on it and it went out.

  Cursing his luck, all he could do was hope she would survive. He fired and in the flash saw two things. The first was a great, complicated chunk of the thing flying toward the ceiling. The second was a massive crowd of humanoid biorobots jamming the tunnel and coming straight toward them.

  He pulled at the living mass of flesh. Pulled harder. It held tight.

  Her body was now flaccid. He thought she might be dead but could not be sure. In batt
le, you do not linger over the dead—you keep trying on behalf of the living.

  He dug his fingers into the cartilage and muscle of it and gave a last, mighty tug.

  It rolled off her. He pulled out his own light and looked at it. The thing was still pulsating, and might well recover.

  He fired three shots into the oncoming horde of biorobots, reloaded, and fired another five.

  “Di!”

  She was still. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. Her tongue lolled from her mouth.

  He bent to her and gave her mouth-to-mouth. At first, nothing came back but dead air. But then she coughed, she gasped, she opened her eyes.

  His love surprised him, it was like lava, a white-hot flow of sheer joy in his heart.

  She cried out, again, again, scream after scream.

  He held her to him. He could feel her gagging and struggling to regain her composure. His mind echoed with just one thought, repeated over and over: “There is no time, there is no time.”

  “OK,” he said, “OK.” What he had been afraid of was happening. She was slowing him down. “We need to do this.”

  “I know … please…”

  He stood up and grasped the wheel once again. Four of the biorobots, now just a few feet away, leaped at him. He shot two of them in the face, and the other two dropped back.

  He tugged at the wheel, which moved a little. She got her shaking hands on it and once again they pulled together. Perhaps it was going to give way, or perhaps the little bit of extra strength she added helped, but it finally released.

  The hatch fell open. Overhead, Flynn saw parts of the frame that the floor of the equipment room was seated in.

  Getting through it would take hours.

  Above the next square in the grid of beams there was the outline of a hatch, but Flynn was too big to slip through the crawl space. If the hatch could somehow be opened from above, he could just make it, but that was not going to happen.

  They had lost. Simple as that. The next time the biorobots rushed them or sent in some other monstrosity, they were done.

  There was a strange sound. He shone his light toward it, which revealed Diana, bent double. She was vomiting. She gagged, coughed, spat, and looked up. Saying nothing, she went past him and fulcrumed herself up into the crawl space.

  “It’s tight,” she said.

  “Nobody can get through there.”

  “If the hatch were open, we both could.”

  “I know it.”

  She slid a little farther in.

  “You’ll be trapped.”

  “Better than being eaten.”

  That was true enough. His plan had always been to shoot himself if he ran out of options. For years, he’d carried cyanide capsules, but he’d stopped this practice after one had leaked in its case—leaked, or been tampered with; he could not be sure.

  “Push me,” she said. Her head and shoulders were in the crawl space, one arm stretched toward the hatch.

  “Di, you’re not coming back out, you realize that.”

  “Do it, and give me your knife. The latch is simple. All I need is a blade.”

  He pushed the knife up beside her, hilt first. “It’s sharp as hell—don’t even breathe on that blade.”

  She took it and levered her left arm under the metal grid, hissing through her teeth from the pain. She was now head and shoulders beneath the hatch. Her legs dangled down. Flynn stood watch. The biorobots edged nearer. From somewhere deep in the shaft there came the roar of some enormous beast. The biorobots began shuffling among themselves. They were making room for it, standing aside.

  “Any luck?” Flynn said.

  “Getting—just—just—”

  Loud slithering. Enormous. He shone the light toward the sound.

  “Give me back that light, goddamnit!”

  It was a crocodile at least twenty feet long and it was coming fast, and it had desperately human eyes—green, staring, appalled. One of Aeon’s skills was to combine species.

  What would that be like, living like that, with the memories of a man and the instincts of a brutal reptile? The eyes were, of course, insane.

  Flynn raised his pistol. There were now just three bullets left, and crocodiles are notoriously hard to kill.

  He fired. It seemed to swallow the bullet. With another hissing roar, it lunged at him.

  “Light! You damn fool, where are you?”

  He fired again, this time into the brain.

  It roared again, spraying a haze of blood. The eyes were all wild now, bloodshot and practically bulging out of the head.

  “FLYNN, PLEASE!”

  The thing latched onto his leg. He felt the teeth penetrate, then dig deep into the muscle.

  Last shot. Directly into the skull, point-blank range.

  The head blew apart; Flynn’s devastating bullets had finally hit a vulnerable point.

  The jaw dropped open and the creature began convulsing wildly, lurching all over the tunnel, momentarily blocking the way of the biorobots. But they had guns, too, and began firing past it.

  With bullets whinging off the walls, Flynn shone the light up into the crawl space.

  There came a clanking sound, then a metallic crash, and Diana’s legs were gone. In the place of her body a glow shone down from above.

  “Come on,” she called.

  He drew himself up. About eighteen inches of the hatch extended to the part of the floor that was directly above it, and Flynn was able to get through. She helped him pull himself into the basement.

  “My God,” he said. “My dear God.”

  Together, almost ceremonially, they closed the hatch. At once, it began shaking. The biorobots were not going to stop, and the latch that Diana had gotten through was not going to hold them back.

  Flynn looked around the room. He saw large, boxy units of air-conditioning equipment and compact server farms on equipment racks, a row of twelve of them. He couldn’t move the fans and compressors and dared not touch the servers.

  “We can’t secure the hatch,” she said.

  “I know it.”

  It began hopping on its hinges. Maybe a minute was left before they poured into the room.

  “We need to get into the PEOC. Odds are they won’t follow us.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Aeon is already in that room, you can be sure. There are implanted people in there, and worse. Problem is, nobody understands this. We’re a couple of intruders with a dubious agenda.”

  “Aeon will have support in the operational group. Somebody in there is going to be a biorobot, maybe more than one of them, and Lorna won’t be the only implant.”

  The hatch shook so hard it felt like an earthquake. Then it stopped. The latch began to rattle.

  Flynn strode along the catwalk to the heavy steel door that separated this machine room from the East Wing basement and the PEOC. He saw that the door had a locking mechanism on it that could be remotely activated. However, it was not locked—a safety measure, no doubt. It would probably be sealed only under DEFCON 5, which would not be triggered until missiles were actually in flight.

  “We’re good,” he said. “Still good.”

  He pulled the door open. The corridor beyond was silent, dark, and empty. At the end was a steel door painted bright red. The entrance to the PEOC.

  “Let’s do it,” Flynn said. As they moved toward the door, the two Secret Service agents guarding it leaped to their feet.

  Flynn contemplated what was probably his greatest problem: He was out of bullets.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “STAY BEHIND me,” Flynn said. “If they belong to Aeon, they’re likely to open fire without warning.” Hands up, he took a careful step forward.

  Both agents moved to draw their pistols.

  “Hey, hold it,” Flynn said.

  “You hold it. Stop right there.”

  Flynn kept walking, one step, two, three.

  “Stop! Now!”

  Flynn obeyed. He was
not quite close enough to take them before they could pull their triggers. He needed a couple more steps.

  “Please identify yourselves,” one of the agents said. He was older, heavy around the edges, balding. His partner was young and vacant enough to be a biorobot.

  “Maintenance,” Flynn said. “There’s a drainage issue.”

  This brought a slight smile to the face of the older agent. “Which would be why you two smell like you’ve been in a sewer.”

  Flynn took a casual step closer. “Sorry about that. Look, I don’t know what’s going on in there, but we need to open a valve in the men’s room or they’re gonna be real unhappy real soon.”

  “Where’s your equipment?”

  Flynn nodded. “Back there. Don’t need it for the valve.” He took another step.

  The second agent’s jaw clenched and his muscles tightened. His hand began moving toward his jacket. If he drew his weapon, he would certainly fire; his fixed stare, bright with menace, told that story very clearly. The older agent was still smiling.

  When the younger agent started to bring his gun out of its shoulder holster, Flynn delivered a blow to his throat. He crumpled, coughing and gagging.

  The older man’s mouth dropped open. He looked down at his partner, then back at Flynn.

  “Sorry about that,” Flynn said. “No guns, please.”

  The agent held his hands away from his body. “No guns, OK.” He regarded Flynn with the eyes of a terrified mouse.

  Flynn reached down, picked up the comatose agent’s gun, and slipped it into his pocket.

  “Watch out,” Diana said.

  The older agent was going for his pistol. Flynn reached out with lightning speed, took it, and handed it to Diana.

  The agent stared at his hand, then started rubbing it. “You’re that weird guy that’s been hanging out in the Residence at night. The alien.”

  “I’m not an alien.”

  “You still can’t go in there, mister. Don’t you know we’re at DEFCON 4?”