The lines between Harmon’s eyes twitched a fraction, but his eyes were what fascinated me. They were cold. Defiant. Still scheming.
“You know, you can’t hold me.”
Jackson wasn’t fazed. “Oh?”
“All this”—Harmon’s gesture included the room and the events of the last ten minutes—“All this is my word against yours. And his.” He sneered his last two words in Axel’s direction. “You have no evidence.”
“We have the chemical/biological agent in my coffee and the capsule you brought it in.”
Harmon chuckled. “Within two hours, all trace evidence will be gone. The virus will feed upon the chemical, and then, without a human host, the virus will die. Amazingly short shelf life, don’t you think?”
Jackson absorbed that, then said, “Axel, show the Vice President.”
Axel pulled a camera from between the leaves of one of the potted poinsettias on the fireplace mantle. He pointed it at Harmon. “We’ve been recording since before you entered the Oval Office.” He jerked his chin toward the recessed bookcase across the room. “Another camera over there caught you putting the bio/chemical agent into the President’s cup.”
Harmon shrugged. “Again, nothing malicious to be found on me or in his cup.”
“We have this conversation. Your words. The audio is quite clear.”
Harmon’s hooded eyes gave nothing away. As if sensing the momentum shifting against him, Harmon turned inward and would not speak.
Jackson, recalling a key piece of the plan, brightened. “Speaking of audio . . .” He pulled his cell phone from his pocket, pressed a few icons. The recording of Harmon’s call with Cushing filled the air between the two men.
The effect was immediately visible to us all. Harmon’s jaw clenched and unclenched and his hands fisted upon his thighs.
Jackson said again, “As I said, you have two choices.”
Harmon refused to look at him.
“We have enough evidence to try you on treason, sedition, and attempted assassination, John. In case you’ve forgotten, those charges carry the death penalty. Given the glacial speed of the judicial system, the trial could take a year. Perhaps longer. Doesn’t matter. You’ll be remanded into federal custody today and will never see the outside of a cell or courtroom until they carry you to your execution.”
Jackson let his words sink in before he added, “Or . . . you can resign. Today. For personal reasons. If you choose that route, you will leave Washington no later than six this evening and return to your home in Boston. You will remove yourself from public life and service—entirely. You will hold no press conferences or interviews, write no books or articles. Give no speeches. You will never return to D.C., never venture into any state contiguous to D.C., and never communicate with any present or former employee or elected official of the federal government as long as you live.
“If you choose to resign, before you leave my office, you will sign an affidavit confessing to your role and participation in a plot to assassinate the duly elected president of this nation. That paperwork will be filed with three attorneys of my discretion. Any deviance from the conditions of your resignation—any deviance in the smallest detail—will result in the public release of your affidavit.”
Jackson and Harmon spent the next three minutes taking each other’s measure. I watched as Harmon seethed and weighed his options. The two choices he had were two too many in my estimation, but it was not my role or decision.
When Jackson had waited on Harmon long enough, he stood. “Axel, use your coms to call in the remainder of my detail.”
Harmon jumped up. “No. Stop. I-I . . . I accept your—”
The door from the West Wing corridor opened and the President’s Chief of Staff entered. Marcus Park took in the tense scene before speaking. “I apologize for the intrusion, Mr. President; however, your Secret Service detail has noted some . . . deviations from standard protocol. I wanted to assure them that all was well—”
At the disruption, I’d shifted my attention from the standoff between Harmon and the President to Park. A strangled sound wrenched my focus back. In an instinctual move to protect the President, I stepped closer to his side.
But it wasn’t the President who was in trouble.
It was Harmon.
Red, blotchy color suffused Harmon’s face, and his mouth hung open. He mouthed a few garbled words. A pink-tinged foam dribbled from between his lips. Then, while I watched, he clutched at his left arm and stiffened. He collapsed, his shoulder striking the coffee table between the two couches before he rolled to the floor.
Park reacted first. He raced to the door and shouted. “Medical! Medical!”
To Axel’s credit, he responded by clearing Harmon’s airway and performing CPR. Then the Vice President coughed once, sending a font of blood shooting from his mouth. President Jackson stood over Axel and Harmon, watching and praying.
In less than a minute, the staff of the White House Medical Unit arrived—as did other West Wing staff members who crowded the doorway. I could hear the sounds of the WHMU’s emergency and trauma staff as they intubated Harmon, began bagging air into his lungs, and charged and discharged a portable defibrillator again and again.
I think we all knew it was pointless. By the time the WHMU emergency staff had taken over from Agent Kennedy, the Vice President was already dead.
The President stayed nearby until two agents from his detail convinced him to move back. They ushered him to his desk, and he stood behind it, staring out the thick, blue-tinted glass of the Oval Office windows onto the south lawn. He was deep in thought when I approached him.
I touched him to let him know I was there. “Sir? Are you all right?”
Robert Jackson moved his head a few inches my way and whispered, “Yes. Thank you. Thank you for everything, Miss Keyes. If it weren’t for you, it might have been me lying over there. Would have been me.”
“Mr. President, what do you think happened? Did Harmon contaminate himself with the toxin he intended for you?”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing, but didn’t he say it was supposed to take forty-eight hours before it caused death?”
Axel’s approach interrupted us. “Sir, I should . . . tidy up the Roosevelt Room.”
“Yes. Right away. Box up the surveillance system and lock it in your car’s trunk.” He looked around. “We’ll remove the two cameras from here later.”
“What about the recording?”
“Destroy it. In fact, do that first.”
“About that, sir . . . and the other, uh, unusual things caught on the recording?”
Jackson faced the head of his detail and crooked his finger until Axel bent his ear toward the President’s mouth. “I have placed my utmost faith and trust in you, Agent Kennedy, and I am giving you a direct order to destroy that recording at the first possible moment—without re-watching it or making a copy. I need you to erase and then physically destroy the system’s hard drive. Am I completely clear?”
Axel straightened. “Yes, sir.”
“Will you comply with my order?”
“I will, sir, but . . .”
“But?”
Axel stood his ground. “But I hope we may speak of this again, sir.”
Jackson studied his lead agent. “All right.”
Axel strode off to box up the surveillance system. Jackson glanced at his other agents. The two of them had positioned themselves near the curving walls of the office, one on either side, about six feet from the President’s desk.
The Vice President’s detail stood near Harmon’s body as the medical unit, still performing CPR, moved him from the floor of the Oval Office to a gurney. At the “whop-whop” sound of a military helicopter setting down on the south lawn, the medical staff, surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service agents, rushed the gurney to the waiting chopper.
Jackson turned to the windows again, where the movement of his mouth wouldn’t be as obvious. “Gemma?”
&
nbsp; “Here, sir.”
“To answer your question, I don’t know what happened to Harmon, but it is for the best. The Secret Service will require an autopsy, of course, but nothing we did here today can be attached to his death. As for Harmon’s attempt to steal the presidency? It is a moot threat now; no one else is positioned as he was to usurp my position. Yes; all for the best.”
For the best? I supposed it was.
I turned inward, aware of the hush.
“Nano?”
I heard and felt nothing.
Very odd.
“Nano?”
Silence. Empty, hollow silence.
A creeping, ugly suspicion budded in my mind. I cringed from it, but it grew larger . . . until it bloomed.
I entered the warehouse, something I hadn’t needed to do since we left the cavern, since the nanomites had further transformed me.
“Nano? Where are you?”
We are here, Gemma Keyes.
“Why are you hiding from me?”
We are not hiding, Gemma Keyes.
“Baloney! You’ve never disappeared like this. What’s going on?”
Gemma Keyes, lunch meat has no bearing on this situation.
“You’re too sophisticated to pull that ‘I don’t take the meaning of your slang’ drivel, Nano. Tell the truth: Did you freeze me out? Why? And what happened to Harmon?”
The warehouse sank into a protracted stillness, so long that I started to get really ticked.
“Nano? I asked you a question. We are six, remember?”
The helicopter containing the Vice President and emergency medical staff took off with the White House Press Pool snapping photographs and running feverish video standups on the south lawn. When the chopper disappeared, the Secret Service herded the press back to the Press Corps Offices.
The Oval Office emptied except for the President and his Chief of Staff. Park was making the case for an immediate press briefing.
“We need to get out ahead of this. Provide some context.”
“Give me a minute. I should speak to his wife, first. We won’t issue an official statement to the press until she’s been told.” Jackson reached for his phone. “Janet? Get me Mrs. Harmon on the phone. Quick as you can, please.”
I wandered over by the fireplace and stared at the untouched breakfast plates on the low table between the two couches, the meals still covered and waiting, the tainted cup of coffee now forgotten on an end table.
“Nano? Did you . . . did you do something to Harmon?”
The fact that I had to ask, told me a lot, because I should have known the answer—immediately and intuitively. The nanomites had blocked me. Shut me out.
Another bone to pick at a later date.
I pressed harder. “Nano? Did you do something to Harmon?”
Yes, Gemma Keyes.
A sick feeling rose in my throat.
“What-what did you do?”
We noted a slight weakness in the wall of his superior vena cava, Gemma Keyes. When the weakness gave way, blood could no longer reach his right atrium in sufficient volume. This resulted in catastrophic failure of the heart.
“A weakness?”
Yes. A nascent aneurysm. At the time of Harmon’s medical event, the weakness had become acute and of a significant size. Under the stress of confrontation, the aneurysm gave way.
“You caused the aneurysm to grow, to weaken?”
We merely exacerbated a defect that could have, potentially, led to his demise.
“No, you killed him!”
He intended to kill the President, did he not?
“But it wasn’t up to you to determine how to deal with him! The President had a plan and was already dealing with Harmon!”
Gemma Keyes, the President’s plan was inherently flawed. It did not decisively remove Harmon as a threat; it merely contained him—with no long-term certitude. As with our handling of Arnaldo Soto, our actions resolved the threat permanently; our actions were both expeditious and efficient.
Fast and effective are always good.
My own words.
My own words!
Then, what they’d said about Soto penetrated.
“Wait . . . what do you mean, your handling of Arnaldo Soto?”
He and his sister have returned to Mexico.
“No! What did you do? Nano!”
The FBI sent a plane to transfer Arnaldo Soto and his sister, Esperanza Duvall, to its Dallas field office. We notified Estevan and Miguel Soto of the details of the transfer and suggested that they insert their men as the plane’s flight crew. We showed them the most efficient means of doing so—one that would ensure no loss of life.
They followed our instructions. Yesterday morning, Soto’s crew landed the FBI’s plane on a private landing strip between Albuquerque and Dallas. They were met by a plane owned by Miguel Soto; his plane returned Arnaldo and his sister to Mexico. No one was harmed; however, Estevan Soto has informed us that the double transplant took place last evening. The surgery was deemed a success.
I screamed inside with rage and frustration. With revulsion.
In what I interpreted as a nano shrug, the mites added, We agreed with the boy Emilio’s assessment regarding Arnaldo Soto: It was more expeditious and efficient for Dead Eyes to be dead, not just Dead Eyes.
The President was still on the phone, preoccupied with consoling the widow of Vice President Harmon, when I slipped out the door to the Rose Garden. There, among the ice- and snow-covered plants and shrubs, the horror of the nanomites’ actions overcame me.
I spewed the contents of my gut onto a snowdrift until there was nothing left. When I finished, I sat on a bench in the cold. Shaking. Angry. Hurt. Betrayed.
Gemma Keyes, we perceive that you are angry with us. However, you can admit that our actions have resolved every problem in the most effective manner, can you not?
I couldn’t believe what I heard. The nanomites had assumed a condescending tone; they had the nerve to flaunt a superior attitude—to me, a Tribe, permanently melded to the nanocloud!
“No, Nano. I cannot admit such a thing. You are very smart, but you are also very ignorant. You—”
We are not ignorant, Gemma Keyes. We have learned many things; we have acquired five percent of all human learning to date—
“Nano! Cold, factual ‘information’ is not everything, does not encompass everything! You are not the judge of what is good and what is bad. Only Jesus is the arbiter of all that is right and wrong. He is the creator—he decides what is right and wrong.”
I rested my pounding head in my hands. “Trust me, Nano. For all your ‘knowledge,’ you are ignorant of many things.”
~~**~~
Part 3:
Stealth Redemption
Chapter 23
I spent hours walking the Washington Mall, wandering from the White House across to the Washington Monument, on to the Jefferson Memorial, then around the Potomac River Tidal Basin, through the MLK, Jr. and Lincoln Memorials, past the Viet Nam Veterans and World War II Memorials, back to the Washington Monument, then up to the Capitol Building. I was just Gemma Keyes visiting our nation’s capital. No invisibility; no Kathy Sawyer. No precautions.
Just walking and taking in the sights. And pondering.
I wound around the Capitol and made my way past the Botanical Gardens and the National Air and Space Museum, then on to L’Enfant Plaza and the nearest Metro station. By the time I concluded my mindless trek through snow and slush and returned to my hotel, my water-resistant boots had “resisted” as long as they could. They were soaked through, and my feet and legs were numbed blocks of ice.
I peeled off my sodden clothes and took a hot shower, and I let the steaming flow beat on me until my body heated and my skin could take no more. Afterward, my body was warm, but my heart felt like bleak, barren tundra.
I went online and booked a return flight to Albuquerque for the following morning. I didn’t use the nanomites. We hadn’t spoken since I left
the Oval Office. I’d departed the White House without saying goodbye to the President, too, but I didn’t think he would mind. I watched him on the news that evening, and he appeared harried enough as it was.
The live coverage of the Vice President’s death was a media feeding frenzy. With nothing definitively new to report or remark on, the commentators had taken to running the same clips on a repeating loop until I had them memorized: Robert and Maddie Jackson standing hand-in-hand before the press, expressing sympathy for the Vice President’s family and sorrow over the untimely death of their friend and colleague (an Oscar-worthy piece of acting on the Jacksons’ part, by the way); an extensive photo collage of the Vice President at every age and important juncture; video and stills of the medical staff rushing the Vice President to the waiting helicopter; and the endless speculation by the pundits: How had the Vice President’s heart condition escaped the notice of his physicians?
The most-repeated clip was that of the chief medical officer of Walter Reed National Military Medical Center as she addressed the press. “Vice President John Etheridge Harmon succumbed to cardiac arrest at approximately 8:30 a.m. this morning. Preliminary forensic evidence suggests cause of death to be the rupture of a previously undiagnosed aortic aneurysm. An autopsy will be performed to confirm the preliminary findings. At this time, we have nothing further to add except that the staff of Walter Reed extends its heartfelt condolences to Mrs. Harmon and to the children and grandchildren.”
***
The announcement of the Vice President’s death hit the public airwaves and social media with the force of an F5 tornado. For General Imogene Cushing, the news was more akin to standing in the path of an inescapable avalanche. In the hours since the news broke, she hadn’t left her apartment. She’d missed a Saturday morning meeting with her team and had ignored her cell phone.
Cushing’s career—her entire life—had died with Harmon. Her promotion to Secretary of the Air Force (a stepping stone on her way to higher things) would never happen.
In point of fact, with her top cover gone, she stood in grave and imminent danger. Her mission and funding would come under the oversight and attention of fresh eyes—and without Harmon running interference for her, neither her actions nor her expenses over the past nine months would withstand scrutiny. She had nothing to show for the 3.75 million dollars she’d expended—nor did she dare suggest that the Vice President had been running a covert operation to acquire futuristic nanotechnology.
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