*
Just across the Potomac River from the White House, the Pentagon was the largest office building in the world. The giant five-sided structure was home to the byzantine bureaucracies of the United States Armed Forces and was a small city unto itself. Even two hours before sunrise, when its workforce was reduced to the few thousand souls who pulled the graveyard shift, it was a bustling place. An armada of semis were lined up near the building’s loading docks to deliver everything from classified documents to restaurant supplies, while dozens of trash trucks hauled away the previous day’s mountain of waste.
Speeding across the southern parking lot, an unmarked late-model Ford sedan was headed directly for the building at seventy miles per hour. A second before it rammed into the side of the edifice, it broke into a long skid and fishtailed perfectly into the parking space closest to the front doors.
Seconds later, General William M. Grey, commander in chief of the United States Space Command and head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff came up the steps into the lobby, the steel taps on the soles of his shoes clicking an angry rhythm across the tiled floor. Forty-five minutes earlier, he’d been dead asleep when the phone rang. Nevertheless, the stocky sixty-year-old arrived at the office looking every inch the five-star general, all spit and polish. Without breaking stride, he was joined by his staff commander, Colonel Ray Castillo. The lanky young science officer followed his scowling boss to a fleet of elevators and opened a set of doors with a swipe of his identity card. The doors swooshed open and the two men stepped inside. The instant the doors were closed, the men knew it was safe to talk.
“Who else knows about this?” the general demanded.
“SETI out in New Mexico phoned about an hour ago. They picked up a radio signal at approximately one fifteen A.M. The thing is emitting a repetitive signal, which we’re trying to interpret.” Castillo answered nervously, trying to sound professional. He knew how little tolerance Grey had for sloppy work.
“They tell anybody else? The press?”
“They agreed to keep quiet about it for the time being. They’re afraid of losing credibility if they announce anything prematurely, so they’re going to run additional tests.”
“Well, what is this damn thing? Do they know?”
Colonel Castillo shook his head and smiled. “No, sir, they’re clueless, even more confused than we are.” Grey swiveled his head around and impaled his assistant with a disapproving grimace. The men and women who worked for the United States Space Command, an autonomous division of the Air Force, were not permitted to be confused about anything, not while Grey was running the show. Their job was to know all of the answers all of the time. Castillo winced and studied the stack of papers he was carrying. “Excuse me, sir.”
The doors opened onto a clean white basement hallway. Castillo led the way down the corridor and through a thick door. He and the general stepped into a plush, cavernous underground strategy room, with a big screen computerized map dominating the main wall. Designed and built in the late seventies, the room was a large oval space with the primary work area, sixty radar consoles, sunk three feet below a 360° perimeter walkway. Three dozen high-security-clearance personnel were down in the pit monitoring everything that moved through the sky: every satellite, every reconnaissance mission, every commercial passenger flight, and every moment of every space shuttle mission. In addition, a network of specially dedicated surveillance satellites kept an eye on each of the thousands of known nuclear missile silos worldwide. With its thick carpeting and colorfully painted wall murals of space flight, it always reminded Grey of “a goddamned library,” as he had called it on more than one occasion.
“Take a look at these monitors,” Castillo said, pointing to a row of ordinary televisions tuned to news broadcasts from around the globe. Every few seconds, the picture quality would suddenly disintegrate into a rolling blur, different from any sort of picture distortion they’d seen before. “Satellite reception has been impaired. All satellite reception, ours included. But we were able to get these shots.”
He led the way to a nearby glass table which was lit from below and showed Grey a large photographic transparency. Taken with an infrared camera, it showed a blotchy, orb-like object set against a background of stars. The image quality was too grainy and distorted for the general to make either heads or tails of it. Several members of the Space Command staff joined them at the table. Grey, the only non-scientist in the group, wasn’t about to start asking a bunch of asinine questions. Instead, he glowered down at the blurry image for a moment before announcing his opinion.
“Looks like a big turd.”
Castillo was about to laugh when he realized his boss wasn’t trying to be funny. He continued his presentation by laying down a second, equally turdlike photo of the object. “We estimate this thing has a diameter of over five hundred and fifty kilometers,” he explained, “and a mass equal to roughly one-quarter of the moon’s.”
“Holy Mother of…” Grey didn’t like the sound of that. “What do you think it is? A meteor, maybe?”
The entire clique of officers glanced around at one another. Obviously, Grey hadn’t been completely briefed about the nature of the object they were looking at. “No, sir,” one of the officers piped up, “it’s definitely not a meteor.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, for one thing, sir, it’s slowing down. It’s been slowing down ever since we first spotted it.”
Grey’s trademark scowl melted temporarily into one of bewilderment as the implications of what he was being told began to register. If it was slowing down, it could only mean the object was being controlled, piloted.
Without a moment of hesitation, he marched to the nearest phone and called the secretary of defense at home. When informed by the man’s wife that he was sleeping, Grey barked into the receiver, “Then wake him up! This is an emergency.”
*
Thomas Whitmore, forty-eight years old, was one of the first people awake in a city of early risers. Still in his pajamas, he lay on top of the covers with a pair of bifocals perched at the end of his nose thumbing through a stack of newspapers. It was a sweltering, muggy night in the District of Columbia, and even with the air-conditioning running, he was too uncomfortable to fall back asleep. The phone rang at a few minutes past 4 A.M. Without lifting his eyes from an article about international shipping policy, he reached over to the nightstand, picked up the receiver, and waited for whomever was calling to begin speaking.
“Hello, handsome,” a female voice purred into the phone.
That captured his attention. Recognizing the voice, Whitmore tossed the paper to one side. “Well, well. I didn’t expect to hear from you tonight. Thought you’d already be asleep. How may I assist you?” He smiled.
“Talk to me while I get undressed,” she replied.
“I think I can help you with that request,” Whitmore said, arching an eyebrow. He didn’t get an invitation like that every day. He glanced around the sumptuously appointed bedroom, making sure no one was around except the small figure beneath the sheet at the other side of the bed. Glancing up at the clock, he noticed, “It’s past four in the morning here. Are you just getting in?”
“Yes, I am.” She didn’t sound too pleased.
“You must want to strangle me.”
“That possibility has crossed my mind.”
“Honey, federal law specifically prohibits attempts to cause me any bodily harm,” he informed her. “Why are you so late?”
“The party was out in Malibu and they closed the Pacific Coast Highway. The waves were crashing all the way up onto the highway. They think there must have been an earthquake somewhere out at sea. Anyway—”
“So, what did Howard say?” Whitmore asked anxiously. He had sent her to Los Angeles on a not-so-secret mission, hoping to recruit Howard Story, a super-rich Hollywood entertainment executive with a Wall Street background, to join their campaign.
“He’s on board,” she reported.
“Excellent! Marilyn, you’re amazing. Thank you. I’ll never ask you to do this kind of thing again.”
“Liar,” she crooned with a smile. One of the things Marilyn Whitmore loved the most about her husband was his inability to lie. She shut off the light in her hotel room and slipped into bed. She hated those glitzy West Coast movie people and their lavish garden parties, everyone trying to impress everyone else with their name-dropping and tedious descriptions of their next big project. She’d rather have been in bare feet and jeans hanging around “the house.”
“In that case, I have a confession to make,” Whitmore told her. “I’m lying in bed next to a beautiful young brunette.” As he said this, the small figure on the other side of the bed stirred slightly, vaguely aware she was being talked about. Whitmore pulled back the sheet to reveal the sleeping face of his six-year-old daughter, Patricia, who had graced her pillow case with a tiny drool mark.
“Tom, I hope you didn’t let her stay up watching TV all night again.”
“Only part of the night,” her husband admitted.
Patricia recognized something in her father’s voice and, without opening her eyes, lifted her head off the pillow. “Is that Mommy?”
“Uh-oh! Somebody’s waking up,” Whitmore said into the phone, “and I think she wants to talk to you. When exactly are you flying back here?”
“Right after the luncheon tomorrow.”
“Great. Call me from the plane if you can. I love you. Now, here’s the wee one.”
He passed the phone to his daughter and found the remote control for the television. He turned the set on and surfed through a few channels until he ran across a political talk show, a panel of pundits pontificating on politics. The first thing he noticed was the picture distortion. Every few seconds, the screen split into vertical bars which then rolled and collapsed to the side. Although it was distracting, it didn’t prevent him from listening to the crossfire argument.
“I said it during the campaign and I still say it today,” a bald man in suspenders declared, “the brand of leadership the president provided during the Gulf War bears no relationship to the kind of savvy insider politics needed to survive in Washington. After a brief honeymoon period with the congress, his inexperience is catching up with him. His popularity numbers continue to decline in the polls.”
A woman with smart hair and a sharp tongue waved her hand in the air, dismissing the bald man’s ideas. “Charlie, you remind me of a broken clock—you’re only right twice a day. But this is one of the few times I agree with you. The current administration has gotten bogged down in the swamp of D.C. deal-making. In recent weeks, the president has waded into the murky waters of pragmatic backroom politics, only to find the sharks of the Republican party biting at his ankles.”
Whitmore rolled his eyes at the overwrought prose. “Where in the world do they find these people?” Simultaneously disgusted and entertained, he got out of bed to see if he could adjust the set. As he began working the knobs, the channels began flipping one after the other. He stared at the set confused until he turned around and discovered that Patricia had picked up the remote control he’d left behind. After saying goodbye to her mother, she was hunting for the morning’s first cartoons. Every station had the same picture distortion.
“Honey, it’s too early for cartoons. You need to go back to sleep for a little while.”
“Yes, I know, but…” The little girl paused to think, hoping she might be able to negotiate a compromise. Then she tried a different strategy. “Why is the picture all messed up?”
“It’s an experiment,” her father informed her. “The people at the television stations want to see if they can make little girls watch really boring shows all night so they miss everything fun during the day.”
Patricia Whitmore wasn’t buying any of it. “Daddy,” she tilted her head to one side, “that’s preposterous.”
“Preposterous?” Whitmore chuckled. “I like that.” Nevertheless, he switched off the television and put the remote out of reach. “Get some sleep, sweetheart.” He put on his robe, gathered up his newspapers, and slipped out the door.
In the hallway, a man in an expensive suit was sitting on a chair reading a paperback novel. Startled, he snapped the book closed and jumped to his feet. “Good morning, Mr. President.”
“Morning, George.” Whitmore stopped and handed him a section of the newspaper. “I’ve got one word for you: the Chicago White Sox!”
“They won again?”
“Read it and weep, my friend.”
In truth, neither man cared very much about sports, but both of them paid enough attention to give them something to talk about when they were together. George was from Kansas City and Whitmore from Chicago. Last night’s victory put the Sox half a game ahead of the Royals in the pennant race. George, the Secret Service agent who protected the president from midnight to six, pretended to study the paper until Whitmore was a polite distance down the hallway. He then pulled out his walkie-talkie and whispered a message to his fellow bodyguards, alerting them that their workday had begun.
The breakfast nook was a cheery room decorated with yellow wallpaper and antique furniture collected by Woodrow Wilson in the early years of the century. At the long table in the center of the room was an attractive young woman in a white blouse and tan skirt. Her shoes were sensible and her hair was perfect. She’d already finished her breakfast and was elbow deep in a mound of newspapers and press releases by the time her boss joined her.
“Connie, you’re up early.”
“This is disgusting, reprehensible,” she growled without looking up, “the lowest form of bottom-feeding scum-sucking journalism I’ve ever seen.”
She was beautiful, intelligent, and always ready for a fight. Constance Spano, President Whitmore’s communications director, had started out as a campaign staffer during his very first run for political office and, over the years, had developed into his most trusted adviser. The two of them had reached the point where they could finish each other’s sentences. Although she was in her late thirties, she looked much younger and was a very visible symbol of Whitmore’s “baby-boomer” presidency. She made it her job to aggressively defend her boss against an increasingly hostile and irresponsible press. The object of her wrath this morning was the editorial page of The Post.
“I can’t believe this crap,” she said slapping the paper with the back of her hand, “there are a hundred bills before Congress right now and they devote their Friday op/ed column to personality assassination.” Without looking up, she cleared some room for him at the table.
“Good morning, Connie,” her boss said again pointedly, as he poured himself a cup of coffee.
She looked up from the paper. “Oh, right, sorry. Good morning,” she said before launching off once again on the crimes of the city’s conservative newspapers. “Tom, they’ve spent all week taking cheap shots at your health care and energy proposals, but today they’re attacking your character outright. Just listen to this: ‘Addressing Congress…’” She paused long enough for the butler to serve the chief his omelet. “‘…Addressing Congress earlier this week, Whitmore seemed less like the president than the orphan child Oliver holding up his empty bowl and pleading, “Please sir, I’d like some more.”’” Connie stared across the table, outraged. “Am I missing something here, or is that just old-fashioned mud-slinging?”
Whitmore, an unusual politician, never took the papers too seriously. He left that part of the job to Connie, knowing that before the day was done, she would strike back at anyone who had dared to attack him. “He deserved it,” the president said between mouthfuls.
“Who did? Deserved what?”
“Oliver. A hungry kid asking for a second helping of gruel from the stingy master of the orphanage. I think it’s kind of flattering.”
Connie disagreed. “The point is, they’re attacking your age. Trying to spread the idea that you don’t have enough experience or wisdom. And the onl
y reason it’s working for them is because of the perception that you’ve hung up your guns, set aside your ideals. When Thomas Whitmore is fighting for what he believes in, the media calls it idealism. But lately, there’s been too damn much compromising, too much you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours business.” She shut up and reached for her coffee, realizing she’d overstated her case. But somebody, Connie thought, needed to have the guts to say it out loud.
Whitmore stabbed another bite of his omelet, chewing it thoroughly before he responded. “There’s a fine line between standing behind a principle and hiding behind one,” he said calmly. “I can tolerate some compromise if we’re actually able to get some things done around here. The American people didn’t send me here to make a bunch of pretty speeches. They want results, and that’s what I’m trying to give them.”
As far as Connie was concerned, he was missing the point. Real accomplishments, she believed, weren’t born from a spirit of muddling through. She feared Whitmore was losing his fire, his vision. Until recently, everything about his presidency had been different. They’d campaigned on the themes of service and sacrifice, an “Ask not what your country can do for you…” message that all the experts and operators told them was sure-fire political suicide. They said nobody wanted to hear about doing more and having less. But in Whitmore’s awkward-charming way, he’d made the message real to millions of Americans, and he had easily beaten his Republican opponent. In his first year, he’d introduced major legislative initiatives to reform everything from the legal system to health care to the environment. But for the past few months, the programs had been stalled in committees, held hostage by lawmakers who all wanted something on the side for their districts. Against the advice of Connie and many of his advisers, the young president had spent most of his time and energy shepherding his bills through the process, allowing himself to get bogged down by first-term representatives he could have steamrollered. All of them were willing to cooperate, but only in exchange for one favor or another. In the meantime, his prestige and popularity were down among the voters. Connie considered Whitmore not only her boss, but her friend and her hero. It killed her to see him bleeding from the thousand small wounds inflicted on him by other politicians, and the summer session was only beginning.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 2