That was the last thing Bishop remembered until he was sitting in a metal chair in some other room, being examined by a medic.
He was no longer so cold. And he could hear.
“Mr. Bishop, do you have any pain?”
Bishop turned tear-blurred eyes toward the speaker. It was a young woman. She was wearing a look of grave concern. He wondered how she knew his name, until he saw her eyes looking at his chest and he remembered the name tag. He looked down. It hung incongruously from a piece of lapel on the remnants of the dinner jacket he still had on. An FBI-issue terry-cloth wrap had been thrown around his shoulders.
“Do you understand me?” the woman asked.
He nodded. “No pain,” he said.
“I’m going to leave you here,” she said. “You have a few cuts and burns but—”
“What happened?” he asked stupidly.
“An explosion,” she said. “If you’ll wait here, I’m going to take care of someone else.”
“I’ll wait,” he said. His eyes dropped to the floor. A dusty tile floor. There were planters nearby. He saw dark shops beyond. He had been through here earlier in the day, walking toward the ballroom with ...
“Oh, Christ!” he cried. He tried to stand, dropped as his legs refused to cooperate, and sat, looking around.
He didn’t remember the explosion, but he remembered the moments before it. He and Laura were sitting at their table, almost dead center in the big hall. They were talking pleasantly to people they didn’t know, a couple who seemed enchanted with Laura, and waiting for Julie to step to the podium. Then the world went red and he felt as if he were flying.
He woke, briefly.
Bishop’s thoughts drifted backward into waves of elapsed memories, of the times his daughter needed him. To be there. To show up. He summoned up the first words she’d been able to sound out for herself, during a short family trip to Florida when she was five, written on a bus window. E-mer-gen-cy. Emergency exit. He could still see her proud smile, her darling little legs cheerily kicking at opposite tempos, unable to reach the floor or the seat in front of her. Searching through the fog, he remembered the times he pretended to rise from the dead during her school’s haunted hayride nights. Despite the thick, gnarled makeup he wore, she could always tell when it was her father clawing at the side of the wagon. And despite the multitude of shrill, shrieking children, he could always single out his daughter’s excited squeal. He always made her the lucky victim, the most special rider of the night.
But he struggled to retain the thought of her face as it was then, as her present, more familiar features took hold of his delusional imagination.
Laura was glowing, her head turned slightly away from him, forward. Her light summer dress swaying proudly like a new flag, her hair flowing as if it were a tropical shore. He followed her as she slowly ran, silently along the slate pathway leading to their home, home toward her mother. Her mother. His wife. His late wife. She had been the embodiment of his future, of his daughter’s future. His departed companion was the eternal bond between them, the rope connecting the climber to the cliff. And when that was detached, Bishop had to become Laura’s security. His daughter’s guide, her unconditional friend, her devoted supporter. Her father.
Bishop saw himself stop short only paces away from them. His family. The only links to what he could call real life. Laura embraced her mother like they were seeing each other for the last time, like only children know how to hold, except it was Bishop who couldn’t stay there, who didn’t feel right, and then she looked at her father as if to say, “Thank you.”
He had been there for her. Whenever he could be, in whatever shape the world had left him in. With whatever love he had protected for her inside his heart. It was always there. And always would be. And no one was ever going to remove that from him.
And now ...
He looked for his wristwatch, saw that the pressure he felt there was his bandaged forearm. He had neither a wristwatch nor a shirtsleeve. He let the arm drop, then raised his hand in order to cry into it. He wasn’t sure exactly why he was crying. But then a functioning part of his mind began putting it together. The medic had said there was an explosion of some kind. He had been knocked over and out, injured. His daughter ...
“Dear God ...”
He had an overpowering urge to see her, to hold her, but his body was trembling. Someone, one of the medics, saw him and came over to him, decided that he was not all right and that he needed to go to the hospital. He let himself be moved, lifted, wheeled for what seemed an interminable time. He was dropping, wheeled again. There were sights, shapes, sounds, but all he could see was his daughter’s destroyed body lying next to him, her pale flesh so still.
He was crying again, shaking, and then there was a pinch in his arm and it was over.
CHAPTER 13
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The Situation Room was rank. All the energetic air-conditioning did was turn it into chilled rankness.
Ryan Kealey knew the primary ingredients of the smell: sweat and coffee. He could tell, almost to the half hour, how long the mix had been fermenting. He could also identify the kind of perspiration. It wasn’t the surface sweat of exertion, the kind you pushed away with a sleeve on the basketball court. It was the deep, hot, stagnant sweat of pressure laced with fear.
“I liked it better when the air had smoke in it,” Kealey said as Robert Andrews shook his hand.
“Sure used to hide that other stuff, didn’t it?” the CIA chief said knowingly behind a crooked grin.
“Killed those nasal passages dead,” Kealey answered, returning the smile.
Andrews extended a hand toward the seat that had been vacated by Jon Harper. It felt good to collapse into it. The president was not here, so Kealey had time to collect his thoughts.
The flight from the rooftop of the convention center to the parking lot of the George Washington University Hospital had taken a little over a half hour. The ride to the White House in a black Escalade had taken nearly twice as long due to police roadblocks and traffic. There had been more people leaving D.C. than usual, and it had nothing to do with the tail end of a busy commute. If anything, the traffic should have been lighter as the federal and local intelligence communities stayed at their desks, looking for clues about what had happened and what could happen next.
These are families leaving town, he’d thought as he noted the higher than usual percentage of minivans.
That was the curse of his profession. Noticing things. Both the conscious and subconscious mind were trained to record data. The vast amount of stored information—some of it unidentified because it was never tapped—was a phenomenon first studied after the September 11 attacks. Without naming names, mental health workers determined the percentage of New Yorkers who “knew something was wrong” by the wrong-way flight down the Hudson River of the first hijacked jet, American Airlines Flight 11. It was a staggering 59 percent. More than half the people who sought psychiatric counseling were subliminally aware of existing flight patterns by sight, but mostly by sound.
Kealey’s entire existence was like that. It was one reason he had to get out. The vessel was full.
But it was never drained, he thought as he noticed that more office lights were on than usual, that street vendors were hawking more American flags than before, that helicopters were hovering, instead of passing over the capital. In many of those, onboard computers were comparing license plates to U-Haul databases and profiling renters by name; onboard cameras were watching approaches to the Capitol, the White House, and other institutions and using facial recognition software to match pedestrians to FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security “wanted” lists; onboard infrared and ultraviolet eyes were scanning backpacks and laptops, underwear and shoes, baby strollers and shopping bags for explosives or radiological material. One of them, Kealey knew, would be monitoring all cell phone communications in the city, watching for dialed numbers. Terrorists who planted improvised explosive device
s triggered them with phone-to-phone calls. These phones were “short-term units” bought with cash off the rack, the pay-as-you-go variety. IDing buyers at domestic electronics stores, running their names for potential terror affiliations, was not enough; many of these phones came from overseas. Thus, Homeland Security had developed software to keep a record of every call made in the United States to and from “long-term units.” Any call that was not on this list was instantly flagged. Between the time the first two digits of the receiving phone signaled an alert and the last two digits could be dialed, a computer on board the chopper activated Trask Industries’ new KillButton. This was a directed electromagnetic pulse that would immediately shut down the receiving cell phone and pinpoint the caller for police.
All of that flashed through Kealey’s brain as a new mental file was opened: D.C. in panic mode. He would always remember those details and would be able to apply them to any other city on the planet. Even if it was a place he had never been, he would know at once whether something was wrong.
“Helluva signal you worked out, Mr. Kealey,” Homeland Security director Max Carlson said.
“Thanks. This morning I didn’t even know what a user hashtag was.”
There were knowing chuckles around the table. Kealey could tell that many of those present still didn’t.
“How are Allison and the boy?” Andrews asked.
“Battered but unharmed.”
“And Julie?”
Kealey made a face. He didn’t feel it was his place to say. “Alive,” was all he volunteered.
“Did you see Jon at the hospital?” Andrews asked.
Kealey shook his head. “He was running toward the chopper while I was being shown to an SUV.”
All the conversation danced wide of the reason they were here. No one wanted to discuss the attack or Kealey’s perspectives without the president in attendance. It was bad form; even a lame duck could ask for the resignation of a department head.
The president emerged from the Executive Conference Room with Jeff Dryfoos. Kealey went to rise, but Brenneman motioned him to stay where he was. The secretary of state departed, a leather case under his arm, and the president sat. He gestured to nearly empty plates of sandwiches in the middle of the conference table.
“Help yourself,” he said.
Kealey was hungry. He obliged, placing a turkey wrap on a small ceramic plate and pulling it toward him.
“Thanks for coming,” the president said. “Great work you did tonight. Everyone appreciates it.”
It never sat quite right, having a body count referred to as “great work.” Not that those guys at the convention center didn’t deserve to die. It was just one of those actions that seemed to merit reflection, not a pat on the back. Besides, there wasn’t a field agent alive who would feel in his or her heart that this was a job well done. The trick was to take the bastards out before they killed anyone.
Kealey thanked the president, anyway.
“Mr. Dryfoos is off to see some consuls general with fingerprints,” the president said. “Bob, did you tell Ryan what we have?”
“Not yet, sir,” Andrews said. He turned to Kealey.
“Eastern Europeans and Middle Eastern perps,” Kealey said to save time. “INS confirms they were here legally.”
It was as though someone had dropped a quilt on the room. No one spoke or moved for an eternity of seconds.
“Yeah,” Andrews said at last.
“Not a big solve on my part,” Kealey said. “I heard the languages, and you don’t coordinate something this big with so many nationalities unless they’ve been on-site for a while. Planners couldn’t risk even one illegal being turned up in an operation of this size.”
The silence returned.
“This might be a good time for you to tell us what else you know,” the president suggested.
“One question first, sir,” Kealey said. “Has anyone taken credit for the attacks?”
“Not yet,” Andrews said.
“Has anyone denied being behind the attacks?” Kealey asked, pressing.
Andrews shook his head. It was a gesture of admiration, not denial. “We were discussing that just before you arrived. The usual suspects, al-Qaeda and Hamas, among others, have issued Web statements of approval, but from the sidelines. They’ve all made a point of saying they had no operational involvement in this.”
“Because they’re all basically cowards and fear reprisals,” said someone sitting across the table. He was Admiral Donald Breen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Kealey could tell he hadn’t been here long; his uniform wasn’t wrinkled.
No one disagreed with his assessment.
“It’s more than that, Admiral,” Kealey said.
“Oh?”
Andrews put a hand on Kealey’s wrist. Obviously, the CIA director had figured it out, too, and felt it would go down better coming from him.
“That kind of distancing from multiple groups tells us that whoever planned this attack is a major new player,” Kealey said. “If the other groups know who it was, then they do not want to claim credit for the accomplishment out of respect. It’s a way of tipping their hat. If they do not know them, the same rule applies, though for a different reason. Al-Qaeda and the others want to show that they respect the accomplishment in the hopes of being asked to participate in future attacks.”
Admiral Breen nodded thoughtfully. Kealey knew the man only by reputation. He had been appointed by the president because he believed in military solutions as a last resort. That meant hearing, and exhausting, all other opinions first.
“So we’re agreed that we probably have a new mega-player on the scene?” the president asked. “Mr. Kealey?”
He nodded gravely. “People don’t just rig themselves with explosive devices, infiltrate two major weekend events, and carry MP5K assault weapons without serious funding, preparation, and support.”
“I’d go a step further and say it’s unprecedented,” Carlson added.
“Do we know anything about the kind of explosives they used?” Kealey asked.
“Preliminary field analysis of the residue indicates both C-four and Semtex,” Carlson told him.
“Suggesting diverse sources,” Kealey said. “One of them gets closed down, they still have another. What about their physical construction ?”
“The one in the ballroom appears to have been a briefcase bomb, and the individual who blew himself up in the hotel wore an explosive belt. We’re not sure of the third, the one inside the food area.”
“I saw that area myself,” Kealey said. “It was totaled. That’s where Colin Dearborn was. I asked him about it before I left. He said it was a massive white blast.”
“Magnesium component,” Andrews said.
Kealey nodded. “Right. The only reason he survived, and without so much as a scratch, was because he leaned against a column to tweet.”
“Max, is the magnesium significant?” the president asked. He was careful to pitch that one to Homeland Security. With Andrews and Kealey present, he clearly didn’t want this to become too much of a CIA show.
“Burns,” Carlson said. “In powdered form it becomes and remains extremely hot. In addition to shrapnel, it’s a way of ramping up the pain and damage.”
The president shook his head. He looked tired to Kealey—not today, but generally—yet at the same time he seemed more focused and energized than in the old days.
“Mr. President, while you were out, we picked up some intel,” Sandy Mathis said.
“Go ahead,” Brenneman said, swiveling his chair slightly.
Kealey turned toward the video monitor. He had noticed that it was on but hadn’t really paid any attention. Kealey did not know this man by name or reputation.
“A bartender at the Hilton came forward with information about a man named Michael, or so the individual claimed,” Mathis said. “Thirtyish, blue sports jacket, white shirt, dark pants. He’d stopped in a short while before the explosions, ordered an i
ced tea. He was carrying a briefcase and said that he was an attendee of Julie’s nursing conference. According to the bartender, he was sweating, flushed. Nervous was the word the bartender used.”
Kealey waited in silence. He could tell there was more.
“This man, sounds like Michael Lohani, the man Julie Harper mentioned to her husband,” Mathis went on. “The one she called security on.”
“Do you know anything about Lohani?” the president asked.
“He checked into the Hilton last night at seven twenty,” Mathis read from a laptop. “The reservation was prebooked by a travel agent who made it on behalf of a Yemeni firm, International Pharmaceuticals. Neither the company nor any of its principals are on any hot lists.”
“It’s Yemen,” Carlson said angrily. “What are the odds that it can be one hundred percent clean?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Brenneman had resisted imposing stricter sanctions on the terrorist hotbed for fear—as he put it in an executive white paper on policy in Yemen—of “poking the cat with sticks.” Brenneman had even crossed out the original word, dog, for fear of insulting Sana’a.
“What about the hostage takers?” Kealey asked. “Anything come up with the fingerprints?”
“Nothing,” replied Andrews.
Kealey took a belated bite of his sandwich. “Damned strange. The guys I faced were well trained.”
“They could have been mercs,” Admiral Breen offered.
“Possibly,” Kealey said. “They certainly didn’t seem as anxious as that Lohani guy. The problem with that, though, is that not only did they seem ready to die, but it looked to me like they were planning on it, going out in a firefight.”
“How is that any different from the Taliban or the Chechens or the mujahideen?” the president asked.
“These men were a disparate group of nationals on foreign soil,” Kealey said. “You just don’t see that level of cooperation, skill and, frankly, intelligence in that kind of fighter. They are angry, knee-jerk reactionaries. One man I spoke with said words to the effect, ‘The more languages one speaks, the better one knows other men.’ ”
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