At the bottom of the sink, the creature twitched and startled her again. If it had remained motionless, she might have missed it. She hoped that this was not the jumping kind, and slowly approached the sink. If I can only reach the faucet, I can wash it down the drain, she thought. She was too civilized to grab a shoe to beat the life out of it, and the last time she had seen anything that resembled a weapon, she had been in the middle of the massive suite many feet away.
She gave a frantic flip to the crystal cold water faucet, and retreated two steps away from the flowing stream. She watched as the spider was washed down the drain. She let the water in the sink pour while she went back to creating her bubble bath. Once the water had filled the tub and the bubbles had reached the top in a soothing white blanket, she turned off the faucets and slid slowly into the bath.
The drenched spider began his slow and painful crawl up the inside of the sink drain, its simple mind intent on survival, not revenge. If attacked, its venomous bite would be its defense, but it lacked the ability to do no more harm to a human than a few days of pain, itching and swelling. The shock and worry to the victim would be more than enough to give it an opportunity to escape.
Scarlett luxuriated in the tub with her eyes closed, facing the huge ornate mirror on the opposite wall. Its size gave the illusion that the large bathroom was doubled in size. She ran through her activities planned for the evening and pondered what to wear. She calculated how long it would take to prepare for her appearance at the dinner banquet, giving time to arrive fashionably late. That way, she would have a large audience for her next speech, and wouldn’t need to speak as long as usual. She began to consider whether Max’s style was rubbing off on her, but abruptly abandoned that ludicrous idea as the warm water relaxed her.
She began to sing, secure in the thought that there was no witness to hear her off-key attempt at imitating an old Lady GaGa song that was stuck in her head. She finished her rendition of “Dance in the Dark” and noticed that the water was cooler than she liked. She opened her eyes to locate the hot water faucet at her feet. From reflection in the mirrored wall behind the faucet head, she saw it. Perched on the counter of the vanity above her head, the spider twitched. This time, she screamed.
Within seconds, the door of the adjoining room burst open and two Secret Service agents entered the suite. With guns drawn they rushed toward Scarlett, who sat in the tepid water with her mouth agape and her body exposed, staring at the reflection of the spider above her head. With one scan of the room, the agents followed her gaze and assessed the threat. Without comment, one muscular agent smashed his hand down on the counter and assaulted the threat with a slap. The spider was the jumping kind. It sprung onto the back of the agent’s hand and sunk its fangs in the attacker, prompting a surprised yelp and spicy cusswords from the commando-trained former Navy Seal. The arachnid jumped again, hitting the floor as Scarlett screamed, “Get him!”
Both of her Secret Service agents, suddenly realizing that they were in the Vice-President’s bathroom witnessing her in all of her naked glory, turned their backs as Scarlett hurriedly wrapped herself in a large robe. They attempted to corner the escaping spider by moving in a crouch with their arms outstretched, looking like two farm boys at a greased pig contest. Finally, the spider was confined in the far corner of the bathroom and they made their final approach.
Then there was a bright flash and the lights went out. “Did you get him?” she screamed.
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CHAPTER 62
G
lenda Reasoner had been missing for twelve hours before the lights went out and plunged The City into ominous darkness. To pull off their grand deception, it was essential that Glenda be kidnapped and detained, together with her field crew.
If she popped up in the sea of humanity that would soon be fleeing the city, the scheme would fail. Darkhorse carefully devised the plan to set up their kidnapping while she was on remote assignment to the shipping docks on the Hudson river. The caller who had lured them to this location was reading from a script prepared by Darkhorse, but the junior editor who received the call didn’t know that.
The hook that brought Glenda and her crew out of the studios at Rockefeller Plaza was a story that she had reported about on many occasions; the vulnerability of our ports to terror attacks from containers loaded on ships originating in the Middle East, Yemen on this occasion. They were to record footage of cranes removing containers from a ship flying a Yemeni flag, while Glenda expounded on the multiple horrors that could be lurking inside their metal walls.
The location he chose was a commuter parking lot near the docks whose security cameras had been disabled. There would be no witnesses in the middle of the day when everyone was at work earning a living. By the time she and her crew had been loaded into the two white SUVS that concealed the incident from the view from the access road, the kidnapping was complete. Sixty seconds front to back, and they were on their way to Pryor’s coastal estate in the Hamptons., with the drugged and bound journalists stowed beneath a cargo cover.
She was to be kept alive in the event her life was needed for some unanticipated reason, but she would soon become dispensable, and she knew it. Her crew would be disposed of long before her usefulness to Pryor had expired. She was known for her feisty demeanor and hard-driving persistence during interviews, and her spirit was her greatest asset, but those qualities would not save her when her time was up.
She woke up hours later in a room that could have been in a four star hotel, with one difference. There were no windows, and the door was locked from the outside. Judging from the disarray of her clothes, she had been placed on the bed by her captors and fondled while unconscious, but her clothes were intact, a good indication that she had not been raped. If she had, her rapist would likely have removed her underwear and not bothered with restoring the dignity of putting them back on. Still, she seethed at the idea that they had touched her.
Glenda rose from the bed and staggered into the bathroom. The drug was wearing off slowly. In her groggy state, she heard the sound of a key unlocking the door. She whirled and stood face to face with Adam Pryor.“You will speak the words I have programmed into the message or you will die,” he said, dispensing with the formalities of an introduction.
“I know you…I interviewed you…You’re Pryor. Homeland Security…You disappeared…They’re looking for you…” She struggled to talk through the mental haze that lingered, but only managed a soft moan. She leaned against the vanity to keep from crashing to the floor. “Sleep it off, Miss Reasoner, and then we will talk about what you will do for me.” Pryor wheeled and walked out of the room as Glenda slid to the floor.
The computer was assiduously copying her image, voice pattern and dialect, and soon her life would become irrelevant. Voice recognition technology had advanced far beyond the ability of word processing. Image emulation could dispense with the human component once the computer had inputted and filtered the data from her years of Bull Network broadcasts and live appearances. With a mental command, the operator of the Manipulator System could supply words to her image, change the color and style of her clothing, and broadcast any message. It would be a simple matter to hack into the Bull Network and broadcast seamlessly from a remote studio with their own equipment, seized and sheltered before the blast.
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CHAPTER 63
S
carlett and her Secret Service contingent walked down thirtytwo stories in the stairwell. In the time it took them to move in the darkness from the penthouse to street level, they could have traveled by elevator from top to bottom and back over thirty
times. With guns drawn they guarded the descent from the front and back, constantly trying to get a response from their communicators. There was no static. They were useless, like the TV, and the lights. Their only illumination was from a small chemical glow stick that was part of the survival kit assigned to each agent. They gave approximately five hours of light, long enough, they hoped, to ge
t to a place where they could wait out the night. Once the glow stick was activated by bending the stick and cracking the interior case that kept two chemicals separated, the mixture emitted an eery green light. Unlike a flashlight, the glow could not be turned off and saved for later. They had five hours of glowstick illumination and no more..
Scarlett placed her left hand on the back of the Secret Service agent in front of her, and tried to hold the rail with her right. At each landing, the team would stop briefly to listen for activity, not knowing whether the incident was an attempt on the Vice-President’s life, or something much bigger.
Scarlett had enough of silence, and the sound of her voice in the darkness was startling. “I know you boys got an eyeful back there, and if you ever breathe a word of this to anyone, or if I read that some anonymous source just happened to say that I’m afraid of spiders or have a nice rack, you will all be washing dishes in the Senate cafeteria for the rest of your careers, y’all got that?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” they replied in unison. The humor of the situation had been lost on them, and they were deep in doing what they had been trained, but the agent in front let out a brief chuckle at the thought. “I heard that,” she muttered in her most threatening tone. “I…”
“Ma’am, we’re at the ground floor,” he interrupted. “Check the perimeter. Standish, you guard the Vice-President. We’re gonna go out for a little look around.” The three quietly opened the door to the darkened lobby and fanned out. In the distance in a side hallway, they could see light, and a heard a pounding noise. They approached silently and leveled their Glock 9 MMs at the sound while wheeling around the corner. At the end of the hallway, a woman in a full length mink coat, over a diaphanous nightgown stood at an ATM machine. She held a lit candelabra. She screamed.
“I was only trying to get my money out. Don’t shoot me! It’s my money in there. Damn thing doesn’t work!” She pounded on the machine one more time, as if her actions would suddenly make it spring to life and give her comfort. Her makeup was smeared from crying, and their intrusion into her agony produced a new torrent of tears. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do,” she sobbed. I can’t find my husband, and I’m all alone, and it’s dark…so dark.” She slowly slid to the floor. Her high heels slid off her feet as she plopped to the marble tile.
“Shit,” exclaimed one agent, ignoring her plight. The sudden appearance of the inappropriately dressed socialite had sprung him back into survival mode. “Go down to that boutique down the hall and find the warmest ladies’ coat you can get your hands on, and some comfortable boots for the Vice-President. Better yet, grab that candle, get Ms. Conroy, and bring this lady with you. It’s going to be cold outside.”
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CHAPTER 64
M
ax Masterson, it’s not nice to scare an old lady like you did,” Leila Fox was busy serving up a dinner for six people that would have fed twenty. “I nearly had a heart attack when you peeled off your face and tossed it onto the La Z
Boy chair,” she said, while spooning a mountain of mashed potatoes onto Andrew’s plate.
“Mrs. Fox, I had no intention of frightening you to death, but that disguise was getting to me. I startled myself when I looked in the mirror after putting it on. Rachel and I had them made so we could get out in public without it becoming a major event. Pretty good, eh?”
“Pretty bad, I’d say,” Andrew chided. “Max, you can’t go around without Secret Service protection. Not with the country on high alert.”
“That’s what I keep telling him, but he keeps coming up with ways of getting around established protocol.” Armstrong took the rare opportunity to voice his opinion, but he knew that Max would disregard it.
“Fat lot of good that did for Kennedy and McKinley, and don’t forget that nut job that shot Reagan,” Max responded.
“Max, you keep on doing things your own way,” Leila Fox interjected. “That is one thing I like about you. But be careful. I don’t want you to end up dead like my dear departed Joseph. I can’t deal with any more dying until my own time comes.”
“Mrs. Fox, I’ll try to stay alive long enough to come to your hundredth birthday,” Max replied.
Armstrong’s communicator alerted him. He had been in continuous contact with Secret Service to monitor anything that arose while he was away from the White House. “Mr. President, another device has been detonated in New York City, and we have lost contact with the Vice-President. We need to leave immediately. Sorry for your loss, Ma’am.”
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Max, Rachel, and Andrew flew back from the Midwest, with Rachel as pilot and Armstrong as co-pilot, with Max and Andrew free to strategize in the jump seat during the hour-long flight back. Andrew shared his mother’s advice that had not been repeated by her at the gargantuan dinner she had prepared for after the funeral. There wasn’t much left to advise, and Andrew was relieved that Max had been free to ask questions without his acting as an intermediary. Neighbors had prepared dishes for the wake at the community center, and what wasn’t consumed by the neighbors in the middle of the day remained on tables that lined the dining room. They had carried as many leftovers as the cargo hatch could hold, and Andrew knew that his mother’s home-cooked meals would be devoured by the White House staff before the sun set.
“Mr. President, we have a problem.” Andrew Fox and Roger Sinclair stood in the doorway of the Oval Office, their faces grim. “Good! If we didn’t have any of those, I’d have nothing to do, other than look at what they did to New York. When is this going to end?” Max sat confidently behind his desk, reviewing the evening’s reports on his monitor. Shortly after dark, a burst of gamma radiation had burst from the top floor of Trump Plaza in Jersey City, taking out most of New York City’s electronics, on the far side of the Hudson River. The power grid fell shortly thereafter, plunging the city into blackness. All transportation was shut down, and reports from outside the blast zone had indicated that a geostationary satellite which transmitted all communications for the greater New York and New Jersey metropolitan area had been rendered useless. Nobody was moving, and nobody was talking. The electronic components of every cell phone and cellular tower had become fused by gamma radiation.
Sinclair chose to ignore Max’s sarcasm and reported what he knew. “The same folks as the ones who disrupted your inauguration are responsible for shutting down New York. This time, they did it on a much larger scale. They put the bomb on the highest floor of a building so that it would spread over a larger area.”
“What are they capable of?” Max inquired, his eyes glued to the screen. “We don’t know how many of these things are out there or where or whether they intend to do it again.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” said Sinclair. “We have been unable to communicate with anyone inside of New York City for more than two hours, and the Vice-President was last heard from about an hour before the blast. She and her Secret Service contingent of four agents were in her hotel, and they planned to attend a social function and dinner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel later. She was scheduled to give her speech to the UN tomorrow morning about our response to domestic terrorism. We haven’t been able to raise Secret Service or the hotel, and we fear the worst.”
“Don’t go there,” said Max.
“I don’t have to go there. It’s already here,” replied Sinclair. His concern for Scarlett’s well-being had caused his eyebrows to knit together, despite his controlled effort to remain calm. What the words didn’t communicate was more than projected on his face.
“Retaliate.”
“We can’t. They’re here. Among us,” replied Sinclair. “I have been trying to tell you all along. Unless we find out that there is a central command that is running this terror operation and can bomb the hell out of them, or we can find the head honcho and put him away, we have to do the prudent thing and continue to run this government. We have the FBI investigating whether other bombs of this type have been found, and CIA is checking for l
inks to foreign terrorists. They must have obtained the bomb-making material somewhere, and my guess is that it came from somewhere outside the U.S.”
“Are we still in COGCON 1?”
“No, once we got through Inaugural Day and assessed the damage, we stepped down security. At the time, we looked at it as an isolated incident,” replied Sinclair. “Everyone is back at work here in the Capitol, thanks to our hardened power grid and Faraday shielded electronics. It’s the civilian population that we failed to protect…” Max interrupted.
“We are back at COGCON 1. You know the protocol. To insure the continuity of government, we must go in there and rescue the vice-president, and we need to do it now. The longer we wait, the worse it will be, and I seriously doubt that her security detail is sitting in a dark, cold hotel fretting about what they are going to do next. How are we going to find her in a city of 24 million people, all of them traveling on foot?”
“We are already on the way,” Andrew Foxannounced. “Two Helos are over New Jersey at the moment. We can watch it all on the monitor. Dawn will break in another ten minutes, and we will be able to see what is happening out there. Right now, the only visuals we have are what we can see from the searchlights and night vision electronics, and most of the city is huddled indoors trying to stay warm. There aren’t many people out on the streets yet, but my guess is that they will be, once the sun comes up. They have nothing else to do if they want to survive.”
Sinclair interrupted. “Always assume there is a second bomb. And after the second, a third. We are dealing in unknowns, but if we put a lot of people in the air…look, a lot of people are going to die. This blast was ten times the size of the Inaugural Event, and we don’t know how many there are. Our shields have not been field-tested, and we don’t know if they will…
No Corner to Hide (The Max Masterson Series Book 2) Page 20