“And I don’t want to be the one hauled up to testify on why we failed to stop a nuclear weapon detonating on US soil! You want to be the one to explain why we banished from the room someone who might be able to help us? While you’re at it, you want to tell me why, when we’ve got a fifty-billion-dollar US intelligence budget, it took a girl reporter from Boston to find him and hand me this?” Carspecken brandished the Virginia driver’s license. “Christ sake, what do you guys do all day?”
Bruce glowered but said nothing.
“I want her here,” the general went on more calmly. “And I’m pretty sure it’s legal if the president says it is. Lowell”—he turned to Mr. Carlyle—“can you get your office to draft something granting temporary authority?”
With that the room returned to a general hum of frantic activity.
I wasn’t clear on what exactly I was supposed to be doing, now that I’d won the right to sit there. I tucked myself into a corner chair, only a few seats away from where Tusk had sat. I was listening uneasily, trying to make myself invisible, when an aide approached and beckoned for me to follow him. After all the ruckus over my presence, no one paid attention when I stood up to leave. The door slid open. Captain McNamara, true to his word, was waiting outside along with several other guards. Silently the aide led me back to the tiny conference room where I’d sat before. This time the aide pointed toward a black phone on the center of the table.
“Line four,” he said, and left.
I could not imagine who would be calling. Elias? Hyde? Surely neither of them had the clout to get a call patched into the Situation Room of the White House in the middle of a nuclear crisis.
“Hello?”
“Alex! Are you all right? Where are you? Where exactly, I mean?”
I nearly fell over when I heard his voice. “Lucien? How on earth—how did you know I was here?”
“Actually, anyone on the planet with access to an Internet connection can see that you’re at the White House this morning. Cheeky little article, I must say.”
“No, but—I mean, how did you reach me here? They just pulled me out of a secure communications room to take this call.”
“A secure—you don’t mean the Situation Room? How in God’s name did you talk your way in there? Never mind, doesn’t matter. Here’s what you’ve got to—”
“How do you know what the Situation Room is? No, wait, back up. You didn’t answer how you got through on this number. Not because of your dad, is it? Does he have that kind of pull?”
“Alex. Listen to me.” Lucien’s voice sounded strained and urgent, nothing like the Lucien I knew. “There are some things I need to explain, and which I will explain. Later. Right now trust me when I say I am risking my job to get this call routed through Langley to you. You need to get out of there, right now. Will you do that for me?”
His call was routed through Langley? What was he talking about? Had he gone completely mad? My mind raced.
“No. I can’t leave now,” I said haltingly. “Lucien, I don’t understand.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . . Here’s the thing. I know a bit more about Nadeem Siddiqui than I’ve let on. I searched his room too. The room he was renting in Cambridge, from the barmy old lady near the train station? I got there before you.”
“You . . . searched . . . Nadeem’s room . . . ,” I trailed off. “But why? You mean, before I even told you about him? But what about that morning when we woke up—and I wanted you to call Pakistan—”
“Alex,” he cut in sharply. “This isn’t a clean line. People may be listening on both ends.”
I snorted. He was crazy.
And then, all of a sudden, I understood. “You just said you were risking your job? What job? I thought you were a graduate student.”
“It doesn’t matter. I need to tell you what—”
“What job, Lucien? Where do you work?”
Silence.
“You’ve got three seconds or I hang up.”
“I—I work for British intelligence,” he said finally. “That’s all I can say. I’m sorry. And I can only tell you this next bit off the record—although I suppose it hardly matters now.” He sighed. “I can only tell you this next bit because it is being conveyed as we speak through official government channels. They searched his desk. Back in Pakistan. They found files, loads of them, stuffed with maps and diagrams. Not the kind of stuff that’s publicly available. He had—oh, hell, he had the Eiffel Tower, and Buckingham Palace here in London. But mostly he had plans of the White House. Floor plans and detailed calculations of which walls are weight-bearing, where the ventilation shafts go, that type thing. Do you understand? Alex?”
It was too much. I was still trying to process the first half of what he’d said. “You’re telling me that you’re a spy?”
“Yes.”
“And you—does that mean—have you been spying on me?”
“No! Well, rather—yes. But only after we had already—”
“How dare you! You bastard!”
“Fine. I’m a bastard. But you knew that already.”
“You lying, miserable, wretched . . .” I was spitting with rage. “I am going to come and strangle you, you son of a bitch!”
“Right. I’ll look forward to your strangling me at your earliest convenience. But can we focus, please? Alex? You were right about the banana shipments. You were right about Nadeem. You were right about everything. And maybe you’ve already figured this out, too, but what I am trying to tell you is that it appears the target is the White House.”
I was silent.
“And just because you killed him—nice work, by the way—that doesn’t mean the operation won’t go ahead. There’s a whole cell behind this. We believe Nadeem was working with someone inside the US intelligence apparatus, someone with quite senior clearances—”
“Edmund Tusk,” I said dully.
“What?”
“He’s the number two—”
“I know who he is.” Now it was Lucien’s turn to sound shocked.
A moment passed.
Then he said, “I need to go. I’m so sorry, about everything. We can talk later. Please get out of there. Just go, will you? I don’t know how long before the bomb . . . how long you have.”
He hung up on the other end, and I sat very still. There is something soul-destroying about learning that a man who has made love to you has also been lying to you. I could feel tears rolling down my cheeks. I batted them away. It did not matter what his motivations had been, why he had wanted me in bed. And I had worse problems to grapple with today. The specter of nuclear annihilation does tend to focus the mind.
But salty tears kept running down my face. I ripped the bandage off my eye. It was bleeding again, swollen firmly shut, and now I was having trouble breathing through my left nostril. I wondered whether Nadeem had broken my nose as well. That horrible, evil little man.
And Lucien. It was hard to say which of them I hated more at that moment. Lucien did deserve to be strangled. I was looking forward to it. I forced myself to stand up, and blood and anger sluiced so forcefully through my veins I had to put my hands on the table to steady myself. I felt capable of anything.
WHEN I REAPPEARED IN THE Situation Room, I stopped conversation for the second time that day.
I gathered from the horrified looks around the conference table that I must look ghastly.
I ignored them. I walked over to General Carspecken and leaned in close. “Forgive me if you already know this, but I just spoke to . . . to a well-placed source. They said an attack could be imminent. And that the target is the White House.”
The general raised his eyebrows. “We’re already operating under the assumption that time is short. Who’s your source? And where are they getting information on potential targets?”
I hesitated. “It’s a source in British intelligence.”
“British intelligence?” he repeated skeptically.
“Well, you
know they were monitoring him. Nadeem, I mean. Apparently he had drawings stashed in his desk. White House floor plans, and diagrams of ventilation shafts, that type thing. It makes sense, doesn’t it? I told you what Tusk said—that he was headed to the target. And about how you wouldn’t waste a bomb, if you had just one.”
“I’m not sure I buy this business about Tusk. He’s been an outstanding CIA officer for thirty years. But you’re telling me Nadeem Siddiqui had White House floor plans? And the Brits know about it? And they didn’t think this was worth mentioning?” Carspecken looked outraged.
Several people started to speak at once, and then the door to the room opened and C.J. careened in.
“We just got off the horn with London,” he panted. “They’re making a pretty compelling case that this is the target. The White House. The Paks went through his desk at Kahuta and turns out—”
“That he had White House floor plans in there?” Carspecken interrupted wryly. “Yeah, so I’m told. Alexandra here has just been briefing us.”
C.J. whipped around and glared at me.
I shrugged.
“You knew about the floor plans?” he asked accusingly.
“No. I just found out when you did. I got a call.”
“Who from?”
“Sounds like the same people who called you.”
“You know, I doubt that, seeing as I just got off a secure comm between Langley and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service.”
I said nothing.
C.J. raised his eyebrows challengingly. “Really not the time to be coy, Ms. James.”
“I told you. I talked to the same people you did.”
“Riiiight,” he dragged the word out sarcastically. “You’re telling me MI6 is phoning in to the Situation Room with hot news tips for you?”
I picked at my hemline. “Something like that.”
He cracked his knuckles and regarded me with an expression somewhere between disbelief and wonder.
“Whatever,” he said finally. “Completely ludicrous and impossible, but whatever. It is true that it would have been nice for the bastard Brits to have shared what they knew a little earlier. At any rate—”
But the door swung open again and a tall man rushed in with a stapled stack of papers. He whispered to General Carspecken, flipped through the stack, then pointed momentously to something on one of the last pages.
Carspecken scanned it and went rigid. “I believe most of you know Dick. Our director of the Secret Service. Please share this with everyone,” the general commanded hoarsely.
Dick held up the papers. “It’s our visitors’ record. Everyone who’s been cleared in and out over the last week. Shaukat Malik was here. Two days ago. His photo’s in the system and everything. Same guy as on that Virginia driver’s license.”
I gasped and clamped my hand over my mouth. “He said that. This morning. He said he was in the White House.” I struggled to remember the exact words. “He said . . . something about a video. About making a video, so everyone would know it was a Muslim bomb.”
“What, like a martyrdom video?” said Bruce. “That would make sense. All the jihadi groups do them. If he actually got inside the White House to film one . . .” Bruce puffed the air out of his cheeks. “Holy shit. That would be one hell of a terrorist recruitment tool.”
The general held up his hand for quiet. “Let’s get back to the facts. How did he get cleared in?”
Dick scanned his records again. “He was on a VIP guest list. Special access, along with another guy, for an after-hours tour. Says here he was sponsored by”—Dick bit his lip—“by Lowell Carlyle’s office.”
I glanced around. Mr. Carlyle was not in the room to defend himself.
“I know about that too,” I said softly. “It was Thom Carlyle who set it up. He didn’t know about—”
But the general held his hand up again to stop me. “We can sort out who did what and why later on,” he ordered. “Right now we need to understand who we’re dealing with. What do we know about Shaukat Malik? Where did he come from? And is he dead, or not?”
“Oh, he’s dead, all right,” I muttered.
“If our journalist friend could control herself for a moment, I’ll be glad to brief everyone on the professional assessment of the US intelligence community,” C.J. spat.
I rolled my eyes. “Sure. All yours.”
C.J. started holding forth on how Shaukat Malik and Nadeem Siddiqui were believed to be one and the same person. The consensus view at the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center was that he had used the name Nadeem for his daily life in Pakistan and England, and the Shaukat Malik moniker for everything to do with the clandestine nuclear plot.
“Yeah, fine, but is he dead?” Carspecken interrupted after a minute.
“Well”—C.J. shot me a look—“we just picked up a body in northwest DC. At the Dumbarton Street address she gave us. Positive identification will take some time. But it looks like it could be him. Meanwhile, we’re working with MI6 to paint a picture of his movements over the last several weeks. . . .”
I sat half-listening and trying to put my finger on why all this seemed irrelevant. It wasn’t just that I already knew most of what C.J. was saying. It was that whatever Nadeem’s precise role had been, it was over. Yes, that was it. Nadeem or Shaukat or whatever we were supposed to call him was now irrelevant. What was urgent at this moment was to figure out where the bomb was.
C.J. was droning on about the exact nature of Nadeem Siddiqui’s work at the nuclear facility back in Pakistan when Dick, the Secret Service chief, popped his head around the door and said, “One more thing. You asked us to find Ed Tusk. He’s not picking up his phone. So I just put a dog team on it. K9 unit. They’ll find him.”
General Carspecken looked pained. “Is he still on White House grounds?”
“His badge hasn’t scanned out. He’s around.”
“Good. When you find him, bring him here. We’ll get this nonsense straightened out.” Carspecken looked severely at me.
Dick turned to go.
Suddenly I stiffened. “You said he hasn’t scanned out? That’s the wrong question.”
“Why?” Carspecken asked testily, as though he was regretting having argued for me to stay.
“Forget whether he badged out.” I looked at Dick. “Where did he badge in? Where and when? Did he drive here?”
Carspecken looked confused. “Does it matter?”
“Well, I don’t know, Mike. I guess only if you care about trying to track down the bomb,” I snapped. Then I took a deep breath and tried to adopt a more polite tone. “You can build a nuclear weapon with less than forty pounds of weapons-grade uranium. Tusk told me that. That’s not much. The whole thing would fit in the trunk of a car.”
Bruce, the FBI man, cut in. “No. It’s not that simple . . . . The Soviets used to get everybody pissing their pants over this stuff. You guys remember that old crackpot KGB general—General Lebed, was it? He used to talk about suitcase nukes. How they’d lost dozens from the stockpile. And how they lacked the standard safety devices to prevent unauthorized detonation. Turns out it was a total fantasy. They never existed.”
“Just because the Soviets didn’t have them doesn’t mean they don’t exist now,” somebody piped up from the back of the room.
“Okay, fine. But you can’t just slap one together. This banana shipment hit US soil on Tuesday. That’s three days ago, people. You’re telling me that’s enough time to assemble and deliver a precision, self-contained nuclear device?”
“That’s the point! It doesn’t have to be precision.” I whipped my notebook out of my bag and flipped through until I found the right page.
“ ‘It doesn’t have to be reliable,’ ” I read out. “ ‘Even if it fizzles and doesn’t work that well, you’ve still succeeded at producing a complete fucking catastrophe.’ ” I paused. “That’s Edmund Tusk. His exact words from yesterday. Direct quote.”
Everyone turned to look at
General Carspecken. He was rocking back and forth in his chair, his lazy eye cocked crazily at the ceiling, his good one twitching with anger.
“Goddamn it.” He slammed his fists down onto the table. He turned to Dick. “Find out, will you? Where he badged in. We need that right now. And I need you to get POTUS and FLOTUS to a safe location. Actually, I need you boys to get this whole damn complex evacuated. The West Wing, the Residence, the Executive Office Building, everything. We gotta get people out of here. Immediately.”
The Secret Service director nodded and scurried from the room.
“Not us,” added Carspecken. “We stay here and see this through. Everybody, get your superiors up and on the line. I want the highest-ranking person at every relevant agency in Washington, either here in person or on secure video where I can see them. Fast as you can.”
Staffers started grabbing papers and screaming on telephones. A bank of video monitors began lighting up, illuminating tense faces at the State Department, at the Pentagon, at Treasury, all over the city. The door to the Situation Room banged open and shut. Outside I could see the evacuation order being carried out. Uniformed Secret Service guards were hustling people down the hallway, yelling at the men to drop their briefcases, yelling at the women to kick off their high heels, yelling at everyone to run.
A FEW MINUTES LATER I joined the swarm.
Whatever temporary authorization Lowell Carlyle had secured for me was deemed to have been overtaken by events. Captain McNamara was ordered to get me off White House grounds, along with everyone else. The corridors were thronged with people. McNamara bustled me along, one hand on my back, the other clamped over his earpiece, listening.
At the bottom of the stairs back up to the main level, he stopped and held his finger to his lips. His face screwed up in concentration. “Gotta turn around. Other way.” He spun me back into the hallway.
“Why?”
“They found the car.”
“Tusk’s car?”
He nodded, still listening.
“And? Where is it?”
“Here. In the staff garage under the Old Executive Office Building. He badged in this morning at the Seventeenth Street gate. So we’re being diverted from that side. This way, let’s move.”
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