by Bob Mayer
What exactly did they represent?
He hadn’t thought of that incident in Iraq in years. Not consciously. A secret buried deep inside, in the depth of his soul, that he’d wanted no one to ever know about, least of all himself.
It was a visceral revulsion of himself.
The truth.
He pulled back the slide on the pistol that locked it and dropped the bullet in the chamber. Then he hit the release, slamming the receiver in place.
Loading it.
Locked and loaded.
Johnston got up and turned the uniform jacket around, hiding the medals.
Then he put the gun to his temple.
His military aide had stomped out in a huff because General Riggs had just told him he was the most worthless human being ever and to find Brennan. It was strange that Riggs had told the full-bird colonel off like that because, like all aides, he was something important to someone important (a nephew, an important wife, holder of some good blackmail) and that mattered more than if they could do the job.
Still it was kind of funny that Riggs had finally bothered to tell him what he’d always thought. Outside of that aide who had been foisted upon him, every member of Riggs’s inner circle was intensely loyal to him, owing their careers to his rising star. As he went, so went they. They also shared his philosophy that the military needed to be given a freer rein to deal with the problems in the world, that the civilians could fuck up a soup sandwich.
Let the aide sulk. That just proved the point that he was useless, taking things personally. The damn idiot was an aide to the vice chairman of the JCS. Didn’t he realize his ticket was already punched by some rabbi somewhere who had the strings to get him that job? Riggs might be number two in the Department of Defense but he knew who controlled the purse strings and also knew who got the lucrative contracts and could offer jobs to retiring generals to make lots of money.
The game was rigged, and it disgusted Riggs, but like the Robert Heinlein quote hanging on his wall said, “Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet, you can’t win.”
The key, of course, was that each man’s idea of winning was different. Money, unlike most people, interested Riggs not in the slightest.
Riggs prided himself that he’d never been anyone’s aide. He’d worked his way to this position. He was a good soldier and a smart soldier, meaning he did the damn job, not aided someone else to do it. Although, technically, he was number two to the chairman, Riggs was the one who did the real work.
Like the whole Cherry Tree thing. Think the chairman would go within a mile of that?
His intercom crackled. “Sir?” The terse inquiry still emanated hurt feelings.
Fucking loser, Riggs thought. “What?”
“I’ve got news. It’s important.”
“Get in here.”
Riggs shoved the last bit of candy bar into his mouth as the door opened and the colonel rushed in.
“The White House is in lockdown!”
It didn’t occur to him to ask the first question most normal people would ask: Why? “What about the Emergency Operations Center?”
The aide shook his head. “Just the main building. They’ve cut off the East and West Wings. The only news came from McBride—something about a surprise emergency exercise by the Secret Service to test the security system.”
“Bullshit. Where’s Brennan?”
“The Secret Service took him into custody after he attacked the president’s daughter.”
Riggs smiled. “Finally grew a pair, did he?”
But that was also a preemptive strike, he suddenly realized.
It was adding up. They were coming after him. Locking the president in and coming after the only man who could save the country.
“Who’s got the football right now?”
The aide blinked. “Sir?”
“The Duty, dammit.” Said that way, with a capital D, got through to the aide.
“Major Preston, sir.”
Riggs nodded. “Good, good. He’s a good man. Reliable and knows his priorities. He’s one of ours. Where’s the vice president?”
“With the chairman, sir, in Scotland, working on SAD.”
“So no one’s in charge.”
“Sir, the—”
“Get my car. Assemble the staff. We’re going to the PEOC.”
“Sir, we—”
Riggs fixed the man with a withering stare and he scurried to get the car.
Riggs hefted himself, with difficulty, out of his chair.
Time to face his destiny.
He opened his drawers and pulled out what he would need: his pistol, a copy of the Constitution, a Bible, and four Snickers bars.
Once Moms got them moving and they understood the threat was a pathogen, the Secret Service inside the White House reacted with precision and alacrity. The corridors leading to the East and West Wings were sealed. All doors leading in and out were also shut just after the two agents who’d dumped Brennan at the helipad returned. The president, along with the First Lady and First Daughter, had been hustled upstairs to the private residence, all shouting at each other.
It seemed the First Family had a lot of unresolved issues.
“What about tunnels?” Moms asked McBride, who seemed to be the one who knew who did what here.
“We’ve shut all the doors below,” McBride said. “I’ve got an agent on each one. The head of the Secret Service is outside and he’s got people in hazmat right up against the building on an interior line and then an exterior line working both ways. What the hell is going on?”
Moms took a deep breath. The building was secure for the time being, and McBride had issued a cover story for concealment about a no-notice security exercise. How long that cover story would last, she had no idea. There were a lot of people milling about, at a loss what to do now that the routine of preparing for Christmas at the White House had been interrupted.
And the president and his family had apparently gone insane.
They’d lined everyone up and made them dump cell phones and any other communication devices into a large barrel. All trunk lines in and out were shut off. Complete blackout.
“Get these people occupied doing something,” Moms said to McBride.
“Hold on,” McBride said. “What’s wrong with the president? I need to know what is going on.”
So Moms spent two minutes and twelve seconds telling him about Cherry Tree and that somehow it was loose here in the White House. The color drained from McBride’s face when she told him what Cherry Tree did: A politician’s worst nightmare had just been thrust in his face.
“You mean he can’t lie?” McBride asked when she was done.
“From what I understand, it’s worse than that,” Moms said. “Whoever is infected can’t stop telling the truth. And the problem is we don’t know how many people in here have been infected. You need to quarantine anyone who has had physical contact with the First Family. His daughter brought it in here, so start with her.”
McBride shook his head. “That’s not going to be easy.”
McBride turned to the crowd of Secret Service agents, stewards, staffers, media reps, chefs, maintenance personnel, and others who were now trapped inside and began to try to make sense of this insanity as they backtracked to the moment Debbie Templeton left her lunch with Brennan and entered the White House. Each person he thought she might have had physical contact with was hustled into the State Dining Room.
But Moms was focused elsewhere, also trying to stay physically distant from everyone. A woman was sitting in a chair near the staircase up to the residence. She’d been hovering near the president when Moms interrupted the already cut-off news conference. The woman seemed quite detached from all the turmoil tornadoing around her. From the appearance of the chair it was supposed to be one that was admired, not sat in. The fact this woman felt secure enough to do that said something on top of her lack of alarm.
She had a large lea
ther-bound book on her lap. It reminded Moms of her mother’s photo albums. The ones with the little black corners holding everything together. As the chief of staff tried to put a lid on a pot inside the White House that was beginning to boil with Cherry Tree, Moms wondered how different it was now that pictures all seemed to be on hard drives or in the cloud, not tangible, not in a book like real memories. It made memories seem less real.
As Moms made her way around the crowd toward the woman, she considered the fact that people probably still made scrapbooks, even if they were electronic and could be wiped out with the flash of EMP from a nuke. (Nebraska wasn’t that far away in her own memory scrapbook.)
Her mother’s scrapbook had been full of pictures of her brothers, all younger, all of whom were now leading normal lives—doctor, salesman, actuary, and the youngest taking over the farm. Moms had never really considered that there were no pictures of her in that scrapbook. Did that mean she didn’t exist?
Moms could make out more as she got closer. The woman wore a nondescript business suit and had the tag on the chain around her neck that everyone else who belonged here had. The color indicated the highest security clearance.
The woman was too aware, yet detached at the same time. It took one to know one, and Moms had a good idea this woman came from the same dark world she did. Moms didn’t like people with their own agenda on her mission. This woman was up to something and it most likely wasn’t the same thing Moms was up to, so therefore she was a potential problem.
Moms stopped in front of her and the woman stood, book clutched to her chest. Exactly the way suicide bombers almost always took off their bomb-laden backpacks and clutched them to their chest before pulling the fuse. It was a level to which Freud had not dared go, clutching that which meant life and death closest to your core, your heart.
“What are you doing in the middle of my op?” Moms asked.
The woman smiled. “You must be Moms.”
It wasn’t the smile that relaxed Moms slightly; it was the way her eyes matched the smile. Nada always said, “watch the eyes.” Moms had been face-to-face with lots of dangerous people and those who wished her harm, and this woman was neither.
Not directly. But she was something and Moms needed to know what that was.
And she knew her Nightstalker name, which was a bit disconcerting.
The woman, Elle Keep, her nametag said, was still a problem, but probably not a dangerous one. A loose thread in a big building full of loose threads. Moms needed to cut this one or reel it in so she could move on to the next one. That plan unraveled with the woman’s next words:
“It’s my mission. Even better, and more professionally, we could call it our mission.”
Nada watched the eyes, but Moms had another way to evaluate. She looked down at the woman’s shoes. Shoes told you a lot about a person. These were expensive but functional. Which meant she knew how to fit in, but also how to be practical.
“What’s our mission, Elle?” Moms asked.
The woman shook her head. “Call me Keep.”
Frak me, Moms thought. “Keep?”
“More correctly, the Keep. I’m from the Cellar. I always wondered if I’d ever meet a Nightstalker. I wondered, but hoped not to because of the circumstances that would be inherent in such a meeting.” The Keep looked past Moms at the media people screaming about their rights to the chief of staff and two chefs on the marble floor wrestling because they had finally let loose on each other about whose dessert POTUS liked better. “But I certainly could not have imagined this.”
“We usually can’t imagine most of our missions,” Moms said as she processed Cellar. Mac had always bet the under, saying it was a myth. Sort of the way people in Black Ops always said, “I thought you guys were doing that!” and the other person said, “No, we thought you were doing it!” But everyone always hoped there was something like the Cellar, which really was supposed to be doing “it.” Because “it” needed to be done.
“Good point,” the Keep said. “You work for Ms. Jones, and I hate to be rude, but she works for Hannah. As do I.”
Nada wins again, Moms thought. “And what does the Keep do?”
The Keep rolled her fingers on the book she held so tight. “This book. I know you have to keep containment here and I don’t want to be an inconvenience, but above all, we must protect this book. It’s more important than the president.”
The Secret Service that had been on duty was holding a perimeter, keeping the main building secure. Inside of them, a cordon of security in hazmat suits was at every possible exit: doors, windows, underground tunnels. As Cherry Tree blossomed inside, the uniformed senior officer outside, confused but resolute, kept the line. He’d called in everyone on the roster and also had the members of the Tactical Response Team doing an exercise around the House for the sake of the media that had gathered outside.
It was a ruse that would only last so long, but now that information was starting to clarify on Cherry Tree, it was a ruse that only needed to last so long.
Then, as always, things got worse.
General Riggs’s convoy pulled up to the rear of the White House. His armored limo rode heavy, followed by five black Chevy SUVs with tinted windows. Riggs’s staff piled out and the general bulled his way forward, halting just short of the senior Secret Service agent.
“Sir, we’re conducting a security training exercise and—”
“Bullshit,” Riggs said. “What’s really going on?”
“Sir, we’re conducting a security training exercise—”
“I’m the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” Riggs said. “The chairman is in Scotland. That makes me the ranking military officer in the country. I have the highest security clearance in the country. What is going on?”
The senior agent did his best. “Sir, it’s a confusing situation, but the White House is in lockdown because some sort of pathogen is loose. We don’t believe it’s fatal or even physically harmful, but information is still coming in on it.”
“We’ve been attacked.” Riggs said it with absolute certainty. “The White House has been attacked and we’ve been decapitated by a biological attack.”
The Secret Service agent shook his head. “No, sir. I don’t think so, sir.”
“You’re not paid to think,” Riggs said. “You’re not paid to command. I am.”
A reporter who had been lurking outside the barriers shoved against a couple of agents and shouted, “General! What’s going on? Who’s running the government? If this is an exercise, where is the president?”
Riggs paused dramatically, feeling his destiny welling up in his chest, and turned to face the reporter. “There’s no need for alarm. As for now, I’m in control now and will be until we can”—he held up a meaty fist with the rolled-up copy of the Constitution in it—“make sure things are running smoothly again. That is”—he said—“pending the return of the White House…” But fuck that, it wasn’t true. “Gentlemen,” he said to no one in particular, but everyone within earshot, “I am in charge.”
He turned and strode toward the East Wing, his staff crowded around him. The head of the Secret Service watched them walk away, then turned to the reporter.
“It’s all part of the exercise,” he assured the confused man. Then he returned his attention to his priority: the building containing the president.
Riggs burst into the Visitors Foyer, noted the blocked doors to his right and the Secret Service guards, and turned left, down the East Colonnade. He went past the Family Theater (and they gave the military shit about waste?) toward the East Wing of the White House, the lesser known of the two flanks. It contained the First Lady’s offices, like anyone gives a rat’s ass about that bitch, Riggs thought as he waddled into the main corridor. It also had the calligraphy office, because that was the way they ran shit over here with their sense of priorities.
A military guard stood at the entrance to the elevator that led to the PEOC: the Presidential Emergency Oper
ations Center. Most people knew about the Situation Room under the West Wing where the Oval Office was, but the PEOC was the real deal. Where the commander in chief would go when the shit hit the fan. Where the armed forces of the United States could be commanded and controlled.
Except the shit had hit the fan and as far as Riggs could tell, the president was cowering over in the Residence.
The marine on duty at the elevator popped to attention and snapped a salute. Riggs acknowledged him by tipping the Constitution to the brim of his cap. As many of his staff as possible (not many, given his girth) crowded in with him; the rest would have to wait for the next ride.
The PEOC had been built during World War II for President Roosevelt. During the Cold War it had been boasted that the center could survive a direct ICBM hit. As Riggs descended in the elevator through earth and the steel-reinforced concrete that covered the bunker, he knew technology had outstripped the outmoded facility. A modern targeted nuke would bust this bunker wide open.
He didn’t plan to allow the Russkies and the Chinese the opportunity to do that.
Riggs giggled at the thought. Those pinched in around him tried not to eye him, staring up at the ceiling or at the walls. The elevator rumbled to a halt and the doors slid open. The duty staff, a half dozen officers, and NCOs who manned the PEOC hopped to attention as Riggs entered.
“At ease, gentlemen, at ease.”
Riggs went to the head of the conference table, which took up most of the room. It was where Bush had eventually arrived on 9/11. Of course, Riggs knew the real deal, because he’d met the officer who’d had the duty that day, when America was attacked. Bush had been reading aloud to a group of second graders, continuing even after being told one, then two planes had hit the World Trade Center.
Then they’d finally managed to get to Air Force One, took off, and had no clue where to go since there was concern Washington, DC, was under attack. They eventually landed at Barksdale Air Force Base and then flew on to Offutt where the president was secreted in the Strategic Command Underground Command Center. There he communicated back to the VP in this very room until it was deemed safe for the president to return to Washington.