“What?”
“Nobody died at the Capitol, Mr. Morgan. It was all a fake. Everyone’s safe. The new government is installed.” He stopped and rubbed his face with both hands. “But Lucy’s right. We shouldn’t talk here. I guess you’ll have to come with us. We’ll leave as soon as they get the mess cleaned up. In the meantime, relax. I think this is going to come out okay. You did well, actually. Except for the bank manager, perhaps.”
Heismann drove to within a mile of the nurse’s house and then pulled off the avenue and into the parking lot of a large church. He drove around to the back of the lot and parked the Suburban in a corner, well out of sight of any passing police cars out on Wisconsin Avenue. The injured policeman was still breathing, albeit with audible difficulty. His face was bruised and swollen, but one eye was partially open. Heismann thought about what to do with him. He could smother the man and simply end the problem. Except the officer hadn’t really seen him, and he had served a useful purpose in getting the Suburban through the immediate security cordon around the downtown area after the attack. He decided to leave him to his fate.
Although it was just midafternoon, the skies were growing dark and overcast. Rain tonight, he thought. Help them clean up the Capitol steps. He flipped on the radio, but both bands were silent except for the emergency broadcast station, which was still telling everyone to go home and stay there. Otherwise, there was only an electronic wall of static.
They had obviously shut down all the commercial stations, trying to limit knowledge of the extent of the disaster. Well, that made sense. He consulted his city map and fingered his way to the nurse’s house through the nearby residential streets. He retrieved his raincoat, grabbed the briefcase, got out of the Suburban, and locked the doors. He felt like he should leave a note somewhere, but he did not dare draw attention to the vehicle until he was well clear of the area, probably in twelve hours or so, once the initial search frenzy died down. Anyway, someone would see it. Even these police would find it soon enough, once they started looking.
He walked through a side gate and turned right, still just another commuter, hurrying home a little early, as requested by his devastated government.
Forty-five minutes after the shoot-out in the bank, a government limo pulled up and Swamp, Hallory, and Lucy got in. Hallory pointed Swamp into the back left corner, so Lucy ended up in the middle. She seemed to be avoiding even looking in Swamp’s direction. Her face was still puffy and she sat down carefully. He wanted to ask where they were going, but he was still trying to absorb what Hallory had told him in the bank.
They drove in silence down Seventeenth Street. Swamp observed many police cars but no pedestrians and zero civilian traffic. The city’s office buildings appeared to be virtually deserted. As they got closer to the Mall and the White House, he began to see military police vehicles, Humvees and even armored personnel carriers, parked along the broad avenues. He couldn’t tell if they were manned or just parked there. He could hear but not see helicopters flying low over the city. They drove into the precincts of Lafayette Park and the limo pulled over to the sidewalk.
“We walk from here,” Hallory announced.
“Where?” Swamp asked.
“Crown,” Hallory said, using the Secret Service code word for the White House.
They walked southwest across the park, which was surrounded by military vehicles, many with engines running. Looking through the bare trees, Swamp could see what looked like Army troops up on the roof of the White House itself, the men carrying rifles and other weapons. As they arrived at the West Executive gate, a large limo with diplomatic plates, dark-tinted windows, and headlights blazing exited past them, while another one was easing up to the gate for inspection. A single heavily armed Apache helicopter was flying a tight orbit about a thousand feet above the White House, turning slowly in a continuous 360, as if looking for something to kill. Secret Service Uniformed Division officers processed them through the gate security equipment.
Five minutes later, they were in the White House Situation Room. Swamp caught a glimpse of a video screen showing a nighttime scene of what looked like a dozen large Air Force transports at an air base somewhere, surrounded by military and civilian vehicles of every description. A second screen showed a picture of a devastated and still-smoking west portico at the Capitol. The ground was littered with the wreckage of the viewing stands and what looked like dozens of sheet-covered lumps.
The main conference table was filled with officials in their shirtsleeves, working phones or conferring with staffers. The sitroom seemed smaller than he had remembered it, and those screens were new. Swamp recognized at least three cabinet secretaries, including the secretary of defense from the outgoing administration. Or was he still the SecDef? Was there a new government or not? Hallory had said there was.
Hallory nodded at a side conference room, then led Swamp into it and closed the door. Bertie Walker was inside, talking on a secure phone. He hung up and got up to greet Swamp and shake his hand, a sly grin on his face. Lucy had remained outside to talk to a cluster of Secret Service people.
“Oka-a-y,” Swamp said, grateful to sit down again. His various aches and pains were becoming more than just an annoyance. “Whiskey-tango-foxtrot, over?”
“Mutaib’s dead,” Hallory announced, and Bertie’s grin faded.
“How?” he asked. Swamp thought his question sounded rather offhand.
“Our trusty firefly hunter here popped him when he tried to run from the bank.”
“The bank? I thought Lucy was supposed to take him to Langley?”
Hallory shrugged. “Shit happens, I guess. Lucy’s car collided with a cop car out on the Mall. Mr. Morgan here was in the backseat and seized the opportunity to commandeer the vehicle and go to the bank. And now I think we know precisely what Heismann/Hodler looks like, by the way.”
Bertie sat back down, trying to digest the news. Then he understood. “Ah. He had himself recut to look like Mutaib?”
“Clever bastard, huh? And then apparently he made sure Mr. Morgan here got a look at his face, in hopes, I suspect, that he would go take care of business. Sooner or later. He was the eyewitness, after all.”
“I’m going to break somebody’s head, somebody doesn’t tell me what’s going on,” Swamp said.
Hallory looked at his watch, as if trying to make up his mind. Just then, a muted cheer went up out in the Situation Room. Bertie got back up, opened the door, and looked out. Swamp heard someone say, “Almost two thousand, not six hundred. More being brought in. First C-seventeen is rolling as we speak.”
“They gonna do it, Jack?” Bertie called over the general conversation out in the main room. “The whole enchilada? OPEC, too?”
Swamp couldn’t hear the answer, but Bertie was closing the door, a satisfied expression spreading over his face. “It worked,” he announced to no one in particular. “It fucking worked. Amazing.”
“What fucking worked?” Swamp asked, almost shouting himself.
The door opened again and in walked Tad McNamara. He was grinning as he came over to shake Swamp’s hand. Everybody wants to shake my hand, but nobody will tell me shit, Swamp thought. He repeated his question.
Bertie and McNamara sat down at one end of the conference table, flanking Hallory, who finally explained it.
“You’ve been the victim of a Communist plot,” Hallory said.
“There aren’t any more Communists,” Swamp said, and Hallory grinned.
“Figure of speech, Mr. Morgan. But you’ve been running a script ever since we first dropped that firefly in your lap. And today is payday. As I told you earlier, the attack was a fake. The German, Heismann/Hodler, was real, and he really thinks he’s done his job. But his controller worked for us.”
“You’re telling me you people knew where this guy was all along?” Swamp asked.
Bertie and McNamara looked down at the table. Hallory was nodding. “More or less,” he said. “His campaign to kill the nurse was no
t in the plan, of course, but we had to let that play out.”
“Jesus Christ, you let that guy damn near kill that woman.”
Hallory was shaking his head. “We didn’t know he could change shape like that. We didn’t really know what he looked like, because not even Mutaib knew what he looked like. The guy always wore a disguise of some kind after he went through all those surgeries.”
“Is that why Immigration came back with oatmeal when we pulled the string on Heismann and Hodler?”
“They were following instructions, Swamp. A lot of people followed instructions in this op without knowing what or why they were doing it.”
“And the fire at the clinic?”
Hallory looked uncomfortable for the first time. “That again was at Heismann’s initiative. When we started this thing, Mutaib warned us that Heismann might wipe out his trail. The problem was that we didn’t know when he would actually finish his plastic surgery program, other than it would be before the inauguration, because after that, he’d go to ground. There were admittedly some unknowns loose in this little equation.”
“And what equation was that, exactly?” Swamp asked. “Anybody?”
“Did you see all those transports out there?” Hallory said. “On the screen when you came through the Situation Room?”
“Yeah. And?”
“Those transports were all staged last week at Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean. Now they’re convened at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. They began landing two hours after the ‘attack’ took place, coincident with an ultimatum from the United States. Right about the same time as we sealed their borders and their airspace.”
“Ultimatum.”
“Yeah. An ultimatum that said we had direct, incontrovertible, eyewitness proof that a faction of the Saudi royal family was behind a decapitation strike aimed at the inauguration proceedings. That American transports were loading up every American citizen who could get to the air base. And that unless the Saudi government handed over everyone involved in this attack, plus every swinging dick currently in the country who’d ever been associated with, a member of, a supporter of, an ally of, a relative of, a business or banking partner of—you name it, anyone, and especially Saudi government and military officials who’d ever even thought about or mumbled the name Al Qaeda—a dozen or so hundred-kiloton nuclear warheads would soon be arriving to turn the entire Kingdom into green glass.”
“Wow.”
“The Agency had a preliminary list of about six hundred people ‘of interest.’ The Saudi royal family has informed us they’re going to hand over some two thousand sweating bastards, who apparently are on their way to Prince Sultan Air Base as we speak.”
“Mutaib was dealing with the Saudi royal family?”
“He was dealing with a Saudi prince,” Bertie said. “Admittedly, there are dozens of them, so one can just about always say he’s dealing with the royal family.”
“Was the king involved in this?”
“No. This was one faction, one of many. They owned the bank, they’d installed Mutaib, and they approached him about doing the attack. Unbeknownst to them, he’d gone infidel on them. He contacted us in Langley when he finally understood what they were contemplating. We brought it to the fusion committee, where someone came up with an interesting idea.”
“Which was?”
“Which was, in essence, why not take over the plot? Let them think they’d actually executed the attack, and then, once and for all, beat the Saudi problem into complete submission. And one of the things we’d need was an eyewitness.”
“Eyewitness proof,” Swamp said. “And that would be me?”
Hallory nodded his head. “Right after this fake attack, we told them that land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles were being retargeted and readied for launch. We showed them some video of what that looks like. We told them that we would turn every horizontal habitable acre of the Kingdom into the world’s biggest caldera if they didn’t meet our demands. Like I said, we said we had lists. And if anyone on our lists didn’t show up under guard at Prince Sultan Air Base in four hours’ time, we would launch.”
“And they believed it?”
“Hell yes. The whole world has been watching a very carefully and elaborately staged disaster scene play out on the Capitol steps. We’ve got footage of the attack. We’ve got footage of the terrible damage, hundreds of bodies. We’ve got smoke, ambulances racing through town, because ambulances did race through town. They just didn’t go anywhere.”
“Holy shit.”
“The whole world got to see what we allowed them to see, because this is probably the only city in the country where we could pull this off. We’re the feds. Mediawise, we own this town. We’ve got every channel—visual, data, voice, broadcast, satellite—including all the foreign embassies’ comms, locked down or jammed down. We have all the major networks clamped off, with only one television channel going. And that channel is ours.”
“Wouldn’t they figure that out?” Swamp asked. “That all their regular sources had been shut down?”
“A total national emergency,” Hallory said. “The government took over everything immediately. Foreign governments would expect that. It’s what they would do. And brother Mutaib, who, as the head of one their most important banks, was de facto an important member of the Saudi establishment here in Washington, dropped a hint to the Saudi security service in Riyadh about thirty minutes before the ultimatum hit. Said there was a rumor circulating in Saudi circles here in Washington, to the effect that the attack was the responsibility of this faction. And then he, as well as their embassy, went off the air. Yeah, they believed it.”
Swamp shook his head in wonder. “And the president, the president-elect? They’re safe?”
“As I explained, everyone is safe. We fed the target coordinates to the German via Mutaib. He did do his own little reconnaissance, but there was no way he could get the exact coordinates without waltzing up to the steps of the west portico and pointing his GPS at the sky. Plus, we provided the Russian mortar, and the mortar rounds. The German had no way of knowing. He was totally dependent on Mutaib for logistics.”
“But what about all those people? The people invited to be there?”
“All hustled inside the Capitol when the first round was fired. We took over the TV coverage and began transmitting some really good special-effects work, courtesy of our friends in Tinseltown. They do that shit pretty well, don’t they?”
Swamp nodded. “I saw it. It was very realistic. Even the bit where the cameraman dropped his teeth and left the scene. But after that, it was all smoke and noise in that house. My ears are still ringing.”
“Especially that,” Hallory said. “They set it up to look like the one camera still going was unattended. The actual TV signal was running thirty seconds delayed, so we had time to switch over. We cut off the other networks, and we cut off all the sound. But we let it run for about three minutes before we showed a Secret Service agent, all bloody and bandaged, run up to the camera, and then it went off, too. After that, it was all government statements, official briefings, like that. But the whole world, including the Saudis, of course, got to watch what looked like unfiltered, if totally doctored, video of mass murder and mayhem. Good stuff.”
“And your eyewitness?”
“That was going to be you. Which is why Lucy was right there, waiting to pick you up. When the time comes, you are going to be taken before some cameras to tell the world what you saw and that a German terrorist, hired by the Royal Kingdom Bank, did it.”
Swamp finally asked the question he’d been wanting to ask for several minutes. “How did you guys know that the German wouldn’t just shoot my ass the moment he caught me sneaking around there?”
Hallory looked at McNamara for a second before answering. “I guess we didn’t.”
“You guess you didn’t.”
“No, we didn’t. We had the house wired, of course, so we could hear some of what he w
as doing in there. But we had to be very, very careful with that—if he’d tumbled to surveillance, he’d have been gone. We did know that you’d gone there, and we did know he’d taken you prisoner.”
“So there was a plan B?”
“Another agent.”
“An actor, actually,” Hallory said.
“So the whole time—”
“The whole time you were running with the firefly, you were headed toward the second floor of that town house,” Hallory said. “We knew you’d keep going on it. That’s what you were famous for. Swamp Morgan, the closer. At some point, we had to kick you out of OSI, but when we thought you might be hesitating, you got a new job offer. From Bertie here.”
Swamp suddenly remembered Bertie’s speculation about a decapitation strike, back when he’d provided the details on Heismann. He had to admit he’d been skillfully steered—suggestions, musings, planting the seeds of every action he took. They weren’t kidding. They’d been playing him right from the beginning. Now they were playing the whole world. Bertie was watching him work it out. Bertie, who’d come out of the dark just a couple weeks back, renewing old acquaintances.
“How long do you have to keep this thing going?”
“It’ll be dark here in a couple hours. Europe’s quit for the day. Going on midnight over there in Arabia, of course. But everyone who was at the Capitol for the inauguration will stay there, inside the building, until the last plane leaves Prince Sultan Air Base. Probably early tomorrow morning, our time. In the meantime, we’ve got crews working hard to provide the appropriate visual fodder for all the foreign intelligence satellites—cleanup crews at the Capitol, emergency vehicles, signs that we’re treating the wounded inside the building, smoke generators, all the appropriate infrared signals, the military at DefCon Two, warships leaving port, AWACS and F-sixteens on station—the whole bit.”
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