Teddy Harrison peeked in and assessed. “I can’t believe you’re still up.”
Weston nodded and waved his old friend inside.
“Are we drinking?” Teddy asked.
“We should be.”
“Well, then call the Secret Service, because I’m armed.” He revealed a bottle of whiskey as he took a seat on the partner’s side of the desk. Good ole Teddy, a master of unspoken reassurance. “Thomas H. Handy Rye,” he boasted. “Won the World Whiskies Awards for Best American Whiskey in 2009.”
“Well shit.” Weston leaned past the American flag on his right and tossed his old drink into a planter.
Teddy poured for both of them. “You want the bad news or the bad news?”
“Let’s just hear it.”
“If we execute Operation Wolfsbane, we’ll lose more Americans in one day than we’ve lost in any war. Ever.” Teddy threw back his drink and reloaded. “And if we don’t do it by moonrise tomorrow night, odds are the wolves will escape. If they do, the CDC’s prognosti—prognosis—prognostica—is it –cate or? Ah fuck it.” He took another shot and muttered, “It’s across the country in less than a week. Worldwide within a month.”
“We have to find him. Today.”
Teddy nodded and drew a deep breath. “We have ten hours between the moon’s set and rise. Ten hours, to find one man in New York, a man who doesn’t want to be found. Amid all that chaos…” Teddy shook his head.
“So that’s it? No alternative?”
“Sometimes there is no alternative.”
“No. I won’t accept that.”
“This is the hand we were dealt. It wasn’t an oversight, Will. There was no mistake on your watch. I’m sure Fox News will uncover that letter from Valenkov and take us to task for not creating a ‘Department of Werewolf Defense,’ but this is not your fault.“ He paused for a laugh, but he didn’t get one. “History will see that,” he said, sputtering. “Just maybe not in our lifetimes.”
“Never. They’ll never understand killing our own.”
Teddy knew he was right. “We’ll put Valenkov’s face out there, we’ll hit them over the head with what you were up against. The CDC prognosi… tigotations… will go public. Your voice will be heard.”
“I’ll be charged with a million counts of murder.”
“The lawyers are already on it.” Teddy said, and then he raised his voice to stave off Weston’s interruption. “We’ll make an executive declaration to classify werewolves as a catastrophic threat to the security of the country.”
“They’re still American citizens.”
“Nope. Not if we can help it. We’ll go to Directive 51.”
Directive 51 was the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive signed by George W. Bush in 2007. On the surface, it established provisions for the “continuity” of the federal government in times of catastrophic emergency. But there were controversial details of 51 that provided for broad and unilateral executive decisions in regard to military strategy during situations of domestic terrorism.
“We’re good on that,” Teddy continued. “Liberals will have an epic shit when we’re forced to reveal some of the classified details of 51, but we’ll give it the spin.”
Directive 51 was a perfect symbol of the ideology Weston had been trying to put in the country’s rear-view mirror. He hated everything about it. Resorting to it as a defense seemed beyond hypocritical; it’d be a flat-out surrender.
“We’ll face a tougher road from the international community,” Teddy continued. “They’ll throw the BWC at us, as if every goddamn one of them aren’t breaking it themselves.” He was referring to the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention, an outdated set of rules from a different global landscape. Today it only serves to handcuff legitimate governments, because the enemy—human or monster or whatever between—no longer plays by the rules.
“They’ll have to get in line to throw me in jail,” Weston muttered.
“You’re not alone on this, Will. You’ll have the support of everyone in the administration.”
“Publicly I’ll have their support. What about privately?”
“Pussies. They’re all pussies. It’s too big, that’s why they’re not sitting at this desk. They can preach all they want if they offer a better alternative. This isn’t the best option we came up with, it’s the only option we came up with.”
“Have we tried hard enough?”
“We can’t second-guess the team when we’re under the gun. Alan is our man.”
General Alan Truesdale was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and chief military advisor. His was the most challenging cabinet position to fill as Weston’s administration faced the difficult task of revitalizing America’s international standing after a decade of international recklessness. The man was born with a gun in his hand, but his judgment was sound. Weston felt confident that he’d done his soul-searching before presenting Operation Wolfsbane.
“Rebekkah’s not convinced,” Teddy added. “She said, ‘If that’s the only answer, we have to ask a different question.’”
“And what might that question be?”
“If the clock weren’t ticking, I’d sit on the toilet and think of one.”
Weston took a deep breath. “Maybe I should go to New York.”
“And what? Die with the rest of them?”
“Take the blame. Show my solidarity. Let them paint me as a hero, as a villain, as a madman, whatever they need. The country will move on; the government will continue—”
“No, no, you’re a bigger man than that. Martyrdom is a last indignant gasp in a losing fight. You deserve better, and they deserve better. They’re going to need you. And look, you’re not in this alone. You can push us away, but we won’t go. Everybody will sign the declaration.”
“No pressure. I’m not going to take them down with me.”
“Then they’ll shake themselves out.”
Weston thought for a moment, imagining which members of his cabinet would turn on him. “Won’t matter much in the end.”
“Not at all, really.”
They were quiet for a moment. The room was so still that the ticking of the grandfather clock became maddening. Weston’s arms and legs felt weightless, and then he imagined he could see himself from some third perspective in the room.
When Teddy finally broke the silence, his voice was both quiet and startling. “At some point there will have to be a broad pardon for all of us. Allison’s signature will be on the order, so it’ll have to go down the chain.”
Allison Leslie, the vice president. One of a hundred careers he was about to poison. With her signature on the executive order to carry out Operation Wolfsbane, she wouldn’t be able to pardon him for murder.
“We’ll need to be smart about who gets the baton when the time comes. We’re looking at Rosenbaum.” Teddy said.
Weston’s eyes erupted.
“He’s a good man,” Teddy argued, “and an old friend. He’ll keep it clean.”
“He’s the Secretary of Agriculture!”
“Okay—“
“The Secretary of Agriculture is going to become president?”
“Who the hell knows what’s going to happen? This is going to punch a gaping hole in the political landscape. Partisanship won’t stand aside for long. We need the top name that’s not on the order to be a reliable ally, and Ira Rosenbaum is a reliable ally.”
As usual, Teddy was right. They were going to need help at the top. Not just him, but the men and women standing by him. “We should sit down with him.”
“I spoke with him today. I was vague with details, but the writing is on the wall. He’s onboard,” Teddy said, pouring himself another shot. “Tomorrow morning, Alan will brief a bipartisan congressional committee on the broad strokes, and then you and Rebekkah will hear them out on the record. Again, the writing is on the wall. I don’t think it’ll get contentious.”
“Not even from Hynds?” Bob Hynds was th
e Speaker of the House, a notoriously contnentious Republican. It was his job to stand in Weston’s way, and the rest of Washington’s burden to take a side.
“I already backchanneled with him. Gave him extra time to prepare his pièce de condemnation. But he understands our position. He’s going to sign.”
Weston took some comfort in that. Hynds’ reasonableness was one of the best-kept secrets in politics. But it wasn’t Hynds that he really dreaded facing.
“Brewer is on the committee?”
Teddy nodded solemnly.
James Brewer was the president pro tempore of the Senate, third in the line of presidential succession and the most senior senator in the Democratic party. He’d overcome a controversial youth in the Ku Klux Klan to serve in the senate for fifty-one years. He was remarkably sharp at 93, and he understood the game better than anyone. And he was born and raised in Manhattan.
“Does he have family in the city?” Weston asked.
“He has a son and a grandson. Lawyers. And they have families.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“He already called over and offered his support. I’m telling you they’re behind you. We’ll all be in pain. We’ll all grieve. But I’ll never apologize for doing my duty to this country. And I don’t think you should.”
Teddy held his drink aloft, coaxing Weston to meet his toast. The whiskey seared their tired throats.
“Tell me we’re doing everything we can to find Valenkov.”
“We have all of our best trackers on it. The DHS called in the Shadow Wolves, Native American smuggler trackers. Black ops are in, spooks, FBI. Tildascow is on her way back from Transylvania with some kind of werewolf hunter.”
“Good. Good.”
“Even if we find him, there’s no guarantee this bloodline thing will—”
“I know. I just don’t want to give up.”
“Nobody’s giving up.”
Teddy took another shot and threw a coughing fit that almost cost him his last kidney. And then he looked at Weston, who knew he’d run out of reasons to stall what he’d come to say.
“You have to know…” Teddy muttered, “Any troops we send in tomorrow, they won’t be coming out. There won’t be time for exit checks. Once they hit the ground, they’re gone.”
“So if we’re in, we’re all in.”
“If we’re in, we’re all in.”
The president ran his hands across the surface of the Resolute desk.
“Let’s go all in.”
Two
Joint Base Andrews
Prince George’s County, Maryland
7:04 a.m. EST
Yannic Ilecko had never imagined the texture of America. Foreign lands were irrelevant to a man who had never traveled more than fifty miles from his place of birth. And yet, the country was exactly what he might have expected. They had taken their hard concrete and covered all of the softness of the earth, and then everything else along with it.
Ilecko sat on a cot, gazing across the rows of identical cots in the long, soulless military hangar. Flags adorned the walls, so brash and proud and oozing with the self-ordained superiority of the Statele Unite ale Americii.
The chubby American boy—“Lon,” they called him—was curled up on a nearby cot, snoring obnoxiously. The plane ride had been taxing, and the boy’s weak body was not prepared for such rigors. Ilecko had had no precedent to imagine how his own body would respond to such torture, but an hour later he felt only the fatigue of a hard day’s work.
The boy awoke with a start, exclaiming something about a “yo-da.” His mannerisms were distinctly American (his first morning’s labor was to take a disapproving sniff of his underarm), but he seemed always to be struggling with fear. “She is not sleeping?” he asked, mangling limba română.
“I slept on the plane.”
The boy made a motion to his throat as if to throw up. “She is not liking the plane. She might toss high.”
“Will you come with us to New York?” Ilecko asked.
Lon was surprised by the question, and again fearful. Not of the thought, but of an answer. “She is not thinking so. She is not part of the military.”
Ilecko nodded. It was as expected.
The boy thought longer, perhaps from guilt. “There is many chickens in New York. Will she be safe?”
“No.”
He nodded, first at Ilecko and then at the floor.
“In my home,” Ilecko said, “You asked if my wife was a werewolf.”
“Yes. She is sorry.”
“So you know they are not called ‘chickens.’”
The boy’s cheeks flushed and his eyes watered. His head rolled loosely, causing Ilecko to wonder if he was going to faint. Finally, he let loose a soft, defeated gasp.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I hoped if we appeared helpless, you would…I’m so sorry.”
His Romanian was sharp after all.
“You are a very smart boy,” Ilecko said. “Don’t let them make you feel otherwise.”
But the boy couldn’t hear the compliment or the advice—he was too soft, raging with self-condemnation. “I am sorry, though,” he said, fumbling with his hands, and then he switched to English. “I shouldn’t have asked about your wife. I’m—I’m sorry for your loss. I didn’t mean to bring up bad… whatever.“
“She would have liked you very much. You would have made her laugh.”
“Thank you for saying that,” he muttered.
Ilecko smiled. The stretch of the muscles felt unfamiliar. And then he surprised himself by telling the boy, “My wife was not the werewolf. I was.”
The boy looked up, but remained quiet.
“I awoke one morning with her blood on my hands. And my pursuit of Lord Valenkov began.”
And then his life had continued, he said; despite lack of purpose, like a record skipping after the music died. He’d fought so hard to purge the memories, but something inside him wanted to tell this boy what he had never told anyone before.
He had awakened naked in the forest, in the grey, damp haze of a spring morning. Sticky blood covered his hands. Dead weeds were pasted to his bare chest. His skin was hard and numb.
The mountains pointed his way home. The sun crested the hills as he walked, but it brought no warmth. He kept to the woods, away from the road. He came across a dead deer, its insides strewn about the shade of a fir tree. It might have been his own work, but he also sensed a bear nearby, watching from the safety of the trees.
Even the most fearsome animals stayed clear of his scent.
There was the farm, where the warm embrace of his wife would ease his terror. The wolfsbane on their land began to throb in his head, slowing his blood, pulling nausea into his chest. He fought through the daze.
The wolfsbane—this much of it—would incapacitate other werewolves. But not Yannic Ilecko. His heart and body were strong from the hard work and honest thoughts taught by his father and grandfather.
He stumbled across the crops, as carefully as possible, to escape the drown of the wolfsbane. When his senses awoke, he turned southeast toward the house.
Only dead wisps of smoke rose from the chimney. That was the first thing he noticed. Violeta should have been cold without a full fire.
Something was wrong.
The front door was open—how could that be?
She must have gone to town?
Please, she went to town, there must have been a reason to go early—
He ran, a naked and bloodstained madman, crushing potato plants as he stumbled across the soil furrows, wrenching both of his ankles, he reached the house and slipped on the porch, smashed his knee into the support beam, knocking down the awning, not knowing until later that he’d fractured his kneecap, he forced the door open, breaking it against the fallen awning and he stooped to limp inside—
He knew the smell. No. The wolf knew it.
Not just blood. Her blood.
He found her facedown in a pool of her spilled life.<
br />
The back of her head. That was the first he’d ever seen of her. And then she’d spun, and her hair had erupted like a blazing torch, and he’d seen those playful freckles, that sweet smile, and those pale eyes. The color of a winter’s dusk. And she smiled, and he wondered how there could be such beauty.
When he didn’t return the favor, thinking she could not be beckoning him, Violeta creased her glimmering orange brows and waved. Get over here, you. So expressive were her thin hands. So delicate they would burn after only moments in the sun, yet so strong as they caressed his chest.
That right hand that she’d summoned him with, the hand of God, was now gone. It had been stripped of its flesh and severed at the wrist.
She deserved better than him. He insisted upon it. But he could not stand to see her unhappy; he could not let those brows crease again. He could never deny her, no matter how ludicrous the thought of the floare Violeta with the sălbatic Ilecko.
And in the end, the flower was crushed by the savage.
No other vârcolac could have broken through the wolfsbane.
Could she have known her husband was the monster as he was killing her? Did she call out his name, plead with him to fight against the wolf, even as he ate her flesh?
He buried her beneath their willow trees. He tossed dirt on her lovely face, returning the flower to the earth, until he could see her no more. And then she was gone.
He took no comfort in the hunt for Zaharius Valenkov. No joy when he finally lanced the life from Valenkov’s heart.
It was just another tragedy for a cursed family. Valenkov had suffered the transformation for twenty years. And he too had loved ones—to deny that would be to succumb to blind rage, and Violeta would never permit such a thing. He would never betray her again, if there was any hope that she might forgive him from her perch in Heaven before he plummeted in the other direction.
Perhaps it was Violeta’s silent whisper that made him to come to America. That might explain what he could not. And yet, here he was, in a strange land, to see to more heartbreak for the Valenkov clan.
After his tale was told, the American boy struggled for words.
Now Ilecko found it easier to look at him. He noticed his red hair and—
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