Bat out of Hell

by Alan Gold

  “Would they have known what was happening? Do you think they suffered?” asked the captain.

  The fire chief shook his head sadly. “Man, that was some mother of a bomb. Whoever made it had no idea of the quantity to use in a confined area; I’d say he used three or four times what was necessary. The poor bastards asleep would have died before they could even have opened their eyes. If that’s a way to go, I’ll choose it for myself.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by a patrol officer who approached his captain and said, “Sir, I think you’d better hear this.”

  The captain followed him to his patrol car. The patrol officer’s partner was in a conversation over the radio with a woman.

  “That’s not information I can give out, sir,” she said. “That address is governed by security provisions and is locked down. I can’t reveal the name or details of the occupant. I’m sorry.”

  The captain picked up the microphone. “Excuse me, ma’am, I don’t know who you are.”

  “I’m the supervisor of Northeast Washington Atlantic Bell. Who are you?”

  “I’m Captain Perry Arnaudo of the Twenty-Third Precinct. Ma’am, we’ve just had a massive explosion in this house. We suspect it was a bomb. That means terrorists. I don’t want to have to call Homeland Security to monster you. All I want to know is who was in the house so I can inform next of kin.”

  She was silent for a long moment. “Okay, I’ll give you the name, but that’s it. The house belongs to Mr. Alan and Ms. DeAnne Harper. Captain, that’s more than my job’s worth. Now please, contact Homeland Security, but I can’t give you any more information. Good night, sir.”

  Captain Arnaudo handed back the microphone to the driver. “Jesus Christ.”

  He walked away from the patrol car and stabbed his office number into his mobile phone. His assistant answered immediately.

  “Hey Captain, what’s happening down there? It’s coming through on the news, and it’s . . .”

  “Don, shut up. Text me through the phone numbers for the White House and Homeland Security.”

  “Sir?”

  “The woman whose house has just been destroyed was DeAnne Harper. In case you don’t know it, Ms. Harper is . . . was . . . the secretary of health. This is a serious fucking terrorist attack. I’m clearing the area right now because where there’s one bomb, there’s often a second one that explodes sometime later to take out police and emergency workers and sightseers. Get on to the FBI and the security details for top government officials. Tell them what’s happened to Secretary Harper and say that every cabinet and senior government person is on a potential hit list. Tell them that until we find out about this bombing, everybody on the protection lists has to have maximum protection immediately. That means now!”

  10

  Debra Hart was in the shower in the apartment on Third Street SW, loaned to her by the White House, when her mobile phone rang. She decided to ignore it and continued to allow the needles of hot water to prepare her for the day ahead. A day of meetings with officials from the Departments of Agriculture and Health to prepare the president’s plans for how she would deal with the latest problems caused by the bats.

  Toweling herself, her mobile rang again, and this time she answered it immediately.

  “Ma’am, a car is outside your building to bring you to the White House. The president has asked that you’d come here as soon as possible,” said the president’s personal assistant.

  “But I have to be in my office for an eight a.m. meeting with . . .”

  “Doctor Hart, all meetings have been canceled. The government is in security lockdown. Please come to the White House immediately.” The PA hung up, leaving Debra frowning. Lockdown? What the hell for?

  It took her a mere ten minutes from the phone call to dressing, rushing downstairs to the black limousine, and being taken through Washington traffic to the White House’s tunnel entrance just off Pennsylvania Avenue. Taking the elevator to the lobby, she was escorted by a Secret Service officer to the president’s Oval Office. She was silent on the way through, knowing better these days than to ask questions of the security details. But what worried her were the glum faces of everybody she met. Normally they’d greet her with a smile or a kind word. Today, the building was funereal and seemed to be encased in silence.

  “Debra, thanks for coming so early,” said President Thomas.

  She nodded. The office was full of people, groups of threes and fours standing and sipping coffee and speaking in undertones as though waiting for her to arrive. She sat on one of the sofas.

  “I didn’t want to begin the briefing before you got here,” he said. “Ted . . . ?”

  Ted Marmoullian, Deputy Director of the Secret Service and on assignment as head of White House security, stood and began to address the large number of people. He was a middle-aged man with graying hair, but his body was that of an athlete. It was his eyes that spoke eloquently of his inner and outer strengths—cold, unforgiving eyes, without a single crease of mirth. He was the sort of man you needed to befriend because he’d make a dreadful enemy.

  “Some of you would already know that in the early hours of this morning, the home of Secretary of Health DeAnne Harper was bombed. She, her husband, and their three children were killed instantly.”

  There was a gasp in the room from those given the information for the first time. People stared at Ted in amazement. Debra was horrified and put her hand to her mouth.

  “The bomb was C-4, a plastic explosive. The entire house was destroyed. There’re just walls left. All cabinet officers and senior government people have gone onto level six security. This was a terrorist assassination, and we can be confident that it wasn’t the only one that’s being planned. We’ve picked up nothing in our monitoring that this event was going to occur. There was an anonymous call made to an FBI Washington district office, which we’re following through, but there was nothing whatsoever that would have identified Secretary Harper as the victim of terrorism. We have no idea at this moment who the perpetrator is or what organization he belongs to. Nobody has claimed responsibility, but that can take up to twenty-four hours to occur.

  “There’s one forensic clue, however. Some distance away from the scene of the incident, we found a business card, crumpled in the roadside gutter. It belonged to a woman called Lorrie Benson. She’s currently being questioned by the FBI, but she was in bed when officers went to her apartment and seemed to be taken completely by surprise. There’re no explosive residues on her body or her clothes, and she has an alibi for where she was the previous night. She was in a disco, and her alibi checks out until one this morning. After that, however, she has no alibi verification, but her partner and she swear on a stack of Bibles that they were in bed asleep when the bombing took place,” he told them. “To be honest, Lorrie is in such a state of confusion and distress that either she’s a brilliant actor or finding her business card near to the scene of the explosion was a complete red herring, either accidental or deliberate.”

  The president intervened. “Tell them why you picked her up, Ted.”

  “Her business card said that she was the personal assistant to Tom Pollard, the CEO of the animal liberation group, CHAT. But she hasn’t worked for him for over a year. She left his office in Manhattan to come live in Washington with her partner. She swears that she’s had nothing to do with CHAT in the past twelve months. We’re checking her phone and banking records right now, but from the reports of the initial interrogation, I very much doubt that Lorrie is the person responsible. It’s possible that her card was placed there deliberately to throw us off the track of the real offenders, but we’re certainly not ruling out CHAT at this stage.”

  Shaking her head in consternation, Debra asked, “I don’t understand . . . why would CHAT or any animal liberation group want to murder the secretary of health? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “We have no information at this stage, ma’am. We’ll keep you informed.”

  “Than
ks, Ted,” said the president. “I’m devastated by the callous murder of the secretary of health. She was a good friend, a terrific colleague, and the nation will miss her expertise terribly. But we have to try to fathom why she was the target of an assassin. Ted’s right, of course, that this CHAT business card could be a coincidence or something designed to throw us off track, but it’s too much of a concurrence to find animal liberationists somehow associated with this terrible deed, remembering that DeAnne was leading the fight against these bat viruses. When I was told what had happened in the early hours of this morning, my very first thought was that it was one of the lunatic fringe animal welfare groups. Why else, for God’s sake, would anybody want to kill somebody in charge of America’s health services?”

  Recovered somewhat from the shock, Debra put her hand up for permission to speak. “Mr. President, as part of my work in fighting these infection outbreaks, we’ve kept a careful watch on the Internet traffic and weblogs of these animal protection fanatics. There are three that could have been responsible. They’ve all been sending out wild messages about retribution for the destruction of the bat population. We’ve told the FBI and they’re investigating them. Animals Alive is based in Phoenix, Arizona; another is Care for All Life, based in Boise, Idaho, and the third is All Creatures Great and Small, based in Long Island, New York. We never took much notice of them, because . . .”

  “What about WEL?” interrupted Ted Marmoullian.

  “WEL? I don’t know them,” Debra replied.

  “Not all that many people have heard of them,” he continued. “WEL is short for Whole Earth League. They’re an ultra-radical fringe group, set up like Al-Qaeda in cells throughout America and a number of other countries. They don’t use the Internet or telephones to communicate. We know they’ve been responsible for some murders and for firebombing animal testing facilities, especially cosmetic houses and experimental laboratories, but they’re as cunning as snakes and we’ve never been able to bring them to court. It’s run by Professor Stuart Chalmers who heads some philosophy school associated with Wisconsin University. Frankly, Doctor Hart, it doesn’t surprise me that you haven’t heard of them. They don’t use modern communication methods . . . they rely on personal messengers to pass on instructions from a small, tight central cabal. They’re almost impossible to infiltrate.”

  “And you think that this WEL organization could have been responsible?” asked the president.

  “Sir, our initial research puts this Chalmers guy giving a lecture in New York University yesterday evening, and he spent the night in the Holiday Inn adjoining the university. He was still there this morning, but our guys have picked him up and are interrogating him. They’ll get nothing out of him, though. Unless he got a Learjet to fly him to DC, it would have been near impossible for him to have left his lecture hall at ten thirty last night, flown to Washington, committed the crime, and then to have flown back to be in bed when our guys knocked on his hotel door at seven this morning. And even if he was associated, he’ll have covered his tracks like an Indian warrior. We’ve also picked up other associates of his, but I’m pretty certain that they’ll all have cast-iron alibis.”

  “And your best guess?”

  “Mr. President. I have no proof, but my guts tell me that if there isn’t any evidence to prove that WEL committed this outrage, then they were probably responsible,” Ted told him. “The clue that was left, the business card of this woman who worked for CHAT was . . . well, probably planted. It was probably contrived to throw us off the scent, but I’d be very surprised if CHAT were in any way responsible. This assassination is way out of their league. They’re into spraying fur coats with paint, not murder. No, if anybody’s responsible, it’s either a completely unrelated terrorist atrocity, courtesy of some whacky paramilitary group who’ll soon claim responsibility, or it was conducted by WEL. If it was WEL, it’ll be a hell of a job getting evidence.”

  Others in the room began to make noises that they wanted to contribute, but the president held up his hand.

  “So what can we do about them?” he asked.

  “Unless we ignore the US Constitution or put the country on the highest level National Terrorist Emergency Alert, there’s not much we can do to shake their tree, other than apply to a judge to hold them for further interrogation. But these guys aren’t going to have left any evidence connecting them with the bomber who actually got his hands dirty and murdered Secretary Harper and her family. Whoever the bomber is, he’ll be a couple of hundred miles out of DC by now; he’ll have ditched the vehicle he used to commit the crime, probably selling it to some boondock car dealership way out of Washington, then he’d have paid cash for some old jalopy of a motor to drive away in, no questions asked, booked into a dive motel, showered to get rid of any explosives residue, gave all of his clothes to a local charity, and will be driving west, north, or south to disappear into the underground network of some city a thousand miles away. I very much doubt whether we’re dealing with Islamic terrorists here, Mr. President. These maniacs are homemade. They look like us, talk like us, and think like us, and they know how to hide among their own so that we can’t tell them in a crowd. Worst of all is that they use no modern communication devices so we can’t monitor them or record their phone calls, emails, or text messages. They don’t use Skype or any other Internet connection devices that the NSA at Fort Meade can monitor. It’s going to be a nightmare, proving that they did this.”

  Ted Marmoullian surveyed the silent room. “And even more of a nightmare finding out what they’re going to do next. Which is why everybody in this room is a target of these lunatics and has been placed under maximum security and protection. Don’t even think about complaining, ladies and gentlemen. When it comes to White House security, even the president does what I say.”

  ***

  The meeting over, the group departed quickly and in silence from the Oval Office. Debra walked out after the majority had departed, hoping to speak alone with the president and to get his reassurance that soon everything would be all right, but he immediately went into an obviously private meeting with his chief of staff. From the few words she overheard, they were talking about how to break the news of the assassination of a cabinet secretary to the American people now that they were having their breakfasts and early news programs were beginning to report both the incident and who had been involved.

  Debra walked through the door with a number of other people and was surprised to find that her path was blocked by a younger middle-aged man with brown hair graying at the edges. Like Ted, he was lean and athletic, but from his suit, shirt, and tie—and the bulge in his breast pocket that defined his gun and holster—Debra immediately knew that this man was a Secret Service protection agent.

  “Doctor Hart?” he said, obviously recognizing her from the dossier he’d been given by his Department.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Agent Brett Anderson. I’m in charge of your security detail. Please follow me.”

  He turned and led her in a different direction from the way she’d entered the White House.

  “I’m not a cabinet officer, and I’m sure that I don’t need a security person?” she asked.

  “I don’t know why I’ve been assigned, ma’am. I’m just here to protect you. At all times, you’ll walk behind me. You’ll never enter a room without me entering first. In the street, we’ll avoid crowds and only walk with the flow of pedestrian traffic, not against it. If we’re walking, I’ll walk a few paces in front. If I see somebody coming toward me who looks in any way suspicious, I’ll slow down or stop, and you will keep walking up to me until you’re close enough to touch me. That means my body will protect yours. If I say the word ‘go,’ you’ll immediately walk quickly back in the direction from which we’ve come and I will deal with whoever it is that I’ve stopped in the street. You will not look back and check what’s happening. You will continue walking until I catch up with you. If I haven’t caught up, continue walking and enter
the nearest shop or building with a large crowd. I’ll find you. If I don’t return, remain hidden and activate a number I’ll put into your cell phone. Another security detail will be there within minutes.

  “You will never arrange to travel anywhere, under any circumstances, without telling me in advance, enabling me to get my colleagues at the arrival point to check out the security.”

  She wondered if this included visits to the bathroom, but she remained silent because this was obviously very important to him.

  He continued, “When you’re in a room, you’ll stand away from doors and windows. I’ll enter first, and wherever practicable, I’ll draw down the shades or curtains. You won’t use private transportation, but only cars that have been garaged or parked under my supervision. You’ll not open your own mail, answer the door, or identify your location when you’re in conversation with people, even those you know well,” he said.

  He would have continued his litany, but she interrupted him, “Am I supposed to remember all that?”

  “It’ll become second nature until this emergency is over,” he said.

  “Look! This is ridiculous. Why am I being given security . . . I mean, I’m a scientist. I’m not a politician or a . . .”