by Mack Maloney
“I’ll have to do it,” the first lieutenant said.
The other officer laughed darkly. “Yeah, well, leave a trail of bread crumbs behind you … and a list of your next of kin.”
The aide tried the door. It was unlocked, maybe a good sign, maybe not. He held his breath, bit his lip — and then let himself in.
Old Spice. Oak. Cigar smoke. These three odors hit his nose first. Not a big surprise. He’d been in this room many times before. The place always reeked of them.
It was also very dark in here, but he was used to that as well. The room was huge. It looked more like a prestigious university library than the secret office of a military man. But again the aide knew that while there might be several hundred books in the expansive office, some by the classic writers, its occupant hadn’t cracked more than a couple of them, if that.
He was standing in the far corner of the room. Short, bulbous, with soft, fleshy skin, and a very red face, General Rushton did not exactly have the cut of a military man. And his TV was indeed on. But the general was standing in front of it, preventing the lieutenant from seeing what was on. The aide could tell Rushton was absolutely riveted to it, though, and not in a pleasant way. His body was shaking, his right hand clenched. He was also talking on the phone. Not his desk phone — a cell phone.
As soon as Rushton realized he was not alone, he discontinued his conversation, then, with absolutely no grace, dropped the cell phone to the floor and crushed it with his foot.
“I’m sorry, General,” the aide finally spoke up. “But we have to get you downstairs. Your family is waiting. The press is here. And people are arriving in the function room.”
Rushton tried unsuccessfully to kick the remains of the cell phone under his desk. “How many guards were out in the hallway when you arrived?” he asked the aide harshly while turning off the TV
“Six, sir,” the lieutenant replied.
“How many teams escorted my limo over here?”
“Two teams in two trucks, sir ….”
“And downstairs?”
“Two teams of Secret Service, plus White House police. All the roofs are covered as well.”
“Did it seem like enough people to you, Lieutenant?”
The young officer hesitated a moment. “Yes, sir,” he finally spit out. “For the time being — for this occasion.”
Rushton’s red face went to a deeper shade of crimson. “‘For the time being?’” he asked icily. “Why don’t you realize I need these people around-the-clock? Those fanatics are doing everything they can to get to me. To my family. That’s why I need so much security. Why do you have problems with that?”
The officer gulped once — he really wasn’t sure just what fanatics Rushton was talking about. Islamic ones or someone else? But he’d been down this road before. “The only problem I have, General,” he said, “is that you’ll miss your family photo, your opportunity with the press — and that the guests in the function room will get restless. So, sir, may I suggest we get going?”
Rushton stood still as a statue for a moment, a bit dazed.
“Did your people leak that memo?” he asked sternly.
This was another unsettling thing. Rushton was scheduled to sit down at 2:00 P.M. for an extensive interview with the Washington Times, a very conservative newspaper. Earlier this day, he’d arranged for a leak that indicated that during this interview Rushton was planning on laying a bombshell on the country: that there was a better than 50–50 chance that terrorists would set off a nuclear explosive of some kind inside the United States in the next week — and that there was really nothing anyone could do about it.
The leak was particularly cynical, as it was actually a denial of what the general intended to say. This was an old Washington tactic. Rushton’s hero of fifty years before, Douglas MacArthur, would dispatch aides all the way from the wartime South Pacific to Washington simply to deny that the general was going to run for President. In this way, you were able to say what you wanted to say while at the same time denying that you ever said it. Rushton played by this set of rules.
But it was the last thing the country needed right now. From sea to shining sea, it was a continent of jitters. Yet because of his high, almost czarlike position, only Rushton, and maybe a handful of other people, knew whether the nuke bomb scenario was true or not. Even his closest aides never knew when to believe him. The capital had been rife with these kinds of stories for weeks, but so far, that’s all there were: stories. In other words, it was a case of missing WMD — real or not — this time right inside the country.
“That ‘message’ was put out, yes,” the lieutenant finally replied. “That’s why we have so many press at the family portrait. They’re expecting you to comment on it ….”
This did not seem to cheer up Rushton any.
“And what about the search for that Iranian airplane?” he asked.
The aide felt his shoulders slump again. This was another bugaboo with Rushton — his new obsession with finding the wreckage of an Iranian cargo plane that had crashed off the coast of Cuba the week before. The aide had no idea what the Iranian plane was doing in Cuba or why Rushton was so interested in it, but only that he had diverted valuable Homeland Security assets to look for it, both Coast Guard and Navy search planes, and asked about it on an hourly basis.
“Nothing on that yet,” the aide replied quickly.
Rushton did not like the reply and glowered at the aide for a moment. Finally, though, the general just said, “OK, let’s get going.”
With much relief, the lieutenant walked to the door, opened it, and gave a signal to the private security guards. They went into action. Two secured the hallway; two more cleared the first elevator that arrived. Then all six arranged themselves around Rushton, covering him from all sides.
They left quickly, onto the elevator and down to the second floor. Only then did the two lieutenants return to Rushton’s office and turn the TV back on. What had Rushton been watching that seemed to upset him so? It was a repeat-loop videotape of the TV news footage shot two days before over South Milwaukee showing the mysterious white helicopter, with the men inside brandishing the old Revolutionary War flag. This video, of course, had been playing nonstop around the country for the past 48 hours.
But for the general to be watching it, over and over again?
One of the lieutenants just shook his head and said to the other, “Now, this is disturbing ….”
* * *
Down on the second floor, in the Presidential Service Room, one of the advance security men took a message in his earphone. He signaled the photographer.
“OK, he’s on his way,” the photographer announced. “Places, everybody.”
The door opened a moment later and Rushton walked in. He did not look like the same man who’d left his office just a minute before. He was smiling, jovial. With press cameras flashing, he embraced the photographer warmly, though he hardly knew the man. Then Rushton hugged his wife for far too long, smearing her makeup and leaving her embarrassed and confused. Then each of his children received a kiss, whether they liked it or not — and the older ones certainly did not. On cue, the small crowd of Rushton’s civilian aides on hand gave him a round of applause.
Again, there were about a dozen members of the press in the room. They’d been given the opportunity to photograph the general while he was being photographed. But they’d all heard the whispers of what was coming up in his interview with the Washington Times and that the quixotic NSC officer had become somewhat of a loose cannon lately. These were the reasons they were here.
They began shouting questions at him, but Rushton, never losing his smile, held up his hands to his ears, pretending he could not hear them. Then he took his seat in the middle of the photo set, plopping down with a smile. At last, the photographer was ready to begin snapping. But then he hesitated. A presidential seal about the size of a dinner plate was hanging on the wall behind the family. It was showing up in the frame.
The photographer signaled one of the security men and through pantomime indicated the problem.
The security man crept forward and whispered in Rushton’s ear. The general turned, looked at the seal — but then thought for a very long moment. Finally he nodded and the security man quickly removed the seal. But for those who witnessed it, it was that long hesitation on Rushton’s part that stood out in their minds.
The photographer urged the family to relax and look pleasant, a very tall order for Rushton’s older children, who looked like they would have preferred to be anywhere else but here. Finally, everyone appeared as relaxed as they were going to get. The photographer snapped the first picture, just one of many, as he knew it would be wise to take at least a few dozen.
But that’s not what Rushton had in mind. No sooner had everyone’s eyes adjusted to the first strobe flash, than the general quickly got to his feet and smoothed the wrinkles out of his uniform. His smile long gone, he signaled his security men. One opened a side door. The others took up their positions around the rotund officer.
Then, with the press shouting more questions to him and without so much as a nod to his family, Rushton hastily left the room.
With more security men clearing the way for him, Rushton took another elevator to the top floor of the building.
Here he met the two Army lieutenants again. They were standing at the door to the building’s elaborate, if somewhat cloistered, function room. From the looks of it, no one had gone in or out of the main door for a while.
But looks could be deceiving. The general was throwing a private affair here today; indeed, the aides had referred to it for weeks as the “secret lunch.”
They knew that the guests had been coming in not by the front door but clandestinely through a rear basement entrance to the EOB, this while most of the Washington early-morning press corps were down on the second floor watching Rushton’s kids compete to see who could be the brattiest. Up a service elevator, cleaned and made spiffy for the occasion, the guests filed into the function room through the kitchen, which had been cleared of all help before they arrived.
So, on the other side of the door now were no fewer than a dozen senators, from both parties, a number of influential higher-ups from several government agencies, including the FBI and Homeland Security, three Supreme Court judges and their clerks, as well as the base commanders of just about every military installation within 50 miles of Washington, D.C.
The general approached the two lieutenants, whose job now was to keep anyone from going through the function room’s main door.
“Can you two handle this?” Rushton asked them as he was being whisked by.
The two junior officers assured him that they could. Rushton stopped and said to them, “Make sure of it. If there are any screwups, you will not want to know what will happen to you.”
With that, Rushton’s security people got him on the move again. He went down the hall, turned right, into the kitchen. Ten seconds later, the two lieutenants heard the function room behind them erupt into spirited applause. Rushton had just entered the room.
Both men relaxed, but only a little. They had no idea just how long they would be out here, guarding this door, while looking as if they weren’t guarding it.
“All those heavy hitters in there,” one said. “How he was able to keep something like this under wraps in this town for so long I’ll never know.”
The other lieutenant just shook his head.
“I don’t want to know,” he said.
Chapter 14
Somewhere in Jersey
New York firefighters Mike Santoro and Mark Kelly had both been injured on 9/11. They’d just come on duty that horrible day when word reached their firehouse in midtown Manhattan that the first plane had hit the towers. Fifteen minutes later, both men were on the scene. They saw the horror firsthand. The flames, the smoke, people jumping to their deaths rather than be burned alive. Twenty firefighters in their company, including Santoro, Kelly, and their lieutenant, started walking up the stairs, heading for the top of the first tower. They met the initial wave of injured coming down around the thirty-third floor. With the stairwells filling with smoke and the electricity starting to fail, the lieutenant told Santoro and Kelly to lead the most seriously injured out to ambulances. Santoro carried one man down the three dozen sets of stairs.
Then the second plane hit the second tower. Now back out on the street, both Santoro and Kelly were struck by falling debris and wound up riding in the same ambulance as the people they’d just rescued. They never saw anyone else in their fire company again. Eighteen close friends killed, trying to save others.
Santoro and Kelly were now sitting in Kelly’s Ford Ranger, drinking coffee and eating junk food. They were parked in a Drive, Shop ’n Go store in East Newark, New Jersey, not far from the Garden State Parkway. Though this was a very run-down neighborhood, the area surrounding the store was somewhat wooded, trees planted to shield those traveling the Parkway from having to see the likes of East Newark.
Santoro and Kelly been sitting here almost all day; it was now 8:00 P.M. Just like several dozen other firefighters, parked at other DSGs throughout upper Jersey, this was how they’d chosen to spend one of their well-deserved days off. Defending the homeland. Helping again. To their wives and friends, though, they were off fishing.
But it had been a long day, especially listening to news radio, which was reporting that a high administration official was now expecting a terrorist nuke to go off just about anytime and because of bureaucratic bungling, Pentagon in-fighting, and, most surprising, inaction from the White House there was really nothing anyone could do about it.
It was getting dark. They’d just drained their fifth coffee each when a white Chevy pulled into the store’s parking lot. The car looked innocuous. It was beat up, dented, with a faded inspection sticker and a temporary license plate hanging off the back. Typical transportation in this part of the Garden State.
A man climbed out. He was slight, dark-skinned, wearing a T-shirt and baggy jeans. A ball cap was pulled low over his brow. The driver walked right by their big Ford, and both firefighters saw him close up. He had an oily face, with bad skin and eyes right out of a cell block. They secretly snapped a picture of him with their photophone, then compared it with the sketch of Ramosa given to them by the ghosts.
“I’ll give that one an ‘eight,’” Santoro said wearily. “And that will make six ‘eights,’ two ‘nines,’ two ‘sevens,’ and thirteen ‘five.’”
Kelly groaned and opened another package of Ring-Dings.
Their spirit was willing, and they were proud to help the ghost team. And at the meeting that night at the Queens Social Club the massive surveillance plan proposed by the outlaws seemed to have made sense: many eyes looking for one person believed to frequent at least one of the DSG stores.
The problem was, in this section of Jersey, a description of someone with dark skin, a bad complexion, oily hair, and penitentiary eyes matched just about every male walking into one of the convenience stores.
And a few of the women as well.
* * *
Sean O‘Flaherty also had faith in the system he’d helped the ghost team set up. True, it was all based on a hunch, not unknown in intelligence work, that this character Ramosa was somehow connected to the DSG napkin. As Hunn and Ozzi explained to O’Flaherty, while hunches were based on intuition, there was also some reality to the situation. They wouldn’t have linked Ramosa with the mysterious drawing had it been scribbled on a doily from Tiffany’s or the back of a menu from a famous Manhattan eatery. While maybe not so in his native Philippines, Ramosa would stand out like a sore thumb in one of those places. But in a DSG along the Parkway in East Newark? He’d fit right in.
Couple this with the common knowledge that many Al Qaeda sleeper agents had been caught or tracked to Jersey since 9/11 and even before and that at least some of these stores were operated by people born not in the United States but in the Middle
East … well, the search for Ramosa at the Drive, Shop ’n Gos seemed to make sense.
The firefighters from Queens were the key, though — the manpower they needed to pull it off. The plan was for pairs of jakes to stake out as many DSG stores as they could and simply take pictures with picturephones of anyone who might look like Ramosa.
But what they never expected was that in East Newark many people fit the cutout’s description. This particular day, the jakes had three dozen DSG stores covered. Unexpectedly, instead of stumbling upon one mark, he being Ramosa, they came up with more than a hundred possible suspects, each one captured on the firefighters’ photophones.
As per the plan, they’d been sending these photos to O‘Flaherty since early that afternoon. And O’Flaherty, sitting at his young daughter’s computer, was soon overloaded with pictures of people who looked a lot like Ramosa but not one that perfectly hit the mark. So many were coming in, at the rate his daughter’s memory files were filling up with the phone-photos O’Flaherty was concerned the computer would freeze up — and they’d be sunk.
It went on like this for hours. O’Flaherty sitting in a too-small chair in a bedroom overwhelming in pink and blue, posters of pop singers and movie stars staring back at him. By 9:00 P.M., they’d still yet to score. He was ready to hang it up and call the troops home. They’d given it a shot, they’d tried their best to help the ghosts, but had come up empty.
Then … a stroke of intuition. Or brilliance, Or just plain luck. But suddenly O’Flaherty hit upon a way to sort out this digital Tower of Babel.
More than 140 photos had popped onto his daughter’s computer. And indeed, many of these people could somewhat match the description of the guy they were looking for.
That’s when it hit O’Flaherty. Sure they all looked alike, but out of the 140, could 2 or 3 pictures or more be of the same guy?
It took O’Flaherty a while to separate and categorize just who sent which picture from what DSG — but then bingo! He spotted one character, sloppy dress, bad skin, Mets cap pulled down low over his eyes, going into the Parkway DSG. He looked pretty much like the illustration. The same guy also showed up at the DSG on Park Street around 8:10 P.M. Then, 15 minutes later, he was at another Drive, Shop ’n Go on Wooster Boulevard. Then, another team caught him walking into the Drive, Shop ’n Go near what used to be the Green Hill projects. Fifteen minutes after that, there he was again, at a store near the center of Newark itself.