by Jack Mars
“Okay, David. I feel badly about today. I do want to patch it up.”
David nodded. “You will.”
When the time came, Hayes rose from the chair, shrugged into his suit jacket, and marched out of the room. David was with him, a half step behind. Hayes entered the underground TV studio. His podium, with the seal of the President, was on a raised stage a foot high, with blue carpeting. It was surrounded by cameras and lights.
Hayes felt good, he felt energetic, and he felt powerful. He felt that surge of electricity he used to get before a race, back when he was the captain of a nationally ranked rowing team.
He resisted the urge to run up onto the stage like a game show host.
Behind him, David’s phone started to ring. He glanced back at his Chief of Staff. David was looking at the caller ID. He glanced up.
“It’s Luke Stone.”
The President shrugged. “Take it. We have a couple of minutes. And anyway, I can handle this. I’ve done it before a million times.”
He stepped up to the podium and looked out at all the bright lights.
*
Luke stood by the water’s edge. He had taken exactly five steps from the bench where his father had left him sitting. He could barely see a thing. The fog was so dense he was lucky this call had gone through.
The phone rang and rang.
“Halstram,” a voice said.
“David, I need to talk to President Hayes.”
“Luke, I’m sorry. You and your partner did an amazing thing today. But the President is going live on the air in two minutes. If you want, you can leave a message with me, and I’ll get it to him as soon as this is over, probably an hour from now. Listen, you should go somewhere with a TV set and watch the show. I’m expecting dynamite from him. They tagged us one, but we’re not out of the fight, not by a long shot.”
“David, we’ve got big trouble.”
“I know. I was there today, remember? We’re going to work hard and we’re going to dig our way out of it. And you’re going to be a big part of that, believe me.”
Luke didn’t know how to handle people like David Halstram, at least, not over the phone. David tended to talk a blue streak, pause for breath, then start talking again. He was energetic, hyperkinetic, and probably very smart. He was certainly convinced of his own abilities, and he was convinced that people should listen to him and do what he said. It was hard to slow him down long enough to listen.
If Luke were there in person right now, he might put the business end of his gun against David’s forehead, and grab him by his thinning hair. Or, if he were feeling relaxed, he might just give David a karate chop to the collarbone. Either thing would likely focus David’s attention. But over the phone? It was hard.
He spoke slowly, as if to an imbecile. “David, you have to listen to me. The President’s life is in danger.”
“That’s why we’re underground right now.”
“David…”
“Luke, listen, I need to be available here. If you don’t have a specific message you want to leave, I need you to call me back in… let’s say ninety minutes, okay? If you don’t get me, try me a half hour after that.”
“You have to get out of there.”
“Okay, Luke, we’ll talk about it. He’s coming on right now. I have to go.”
The line went dead. Luke stared at the telephone. He fought the urge to throw it into the river. Instead, he started to walk to his car. A minute later, he started to run.
Was he really going to drive out to Mount Weather, now, after almost forty hours without sleep?
Yes.
Chapter 36
How she would love to be almost anywhere but here.
She stood outside the gaping maw of the Mount Weather facility’s entrance, smoking a cigarette and holding her smartphone to her ear.
The smoking was one of those secret things that the American people were never supposed to know. Susan Hopkins enjoyed a cigarette now and then, and she had done so ever since she was a teenage supermodel. Especially in times of stress, nothing could beat it, and this was probably the most stressful day of her life. No one had ever tried to murder her before.
She wore a red skater dress, one that was maybe a tad sexy for the occasion. They had choppered it in from the Nordstrom store in the mall near the Pentagon, along with a seamstress to do the fitting. It was David Halstram’s idea. It was for the people watching on TV, so they could easily spot her. That way, after Thomas’s speech, no one in the world could miss the fact that Susan Hopkins was in a tunnel deep underground, hanging on the President’s every word. It was a good idea. But it was also a cool night, and the mountain air went right through the dress’s material.
She shivered. Three very big Secret Service men stood right nearby. They loomed over her. She hoped that none of them offered her their jacket. That kind of chivalry made her want to puke.
Pierre was talking at the other end of the phone.
“Honey,” he said, “I would really like to see you get out of there. It’s making me nervous. I can send a plane to whatever municipal airport is closest to you. You could be on the way back out here an hour from now. I’ve doubled security. The electric fence is on. It would take a small army to get through. You can just tell everyone that you need a couple of weeks off to regroup. Relax by the pool. Get a massage.”
Susan smiled at the thought of Pierre holed up in his thirty-room mansion, safely behind his electric fence. Who did he think he was trying to keep out, fraternity pranksters? His fence and his entry gate, and his eight (instead of four) retired detectives wouldn’t even slow down the people who had almost killed her.
Good Lord.
“Pierre…”
He kept talking. “Just let me finish,” he said.
She thought of the early times with him. She had already done Vogue, Cosmo, Mademoiselle, Victoria’s Secret, even the Sports Illustrated young masturbators issue. But she was starting to age out. She could feel it, and her agent told her as much. The covers had stopped coming. She was twenty-four years old.
Then she met Pierre. He was twenty-nine, and his start-up company’s initial public offering had just turned him into an instant billionaire. He had grown up in San Francisco, but his family was from France. He was beautiful, with a skinny body and big brown eyes. He looked like a deer in the headlights. His dark hair always flopped down in front of his face. He was hiding in there. It was unbearably cute.
She had made a lot of money in her career, several million dollars. Financially, she had been very, very comfortable. But suddenly money was no object at all. They traveled the world together. Paris, Madrid, Hong Kong, London… They always stayed in five-star hotels, and always in the most expensive suite. Astonishing views became the backdrop to her life, even more so than before. They skied in the Alps, and in Aspen. They sunned themselves on the beaches of the Greek islands, but also in Bali and Barbados. They married, and they had children, two wonderful twin girls. Then the years began to pass, and slowly they grew apart.
Susan became bored. She looked for something to do. She got into politics. Eventually, she ran for United States Senator from California. It was a crazy idea, and she surprised everyone (including herself) by winning in a landslide. After that, she spent much of her time in Washington, sometimes with the girls, sometimes not. Pierre managed his businesses, and increasingly, his charitable efforts in the Third World. Sometimes they didn’t see each other for months.
About seven years ago, Pierre called her late one night and confessed something she supposed she already knew. He was gay, and he was in a relationship.
They stayed married anyway. It was mostly for the girls, but for other reasons as well. For one thing, they were best friends. For another, it was better for both of them if the world thought they were still a couple. They cut a media friendly image together. And it was comfortable.
She sighed. It was just another one of those secrets the American people couldn’t know abou
t.
She looked at her watch. It was almost nine o’clock.
“Pierre,” she said again.
“Yes,” he said finally.
“I love you every much.”
“I love you, too.”
“Good. I will take everything you said under advisement. And I will get out of here as soon as I can. But right now I have to go watch the President make his speech.”
“The President is a jerk.”
She nodded. “I know. But he’s our jerk and we have to support him. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She hung up the phone and flicked the remains of her cigarette. She looked at the three lumbering giants that surrounded her. “Let’s go guys,” she said. A minute later, they were all on the elevator, dropping down into the bowels of the earth.
*
“Forty seconds, Mr. President,” a voice from the control booth said. “When my light goes green, you are live.”
“Am I facing green?” Hayes said.
“We’ve got five angles on you, sir, but yes. Green is looking directly into their eyes. Thirty seconds.”
David Halstram positioned himself at the back of the TV studio, taking in the whole scene. The President stood tall at the podium, utterly calm, waiting for the light to come on. In the small amphitheatre facing him sat some of the most important and influential people in the country.
Congressmen and Senators from both sides of the aisle made up much of the audience—mostly liberals like the President, but also plenty of the loyal opposition. The Secretary of State was here, as was the Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of Education. The Directors of NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the National Park System sat in a row, surrounded by their senior staff.
Halstram’s heart raced. To say he was excited would be to badly underestimate his state of mind. He felt like he was in a rocket ship, accelerating through the Earth’s gravity field. These were the moments he lived for.
He was born to do this job. He didn’t drink alcohol, and he had never done drugs. He barely had any need for caffeine. He worked eighteen-hour days without blinking, dropped to sleep for four or five hours, got up and did it all over again. What kind of rush was coffee compared to the life that David led?
President Thomas Hayes was about to give one of the most important speeches in American history, and David Halstram, his chief-of-staff, his confidant, his trusted advisor, was standing thirty feet away.
“Twenty seconds, Mr. President.”
A brief disturbance flickered across David’s awareness. Luke Stone. They had vetted him this afternoon. Of course they had. He had saved the President, but… you had to know who you were dealing with. There was a lot in the man’s file. Red flags waved like crazy. Combat stress. Questionable use of force. Abuse of authority. Forgeries. Apparently, he had entered the West Wing today with faked Yankee White security clearance. How did he manage that? What would have happened if he hadn’t managed it?
“Ten seconds. Good luck, sir.”
Now he wanted them to leave the facility. Okay, David would talk to him about it. Maybe in the morning, they would… what? Go to Camp David?
On the podium, Hayes looked straight at the camera.
The voice came back one last time. “We are live in four…”
“Three…”
Hayes smiled. It seemed faked, forced, but then it faded into something else.
“Two…”
It became a look of determination.
“One.”
“Good evening, my fellow Americans,” the President began, with a broad, confident smile. “I am here to tell you—”
BOOM!
A light flashed, and for a split second, David thought it was the green light the President was waiting for. But it wasn’t green. It was white, and huge, and blinding. It came from somewhere behind the President.
It swallowed the President whole.
David was blasted off his feet by the force of it. He flew through the air, hit the wall ten feet behind him, and fell to the ground. Everything had gone dark. He could not see. The ground beneath him was shaking.
Suddenly, another light flashed, bigger this time, more intense. Everything was rumbling. The entire facility was moving. The ceiling above him caved in. He heard it go, and for a very brief second, he felt it. A large chunk of masonry landed on his lower back and on his legs. It hurt, and then it didn’t.
David had a very quick mind. He knew instantly that his legs were crushed, and that he was, in all likelihood, paralyzed from the waist down. He suspected that although he couldn’t feel it, he was probably hemorrhaging blood.
In the darkness all around him, invisible people were screaming.
I am ten stories below the surface. No one is coming to rescue me.
He thought backwards, rewinding events several seconds. That first blinding flash of light. He saw it now, more clearly than before. The light hadn’t swallowed the President.
It had obliterated him.
The President—and likely everyone underground with him—was dead.
Chapter 37
9:02 p.m.
Washington, DC
“And now…” a quiet voice said. “The President of the United States.”
Luke was just merging onto the highway as the President’s speech was about to start. Luke’s thought was that if the President spoke for an hour, by the time the speech was over, he would be entering the gates at Mount Weather.
He heard the President’s first words—and then the radio went silent.
A woman’s voice came on.
“Uh…we seem to be having technical difficulties. We’ve lost communication with the President’s bunker at Mount Weather. We’re working to correct the problem. In the meantime, a few words from our sponsors.”
Luke punched in another station. The story was the same.
He tried another station. They had put on a rock song.
Finally, a man’s voice came on the radio.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are getting word that an explosion of some kind seems to have struck the Mount Weather government facility. We do not have any details at this moment. There is no contact with the facility, but first responders are converging on the scene. We caution you that this doesn’t mean—”
Luke switched off the radio.
For a moment, Luke felt nothing. He was numb. He remembered the morning on that long-ago hill in Afghanistan. It was cold. The sun rose, but there was no warmth to it. The ground was rugged, and hard. There were dead bodies everywhere. Skinny, bearded men lay all over the ground, with eyes wide and staring.
At some point in the night, Luke had ripped off his shirt. His chest was painted red. He was soaked in their blood. He had chopped them up. Stabbed them. Sliced them. And the more he killed them, the more they kept coming.
Martinez was sprawled on his back nearby, low in a trench. He was crying. He couldn’t move his legs. He’d had enough. He wanted out. “Stone,” he said. “Hey, Stone. Hey! Kill me, man. Just kill me. Hey, Stone! Listen to me, man!”
Murphy was sitting on an outcropping of rock, staring into space. He wasn’t even trying to take cover.
If more enemies came, Stone didn’t know what he was going to do. Neither one of these guys looked like they had much fight left in them, and the only usable weapon Stone still had was the bent bayonet in his hand.
As he watched, a line of black insects appeared in the sky far away. He knew what they were in an instant. Helicopters. And then he knew he was still alive. He didn’t feel good about that, or bad. He felt nothing at all.
Like now.
He snapped out of it as, to his left, an ambulance roared by at a hundred miles per hour, headed west, lights flashing, siren blaring. Luke got off the highway at the next exit. At the bottom of the ramp was a commuter parking lot. Luke pulled in and slowed the car to a stop.
He put the car in park and turned off his headlights. He thought that maybe if he screamed,
he would feel something, so he tried it.
He screamed. He did it for a long time.
It didn’t work.
Chapter 38
9:35 p.m.
Fairfax County, Virginia - Suburbs of Washington, DC
Whiskey on ice.
There was something exquisite about the way it was cold in his mouth and then ignited a fire inside him when it reached his stomach.
Luke sat on the sofa in his own living room. He had just walked in the door moments ago. He glanced at the clock, thinking back. He hadn’t been here in almost exactly twenty hours. He had gone out with purpose, and full of energy. He had worked hard to avert disaster, he had risked his own life again and again, and for what? Disaster had happened anyway.
He turned on the TV set and set it on MUTE. He flicked through the channels, watching the imagery. Mount Weather, where he had been earlier today, on fire. The distraught First Lady being interviewed at a resort in Hawaii. She broke down and wept in front of the cameras. Spontaneous candlelight vigils in many places. A hundred thousand people in Paris, a hundred thousand in London. Deserted streets in DC and Manhattan. Rioting in Detroit and Los Angeles and Philadelphia, places where the President had been beloved. Talking heads talking, talking, talking, some teary-eyed and sincere, and some angry and gesturing emphatically. Someone had to pay, of course. Someone always had to pay.
Now the news changed. Somewhere, fighter planes were being scrambled. Bombs were hitting targets in the Middle East. Nuclear submarines in the North Sea. The American fleet in the Persian Gulf. The Russian president addressing a news conference. Chinese cabinet members in Beijing. Iranian mullahs. Chanting crowds, men in turbans and sandals brandishing AK-47s, kissing babies and hoisting them up to God. A riot in the alleyways of an ancient city, soldiers firing tear gas, people running, being trampled in the darkness. A man, a traitor of some kind, being stoned to death in a dusty town.