White: A Novel

by Christopher Whitcomb

“What did he tell you about the plan?” Mitchell asked. “Do we know where they will strike next?”

  “No,” she lied. GI Jane was a master manipulator, but this was a delicate line she had to walk. “He is going back to the Homestead while field operatives set up the next wave of attacks. That’s all I know at this point.”

  “What is your next objective?” Mitchell asked. He slowly scraped Hollandaise from his salmon, then tasted it, without taking his eyes off her. Strange how much like Sirad this woman should have been and how different they had turned out. GI Jane seemed even more manipulative, despite her lack of beauty.

  “My next objective . . .” GI Jane paused for a moment. “My next objective is to write up a false confession for the Guantánamo prisoner and submit it to Langley with a report of my findings. They want to cover any trace of Jafar al Tayar or the Megiddo project.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Mitchell said. “There’s more.”

  “Colonel Ellis is a very bright man. And very careful. He has to suspect that someone—some agency, some threat—is waiting out there to stop him. Why would he give me a larger role?”

  “The same reason I do,” he said. “Because he needs you.” He paused to watch her face. “But you’re not going to tell him. I know that, you see, because I’m better at this than you are.”

  Mitchell rested his fork on the lunch tray, got up, and walked to within two feet of her. His voice dropped to little more than a whisper.

  “That’s why I hired you. That’s why I hired each of your colleagues. But don’t ever forget that one thing: I’m better than you will ever be.”

  He loved this, the seduction inherent in the dance. He savored the grace of the steps, the posturing, the tease, and the rebuff. This is what had drawn him to the trade in the beginning.

  “I know you don’t believe that,” he told her, “because you are full of ego. You work well without reference. You thrive on uncertainty. You can’t wait for someone to corner you because you so love the threat of impossible odds.”

  He leaned in close. Close enough to smell the way the moisture on her skin was turning from perspiration to sweat.

  “Never forget,” Mitchell said, “that I’m the one who lifted you out of that bleak little world you used to wallow in, and I’m the one who can put you right back in. You are a cog in a mechanism you just think you understand.”

  Mitchell reached out with a bony finger and traced the bags under the woman’s eyes. He wanted her to feel his weight.

  “It’s a mechanism so complex, you won’t even see it coming to crush you. Your next objective is something considerably more audacious than a false report to the CIA. I knew that before you did.”

  Mitchell lowered his hand and leaned in close enough that GI Jane could feel his lips against her ear.

  “But I don’t care about your relationship with Ellis at this point. All I care about is what you are going to do for me.”

  GI Jane fought an overwhelming urge to tremble. Mitchell’s breath smelled of pepper and heavy cream. His eyelashes slowly opened and closed against her cheek.

  And then he told her what she had to do.

  Knock! Knock! Sharp knuckles tapped against the door.

  Trask entered after a beat, holding a pale-blue cup on a matching china saucer.

  “Earl Grey, black—just like you requested,” he said.

  Mitchell had moved to his desk; in his hand was the Alexander Calder biography.

  “I’m afraid our guest has changed her mind about refreshments,” he told Trask. He seemed amused, filled up with rare good humor. “She needs to go.”

  Mitchell didn’t bother to look up as GI Jane hurried past him on unsteady legs. He lifted a finger to his cheek where one of her tears had fallen against it. The liquid tasted salty but pure.

  SATCH HAD NO particular interest in guns. They hardly seemed worth messing with—especially considering the physical strength God had given him.

  “Please . . . ,” the guard squeaked out before the brute of a man crossed the floor and grabbed him by the throat. The radio fell to the ground, sending a clatter echoing through the lab, but the man died silently with a quick snap of his neck.

  “We better move,” Satch said, motioning toward the locked vault. He dragged the body out of sight, picked the radio up off the floor, and hurried over to catch his partner, who had already attached his electronic sequencer to yet another cipher pad.

  “Lab Four, disregard,” Satch spoke into the radio, hoping it might cause enough confusion to buy them more time. He pulled out two six-sided Luxel radiation exposure badges from his pocket, broke them open, and tucked one inside his breast pocket.

  “Got it,” the Brit said, bouncing open the storage vault door even more quickly than the one outside.

  “Here.” Satch handed his partner the second Luxel badge and followed him inside a stainless-steel vault. They moved quickly from shelf to shelf, selecting cylindrical shipping containers marked Caution: Radioactive Materials above the orange-and-black hazmat symbols. They took only the containers marked Amersham 60-C, 137-cesium, 133-xenon, 192-iridium, and 99-technetium—all highly toxic gamma emitters: radioactive research isotopes bound for the university’s nuclear medicine facilities.

  The two men pulled large expedition-built backpacks from the duffel bag and took turns stuffing them with bulky transportation containers. Satch guessed his pack weighed at least 130 pounds and wondered how well his partner would handle the load.

  “Time,” Satch ordered, pulling the top flap over his partner’s pack. He turned toward the door and started as quickly across the floor as possible. Even with his huge strength, Satch felt the pack shorten his stride, test his balance.

  They made the door just as the first campus police officer rounded the corner from the elevators. He looked annoyed more than alarmed. But then he saw the enormous Satch lurching toward him and knew this was no idle call. The giant hurtled down the hallway, an expedition pack swaying behind him with every labored stride.

  “What the hell are you . . . ?” the guard started to ask, but Satch’s forward momentum buckled the man like a linebacker anticipating the run. The guard landed on his back, his hat tumbling across the floor, his pepper spray breaking off his Sam Brown belt, his black shoes and white socks flipping up over his head.

  Satch’s boot caught him in the temple, ending any further resis-tance.

  “Darn it, that’s two,” he said, regaining his feet. He didn’t relish killing, though he knew that’s what he’d signed on to do.

  They got to the elevators without further interference. It made sense that campus police wouldn’t waste more than one officer on the call.

  “This stuff is heavy,” the Brit said as they stepped out of the elevator. He had trained hard, but the load added up to almost 70 percent of his body weight. No matter how much he’d prepared, it still felt like a sizable hump.

  They said nothing else until they got outside to the van. The vehicle—marked on each door with a University of Louisville logo—had been easy to steal. No one would even know it was missing until long after they’d made the switch.

  “CP to twenty-seven,” someone said before Satch remembered he still had the night watchman’s radio in his pocket. “Are you clear at the scene?”

  Satch shrugged off his pack and lowered it carefully into the back of the van.

  “Clear in Lab Four,” he said, holding the radio away from his mouth and trying to emulate the police officer’s voice.

  “Copy, twenty-seven,” the dispatcher radioed back. “See the man at twelve seventy-seven Maplehurst about noise coming outa the Alpha Omega house. Looks like they got a big party over there.”

  Satch clicked the Send key twice, offering the universal police shortcut for “understood.” Then he grabbed Ollie’s pack and laid it in the back of the van beside his own.

  “You’d better drive,” the smaller man said, trying to straighten up. “I think I tore somethin’ in my back.”


  “I’m a better driver anyway,” Satch said, taking the keys and moving to the front door. He smiled at the relative ease of their success as he climbed in. “Better-looking too.”

  X

  Thursday, 17 February

  15:01 GMT

  The Homestead, Kerrville, Texas

  JEREMY DOWNSHIFTED INTO third gear and eased out the clutch as the driveway came into sight. Wrought-iron columns rose from the far side of a mailbox cluster. A ranch banner spanned the columns, reading THE HOMESTEAD in foot-high letters painted white. The ranch looked just like the one he’d visited during the Harvey Point simulations.

  Jeremy Walker, date of birth 7/ 22/ 1971, favorite color . . . hunter green, he reminded himself, trying to concentrate on anything besides the thick, spiny ball rumbling around his gut.

  Stagehand with a roving Folger Shakespeare Library-based road troupe. Who the hell had thought that up?

  The 80-series street-racing tires on his 1970 Nova SS chirped brightly as he turned right into the gravel drive and passed over the cattle guard. Mesquite trees and prickly pear cactus spread out as far as he could see in any direction. Wire fencing lined both sides of the road, divided every few miles by a gate like Ellis’s.

  The undercover job history had to be something they couldn’t track down easily, he realized. Ellis likely would not have many contacts in the theater world, and even if he did, stagehands came and went like carnival workers. This job came with all the anonymity the road could offer and suggested just the right amount of distaste for an ordered world.

  The Homestead’s newest student tried to focus on the arrogant growl of the car’s souped-up L78, 396-cubic-inch engine. Jeremy’s FBI handler had arranged to borrow the boisterous muscle car—a drug seizure—from the local field office. It fit Jeremy Walker’s psychological profile, they said, and it would quickly announce his presence to Ellis.

  All Jeremy cared about was the thrill he got in driving it. The owner had installed a 417 rear end with a limited slip differential, Hooker headers, Edelbrock intake, Accel ignition, and furry red dice hanging from the rearview mirror. The steroid-enhanced power plant turned mid-elevens in the quarter mile, but here on the rutted driveway, it made the car lurch and buck despite Jeremy’s attempts to feather the throttle.

  “That’s it, baby.” Jeremy smiled, trying to keep rpms between three and four thousand. “Let’s let him know we’re coming.”

  There was little doubt of that. The road ran straight as a rifle shot for about three quarters of a mile to a cluster of single-level buildings painted ocher. Sound traveled well across the tinder-dry countryside, and the high-pitched whine of the SS would have awakened the dead.

  Jeremy swallowed the lump in his throat as he pulled up to where a Ford Dually and two late-model Dodges sat parked near a carport. He caught himself in the car’s rearview mirror and wondered if a day of preparation would be enough. They’d cut his hair close to the scalp then taken away his razor, giving him the look of a man who’d trimmed off the outside world, then been too lazy to stick with the commitment.

  Divorced. Twice. Three kids: Patrick, Maddy, and Christopher. Stick as close to the truth as possible, they’d told him. The proximity to reality would keep him centered when all other reference fled him.

  Jeremy shifted into neutral and raced the engine a couple times. That’s what Jeremy Walker would do, he thought to himself. Bold, self-centered, righteous. Then he caught himself again.

  “Don’t think about your new identity,” the FBI undercover expert had told him. “They’ll see right through that. You’ve got to live it. Don’t act. Become the new man. You have to believe it yourself before you can expect anyone else to.”

  Jeremy raced the engine a third time.

  “Fuck it,” he said, stomping on the throaty Holley four-barrel. The man he left behind would have raced the engine too.

  ELIZABETH BEECHUM ARRIVED at the Capitol on the Senate side, up Constitution Avenue, past the makeshift Jersey walls and the dogs and the men with submachine guns and thigh bags stuffed full of gas masks.

  She remembered not so many years back to when anyone could drive in off the street and cross the big lot of crushed rock and shale. Tours of grade-schoolers and Gray Panthers used to picnic on the East Lawn before queuing up in the rotunda for public tours. You could go all the way up to the top of the dome in those days, venture down into the crypt, maybe even get a member to show you the tunnels or point out the bullet holes left behind after Puerto Rican radicals had shot up the place in 1954.

  But those were the old days, gone forever. No more open tours, no more public access to the viewers’ galleries or Statuary Hall, no more sense that the People’s House was still a place for the very Americans who had built her.

  “It’s a crying shame,” she said out loud.

  “Different world,” James agreed, reading her mind.

  The motorcade of black SUVs, marked Metro police cars, and decoy limos pulled up to beneath the south stairs and Beechum climbed out. Secret Service agents in their bulging suits and cuff mikes ushered her in for a handoff to plainclothes Capitol police officers.

  Turf wars, she thought. Just another reason the United States would always be playing catch-up with people who answered to just one leader: Muhammad.

  SR-220, a committee room reserved for closed hearings, was already full when the vice president led her administrative assistant in. She carried a worn leather briefcase in her left hand and a rolled-up battle damage assessment in her right.

  “I want to read into the record that this is a meeting of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,” the chairman said. Beechum had always liked the right, honorable, and distinguished senior senator from Florida, one of the more open-minded Republicans she’d worked with. His ascension to the chair had surprised no one. A senior member of the committee during Beechum’s tenure, Radford Baines Beauchamp knew the intelligence community and he knew Washington. Few had ever succeeded in pushing rot past his discerning nose.

  “This is a closed meeting,” he droned. “All minutes and discussions are classified top secret.”

  With that, he nodded to his not-so-former colleague.

  “Good day, Madam Vice President. Good of you to come. I think we all appreciate how busy you must be.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Chairman.” Beechum nodded back. It felt odd to sit there among the witness seats. Just over a month earlier, she’d walked out for the last time with a bittersweet taste in her mouth. “Nice to be back. I have to admit that I never thought I’d find myself in the cheap seats, but I must be moving up in the world, because Evelyn actually said hello to me in the elevator this morning.”

  Everyone laughed. Evelyn had operated the members-only elevator for twenty-seven years. She never said hello to anyone.

  “Well, cheap seats or no, it’s so nice to have you back,” Beauchamp said. “I want to say how proud this old Republican is to see you moving down Pennsylvania Avenue, especially with everything that has happened. This country would be hard-pressed to find a better second in command.”

  He held up a cautionary finger and pointed to the other Republican members.

  “And I don’t have to remind you that everything said within these walls is classified,” he admonished them. “If that leaks out to the whip I’ll deny it!”

  Everyone laughed again. What might have been a very tense atmosphere loosened considerably.

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman.” Beechum smiled up at the courtly gentleman. Though Washington crawled with all manner of backbiting parasites, Beauchamp was honest to a fault. “Why don’t we get down to it then.”

  She reached for the briefing book James had carried in. West Wing staffers had prepared a redacted version of the CIA’s Presidential Daily Briefing. It outlined information the president felt comfortable handing to this notorious sieve of secrets.

  “As you may have seen on cable news, a new Islamic fundamentalist group has claimed credit for b
oth sets of attacks. They call themselves Ansar ins Allah, and though we don’t have a lot of information about them, the FBI is working closely with the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA to follow up on literally thousands of leads.”

  “There is talk of a connection between Saudis and radical Islamic cells here in the U.S.” A committee member from Alabama spoke up. “Do you believe these people infiltrated this country illegally or are they naturalized Arab Americans?”

  “First of all, we don’t even know that they are Arabs,” Beechum explained. “The State Department has identified dangerous Islamic fundamentalist groups in at least eleven countries around the world. It would be entirely premature to ascribe this to any one geographic region.”

  “Oh, come on, Elizabeth,” another member said. “Everyone is reporting that the FBI has an Arab in custody. They’re saying he is a Saudi by birth. Is that not true?”

  “It’s true that we have detained a naturalized American of Saudi birth,” she admitted. “But we haven’t determined that he had anything to do with the airliner plot.”

  “Has he been arrested?” the chairman asked. “Is he being interrogated?”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss his status,” Beechum said. She knew how this would sound. She well remembered White House stonewalling during the 9/ 11 aftermath. “All I can tell you is that we are looking closely at several countries with a history of state sponsorship, and . . .”

  “Including Saudi Arabia?” the senator from Alabama interrupted.

  “Including Saudi Arabia. It’s no secret that the House of Saud has questionable ties. They’ve come to this committee’s attention in the past. Remember, though—we have to exercise due diligence in all aspects of this investigation. It would be negligent to focus on a single group or country at this point.”

  The member from Alabama slapped the table in front of him.

  “Knew it!” he exclaimed. “I’ll tell y’all what . . . the Saudis have been playing us for fools way too long now. I highly recommend, Madam Vice President, that you stand up down there in the Oval Office the way you stood up before this committee. Somebody needs to make sure politics doesn’t stand in the way of justice.”