The colonel nodded, and the fifth man turned toward his bag.
“I’m a spiritual man,” the colonel said. “But I’m no sorcerer. And I’ve never been much interested in inquiring into a man’s relationship with pain.”
Jeremy watched as the fifth man opened the bag.
“That ear thing was for trying to take advantage of my daughter,” Ellis said. “Heidi lured you down here for us, by the way. Don’t read anything into her intentions.”
The robed torture expert reached into the bag and pulled out two stainless-steel surgical instruments. One had a scissors joint and abraded tongs at the business end, some sort of retractor. The other looked like one of those probes dentists use to check for cavities.
“This is my way of listening to your heart,” the fifth man said. He held the dental probe in the palm of his left hand and the retractors in his right. He carried the instruments gingerly, a professional who knew his way around trembling flesh.
“Do you have anything you want to tell me before we do this?” the colonel asked.
“I came here to offer myself for the one true and righteous God,” Jeremy said. “I never thought it would be a bloodless fight.”
“Well, you thought right.” Ellis nodded.
The fifth man leaned in and held Jeremy’s face still with a viselike grip.
“You have the most striking blue eyes,” he said. “Let’s see what they look like on the inside.”
The torturer’s free hand came forward with the forceps, but Jeremy saw no point in trying to wrestle free. Like he said, this wasn’t going to be a bloodless fight.
“SORRY I’M LATE,” Beechum apologized, hurrying into the West Wing Cabinet Room with Havelock and Alred in tow. James had run back to her office for the latest NSA updates. “General, what do we know?”
She pulled out a chair at the head of the table and poured herself a glass of water.
“Excuse me, Elizabeth, but shouldn’t we wait for the president?” the secretary of state suggested.
“Ah, yes . . . the president,” she said. “As you know, David has been working around the clock since this began. He finally decided to get some sleep and left orders not to be disturbed except in the case of dire emergency.”
“And this would be what?” the secretary of agriculture asked. The former senator from Arizona didn’t know Black Angus from ass backward, but that had never stopped him from speaking his mind.
“Albert, I understand we have fifty-seven DoD installations in the affected areas,” Beechum said, turning to her secretary of defense. “How do we . . . ?”
“Elizabeth, I have to object,” the agriculture secretary interjected. “Nearly half this country has been paralyzed by a terror-induced blackout. I think the president would want to know.”
“Then you go up and wake him!” Beechum erupted. She had no interest in trying to placate the hollow concerns of a man who oversaw cheese subsidies. “The president has been on his feet for more than ninety hours, and these attacks may be long from over. He’s a human being, goddammit. In order to remain effective, he’s going to need a few hours of rest.”
The secretary’s lower lip drooped onto his chin.
“Now about those bases,” Beechum continued. “I want to know exactly how much we’re going to have to draw down the strategic oil reserves in order to keep them running on backup generators. Because if we keep taking hits like this, auxiliary power is about the only thing any of us are going to have.”
CAROLINE WALLER LAY on the living room couch, watching cable news with Christopher in her arms and the channel changer in her right hand. Her parents lived in Buena Park, California, and after more than two hours of trying, she still hadn’t contacted them.
Where the hell are you? she wondered about her husband. Why is it that every time something happens, you run off to save the world but never get to help your own family?
She had never been one to complain, but this was getting a little ridiculous. Life had been so different in Missouri. People there shared a sense of community that meant open doors and open arms in times of need. Many a night Jeremy had gone off to work a bank robbery or a kidnapping only to have one neighbor or another arrive with a covered dish and a comforting smile.
The Springfield FBI office had been great, too. With just six agents and two secretaries, everyone looked out for each other as if their lives depended upon it. Which they did. Men and women who carried guns for a living always knew the risk. In the best of times they laughed it off as an acceptable part of the job, but when tragedy struck, they shared a truly personal sense of loss.
Just a call, Caroline wished. Just a few words to know that he’s all right. Surely this assignment has something to do with the horrific series of attacks that has devastated the country. First the bombings, then the plane crashes, now this. Seventeen states, the news said. Radiological dispersion device—the dirty nuke everyone has talked about for so long.
Well, it had finally come. Now what in the world would they do about it?
Ring . . . ring . . .
Caroline snatched up the cordless, trying to avoid waking Christopher. It had taken so long to get him to sleep.
“Hello?” she asked. Caroline knew it must be her parents, but she held a thin flicker of hope that it might be her husband.
“Hi, Mrs. Waller,” someone answered. “This is Les Mason.”
Oh my God. She silently gasped.
A knot the size of a golf ball rose in her throat. It was after midnight. The HRT commander had never even called her during the day. Why now, if not with terrible news?
“WE ARE EFFORTING to assess damage to operational readiness,” the SECDEF advised his interim boss. It was the first time in history an American cabinet member had briefed a female commander in chief.
“Meaning, you don’t know?”
“Communications are down in some areas,” he said. “I can tell you that nuclear assets are secure and that our command and control staff is in contact with the War Room, but in terms of any actual damage assessment, we just don’t have anything solid at this time.”
Beechum turned toward her attorney general. “What about law enforcement?”
The former Iowa governor looked lost without his FBI chief.
“Well, ah . . . we have no real, uh, constitutional issues right now that I’m aware of,” he stammered. Beechum dismissed him with poorly veiled disgust.
“Forgive my disinterest in our forefathers,” Beechum said, “but we’ve got an acute national crisis on our hands. I want to know just what the hell we’re doing to protect the integrity of our national infrastructure!”
“I, ah . . . I’ll have to defer to our individual law enforcement heads,” the attorney general said, writing ferociously on a yellow legal pad. “The Justice Department is . . .”
“What about our allies?” Beechum asked. She turned to Venable’s secretary of state, a former ambassador to the United Nations.
“The Saudis are fully aware that we’re looking at them,” he said, much more confidently than his Justice Department counterpart. “The royal family believes that this administration wants to lay blame on them in order to leverage OPEC. The Crown Prince will announce tomorrow that he plans to roll back production by five million barrels a day unless we back down.”
“Cost to us?” Beechum asked.
“We’re talking twenty percent of daily consumption. That means five-dollar-a-gallon gas, maybe more. Same for heating oil, which could create real problems this time of year.”
The interior secretary popped up.
“Anticipate widespread economic repercussions,” he said. “The Saudis have about one trillion dollars in our financial institutions, and that doesn’t include Saudi-friendly Mideast partners.”
Beechum well knew the danger of a move against American markets.
“Treasury?” she asked.
A Brooks Brothers catalogue model tilted his head to one side.
“We’re
six months into the first recovery in five years,” he said. “We anticipate substantial weakness in the dollar, a collapse in consumer confidence coupled with inflationary pressure as a result of rising energy prices. Transportation sectors have already been dealt crippling blows. Worker productivity will show significant decline as a result of . . .”
“All right, all right.” Beechum stopped him.
“Excuse me . . .” The door swung open and the press secretary entered. He looked visibly shaken. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s something you need to know.”
Beechum waved him in, knowing that an inquiry at this hour could only mean more trouble.
“I just got a call from the Washington Post,” he said. “They’re citing a confidential source who says there are ‘irregularities’ in the president’s military record.”
“That’s nothing new,” Beechum huffed. “Tell them we dealt with that during the election and have a national crisis to address.”
“I did, ma’am,” the worried man told her. “They have been working this for a couple months and have found several people who say they do not recall him serving in their unit during his Vietnam tour.”
“The president’s military records were destroyed during the 1973 Military Personnel Records Center fire in St. Louis,” Beechum said. “They know that.”
“They claim the fire only affected personnel discharged prior to 1964. The president was discharged in 1972. They are going to run this up on their Web site, and MSNBC has already pushed it into heavy rotation.”
Beechum pounded the table. What else could happen?
“Tell them . . . tell them a certain number of files were ‘in transit’ from one depot to another at the time of the fire.” Which was true. “Tell them the army has already started looking into the matter but won’t have an answer for six to eight weeks. Tell them we’ve got a goddamned real crisis to worry about!”
No one in the room offered a better answer. She hadn’t expected any.
“Back to the real issue,” she said, turning away from what at this point seemed a minor distraction. The press secretary disappeared without a good-bye. “Here’s what I want to do.”
The cabinet members sat straight in their chairs. All good bureaucrats responded well to a motivated leader.
“I want a total lockdown on information coming out of this administration. Until further notice, all directives, information, and consultations originating from the Oval Office will be considered matters of national security. Understood? I will consider leaks of any kind a direct abrogation of your sworn duties. Make sure your people know I mean to prosecute.”
The cabinet nodded.
“Defense: I want the heads of CIA, DIA, NSA, National Imagery and Mapping, and all five branch intelligence agencies in my office . . . the Oval Office . . . by zero three hundred. They will bring individual readiness reports for all fifty-seven DoD installations in the affected areas and projections on collateral losses.”
The SECDEF wrote down her orders.
“State: I want you face to face with the Saudi ambassador. Explain our position without making threats. Wave some intelligence in his face so he knows what has us so wound up. Stress our history of cooperation and mutual respect. Stroke him just enough that he doesn’t panic.”
She turned to the secretary of energy.
“I want a realistic time line for restoring power, broken down by state, city, and population density, and I want a detailed briefing by zero-five on the time lines for crisis site decon. I’ll also need a damage assessment so we can figure out how much radioactive material might still be out there unaccounted for.”
Turning last with a scowl to the attorney general, she said, “As for Justice, I want Alred and DHS down the hall as soon as you can get them here. Make sure they know I want the head of FEMA, too. We’ve batted around the continuity of government protocols. I want concrete recommendations. Finally, I want to pull the trigger on that group in Columbus, Ohio. No more waiting. I want HRT to hit the place and find out what we are dealing with.”
Animated with the importance of matters at hand, the vice president stood up and leaned forward onto the conference table.
“I don’t have to tell you how important these coming hours will be,” she began. “It has been generations since this country faced a threat of this magnitude. I want you all to know . . .”
“Oh . . . my . . . God.” The secretary of defense scowled.
All eyes followed his to a man nearly stumbling into the room. Andrea Chase held him by the arm. He wore gray-and-white pajamas unbuttoned to the navel. His hair looked like a rat’s nest, his face a confused wriggle of stubble, worry lines, and rudely broken sleep. Only his navy blue robe bearing the seal of the President of the United States on the breast and flowing behind him gave up his identity.
“Somebody turn off that infernal music!” David Venable yelled out. “Turn off that music before I lose my mind!”
JORDAN MITCHELL MET his richly appointed Bell Jet Ranger on the pad at Longpath. The moon had risen brilliantly in a clear winter sky, but he took no time to notice.
“You’ve scheduled the meeting?” he asked.
“Eleven o’clock tonight,” Trask answered. The chief of staff juggled two cell phones and a task list that would have challenged a Cirque du Soleil performer. He knew that Mitchell had purposely withheld any information about the meeting, but felt no slight. Trask worked at Jordan Mitchell’s pleasure. There were lots of things he didn’t care to know.
“Where’s Sirad?” Mitchell asked.
Mitchell buckled his seat belt as the pilot pulled up on the cyclical and pointed the nose south toward New York.
“At the Mind Lab. Still nothing concrete.”
“What about our friend GI Jane?”
The helicopter rose away from Longpath, up over Mount Greylock and the snow-draped playing fields of the Berkshire School.
“She took care of him about an hour ago. It’s still local DC news at this point. Everyone thinks it was an accident.”
Mitchell didn’t bother offering congratulations. He had never taken death as cause for celebration.
“What about that biotech company?” he asked, turning back to the prospectus he had been studying earlier in the day. Few minds more effectively compartmented matters of such disparate importance.
“They have agreed to our terms. General counsel is working up the contract. We’ll own them by this time next week.”
“Good,” Mitchell said, turning his attentions out the window. Things were finally starting to fall into place.
“Now, if we can just get a decent performance out of Waller.”
Mitchell stared down into a landscape of moon shadows on melting snow. Trask had been right about the dreamlike nature of his Berkshire retreat. Too bad this job had stolen his interest in dreams.
KHALID MUHAMMAD SMILED broadly as the handsome Gulfstream private jet cleared the end of Guantánamo Bay’s main runway and banked left. They flew just a few seconds before Camp Delta appeared in his window. The bright lights, barbed wire, chain-link fence; the guards looked like toy soldiers in a shoe box from one thousand feet up, but then the plane flew into a maritime squall and, as if by Allah’s will, the interrogation center disappeared altogether.
The truth will set you free, Khalid thought to himself, remembering one of the posters on the wall in the infirmary. Well, maybe. Then again, lies had worked pretty well, too.
“Better sit down so you don’t hurt yourself, sir,” one of his fellow fliers cautioned. The man wore khakis and a safari vest like all the CIA people. It was a uniform they had adopted, trying to look worldly—like they really knew anything at all about Islam or what jihadists truly desired.
“Sir?” Khalid smiled cordially. “Five minutes off the ground and you call me sir? Amazing what a change of clothing will do, huh?”
A change of clothing, a change of attitude, a change of fortune. The information he had provided moved
with great speed up the bureaucratic ladder. Within two days he had received an offer from the director himself. After another day of negotiating, he had gotten his deal. In exchange for details about Saudi agents inside the United States, he would get first-class air travel to Khartoum. The only things between him and freedom were a debriefing at some “undisclosed location” and about eight thousand frequent-flier miles.
“Would you like something to drink, Mr. Muhammad?” the other passenger asked. He was a much bigger man with thick body hair that would have grown all the way up his face if he hadn’t shaved a big circle around his neck. The man looked Balkan, perhaps a Serb or Armenian. He sweated profusely.
“Yes, water.”
Khalid looked out his window again, wondering how long it would take to fly back home. He had come here blindfolded and bound to a stretcher in the back of some lumbering military transport. What a wretched trip that had been!
Allah huakbar, he prayed beneath his breath. God had his own ways. How foolish for men to try to imagine where they fell within them.
“How high do you think we are?” the smaller man asked.
“I don’t know,” Khalid answered. “I’m no pilot.”
The clouds had parted now, but there was no land in sight. A turquoise Caribbean floor rolled out below them, close enough that he could see whitecap reminders of the squall they’d just flown through.
“Neither were those fifteen countrymen of yours,” the big man remarked, returning with Khalid’s water.
“Fifteen countrymen?” Khalid asked. He took the glass and shook his head. It occurred to him that the plane should have been gaining altitude, but he turned to the big man. “What fifteen countrymen?”
“The spineless assholes who learned how to fly without worrying much about the landing,” he said. “Remember them, Khalid?”
The smile was gone now. So was the mister.
“I wouldn’t call men who gave their lives for their religion spineless,” Khalid said. “You may disagree with their cause, but you can’t argue their courage. Now how long before we arrive at this so-called undisclosed location?”
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