“You’d like that wouldn’t you, you fucking doughnut gargler,” Jeremy said, smiling as if talking about the weather. Anyone watching would have thought him a courteous, deeply regretful offender.
“What’s that smell?” the second officer asked, arriving at his partner’s side.
“Your mother, bitch,” Jeremy responded.
“Say what?” The partner recoiled.
“Get the fuck out of the truck,” the first responder ordered.
“Not until I use this gun I got to blow your black ass back to Rwanda.”
The second officer reached down to his hip to cover his weapon while the man with the pencil-thin mustache climbed up and jammed his gun through the driver’s-side window—its barrel pressed right up against Jeremy’s nose.
“Now how ’bout you get your cracker ass out the truck so we can discuss race relations here in the District,” the officer said. His eyes darted through the cabin, looking for the threatened gun.
“Happy to, officer.” Jeremy nodded. Any tail would believe him the wronged party in this mishap. He hadn’t defused the bomb yet, but he had certainly kept it from reaching the Capitol.
XIX
Saturday, 19 February
05:41 GMT
Mount Weather Special Facility, Clarke County, Virginia
ELIZABETH BEECHUM HAD seen site schematics and read off-budget funding requests but had never actually visited the so-called secure location. Referred to as Mount Weather, Site Seven, or just “that place out west,” this unobtrusive collection of buildings and asphalt parking lots looked like any of a hundred military installations from the air.
Home to FEMA’s Emergency Assistance Center, Mount Weather began life as a meteorological observation and research facility. It wasn’t until the 1950s that anyone recognized its potential as a Cold War bunker. By the late 1990s, the 483-acre facility had become the federal government’s top secret capital—home to a shadow government so highly classified, not even those chosen to staff it always knew exactly what to do.
“Please hold on, ma’am,” the Marine Corps flight safety officer cautioned her as the big lumbering HMX-2 banked hard left and started to flare. “We get some pretty tricky crosswinds up here on the Blue Ridge. Hate for you to get bounced around.”
Beechum did as she was told, craning her head to look out the aircraft’s small round window. They had followed I-66 west, she knew, until it spilled into Route 50. Just the other side of Middleburg—where the mountains started to rise above the sprawling horse country mansions of Paris and Ashby’s Gap—where Route 601 turned south, then back upon itself. The decrepit two-lane carriage path wound its way up Blue Ridge Mountain Road to where chain-link and barbed-wire fencing formed an ominous corridor of restriction.
The helipad sat next to a cluster of maintenance buildings. Even through the diffused glow of spotlights, Beechum could make out an entrance gate and a three-story brick building with tall stone pillars, which she had been told was just a facade built to cover ventilation shafts. Heavily armed military men guarded the helipad, but ordinary-looking rent-a-cops in unadorned blue uniforms stood at the perimeter like onlookers at a red-carpet star show.
Enjoy the view while you can, Elizabeth, the vice president told herself. Might be a while before you feel the sun on your face again.
The Shenandoah Mountains stretched out before her as the HMX-2 settled into its landing hover. A Brigadoon-like fog rose off a blanket of white, draping the distant valley in an almost mystical scene of moonlit beauty. They were just forty-eight air miles from her office on Pennsylvania Avenue, but Mount Weather might as well have been a different world.
JORDAN MITCHELL HAD always been a man of action. Waiting bothered him on a fundamental level.
“Is she there yet?” he asked. The Borders Atlantic executive rarely visited the seventeenth floor, but everything he needed to begin the endgame lay within its electronically shielded walls.
“Just set down,” Trask responded. The chief of staff stood at the other end of the room, trying to manage two phone conversations and an intemperate boss at the same time. There were just two other people in the room—a systems engineer who could help them navigate a daunting array of technology and Hamid, who had been in on the game from the start. He, better than anyone except Mitchell, understood the Swiss chronometer timing necessary to orchestrate the final hours of a delicately complex denouement.
“What about Waller?”
Jeremy Waller had turned out to be everything Mitchell had hoped for. And more. The HRT sniper presented a rare combination: a team player who functioned brilliantly alone, an intuitive thinker with the pragmatic mistrust of answers, a physical actor who understood the limitations of muscle. Any other man would have presented control problems, but Jeremy’s blue-collar work ethic and deep-seated patriotism kept it well in check.
“Hang on a minute,” Trask spoke into one of the phones. These calls were very important, but Mitchell remained his first priority.
“Jeremy has been arrested.”
“Arrested?”
Mitchell hadn’t foreseen this.
“He seems to have gotten himself involved in a car wreck,” Trask said, trading attentions between Mitchell and the source on one of the Quantis phones.
“What about the truck?” Mitchell asked. “Where the hell is that truck?”
“Right here, sir,” the systems engineer offered. He pressed a button, and Washington’s Seward Square popped up on a wall-mounted flat-screen television. “Secret Service security camera mounted on a utility pole. I can get you three different angles.”
The technician typed into his keyboard, and the screen broke into four isolation boxes: real-time video of cop cars, fire trucks, ambulances, and a crowd of curious bystanders.
The big yellow concrete truck sat perched atop the crumpled Mercedes like a rhinoceros tupping a hare.
“Do we know where they are taking him?” Mitchell asked.
Trask spoke into one of his phones and shook his head.
“It was DC Metro who arrested him. The precinct station is at Buzzard’s Point, down on the Potomac. Probably take him there.”
Mitchell tried to get inside Jeremy’s head and figure out what his best tactical operator was up to. Had he planned this out or was this just another variable he’d have to overcome?
“Where is Ellis?” Mitchell asked. He pointed to a blank TV screen. “Bring him up on three.”
The technician did as he was told. A street scene flashed on: point of view through a car windshield.
“That’s him in the Navigator, headed north toward the safe house in Adams Morgan,” Trask said. “We have a dozen people on him. Very low probability of evasion.”
“Caleb?”
Trask spoke into his phone, then responded to his boss.
“Still on Capitol Hill. We’re tracking him south on Independence. Appears that he is following Jeremy.”
“Mr. Mitchell?” a female voice inquired over a sophisticated system designed to identify the target voice from a database of sound prints and filter out ambient noise.
“What is it?”
“You have a visitor, sir. Ms. Malneaux.”
“Send her in,” Mitchell said.
He caught Trask in a knowing glance.
“She knows,” Mitchell said.
Trask just nodded and returned to his calls.
“I’M TELLING YOU, I was trying to get you to arrest me! Can’t you figure that out?” Jeremy yelled. He had been trying to convince these two officers of his plan since they threw him unceremoniously into the back of their squad car.
“Nigger?” the cop with the mustache asked sarcastically. “Is there really a white man in America ignorant enough to use that word anymore?”
“I was sitting on twenty tons of high explosives with a bunch of murderous white supremacists on my tail,” Jeremy rationalized. “What was I supposed to do?”
“You could have started with ‘I need so
me help, officer,’” the driver said. He conjured up an Uncle Tom accent. “You’d be surprised what us colored folk can do if we puts our minds to it.”
Jeremy craned his neck, trying to look back up Independence Avenue to where the ten-wheeled bomb sat, detonator intact. He had gambled on hopes that Ellis wouldn’t want to waste the device on anything less than its intended target. If all went right, the colonel would wait until things settled down, then send another driver to pick it up.
“Look, I don’t care what you do with me,” Jeremy said. “But I’m telling you: that truck is filled with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. ANFO. The same shit Tim . . .”
“How do you know about ANFO?” the driver asked. He had dropped the accent.
“I already told you! I’m an FBI agent working undercover, and I watched those assholes mix the stuff in a Thirteenth Street body shop.”
“Want to call it in?” the man with the mustache suggested.
“What can it hurt?” Jeremy tried to reason with them. “Just tell one of your buddies to climb up and look in the drum. Anybody with a nose can tell that shit isn’t concrete.”
The cops sat in their seats trying to decide whether or not they wanted to trust the word of a flat-topped construction worker who felt no shame in dropping the n bomb.
“Your brother is up there,” the cop with the mustache reminded his partner.
“Adam two-ten, Adam four . . . ,” the driver spoke into his radio mike.
“Adam four,” came the response.
Jeremy fell back into his seat, relieved. A quick look into the drum would confirm his story. Police could evacuate the area before disaster struck.
But it was too late.
The flash of light caught them first—brighter than sunshine in the car’s mirror. It took a full two seconds before the shock of overpressure blew out the back window. And then came the sickening boom.
“Holy shit!” the driver yelled.
The squad car skidded right from the force of the blast. All three men felt their ears pop as if they were on a plane falling out of the sky.
“Holy shit!”
By the time the driver gained control and pulled to the side of the road, they all knew what had happened. The flood tide of terror they had seen on television and heard about in morning muster had finally washed into the nation’s capital.
“Mothafucker!” The cop with the mustache gasped. He jumped out of his car to look back up toward the famous dome. Glass was falling from broken windows, but the superstructure looked intact.
Jeremy twisted in his seat, fighting the handcuffs and the smooth vinyl for a vantage on a tragedy he only thought he had averted.
“Adam two-ten, Adam four!” the driver called into his mike. His brother was up there in that mushroom cloud of gray-white smoke. “Adam two-ten, Adam four!”
But there was no response.
Traffic screeched to a halt all around them. People jumped out of their cars, gawking at a terrifying sight. Hundreds of late-working congressional staffers, local residents, bar drunks, and reception-bound lobbyists were already flowing down Independence Avenue like a raging stream of panicked animals.
“Holy shit,” the cop said again.
Jeremy assumed he was referring to the explosion until he noticed the Chevy sedan. And the gun.
Caleb pulled up next to them and aimed a blue-steel pistol through the passenger window. He fired two shots as naturally as if asking directions. The cops fell dead.
Holy shit is right, Jeremy thought. Before he could decide what to do, Caleb had jumped out of his car, yanked open Jeremy’s door, and pulled him into the idling Chevy.
“Thought you’d never get here,” Jeremy said.
The one-eyed albino did not look interested in conversation.
“WELCOME TO MOUNTWEATHER, Madam Vice President,” an Air Force colonel greeted Beechum, yelling over the prop wash of the HMX-2. Two Secret Service agents ushered her to a waiting limousine, black and armored. The younger of the agents carried her luggage: a prepacked overnight bag and her ancient leather briefcase.
“Thank you, Colonel,” she hollered back. The helicopter’s rotors had slowed considerably, but snow roiled in their downforce. “I’m hoping it’s a whole lot warmer inside!”
It was. And more spectacular. Minutes after disappearing into the facility’s ten-by-twenty-foot eastern portal, the vice president found herself inside an underground city that defied legitimate description. The facility’s cavernous central tunnel descended into the mountain of smooth-cut rock, branching off like an ant farm into side tunnels filled with dozens of freestanding buildings—some three stories tall.
“Amazing,” was all she could say as they drove along.
“Sure is, ma’am,” the colonel said. “We’re set up to support two hundred people for at least sixty days. We can sleep up to two thousand in shorter term. Full communications, medical, recreation, and data-assimilation facilities.”
“Where are they?” she asked. “I mean all the people.” She observed that despite signs of heavy activity, there was nary a soul to be seen.
“Locked down, ma’am. Protocol. Security plans go a lot deeper than what you’re probably used to. During movement of principals—you or the president—we halt all activities and secure quarters.”
“I’ve got to tell you, Colonel,” she said, exiting the limo and following the uniformed man into a suite of offices. “I’ve been a lot of places, but I’ve never been to a place like this.”
“It has its own charm, I suppose.” He smiled. Marines in full combat gear stood at ready gun just inside the reception-area door. “We like to think of it as our silo away from home.”
The man’s attempt at humor surprised Beechum. With all the guards and machine guns and game faces, it came as a pleasant relief.
“This is Margaret, your secretary,” the colonel said.
“Nice to meet you, ma’am,” the woman responded. She wore civilian clothing—wool pants and a Fair Isle sweater with an American flag on the collar. Beechum guessed her to be about forty.
“Pleased to meet you, too, Margaret,” Beechum answered.
“And this is your office.” The colonel opened a side door. Inside was a desk, a couch, two end tables, and a credenza. Colors were limited to blue and gray. Lots of mahogany.
“There’s a fridge in the credenza,” he noted. “Three televisions with access to the networks and cable news service. Bathroom is through that door.”
“What about HBO?” Beechum smiled. “You know, I hate to miss The Sopranos.”
“HBO,” the colonel agreed. “We’ve got our own TV and radio stations as well, just in case you feel inspired to come up with a series of your own.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t lined the walls with flat screens and piped-in scenes of Washington to make it feel more like the White House.”
“Good idea,” the colonel replied. “We do call this the White House, actually, but there’s no mistaking one for the other. We wouldn’t want to ruin our decorating scheme of Early Subterranean Bunker now, would we?”
Beechum chuckled.
“You’ll have secure comms to the White House from this STU-III phone,” the colonel said, lifting the receiver to demonstrate. “This second phone is a standard multiplex system like you have in your residence. It’s a shielded seven-oh-three exchange, but it is not secure. This third phone is the JCSAN/ COPAN system you’re probably familiar with at the White House. This is your voice comms link to the NMCC at the Pentagon, the AJCC backup at Raven Rock, and the president wherever he may be worldwide.”
“Thank you, Colonel,” Beechum said. She looked around the room and suddenly felt terribly tired.
“You’ll be getting a FEMA briefing on continuity of government protocols at half past the hour, and you’ll meet with the cabinet shortly after that,” he said.
“Cabinet?” she asked.
“Sorry, ma’am . . . I forgot. Yes, you’ll get details during yo
ur FEMA briefing, but you should know that the COG protocols call for the existence of redundant wartime representation at each cabinet-level position.”
“You mean backup secretaries of each department?”
“That’s right, ma’am. They are appointed by the president, though not affirmed by the Senate for security reasons. We refer to them as Mr. and Madam Secretary. They have all the same authority as their aboveground counterparts during times of transition and acute augmentation.”
Beechum didn’t care to ask about acute augmentation, but one other thing bothered her.
“What about Congress and the Supreme Court?” she asked. “Have you built redundancy into the legislative and judicial branches as well?”
“I’ll leave that to your FEMA briefers.” The colonel smiled. “It’s a bit over my pay grade.”
With that, Beechum’s one-man transition committee disappeared, leaving the vice president to consider her options. Despite the novelty in this underground wonderland, Site Seven was a crypt that shut her off from the rest of the world and a mission only she could accomplish.
All right, Elizabeth, she told herself, trying to adjust to the flat fluorescent light. You’re buried beneath a quarter mile of solid rock while the president plans nuclear war against a threat he doesn’t even understand. You think you’re so smart. How are you going to get out of this?
There was no time for an answer. Before she even sat down, the colonel stormed back in with news of yet another disaster. From what he said, the cozy little bomb shelter was about to get crowded.
WASHINGTON, DC GETS its raw drinking water from the Potomac River, filters it for harmful chemicals, bacteria, and trace elements, then treats it with additives such as chlorine, fluoride, and potassium permanganate before pumping it to consumers. It is a carefully monitored and scientifically controlled system that supplies the District’s homes, offices, and federal buildings with almost 300 million gallons each day.
Colonel Ellis had become intimately aware of this process during his stint at the Pentagon. While working at DARPA, he had seen counterterrorism projections of aqueduct vulnerability. Though chemical and biological contamination seemed a distant possibility because of filtration and flow distribution checkpoints, experts feared one contaminate above all else: radiation. Anyone with the proper knowledge of plant operations could introduce dangerous isotopes post filtration, they decided. The impact of such closed-system contamination could be catastrophic.
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