by Rawlin Cash
He was looking at Fitzpatrick, who’s number crunchers would take weeks to figure out how to algorithmically detect a pattern in internet traffic leading to the assassination. As far as Hale was concerned, the CIA had taken out the only suspect so far. They were the only agency who’d actually done anything. If it was someone’s fault they were in the position they were in, it wasn’t his.
“I want this thing locked down,” Walker went on. “It’s been over twelve hours. What are we, a bunch of pussies? Get the capital secured. Get the White House secured. And let’s get back to work. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care about appearances. We’ve dithered here long enough. If they have to put the army on the streets, do it. After this address, I’m going back to the White House. I can’t run the country form a fucking hunting cabin.”
Walker left the room and slammed the door.
Hale looked at his watch. There was still more than an hour to go before the address and he wondered if he could get the go ahead for it to happen at the oval office.
He pulled his phone from his pocket. There were three missed calls from Fawn. He was desperate to call her back but instead he called Langley.
“We’re working on it, sir.”
“Just make it secure,” he said. “If we lose two presidents in two days we’re done for.”
“That won’t happen.”
“Who’s blocking the return to the capital? Is it still us?”
“No one’s cleared it, sir. We just can’t say it’s secure without being certain.”
“NSA and the Secret Service haven’t cleared it?”
“No, sir.”
Hale took a deep breath. There was safety in numbers. The president couldn’t put all the blame on him.
He hung up and called Fawn.
“Where are you?”
“At the White House.”
“And?”
“We’re still running checks but this guy is a citizen. Works for the federal government here in DC. ”
“Is there any chance he’s the shooter?”
“Haven’t you heard the ballistics?”
“I haven’t heard anything. I’m trapped out here.”
“You’re going to want to see these. You’re with Fitzpatrick, right?”
“He hasn’t shown me a thing.”
“What are you guys doing out there?”
“Just tell me what they say,” Hale said.
“It’s the bullet.”
“What about it?”
“We’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s high tech. They’re still trying to determine what’s going on with it but they’re already calling it a smart bullet.”
“A smart bullet.”
“Yup.”
“How smart?”
“Like guided missile smart.”
Hale didn’t say anything. This day was only going to get worse. He didn’t even know who had that sort of technology. He looked across the room at Fitzpatrick. That fucker wasn’t sharing information.
“How long have they been sitting on this?”
“Not long. Fitzpatrick didn’t tell you, did he?”
“What do you think?”
“Do we know who has that sort of technology?” Fawn said.
“We have it.”
“Sort of,” she said.
“Right,” Hale said.
The United States had two smart bullets programs, but both were still in the prototype stage and were a long way from being ready to use in the field. You definitely wouldn’t want to be trying to kill a president with them. The technology they were based on still had massive hurdles to overcome. Hale had witnessed the tests.
“This is a problem, boss.”
“No kidding,” Hale said. “With this on the loose, there’s no way Walker can go back to the capital.”
“Is he getting antsy?”
“Very. He wants to do his address from the oval office.”
“Tell him no.”
Hale let out a quiet laugh. “Right. He’s getting sick of hearing that.”
“You’ll figure it out,” Fawn said. “I’ll call you when I learn more.”
Hale hung up the phone.
He didn’t know what he would tell the president. The man was jumpy enough as it was. He would not react well to news of a smart bullet.
The CIA had been closely involved in the development of smart bullet technology and Hale’s snipers would be among the first to gain access to it when it became operational. He’d followed closely the Copperhead project back at the beginning of his career. That was a NATO project to develop a 155 millimeter laser guided artillery shell.
The program never delivered a working prototype and was cancelled after years of work and billions of dollars had been spent.
The current programs were a lot more promising. They aimed to develop fire and forget bullets. Some would redirect themselves to hit a target. Others would be capable of sending data back to the firer. DARPA was making progress with its bullet, working with Lockheed Martin and Teledyne. Their bullet would be fired from a regular .50 BMG rifle and its guidance would be tied to the rifle scope. It would know what had been aimed at, and had the optics built into the bullet to redirect itself.
The other project was being developed by Honeywell at Sandia National Laboratories. That company had been tasked by the government with developing the non-nuclear components of the United States nuclear arsenal. Their bullet, or dart as it was called, was a four inch missile with electromagnetically actuated fins that could hit targets at two thousand yards. It required the target to be laser designated. It also needed to be fired from a specially designed rifle.
Hale seriously doubted either of those projects was responsible for the assassination. They just weren’t ready. Funding was tight. Progress was slow. They didn’t work. And even if they did, they were nowhere near compact enough to be used inside the congressional chamber during the state of the union.
There were rumors of projects by other nations. The Russians had been building a bullet that was supposedly accurate at over six miles. However, the last Hale had heard, they’d scrapped the project because they had nowhere near the technological capability to bring it to fruition.
Hale made for the president’s office. One of the president’s aides was standing at the door.
“He’s with the first lady, sir,” the aide said.
“He’s going to want to hear this,” Hale said.
Seventeen
“Mr. Ambassador,” Jamal said into the phone.
He was holding a new Inmarsat satellite phone that had been altered to avoid using the GMR-2 cypher usually used by the company, and which the Saudis knew the American government could crack in real time. Instead, it was using a proprietary algorithm designed by the Kessler Corporation in San Antonio, Texas. The algorithm was the property of the Saudi government and was used to secure all their satellite communications as well as those of the United Arab Emirates.
“I’ve been trying to get hold of you,” the ambassador said.
“What the fuck happened last night?”
“Merely a detail,” the ambassador said.
“You didn’t use my targeter, did you?”
“Your choice was not the type of man, how should I say this?”
“He was the man we agreed on.”
“Jamal, be reasonable.”
“He was the best at what he does.”
“He was Jewish, Jamal.”
“So what? You switched him out and now the Americans have a lead.”
“He panicked. How was I to know he would be so jumpy?”
“Fuck,” Jamal said. “This is why you sent me on that last minute errand last night, isn’t it?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The field trip out to Silver Spring. That bullshit on the highway.”
“That was all necessary, Jamal.”
Jamal had t
o stop talking. He was so furious he could hardly breathe. He thought he’d smash the phone against the dashboard.
“What did you do to him?” he said at last.
“To who?”
“To the Jew, Adel?”
“You know there can be no loose ends,” the ambassador said.
Jamal sighed. “Why wasn’t I told?”
“You didn’t need to know.”
“This was my operation. Whatever idiot you had in there could have messed up the whole thing.”
“At least he was a Muslim.”
“He was caught. He panicked and he ran.”
“He created a decoy.”
“And now they have a lead.”
“They don’t have a lead. They blew him to shreds.”
“You didn’t know that would happen.”
“That man was a safeguard for you. He drew all the attention while you got away.”
Jamal gritted his teeth.
“I didn’t need a decoy. I was miles away. This was planned to the last detail. The name I gave you was the best man for the job.”
The ambassador said what he always said when he was shirking responsibility. “What can I say?” he said. “Orders from above.”
Jamal couldn’t believe the Crown Prince was going over his head. The meddling was putting everything at risk.
Going out to Silver Spring last night, that was ludicrous. It meant Jamal had spent his final few hours before the hit driving around the suburbs getting rid of the Dodge.
That was time he could have been in position.
Not that it had mattered. The strike was a success. But that was because of him. He was the one who’d delivered the goods. And they were compromising him.
He took a deep breath. There was no point arguing with the ambassador. He just did what he was told. The real problem was the Crown Prince.
Mohammad bin Faisal bin Nayef al Saud was the boss of them all. For all intents and purposes, he was the owner of Saudi Arabia. Not the president, not the dictator, not the supreme ruler, the fucking owner. He was the owner of the country, the land, the oil, and all the motherfucking people. Jamal was a citizen of his kingdom. That didn’t mean the same thing it meant in other countries.
Jamal was not going to take this to the Crown Prince. He was not going to complain. He was going to shut up and get back to work. The Crown Prince was a man who could say he wanted the president of the United States dead and it happened. If he wanted a lady in the DC suburbs fucked with, if he wanted a Muslim targeter inside the Capitol during the hit, it happened.
It was his show.
What Jamal wanted now was just to find out how much other interfering had been done. He was about to make another hit. He was about to trudge through a marsh in northern Maryland that had once been used to test Sarin and Mustard gas, and which was still so contaminated that the government used hawk-shaped decoys to deter birds from landing on it. He was about to become the first man in history to do the impossible.
He was going to kill his second president.
And he needed to know if the ambassador had done anything else to put all his carefully laid plans at risk.
“Adel,” he said, breaking all the rules to call the man by his first name, “is there anything else I need to know?”
“Jamal,” the ambassador said, his tone so saccharine it made Jamal want to throw up, “everything we do is to aid you.”
Jamal was a man who even at the best of times liked to know where he fucking stood.
“What have you done, Adel?” he said, straining to keep his voice even.
The ambassador laughed. “Nothing, my boy. Absolutely nothing.”
“You’re certain of that?”
“Jamal, my son, would I lie to you?”
Eighteen
Hale felt sorry for the president. Gary Walker was a self-made man. His father had been a rancher. He’d worked his way up from nothing to become one of Montana’s best-loved politicians. He knew how to connect to people. He knew how to speak to the working man. He knew what they wanted to hear because he was one of them.
He wouldn’t like the fact he’d become president by succession. He wouldn’t like the idea that he was wearing another man’s shoes. As vice president, he’d refused to even set foot in the oval office unless the president was present.
He wasn’t the type of man to take what wasn’t his. He wasn’t the type of man to smile at another man’s wife.
Hale had watched him closely. It was his job to assess every threat, especially those from the inside. When he became head of the CIA he quickly realized that one of the most important aspects of his job was to determine who wanted the president’s job, and how far they were willing to go to get it.
He’d watched Walker like a hawk.
Not once had Hale come across an example of Walker taking credit for something he hadn’t done.
Not once had he sought to deflect blame from himself to another person. He wasn’t unfair to those under him.
If someone else was responsible for something, Walker credited them. When he fucked up, he owned it.
There were smaller things too. He didn’t sit down before the president sat, at least not when there were others present. He didn’t speak over the president. He didn’t argue with the president in front of others.
Hale knew he wanted the presidency, everyone in Washington wanted the presidency, but Walker wanted it by winning an election.
He stood now at a podium with the White House seal on the front and a blank wall behind him. To either side were American flags.
The studio was rarely used and only in cases of emergency. The last time it had been used for a broadcast was in the eighties.
Walker’s wife did the makeup. She patted him with foundation which had been purchased to match her paler tone. It made Walker look pasty, like he was ill.
That was unfortunate.
His rugged looks were one of his best assets.
This was a time when looking like Clint Eastwood was exactly what the country needed.
The address would be live and the technical details of the broadcast were for the most part handled remotely. The computer and camera in the room looked decidedly amateur and the technician looked out of his depth.
It was a shame.
It would have been better to wait until they were back at the oval office and all the fanfare of a full press presence was there to bolster the occasion. Hale felt that this address was going to fall flat. It lacked energy. It was defensive.
Walker cleared his throat.
His wife nodded supportively.
The people in the room were security personnel. Even Hale was there for security.
There was no political guidance.
Walker was doing this alone.
“My fellow Americans,” he began.
His voice sounded good. It was strong.
“Last night we suffered a grievous loss. President Jackson was shot by a single bullet during the State of the Union. The moment was televised live and I can only imagine the trauma it caused our nation. No one should have to see someone die like that. No one should have to lose someone so suddenly. I was present in the room when it happened, and so was the First Lady. From me and Nancy, I want to offer Emily our heartfelt condolences. And to the American people I want to make a promise. Last night, in accordance with the line of succession, I was sworn in as president. I promise I will discharge that sacred duty with faith and honor. I will perform my task with courage and unwavering strength. My first duty is to protect the constitution, the continuity of rule, and the functioning of our government. But it is also to find the men responsible for this vile and cowardly act and bring them to justice. Last night, minutes after the shooting, our military took out the prime suspect in the assassination as he fled the capitol. We know this man was not acting alone. There are others out there who will seek to make further attacks. We will find them,” he paused here, ever so briefly, and then said, “and w
e will kill them.”
Hale was surprised. It brought to his mind the words of President Jackson after Segundo José Heredia and the Sinaloa cartel had killed thousands of civilians across the country. It was a testament to how much those attacks had changed the political discourse of the nation. Just a few years ago, a president talking about killing on national television would have been unthinkable. Even when they meant it, they wouldn’t speak so bluntly. They toned it down. After the losses faced by the country in the past months, killing was exactly what the people wanted. Jackson had known it. Walker knew it. And an increasing number of other politicians knew it too. They no longer spoke of protecting the nation, but of killing its enemies.
It was a semantic difference maybe, but an important one.
Hale watched the end of the speech and had to admit Walker did a good job.
The closing words were, “I will be making another address from the oval office as soon as we have further information. God bless America.”
Hale smiled. Walker had been so angry when they told him he couldn’t leave the safe house. That last bit he’d added on his own.
Walker left the room and was followed by the rest of those present. Hale lingered. Walker had left the original speech on the podium and Hale stepped up to look at it.
As he suspected, the original approved by his staff did not say, “we will kill them,” but “we will bring them to justice.”
Nineteen
It was another two hours before the secret service finally made the call that the White House was clear. Goldwater said the airspace over the capital was secure. That left Hale and Fitzpatrick as the only two holdouts preventing the president’s return. When Fitzpatrick said the NSA had no objections to a return, Hale was alone.
He was pissed at Fitzpatrick for caving.
They were all in the president’s office.
“We’re still concerned,” Hale said.
“I have no problem with you being concerned,” Walker said, “as long as I’m allowed to do my job.”
“Sir, the bullet technology is a game changer.” He looked at Fitzpatrick. “The NSA doesn’t know what it is. We don’t know what it is. How can I say you’re safe?”