by Jack Mars
“We got suspended?” Ed said.
“Ed, listen to me. There’s a lot going on. I know you were looking forward to a little holiday in Iraq, but you need to go back. I’ve known Stone for years. He’s going to be right in the middle of things. I can tell, even from here. But he hits a lot harder with you on his wing. And he’s going to need to hit very hard indeed.”
“You heard the lady,” Ed said. “They’re planning to hold me another…”
“Never mind that,” Big Daddy said. “I’m going to get you out of here tomorrow morning, first light. With a little luck and a good connection in Germany, you’ll be back in the USA early afternoon, DC time.”
“What’s going on?” Ed said.
Big Daddy shook his head. “Loose lips sink ships, my friend.”
“So let me get this straight,” Ed said. “You want me to race home against doctor’s orders, but you’re not going to tell me why?”
“Yes,” Big Daddy said. “Exactly right. I don’t know you well enough to give you information like this. But let’s put it this way. Very few people know about it at this moment, it’s big, and you’re going to want to be there.”
He paused and took a breath. “Stone will be very glad when you show up.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
1:20 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Headquarters of the Special Response Team
McLean, Virginia
“I might know where the president is.”
Luke spoke before Don Morris had even started the meeting. The three of them, Luke, Trudy, and Swann, had all filed in just a minute before, and had taken seats facing Don’s desk like a group of unruly students in the principal’s office.
Steel-eyed, salt and pepper Don, looking both impeccable and formidable in a tight-fitting white dress shirt, sat back in his leather office chair. He half-smiled and shook his head. He made a grunting sound that was almost, but not quite, a laugh. It was more like an exhalation of air that a hydraulic system might make. Luke translated its meaning easily. He was fluent in Don Morris by now:
It figures.
Don looked at Trudy and Swann, scanning their eyes to see what they might know. They both turned to Luke.
“I’ll go with the White House,” Swann said. “Or maybe Camp David, considering the White House came under attack last night.”
“The president is missing,” Don said. “This hasn’t been made public for fear of starting a widespread panic. Officially, he’s in seclusion at an undisclosed location for his own safety in the aftermath of the attack. He’ll be made available when the Secret Service decides it’s safe to do so. But the media is already asking uncomfortable questions about that, and it’s only a matter of time before the less responsible among them start spitballing off the wall conspiracy theories.
“The entire security apparatus of the United States has circled the wagons. To be clear, although we’ve been included in the circle, we are very tangential to this. No one is asking us to do or contribute anything. But I have just spent the past ninety minutes listening to high-level intelligence estimates of where the president might be, so he can be retrieved before things get out of hand.”
He stared hard at Luke now. “Only I guess that cat is already out of the bag.”
“The president is missing?” Trudy said. Her eyes became wide for a brief moment, then settled down again as her brain started to process the startling information. “What does that even mean? How does a person surrounded by security at all times go missing? The Russian attack on the White House…”
“I don’t know,” Don said. “No one seems to know. At least, no one is willing to admit they know. Or almost no one. Care to enlighten us, Agent Stone?”
“I can’t say how I found out,” Luke said.
“You can’t say?” Don said. “Don’t you work here? Aren’t I your employer?”
Luke shrugged. “I don’t know. You tell me. I got a call telling me to come in. Not a call telling me I wasn’t suspended anymore.”
Don waved a hand. “Fair enough. Tell us what you know.”
Luke looked at Swann. “How is this room?”
Swann nodded. “Good. We sweep the whole place for bugs once a week. We sweep the offices of key personnel every two days. So far, we’ve been clean as a whistle. No one even seems to be trying to infiltrate.”
Now Luke nodded. He looked at Don. “He might be at a safe house in the Allegheny Mountains, near a town called Cheat Bridge, West Virginia. It’s in the middle of nowhere, and there’s something about that region making the house hard to hit.”
Trudy had already pulled a small laptop out of her bag and opened it.
“In your opinion, how did he end up there?” Don said.
Luke shook his head. “I don’t know. But I do have an exact address, in case we need it. It’s one of these no name rural routes.”
“Cheat Bridge isn’t really a town,” Trudy said. She was typing fast and scrolling through screens, her eyes staring into the screen and darting back and forth, her super-sharp brain absorbing information at a fast clip.
“It’s an unincorporated area around an old Civil War–era covered bridge that crosses the Cheat River. It’s in the Monongahela National Forest. Besides the remote location, the reason it would be a hard place to hit is it’s located right in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone. Most radio and cell phone communications are blocked there. Wi-Fi is blocked. Even microwave ovens are against the law. All other forms of communications, such as landlines and satellite, are monitored constantly.”
Everyone looked at Trudy now.
She shrugged. “Now you’re gonna say you didn’t know there was a National Radio Quiet Zone, right? And you’re gonna ask me why it’s there.”
Don gestured to her with one hand. “Enthrall us.”
“There’s not much to it,” Trudy said. “There are two major facilities out there. The Green Bank Radio Telescope Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, and the National Security Agency listening station at Sugar Grove, West Virginia. The two places are about forty miles apart. Cheat Bridge is very close to the telescope observatory. But Sugar Grove is the far more important facility. The NSA runs a top secret ECHELON station there.
“If you believe the hype, they intercept all international communications entering the East Coast from there. If you believe the conspiracy theorists, they intercept all communications, both international and domestic. Email, telephone, satellite, radio, anything and everything. NSA wouldn’t even admit the place existed until a report released by the European Union in 2001 outed them. Whatever they’re doing, that whole region is a communications dead zone. And the communications that are allowed—for example, radio contact by local police and fire departments—NSA listens in on.”
Don looked at Luke.
“Why do you suppose the Russians would steal the president of the United States and bring him to a far-flung, blacked-out place, nestled right in the bosom of the American intelligence networks?”
Luke shrugged. “I didn’t say I think the Russians did it.”
* * *
An hour had passed.
They had moved to the conference room. It was Don, Luke, Trudy, and Swann. The door to the room was closed.
Swann had three laptops open across the long conference table. He had pulled generic satellite imagery of the overall region, then zoomed in on the areas in question. On one screen, there was a wide-angle image of the Allegheny Mountains, from the border of Virginia to central West Virginia.
On another screen was a close-up of two large circular clearings cut into the forest, with white buildings, parking lots, satellite dishes, and radomes. The third screen was a split image. One half was an aerial shot of an area of dense woodland, with a dirt road leading to a large house. The other half was a close aerial shot of the house itself, large and white with New England–style gables and a wide stone chimney, perched on a steep escarpment overlooking a valley between two low mountains.<
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Trudy spoke. “The house and the surrounding land are registered to a Russian immigrant named Maxim Kletka. His address of record is a P.O. box in New Jersey.”
“Who is he?” Luke said.
Trudy shook her head. “No one. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t exist. Kletka is not a typical surname in Russia, or in any eastern countries. It’s a joke. In Russian and Serbian, the word kletka means cage or cell, like a jail cell. It’s also commonly used as part of the phrase for bird cage.”
Luke looked at Swann. “How old are these images?”
“Three months. It’s just generic data from a mapping satellite.”
Luke’s shoulders slumped.
Swann raised a finger. “Don’t start, Stone. You want me to get you rich satellite data on that house from yesterday, or today? I can do it. I can practically look in those windows for you. But that’s going to raise alarms with the people you seem to think are in there.”
“Who do I think is in there?” Luke said. He didn’t even know the answer himself.
“Well, you don’t think it’s the Russians, and I tend to agree with you. The place is in a communications blackout zone controlled by the NSA. There’s a cone of silence around that entire region. If I dial up a little custom peek on those coordinates, our friends are going to know about it.”
Trudy jumped in again. “There isn’t a town or city of any size within fifty miles of that spot. There isn’t a legitimate police force, fire department, hospital, or EMS dispatch center anywhere near there. Professional first-responder services are provided at the county level, if that. If you want a real police intervention, you’re going to be relying on the West Virginia state police.”
Don looked at Trudy now.
“What are you suggesting, Wellington?”
She shrugged. “As a safe house location, or as a site to take prisoners, it’s almost insidiously well-placed. Outsiders can’t have radio communications there. You’d have to request them beforehand. Why do you want them? Well, we want to kick the door in at this house. Which means you can’t have any sort of command and control over an operation without letting NSA know ahead of time.
“Airspace isn’t restricted per se, but if you do a drone flyover, they’re going to know about it at Sugar Grove. You can’t have real time satellite data without them knowing. You can’t make a phone call. If you request support from state or local law enforcement, where do you think their loyalty lies? With you, or with the federal agency that dominates that region? Do you think NSA doesn’t have moles at the state police?”
“So you’re saying you think the National Security Agency of the United States stole the president?” Don said.
Trudy shook her head. “I’m not saying anything. I’m not saying the president is even there. To me, that part doesn’t add up. It could just be a big empty house on a mountainside for all we know. We could get there and find a man grilling steaks and drinking beer on the porch. But if we are going to go there, then I think we’ll need to do it in total secrecy.”
“And total secrecy won’t even be possible,” Swann said. “There is a fence around the perimeter of that property, and a long dirt road leading up to it. My guess is you’ll hit an electronic gate when you reach the fence, and there are probably cameras on that road. Whoever is in that house will know you’re coming.”
“Helicopter?” Luke said.
Swann shrugged. “Possible. But it’s all mountainside and there’s nowhere to land. So you’re going to have to hover and fast rope down into the front yard.”
He pointed at the wide area image of the region.
“If you looped around the outside of the entire area and came in from the west, that would be your best look. You’ll be coming in from the West Virginia side, and the Sugar Grove listening station is well to your east, near the Virginia border. They might not pay you any heed right away.”
Now Trudy pointed. “If the chopper came in along this corridor from the northwest, following US Route 250, you could be a very early morning traffic helicopter or highway cops monitoring the roads for speeders. The highway passes five miles north of the house. You could cut off at the last second, and I’ll bet the SRT chopper can cross that remaining territory in two or three minutes.”
Swann nodded. “Two minutes before you hit the house, you could call me on the sat phone. I could be ready to pull up real-time imagery, so you wouldn’t be going in completely blind. Yeah, that would alert NSA, but if they’re really in cahoots with whoever’s in that house, they’d have almost no time to relay the warning.”
Luke looked at Don.
Don sat back. He laced his hands across his head, tamping down his salt and pepper hair. He nodded.
“We’ve been ramping up, as you know. We’ve got guys on board now with SWAT experience. The chopper seats six, with gear stowed. I can give you five good people, you round it out at six. Can you do it with six?”
Luke stared at the house and the surrounding grounds.
“The SRT chopper’s a passenger bird. It’s not configured for a fast rope exit.”
“No. I could pull a few strings and get a Black Hawk or a Little Bird here for a training exercise, but it’ll raise eyebrows if I say I need it before first light.”
Luke nodded. “We can make our bird work. And six? Yeah, I think we can do it with six. We just took out half the Russian empire with four. All we’re doing here is knocking on a door.”
“Ding-dong,” Swann said. “Avon calling.”
“Except the president might be in there,” Trudy said.
Don shook his head. He grunted. “They’re gonna say I’m a crazy old coot. Probably put me out to pasture after this. I just suspended my best people because of pressure from above, then I unilaterally unsuspended them, and now we’re going to hit what’s probably a US intelligence safe house without giving anyone a heads-up. Because based on no evidence whatsoever, we think the president might be there.”
Luke looked at him. “Does that mean we’re going in?”
Don’s eyes were hard and serious. “If you think this agency is hanging by a thread right now, just wait until tomorrow. We’ll be hanging by our necks instead. But yes, we’re going in.”
He paused and took a breath.
“I don’t see any other choice.”
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
4:45 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time
Just south of the Canadian border
Newport, Vermont
The place was falling to hell.
Lawrence Keller was working quickly, going in and out of the house, and he could barely get himself to glance at it. His old summer house. He’d been driving all day, he was damn near exhausted, and the place was bumming him out. If he focused too much attention on it, there was the possibility that he might start crying.
The house was tiny, 700 square feet, one bedroom, one full bathroom, plus a glorified closet with a toilet and a sink. It was over a hundred years old. The cedar shingle siding, decades past its expiration date, had turned gray and yellow and brown. Some of it was rotting out. The rain gutters were plugged with leaves from last fall. Some sort of moss was growing between the asphalt shingles on the roof. The winters here were long and cold, but that moss was tenacious.
It looked awful.
Moreover, the house was slumping . It was tired and had forgotten how to stand up tall. It seemed like it could fall in on itself at any minute. He really needed to take better care of it. Truth was, he hardly got up here anymore.
There were two good things about his old Vermont vacation house. One, and by far the less important of the two, given the circumstances, was that the house was situated on a small peninsula of land called Lake Park, which stuck out into Lake Memphremagog a few miles north of Newport. The house was right on the giant lake, and its back deck looked out on the water and the surrounding countryside.
The most important thing about the house was it sat just a couple miles south of the Canadian border, in a qu
iet, somewhat forgotten corner of the state. People here were poor. They didn’t get out much. They were not curious about you. Keller had seen a statistic somewhere that fully one-third of the townspeople of Newport could be considered obese. Time had passed this area by. Now there was little to do but sit around and eat.
The house was owned by a man named Kevin Lawrence. Kevin Lawrence looked an awful lot like Lawrence Keller. In fact, they were identical in every way. Kevin also had a Vermont driver’s license, and a tan 1995 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera sedan with Vermont license plates. The car’s registration was up to date.
Right now, the car was parked inside the small garage in the back yard, along with a canoe, a bicycle, some deck chairs, and bunch of other summer stuff he hadn’t taken out, or even looked at, in years. The garage windows were blocked with nailed-on wood. You couldn’t see inside. There was no reason for anyone to look in there anyway. The nondescript car in there was one of the most reliable sets of wheels that Kevin Lawrence and Lawrence Keller had ever owned.
In a few moments, he was going to go in there, start up the Ciera, and pull it out. Then he was going to back Lawrence Keller’s fancy Audi Quattro in there. Soon after Keller left his apartment in DC, he had switched his BMW with the Quattro, which he kept in an underground parking garage in Silver Spring, Maryland.
As he moved through the yard, Keller caught a glimpse of the lake. It was a gorgeous early summer day and some kids were water skiing from a little motorboat out there. The lake was beautiful.
“Man oh man,” he said.
He really should have done more with this place. It wouldn’t have taken much to make it a very nice place to spend time. But he had let himself get caught up in the excitement of life in DC. He’d been so important! The chief of staff to the president! Then the president had unceremoniously kicked him to the curb. And now the president…
He shook that thought away.
A short time later, he was behind the wheel of the Oldsmobile. The Audi was locked away. The little house was locked up. And Kevin Lawrence had all his papers and his luggage together (including his gun), along with seven thousand Canadian dollars. He was leaving the country.
