by Stephen Frey
Skylar had no time to congratulate herself. The branch supporting the rope snapped under the pressure as she swung back toward the cliff, dropping her precariously just as she should have landed on the forest floor. She let go of the rope and grabbed desperately for the top of the cliff as she slammed into the face of it. For a few terrible seconds it seemed she would join the bear in his fatal plunge on the rocks below.
But as her hands began to slide, her fingers found a rock and her foot a toehold. She grasped the rock with her left hand, slipped the bowie knife out of its sheath with her right, and stabbed the earth. Now she had three points of pressure, and she was able to climb over the edge of the cliff for the second time in less than three minutes. Hopefully, there wasn’t another bear waiting for her. Except for coming together on the rivers for the salmon runs, mating, and mothering, they were solitary animals. So she felt that she was alone. But others would come looking for the food soon.
When she was standing on terra firma again, she checked herself for injuries. Other than a few scrapes and what was going to be a nasty bruise on one shin, she seemed fine. So she set off through the woods to retrieve her rifle before heading back to town.
As she passed the still-smoldering campfire, she scooped up the last rainbow and began to eat as she walked. She needed energy for the hike, and the munchies were setting in big-time. She was glad the bear had ignored it and focused on the venison. For some reason she was more in the mood for fish right now.
As she walked her adrenaline began to settle, and she began to consider what she was heading toward. What in God’s name did the president of the United States want with her?
CHAPTER 20
LIAM STERLING walked along Constitution Avenue through the late-afternoon humidity of Washington, DC, all the while taking copious mental notes because he never wrote anything down. Written notes created evidence, and evidence was his sworn enemy.
Sterling wore a faded blue Minnesota Twins baseball cap, a dark-red faux beard, and a layer of false padding below his gray University of Iowa Hawkeyes T-shirt. He walked a little slowly and a little hunched over, careful to make his movement seem stiff. And as he moved east along Constitution toward the Capitol, he licked a double-scoop chocolate ice cream cone he’d just bought from a street vendor near the Lincoln Memorial, making certain to allow a few drops to fall on his shirt as he looked around and shook his head in apparent awe. He was trying hard, though not too hard, to look like an anonymous, middle-aged tourist from the Midwest who was visiting the nation’s capital for the first time.
That was the key to carrying off a disguise, Sterling knew. Not trying too hard to look like someone you weren’t. Trying too hard was a dead giveaway to the trained eye, and Sterling was never so arrogant to think that he might not finally be discovered one day. He hadn’t yet, as far as he knew, but there could always come a day.
He glanced south toward the Washington Monument. One more mission and he was out of this racket. He’d decided that last night on the long plane ride from Lima to Dulles.
It had been less than twenty-four hours since he’d finished his meeting with Daniel Gadanz at the jungle compound in Peru. But he already had people coming toward Washington from multiple locations around the globe. They were converging from faraway places in roundabout ways to minimize detection, because if any of America’s intel groups caught a sniff of the hell heading toward them, they’d put this city on lockdown immediately.
Some of the people Sterling had called to help him were most certainly on intel radar screens. If the authorities put the pieces together, they’d shut down the federal government right away, and civilians would be required to show identification on nearly every street corner. Active troops and National Guardsmen would be swarming everywhere searching for the assassins. It would be that intense. And there would go the mission.
Sterling already had his bloodhounds scouring the world for Bill Jensen, but no luck so far. The world was a big place, and Gadanz had been quite certain about Jensen being resourceful. But it was early yet. There was still time to acquire that target, which would mean another twenty-five million dollars.
One of Sterling’s trackers had located Jack and Troy in Connecticut. Sterling could have both of them killed within the hour if he wanted, but killing the brothers now would send all the other targets to ground, and he couldn’t have that. Everything had to be perfectly choreographed if he was going to maximize his reward and, perhaps just as important, he realized, maximize his self-satisfaction at carrying out the greatest attack ever on the United States of America. It would end up being far more momentous than 9/11 or the Holiday Mall Attacks. So he was going to wait on killing Jack and Troy Jensen, even if they were exposed right now.
He smiled a little as he hesitated and turned to the north to gaze at the White House. Marine One was landing on the back lawn. Life is good, he thought to himself, watching the large olive-green-and-white helicopter touch down and whip the tree branches and grass around it into a frenzy.
It surprised him that there was only one chopper. There should be at least two, he figured, three if they were going to be really careful. Those things would be so easy to bring down with a surface-to-air missile, which almost any idiot could obtain these days. If there were two birds in the sky, the president would have a slightly better chance at surviving an attack. The idiot using the SAMs might not hit both of them.
Then he spotted three other choppers hovering to the east.
Daniel Gadanz had been true to his word. The twenty million dollars he’d promised as a down payment had already arrived in Sterling’s UBS account in Basel, Switzerland—Sterling had checked on his cell phone immediately after wheels-down at Dulles a few hours ago. And he’d already moved the money from UBS to an even lower-profile account he maintained in Antigua, in the financial world’s ultimate black hole.
So he had the down payment, and there was so much more to come.
And he had a high-priced call girl back at the Four Seasons in Georgetown, sleeping naked between the Egyptian cotton sheets of the comfortable king-sized bed.
Sterling took another lick off the chocolate cone as he watched the rotors atop Marine One continue to rotate. Yes, life was very good. And it was only going to get better.
Now if he could just figure out who Gadanz’s source was on Red Cell Seven. That would make everything perfect.
Sterling began walking along again. He would definitely take responsibility for killing Bill Jensen and the president. Jack Jensen, too, he’d decided.
He hated the Wall Street bastards with a passion.
THE LITTLE girl lay on a single bed made up with all-white linens. She had delicate facial features with large brown eyes, and she was very pretty—except that her black skin was scorched with awful, blood-splotched sores.
As the camera moved in closer, tiny drops of blood began oozing from the outer corners of both the little girl’s eyes. It looked as if she were literally crying blood. Maybe she was, Sterling thought to himself, as the camera panned back again and two doctors dressed in light blue containment suits moved to either side of the bed.
They bravely took her fingers in their gloved hands as she stared up at them with a near-lifeless gaze. She was probably so far gone at this point she no longer felt the terrible pain of the virus that was consuming her from the inside out, turning her flesh into an awful gray mass of waste.
Sterling stopped the video. It was the third time he’d watched it, and it had the same chilling effect each time. He shook his head, impressed. Daniel Gadanz could be very creative when he wanted to be.
He put the laptop down on the hotel room bed and shook the prostitute’s leg hard. She was young, beautiful, and passionate, but she slept too much. Yes, he was about to earn three hundred million dollars. Still, he was paying her a lot of money, and she damn well needed to earn it.
“Wake up,” he ordered ha
rshly. “It’s time to fuck.”
She lifted her head up slowly off the pillow and yawned. “Again? Already?”
Sterling’s eyes narrowed as a thin smile edged across his face. He was going to enjoy killing this one, much more than he had Sophia. This one deserved it.
CHAPTER 21
BAXTER AND Dorn were shooting pool in the Holly Cabin at Camp David, the secluded presidential retreat that lay sixty miles north-northwest of Washington, DC, near Maryland’s border with Pennsylvania. They’d flown up here earlier this evening on Marine One to escape the District’s burst of sizzling late-September heat, probably the last one of the year, and to squeeze in a little fly-fishing, which they both enjoyed.
Camp David was set deep in the forests of the gentle, easternmost waves of the Appalachian Mountains. The temperature was ten degrees cooler here than on the streets of DC, and there were several blue-ribbon trout streams nearby. They were each going to wet a line in the morning before heading back to DC tomorrow night. They already had a bet on which one would catch the biggest fish.
“Nice shot, Mr. President.”
Baxter constantly marveled at how many things Dorn did well. On a personal level it was frustrating, he had to admit. In all the many eight-ball games they’d played on this table, he’d only beaten Dorn a handful of times. But, he steadfastly believed, it was good for the country to have a man in charge who was competent at so many things—even trivial things like shooting pool.
Sinking billiard balls with such skill was trivial compared to running the world, but he seemed to do everything well. Baxter had no doubt that Dorn would catch the biggest brown tomorrow morning, even without help from the Secret Service.
Still, Baxter intended to stay within eyesight of the president at all times on the stream tomorrow morning—just to make sure the competition went fairly.
“Rack ’em again, Stewart,” Dorn ordered as he dropped the eight ball into a corner pocket. “And concentrate this time, will you? Winning this easily gets boring. At least give me a game. I’ll have to call one of my Service guys in here pretty soon to play, and you know I don’t want to do that. They’re no fun. I can’t cut up with them like I can with you. But I’ve got to have some competition.”
It had been less than twenty-four hours since that aide had hurried into the Oval Office to deliver the unsettling news about his illegitimate daughter, Shannon. But Dorn had already compartmentalized the kidnapping—just as all the great ones could partition disturbing events into the far corners of their minds when they needed to.
Well, maybe it was time to remind him of what had happened, Baxter figured as he snatched the rack from its resting place beneath one end of the table. He had been trying to win that game, just as he tried to win all the games. He was pretty sure Dorn had been kidding just then about getting one of the Secret Service people in here to play. But it had sounded a little serious—and very arrogant.
“Sir, I—”
“What are we doing about Shannon?” the president interrupted.
Baxter heard the shot of emotion Dorn had injected so forcefully into his voice. So the disturbing news of last night wasn’t completely compartmentalized.
“I already have people checking into it. The same people who got that original of the Order from Carlson’s townhouse. They’re thorough. And very discreet.”
“Shannon is my only child.” Dorn bowed his head and tapped the butt end of the pool cue on the floor several times. “As far as I know, anyway,” he admitted ruefully before taking a deep breath. “Damn, Stewart. I’ve never even met her, but I love her very much. Her mother said she’s exactly like me in a lot of ways.”
Baxter had never seen or heard such a sincere display of familial emotion from his president. He’d never heard it for the First Lady, which was probably understandable, since they’d been married for quite some time and spent only the required amount of time together. But he’d never heard it for Dorn’s parents, either, both of whom were still alive in Vermont.
“It’ll be all right, sir.” He’d gone from being angry at Dorn to feeling a sense of sympathy for the man that quickly. Dorn was every bit as good as Ronald Reagan had been at skillfully touching and manipulating his electorate’s deepest emotions—and that included his chief of staff.
“The First Lady and I were never able to have children. She . . .” Dorn had to pause to gather himself for a few seconds. “Well, she could never conceive. There was an accident when she was young.”
“The person who called my aide last night claimed that you’ve tried to contact Shannon over the years. Is that right?” Baxter asked after a few moments.
Dorn nodded.
“Who did you say you were?”
“I said I was a close friend of her mother’s. Shannon spoke to me the first time I called. It was the night of her sixteenth birthday, and we spoke only for a few moments. She was going out.” Dorn hesitated. “She never talked to me again after that. I would leave messages, but she never returned them.”
Shannon was a smart young woman, Baxter realized. She’d figured out the real story right away, that he wasn’t just a friend. “Did she know who you were? You weren’t president then, but did you leave your real name?”
This time Dorn shook his head. “I used an alias.”
“How did you find out about Shannon in the first place?”
“Shannon’s mother called me a month before she gave birth. It was quite a shock.”
“Was she trying to get money out of you?” Baxter asked.
“No. She just said she thought I had the right to know. It was touching.”
“Do you think she’d try to extort you now that you’re the president? Do you think Shannon is in on this?”
“No,” Dorn replied firmly. “Her mother would never do that to her daughter.” He shook his head as he thought on it further. “I misspoke. Her mother wouldn’t do it for any reason. I don’t know her that well, but I believe she’s a good soul.”
Baxter was never convinced anyone was that good a soul. Not if there was enough money involved. “What if—”
“What about that woman you were going to introduce me to?” Dorn broke in as he chalked his cue. It squeaked loudly at the friction with the blue cube. “The one you thought could lead the cell I mentioned last night.”
Dorn was finished talking about Shannon. Despite his ability to compartmentalize, it was an emotional issue for him. Baxter could clearly see that. And he didn’t want to talk about it anymore right now.
“I still can’t believe you think a woman would be a good candidate for this,” Dorn continued, “but hey, I guess I’ll humor you. I’m sure she’ll be just great,” he said sarcastically.
“She has been contacted, sir. I took care of that last night.” Baxter arranged the colorful balls inside the triangle, dropping them loudly into place to display his irritation at Dorn’s sarcasm. “And I do think she’s a good candidate,” he whispered as he straightened up and his mouth fell slightly open, “an excellent one.”
“No disrespect, Stewart, but how in the hell do you think a woman would have any chance against Shane Maddux, the Jensens, and all the other badasses that cell overflows with?”
Baxter’s eyes narrowed as he looked up from the pool balls.
“Well, Stewart?” Dorn demanded. “Answer me.”
“Why don’t you ask her yourself, sir?”
“What?”
Baxter nodded over the president’s shoulder.
Dorn spun around. “Jesus Christ!”
Standing a few feet away was an attractive young woman. She had dark hair that was pulled together at the back of her head in a tight ponytail. She was wearing a maroon Stanford sweatshirt, dark jeans, and muddy black boots.
“Mr. President, meet Commander Skylar McCoy.”
Dorn ran his fingers through his hair and
exhaled heavily, trying to compose himself after the shock of seeing her in the room. “Hello, Skylar.”
“Hello.”
“Why didn’t you tell me Commander McCoy was going to be here, Stewart?” The president was still rattled. His voice was shaking slightly. “I hate surprises. You know that.”
Baxter shook his head. “I didn’t know.”
“What do you mean, you didn’t know? I pay you to know.”
“I asked her superior to have her in Washington early next week.”
“So you didn’t—” Dorn interrupted himself, then gestured at Skylar. “How did you get in here? Do you have friends in the Secret Service?”
“I don’t know anyone in the Secret Service,” she answered, “and judging by their incompetence, I wouldn’t want to.”
“You mean you—”
“I mean, sir, that there are several agents on the grounds who’ll wake up with raging headaches in a few hours.” She nodded at the room’s door. “Two of them are right outside. Does that answer your question?”
Dorn nodded deliberately, never taking his eyes from Skylar. “Yes, it does, Commander. Yes, it does.”
CHAPTER 22
EARLY MORNING, and Chief Justice Warren Bolger steered his brand-new BMW toward the Supreme Court building and through the thick fog drifting in off the Potomac River, which was shrouding the streets of downtown Washington. He loved this sleek, black 7 Series, and the hell with bloggers who ridiculed him for having such expensive tastes. And thank the Lord the car was all they’d found out about. His family’s investment income dwarfed the $231,000 salary he earned as chief justice.
