The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller

by Whitley Strieber

  CHAPTER THREE

  SECRET SERVICE director Forde arrived at 716 Jackson at four in the afternoon. He found the president, Mrs. Greene, and Cissy in the parlor. The president was drinking and pulling on a cigar. He was dressed in what he had been wearing when they’d been evacuated: jeans and a white polo shirt. Cissy wore a tan and rust sweater and Lorna a green silk suit. They sat close together, huddling like people in a storm.

  “Sir,” Forde said, speaking softly, “the situation is under control.”

  “Meaning?”

  “The entire house has been searched. There is nobody in it who might pose a threat. It’s safe to return.”

  “So you caught the perp?”

  “No sir, not yet.”

  “Then it’s not safe to return, so don’t tell me that.”

  “The White House is safe—I’ll stake my reputation on it.”

  “You’ve got a lot of guts, then, or you’re a moron, because what you’ve just told me is that a murderer got in and out undetected. Until you can come to me with an identified criminal, I’m not going back there. I hate all that old stuff, anyway. ‘Don’t sit in this chair, don’t drop crumbs on that rug’—Jesus, give me a break. I sat through a Dolly Madison chair just yesterday. I’m sick of the place, I hate it and I’m not going back.” He flashed a big smile. Not a nice one, though. “Let’s turn it into a museum.”

  As he railed, Forde glanced at Lorna. She called the shots, wore the pants, ran the country, however you wanted to put it. But she did it from behind the mask of the southern belle. Her smile was sweet, but her stick struck hard. You most definitely did not want it to connect with you.

  “If we suddenly leave the White House,” she said, “it calls attention. Right now, that’s the last thing we want.”

  “There’s been a murder, Lore, there’s gonna be attention!”

  “We’re not calling it a murder and we’re not calling it a suicide, Bill. As far as the world is concerned, it was an accident, nothing more. There will be some attention, but nothing we can’t handle. As long as we don’t do an Eisenhower, this will hang in the news cycle for six hours tops.”

  “What’s an Eisenhower?”

  “He went out to some airbase in California and disappeared for a few hours. It was international news for a week. If we leave the White House, it’s international news for a week. If we do it because of a suicide, we’re in trouble for a month. Inevitably, it comes out that the suicide was really a murder and we go down in flames. It was an accident; the building clearance was a routine precaution. So let’s get our tails back where we belong.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Who, Bill?”

  “Eisenhower.”

  “He went to the dentist.” She turned to Forde. “Can we move now?”

  “Any time. We’re ready when you are.”

  She stood up. “Let’s go, honey, we have dinner with Justice Reinhardt and Justice Fuller tonight. We’ve just got time to change.”

  “Oh, God, those fossils.” He stood up, then thrust his face into Forde’s. “Serve and protect, eh? Except for the son of my best friend.”

  “Sir, the Secret Service is charged with the protection of the First Family.”

  Greene shoved him aside and strode out to the waiting Chrysler, Cissy and Lorna following.

  In the car, Bill again asked his daughter if she felt safe returning. She still didn’t, but she also didn’t want to contradict Lorna. You didn’t mess with Mom. She kept count, and she did not forget.

  “Daddy, I feel like Mom does. That we have to be there.”

  “Yeah, and Henry the Eighth had to stay at Versailles, and look what happened to him.”

  Lorna shook her head. Cissy swallowed her guffaw. Daddy had been studying history, God help the United States of America. He was not a genius with facts. Now that he had Henry the Eighth at Versailles, heaven only knew what else he might come up with.

  On the way back, Cissy reflected that she needed to get to her room as soon as possible. She needed a private moment to call the secure number she’d been given. There was no way to be sure that the murder would interest the people on the other end of the line. But it was an “extremely unusual event,” no question there, and she’d been told to inform them of anything like that.

  A few years before, she’d witnessed some very strange things on a ranch in Texas. The people in control had made her sign a security document. Flynn Carroll of the ice-gray eyes had popped up out of nowhere in a bar and thrust the paper at her. He was the coldest, most unsmiling human being she’d ever met, and the most thrilling. Even more so than his friend Mac, with whom she’d fallen in love back in those days. Innocent days, shacked up with that wonderful crook. Mac was dangerous and delicious. He wasn’t like Flynn, though, a man so hard you could believe he had a soul of steel. He also wasn’t limitlessly wealthy like Flynn, a child of the great Permian oil boom that had transformed West Texas, starting way back at the beginning of the twentieth century. Flynn’s was the same sort of Texas story as her own: hardworking ranchers ending up sitting on millions of dollars’ worth of oil.

  He wasn’t flashy like her dad, though. He had a charitable foundation so hidden that its name wasn’t even publicly known. God only knew how much money he gave away. Or had, for that matter. Certainly, he was among the richest men in Texas, and yet he lived modestly, so much so that, when he was a cop in Menard, only his old friends even knew he had money.

  Strange guy, all the way around. And appealing as hell, damn him. Fourteen years her senior, just enough to be too old for her, at least in her crazy parents’ book. The Greenes were schlocky new money. The Carrolls were old Texas, deeply rooted. Dad and Mom just hated that.

  When they got back to the White House, Cissy went upstairs at once. She had selected the East Bedroom, the same room that Tricia Nixon, Susan Ford, Amy Carter, and Chelsea Clinton had used. It was OK. Livable. But she always wondered, every second she was in it, who might be watching or listening. Supposedly, it was private. Like, really? Since the days of her, shall we say, youthful indiscretions, Mamacita had hired hackers to invade her Internet space and detectives to bug her rooms. Lorna despised Mac and distrusted Flynn. She’d known and loathed them both in college, too, for that matter. Mom was tame, Mac was wild. Mom was greedy, Flynn was noble.

  Cissy played with her cell phone. Use it, or use the landline? No, she had to use the cell, otherwise she couldn’t get on the virtual private network Flynn’s people had installed on it.

  If you had a secure device or what you believed was a private space, long tall Lorna was liable to be in there somewhere, and now she had the Secret Service to amplify her snooping.

  She’d just have to risk being overheard. The First Daughter couldn’t exactly take a walk. Because she was pretty, she was hyped silly in the media. Everybody knew this face of hers and everybody assumed that she had time for them. “Hey, Annette, take a picture with me, sign my napkin, sign my face”—it started the moment she so much as stepped out of a car.

  As she had been taught, she logged her iPhone into the VPN. She punched in the number Flynn had made her memorize.

  The phone rang at the other end. It was picked up in the middle of the second ring. As she’d been told would happen, nobody said anything.

  “Two four four,” she said. It meant that she needed a meeting with Flynn.

  The line went dead.

  A moment later, her phone rang. She was given the address of an exclusive restaurant in Georgetown, the Pennington. It was very small, very quiet. There was a bar with high-backed booths. Many an affair had unfolded at the Pennington in one of those infamous booths.

  She called Marty Skinner, her current Secret Service detail, and told him she was going for cocktails at the Pennington. Then she went down to the private entrance to wait for the car.

  As she waited, one of the ushers came discreetly up behind her. “Your mother wants to know where you’re going,” he said. She could h
ear the embarrassment in his voice, which softened her a little toward him. She’d been about to bite his head off.

  “Tell her I’m going to a hookah club to smoke a little hash with some cat from the New Republic. Liberal transgender cat. Black. Atheistic. Muslim.”

  “OK, you’re going to Madame Sally’s.”

  Madame Sally was a dressmaker expert in alterations, and Cissy had been dieting. Mom would be pleased. “That’ll do.”

  The car came up, and she got in and told Marty to take her to the Pennington.

  “Date?”

  “No, I’m gonna sit in the bar and hope for a pickup. Maybe some post-sixty’ll come along and offer to take me to his place and show me his Lawrence Welk DVDs.”

  “You should be so lucky.”

  “Funny guy, Marty.”

  “I try.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  It was five forty when she reached the Pennington. The restaurant, which would be full in an hour, contained only a single ancient customer, apparently a man, gumming away at what looked like a pile of mashed potatoes. The bar was completely empty. Cissy took a booth and waited.

  * * *

  FLYNN CARROLL used the Pennington because it had a little-known side entrance that led directly into the bar. The place had been designed a hundred years ago specifically for discreet meetings. During the Cold War, every booth had been bugged by CIA, but now there was only one hot spot, booth three—and sure enough, there was Cissy Greene, all 128 svelte, shimmering pounds of her, sitting well back in booth three.

  An accident? Flynn couldn’t know that, but he could get her to change booths.

  “Come on.”

  “Flynn!”

  He nodded to his left, and Cissy obediently got up and moved to the corner booth he had indicated.

  She had grown up since he’d last seen her. Her skin was as soft as smoke, and when she moved, she flowed.

  He took a seat across from her, and immediately saw in her eyes something he wished had not been there. She was afraid of him. Terrified, in fact. He watched her tongue touch her dry lips. Her eyes never stopped darting, as if she was also afraid she’d been followed. As well she might have been.

  “Give me your phone,” he said.

  He powered it down and removed the SIM card.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Taking precautions. You act like a person who suspects that they’re under surveillance.”

  “I am under surveillance.”

  A waiter came. She ordered a vodka martini, he a bourbon on the rocks.

  “Are you already twenty-one, Cissy? Has it been that long?”

  “No, but who’s going to card me? Nobody, Mr. Carroll.”

  “Flynn.”

  “No, it’s Mr. Carroll. You’re far too frightening for first names.”

  “You’ve changed, Cissy.”

  “Keeping secrets is hell. It makes you old inside, Flynn.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  She took a deep breath. ‘Here it came,’ he thought. Small talk was done.

  “There was a murder at the White House today.”

  He contained both his shock at this unprecedented crime and his confusion about why she had reached out to him.

  “A wunderkind called Al Doxy.”

  “The Doxys of Plainview?”

  “Yep.”

  “Where do I come in, Cissy?”

  “He was beheaded.”

  “And this brings me in how?”

  “Flynn, I overheard my father on the phone with the Secret Service. They told him that the head had been severed with something that left a wound under a centimeter wide.”

  Flynn was not often shocked, not given what he’d seen in this life and what he knew, but he felt shock now, an unfamiliar coldness creeping over him, accompanied by ultraheightened awareness of his surroundings. He noted the whisper of the bartender’s cloth as he polished a glass, the faint drone of traffic on the street outside, a faraway clink and clatter coming from the kitchen as the evening service got under way.

  He said, “Are you back in the White House?”

  “Mom insisted.”

  Lorna Greene had been student body president at UT when he was a junior, a classic example of the steel magnolia. “Sounds like her.”

  “Should we have gone back?”

  “I’m going to need to go over there. I’m going to need to look into this.”

  “Mom and Dad are out of the loop, you know that. They have no idea about you.”

  “Cissy, the entire government’s out of the loop.”

  “All I know is you’re weird and scary and I can’t talk about what I saw.”

  He reached toward her, then stopped. But she slid her hand into his. She wanted to be reassured, but he couldn’t tell her not to be afraid. He was no liar, and she had good reason to be afraid.

  “I thought of trying to get them to go up to Camp David.”

  “No!”

  She blinked, startled. He realized that he shouldn’t have been so intense, but going to an isolated place like that would be incredibly dangerous, far more so than Cissy could possibly know.

  He didn’t think that they should stay in the White House, either, but he could see the political storm that would erupt if they left. “The murder’s a secret, I assume?”

  “Al Doxy was an NSC aide. So it’s all classified. National security. The press will be told it was a freak accident.”

  “What kind of an accident?”

  “Don’t know. Deflated, maybe.”

  “Deflated?”

  “He was a roly-poly. I knew him in college. Math genius, very overweight, incredibly boring.”

  “What was he working on in the West Wing?”

  She shook her head. “No idea.”

  He made a decision. “I’ll stick close,” he said. “I’ll be in the Residence tonight.”

  “How? Do you need my help?”

  He considered. Could he penetrate the White House? He called its security precautions to mind. He considered his skills, and Diana’s skills. He said, “I’ll be OK.”

  “The place is a prison. You can’t exactly ring the doorbell.”

  “I’ll look over the West Wing, then spend the night in the Closet Hall.”

  She was frowning. He thought she was probably trying to understand how he’d get past the many layers of defense that protected the president.

  “I’ll be in the Secret Service contingent,” he said.

  She nodded. “Can you tell me anything more?”

  He considered the horror that had descended on his unit since the revolution on Aeon. The brutal battles with marauding alien bands had not only continued, but without the support of police from Aeon, the situation had deteriorated. And now there was the constant threat of state-sponsored escalation, which this could be. “You don’t want to know anything more.”

  “Are they demons?”

  “They might as well be, but this isn’t supernatural.”

  “Then it’s aliens.”

  “Maybe. Maybe something a whole lot stranger.”

  “What could be stranger, Flynn?”

  “It’s a big universe. It’s very, very old. There’s just so much out there. Truthfully, we don’t know even yet what we’re dealing with.”

  Frowning, she absorbed that. She leaned forward, washing him in her clean, soft scent. “What happened to your wife—is it connected with all this stuff?”

  Abby had disappeared four years ago. She had been taken by a ferocious alien criminal who was here stealing DNA and probably things about us that we don’t yet understand.

  She’d been asleep in bed at home in Menard. He’d been a detective on the Menard City Police at the time. He’d woken up one morning and she’d been gone. The police, the Texas Rangers, and the FBI had all searched, but to no avail.

  Even after the case had died, Flynn had not stopped searching. He’d been in love with Abby since they were kids. She’d been pregnant when
she’d disappeared. He had continued on with a stubbornness so great that his efforts had eventually come to the attention of Diana Glass, who was running the highly classified special FBI unit that had eventually been transferred to the CIA and was now known as Detail 242.

  There had been no closure for Flynn. He still did not know if Abby was dead or in some awful way still alive. She lived in his mind and heart, all the time. He knew he should move on, but it was just very damn hard to do that. Loyalty ran deep in his blood. He did not give up. That was deep in his blood, too.

  “I don’t know what happened, not exactly,” he said.

  “Yes you do.”

  Maybe that was true, and maybe it was something he just didn’t want to admit to himself. He suspected that there were slaveries beyond human understanding, and captivities that made hell seem a blessing.

  Again, her hand came to his. He let it remain there. “I won’t let that happen to you or your family,” he said.

  She leaned closer. Now she was right in his face. “What about getting beheaded, Flynn? Will you protect us from that, too?”

  Diners were entering—congressmen, a boisterous senator, some Chinese Embassy personnel, and a couple of high-end whores who sat together and whispered.

  “I’ll be there,” he told Cissy. “Don’t let your mom and dad know, obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  He stood up. She raised her eyes. He saw that they were swimming with the wetness of fear. He left her, then, a golden child behind a vodka martini in the comfortable, wood-paneled safety of the discreet old bar.

  Would he see her alive again?

  Maybe.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DIANA LAY naked in the dark. He could see her form on the bed, and as always, his first reaction was desire, followed at once by loneliness. He stepped across the room and looked down at her.

  While you were sleeping …

  “I’ve got to get into the White House.”

  She sighed, then snorted. Her eyes opened. For a moment, she stared. Then she leaped out of bed.

  “Holy shit, Flynn, how did you get in here?”

  “I live here.”

  “Sort of. When you feel like sneaking up on me. Have you ever knocked on a door?”