by Gregg Loomis
Then, the lights went out.
Worse, the generator powering fans sucking air in from above and water out was silent. It seemed to be getting more difficult to breathe.
Someone’s voice shouted excitedly from the corridor behind them, echoes distorting the tone.
Lang swung his light toward the voice. “What’d he say?”
“He said the entrance to the surface is closed,” Rossi said calmly. “Digging may have undercut the foundations of the old stones, caused them to fall into the excavation. Or one of the supports we erected against the outside water pressure collapsed.”
“Sounded more like an explosion to me.”
“No, no, my friend. We brought no explosives to the dig. To use such things would risk destroying what we hope to find.”
“Now what?” Lang wanted to know.
“Now we wait for the crew above to dig us out.”
Why did Lang think it wasn’t going to be that simple? Was it because he was beginning to smell a whiff of that heavy, pungent, sweet odor of nitroglycerin-based explosives such as dynamite, something someone other than Rossi’s crew might have brought to the site? And if that someone had blasted the opening closed, they certainly had not done so with the consent of Rossi’s people above, the people who supposedly would dig them out.
Lang inhaled a mouthful of dust. No doubt about it: it was getting harder to breathe.
And water was collecting around his feet.
472 Lafayette Drive, Atlanta
9:22 the same day
From under the kitchen table, Grumps watched with palpable relief as Gurt bundled Manfred against one of those late winter storms that paralyze the city every few years. Ice, not snow, covered every outdoor surface, transforming the most humble bush into an iridescent handful of diamonds. At irregular but persistent intervals a rifle shot–like crack attested to the inability of another tree limb to bear the extra weight. As usual, schools, including Manfred’s private pre-K, had announced shutting their doors as the first frozen precipitation had fallen the night before. Predictably, state, local and federal governments seized the opportunity to suspend operations along with a number of large businesses. Smaller operations, those whose bottom lines might be adversely affected by an unplanned holiday, bravely remained opened in the face of a clientele largely fearful of risking life, limb and automotive coach work on streets slick as oil.
Gurt had had enough of being confined in a house with a five-year-old’s rambunctiousness despite her normally strict discipline. Manfred had lost interest in his toys, tired of his mother’s reading to him from books already nearly memorized and tormented Grumps to the extent the dog had taken rare refuge from his young master and closest pal. One alternative was to turn on the television and let the magic screen absorb the child, something Gurt was loath to do. She severely limited Manfred’s TV watching, certain that the mindless junk that passed for entertainment would decrease her son’s IQ if not rot the brain entirely.
Gurt zipped up the child’s jacket, smiling at the resemblance the bulky clothes gave Manfred to the Michelin Man. “There,” she said in German, “now we will go to the park.”
All Gurt had to do was dream up some activity that would both engage and exhaust her son. She shrugged into a knee-length fur coat, checked to make sure her gloves were in the pocket and started to push Manfred toward the front door. In midfoyer she stopped. Grumps had abandoned the safety of the kitchen table. His tail broke into a furious rhythm as Gurt pocketed a tennis ball.
“Wait here,” she commanded both the little boy and the dog.
Grumps, now joyful at the possibility of a romp outside, skidded to a stop just short of a collision with the front door. He waited, tail wagging in impatient anticipation as she trotted up the stairs.
In the bedroom, she removed the Glock 19 from the bedside table, checking the action and magazine before stuffing it in a coat pocket. She normally did not carry a firearm when escorting or driving Manfred, out of the fear that should she need to use it, she would draw return fire, endangering the little boy. Besides, how often did a mother driving her child to kindergarten need a weapon?
But these were not normal times. After Venice and the crude but frightening attempt on her home, she felt leaving her pistol behind was foolish.
She watched her and Manfred’s step carefully as they made their way carefully down the three short but icy stairs from the front door to the brick path that led to the driveway. With canine impetuosity, Grumps made the transition in a single leap, landing hard and sliding a couple of yards on his rear on the ice-encrusted bricks. Both Gurt and Manfred nearly lost their balance as they doubled over with laughter.
By the time they reached the driveway, the stillness of the scene became apparent. Although Ansley Park was normally a quiet neighborhood, today it was totally and eerily silent. The sounds of the surrounding city, the white noise of traffic on busy Peachtree Street three blocks away, the whine of jets arriving or departing distant Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, the hum of civilization, were absent as if the blanket of ice were some huge sponge that soaked up all sound.
The rattle of tire chains on pavement across the park was like a shout in an otherwise-silent church and reminded her few of her neighbors were natives of Atlanta. This transplant had brought his winter paraphernalia with him when he left Michigan, Illinois or one of those places where snow and ice were common.
The next interruption of the crushing stillness was the cough of an engine cranking. Gurt looked at a black SUV with an exhaust trail, idling at the curb. Although tinted windows prevented her from seeing the occupant, she recognized the vehicle as belonging to the security service Lang had hired.
A door opened and a man got out. She thought she remembered he had been introduced to her as Randy. The way his eyes had never left her bustline made her wonder whether this was a name or a description. He was a beefy man with streaks of gray in his fading red hair. The fouled anchor and globe of the Marine Corps was tattooed on his right forearm above the “semper fidelis” motto.
Randy came around the car and opened the rear passenger door. “Going somewhere Mrs. Reilly?”
Even in her bulky coat, his stare made Gurt a little uncomfortable. “No, thank you. Just over to the park. The child is restless.”
She started to add that her name was Fuchs, not Reilly, decided the rebuke was not worth the effort and guided Manfred onto the driveway.
Randy turned to take a long look at the Iris Garden. “I don’t feel comfortable with that, ma’am. Even with the foliage off the trees and bushes, too many places somebody could hide.”
Not without leaving tracks in the sheet of ice a blind man could spot, Gurt thought. But she said, “Thank you for your thoughtfulness, but we will be quite all right.”
Taking Manfred by the hand, although there was no sign of traffic, she stepped into the street. Grumps, lesson unlearned, dashed ahead, again unable to put on the brakes. This time he hit the far curb.
Randy shut the SUV’s door with a little more force than Gurt thought necessary. “Then I’ll have to go with you ma’am.”
The thought of the man’s stares made Gurt inexplicably uncomfortable. She’d been . . . what would Lang say? Ogled, that was it, ogled. She’d been ogled by men all her adult life and most of her adolescence.
Her tone had a little more snap in it than she might have wished. “I said, we will be quite all right, thank you. I would prefer to be alone with my child.”
Randy shrugged. “Orders are orders, ma’am. I’m to stay with you while you’re outside.”
She saw no one else was in sight on this rare day when fireplaces would be more than decorative and at least half her neighbors would be home. On the unlikely chance anyone showed up to walk the Iris Garden, he would be as obvious as a wart on the nose. But she understood the necessity of obedience to orders as only those of Teutonic origin can. She herself had complied with enough of them in her time with the Agency.<
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She sighed, admitting defeat. “Very well, but try to keep a distance.”
Randy gave her a wary smile. “I don’t mean to give offense, ma’am.”
“It is not you who is offensive,” Gurt lied smoothly, all too conscious of the gun in her own pocket. “It is I dislike to have my child exposed to men, er, carrying firearms. There is too much violence on television and in the papers already.”
“I understand. The kid won’t see my gun, ma’am.”
“Gun?” Manfred piped up. “The man has a gun?” he turned to Randy. “Can I see?”
Gurt sighed deeply, taking Manfred by the arm. “Come, Manfred. Grumps wants to play.”
“Aw, Mom . . .”
“I said, come!”
Today Grumps was more interested in the various smells of the Iris Garden than he was in fetching the tennis ball. Perhaps the small park’s resident squirrels had left a different scent or the neighborhood dogs had deposited more “pee mail” than normal, each requiring a prompt reply.
Whatever the reason, the first toss of the Day-Glo chartreuse ball only got a glance from the sniffing dog. At the second attempt, Grumps stopped his exploration long enough to watch the ball roll down one of the two slopes that formed the valley that was the park. The dog favored Manfred with a look that clearly asked, “Just what, pray tell, do you expect me to do with that?”
The little boy’s enthusiasm undiminished, he followed the dog, followed by Gurt, followed by Randy.
Gurt was breathing hard, the air cold enough to slice her lungs like a surgeon’s scalpel. Cresting a small rise, she saw other human figures, those of her next-door neighbors Paige Charles and her son Wynn Three, Manfred’s friend.
“I am surprised you are out in this cold,” Gurt said when she was within earshot, motioning Randy to keep his distance.
Paige shook her head, a movement hardly perceptible under the fur-lined hood of her heavy parka. “It was either brave the weather or a restless child. You can’t imagine what it’s like to be cooped up with a kid as active as Wynn Three.”
Gurt watched Manfred and Wynn Three, now playing with a compliant Grumps. “Believe me, I do not have to imagine. I—”
A sharp crack shattered the morning’s cathedral-like silence. Gurt’s hand went to her coat pocket as she frantically motioned Manfred to come to her.
Paige must have seen the consternation on her face. “What? That was just another limb breaking off from the tree because of the weight of the ice.”
Gurt barely heard her. She had a protective arm around Manfred, her eyes searching what she thought was the direction of the sound, but she was certain only of two things: Randy was no longer in sight and she surely knew the difference between a shattering oak limb and a gunshot.
The White House
Washington, D.C.
The previous afternoon
The secretary of defense stood, hands clasped behind his back as he stared out of the Oval Office’s French doors into a rose garden desolated by winter. He checked his watch. The president was twenty minutes late for the meeting. That wasn’t even close to the record. The young chief executive had no qualms about keeping staff waiting an hour or so if the opportunity arose for an impromptu press conference, something he invariably mishandled. The man was a golden-tongued orator as long as he could stick to prepared notes and the teleprompter. Off the cuff, he tended to sound self-contradictory or confused. Fortunately, a sympathetic press usually edited out his most nonsensical responses, leaving only Fox News and conservative bloggers to broadcast the miscues.
Still, the man liked press exposure. Many said someone should tell him he no longer had to campaign and should get down to the business at hand.
The business at hand. The SecDef glanced around the room. An odd crew: a fiftyish female lieutenant colonel who had something to do with intelligence; the U.S. delegate to the Organization of American States; and the new head of the CIA, a former college radical, community organizer and a man who, as far as the SecDef knew, had had no experience in running anything the size of a taco stand, let alone one of the world’s largest intel agencies.
But then, neither had the president.
The last chief spook had resigned in protest of the criminal prosecution of a number of CIA agents who, following the previous administration’s guidelines, had inflicted what the new bunch considered torture on some very brutal individuals, extracting information that had prevented at least one and possibly more terrorist attacks on the U.S. both here and abroad.
Such was politics. The new CIA chief, along with his boss, believed sincerely, the SecDef feared, that total candor and self-abasement were the tools of successful relationships with other nations, a policy uniformly embraced in word if not in deed by America’s enemies. The country’s traditional allies had all but ceased to share information for fear the same would appear on the front pages of the New York Times or Washington Post.
It was enough to make the SecDef wish he had not been chosen as the sole holdover from the previous administration.
The absence today of any of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was significant as was the fact that this meeting was taking place here rather than the much larger adjacent conference room, equipped with the latest real-time technology. The president’s dislike of large meetings was well-known and offered as an excuse to exclude most of the intelligence community and military, both of which he equally and openly distrusted.
His thoughts scattered as the president entered wearing his customary golf shirt and slacks, the first person the SecDef had ever seen enter this historic room in less-than-respectful business or military attire. He was followed by Jack Roberts, chief of staff, a man the SecDef thought of as the “presidential dog robber.” Whatever the White House needed, be it leaking a rumor devastating to a member of the opposition, strong-arming a recalcitrant member of his own party or making it convenient for a congressional fence-sitter to come down on the White House’s side of a vote, Roberts was the go-to guy.
The president motioned for everyone to take a seat as he slid behind the desk and nodded to the director of the CIA. “You wanted to see me, Jerry?”
The director nodded, turning to the woman in the army uniform of a lieutenant colonel. “Let me introduce you to Colonel Faith Romer and Jack Hanson. Colonel Romer is the military liaison with the CIA regarding the Caribbean Basin. Jack is the U.S. representative to the Organization of American States.”
The president viewed Faith with obvious distaste. “Colonel, as I understand it, the Chinese military are in the process of setting up shop in Haiti. And so far this information is known only to us, the Chinese and that man . . . the president of Haiti.”
“DuPaar,” the chief spook supplied.
“DuPaar, yes. To no one else?”
The CIA chief nodded. “As far as we know.”
The president gave him a quizzical look. “Meaning?”
The head of the CIA shifted in his chair uncomfortably. “We had to employ some nonstandard assets to ascertain exactly what the Chinese were doing.”
The president’s thick eyebrows furrowed. “Tell me in nonjargon.”
“The people who sniffed the whole thing out . . . They were no longer with the Agency.”
The president drummed long fingers on the desktop, a sign he was making a choice. He was known to demand quick decisions. He had insisted Congress pass a budget larger than all previous budgets combined in a period of time shorter than it had taken him to choose a puppy for his children.
He pushed back from the desk, turning to his chief of staff. “OK, Jack, what do you think?”
The SecDef had almost gotten used to the president’s habit of seeking advice from those least qualified to give it. As far as he knew, Robert’s sole qualification to comment on foreign policy was a semester spent in Spain in college.
Roberts rubbed his chin a moment as though in thought, a process the SecDef had not considered possible. “As I see it, a Chinese presen
ce in Haiti presents a possible crisis, one we need to keep secret until we have it solved. A confrontation with the Chinese isn’t something we need, with the off-year elections coming up.”
The president turned to the SecDef. “Your thoughts?”
“Mr. President, the military stands ready to have unmanned aircraft destroy any and all Chinese installations should diplomacy fail.”
“Bomb a small, poor Caribbean country back into the Stone Age?” the chief of staff sneered. “First, Haiti is still in the Stone Age, and second, how do you think that makes us look to the rest of the world?”
Fear of foreign opinion had been a major weakness in American foreign policy since World War II, the SecDef thought. But he said, “Diplomacy isn’t my job.”
Roberts shrugged. “Simple enough. The president meets with the Chinese, either has them withdraw or issues a joint statement of their peaceful intentions and our belief in that.”
The SecDef spoke up. “Maybe you missed the part about the Chinese military.”
Roberts was also the administration’s spinmaster, much loved by the media. It had been he who had convinced the public—at least its more gullible segments—that increases in corporate taxes would not be passed along to the consumer. “Besides, meeting with the Chinese makes you look presidential. You can count on the uptick in the polls. But not if word leaks out beforehand. If the public knew the Chinese have slipped troops into Haiti . . .”
The president nodded. “So be it. I want a joint meeting with the presidents of Haiti and China for their assurances the Chinese mission is peaceful and to declare that America will not interfere. For the moment, we’ll keep a lid on the fact the Chinese presence is military in nature. No sense in getting all those conspiracy-loving neocons stirred up. And . . .”
Why did the SecDef think of Neville Chamberlain, Munich and “Peace in our time”?
“After the meeting, I’ll want to address the nation concerning the peaceful intentions of the Chinese . . .”
Roberts was studying his BlackBerry. “That isn’t going to be easy, Mr. President.”
