Truth to tell, Hartley found his own emotions mixed. If Tyler’s popularity sank any further, his bid for reelection was going to be in serious trouble, and that left Hartley with both a problem and an opportunity. For President Tyler and Senator Hartley were members of opposite parties, thrown together in an unholy but productive marriage of convenience thanks to Hartley’s overweening ambition and Tyler’s fetish for bipartisanship. Hartley was intensely disliked within his own party, widely viewed as a weasel who would sell out anybody at any time, and he knew it. Not that it bothered him.
But as Tyler’s popularity sank, the chances that Hartley’s party had a real shot at the White House increased in lockstep. Like every other senator who looked in the mirror in the morning, Hartley saw a potential president staring back, and as the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he made sure he was in front of the cameras as often as possible. Indeed, he was so cozy with the media, so happy to leak certain things if it could help his career, that he was known as “Senator Sieve.”
So Hartley at first ignored the television. Hostage situations usually played themselves out fairly quickly—half a dozen or so people dead and then the gunman ate his own weapon and that was that. There followed the inevitable suicide note, the video game type revenge You Tube fantasy, the grief counselors, the calls for more gun control, the national navel-gazing about the root causes of violence, etc., etc. Just another day in the USA, especially in the yahoo rural heartland. He was about to urge the president to concentrate on the poll numbers when Tyler turned to Augie Willson and said, “Turn it up, Augie.”
Even though the station was a national cable network, the correspondent in front of the locked-dowbe better off without them, she believed, and saw no reason to change her mind now.
As the man drew nigh, she could clearly see the gun in his hand. She couldn’t tell what kind it was—some reporters could do that on sight, but she wasn’t one of them—but she had to assume it was loaded. And, to keep her sanity and her wits about her, she had to assume he didn’t intend to use it on her. After all, why would he? She was his conduit to the outside world, and he needed her.
“Sir”—she began, extending her microphone toward him—“can you tell us—”
There was the sound of a gunshot, and Rhonda Gaines-Solomon screamed and dropped to the ground.
“Jesus Christ!” exclaimed President Tyler, watching the scene unfold at 24,000 feet.
Rhonda couldn’t believe he shot her. He knew she was a reporter, neutral, there to hear his side, and to take it if necessary. But one of her legs hurt like hell.
Without even breaking stride, the man in the ski cap picked up her microphone, looked at her cameraman, and said, “I speak now to the president of the United States. Listen very carefully, everybody, and nobody get hurt no more…”
Chapter Six
LOS ANGELES
“Eddie Bartlett” was out with his eight-year-old daughter, Jade, when his secure cell phone buzzed urgently in his jacket pocket. It was a lovely day in southern California, warm and dry and smog-free. Fire season was just about over and the winter rains hadn’t arrived yet. They were hiking together in Griffith Park near the Observatory, high above the city.
“Dad,” Jade was saying. “Why do people live in Chicago? Or New York? When they could live here?”
Eddie laughed. It was the kind of question he was used to from Jade: one that came out of the blue. “It sure would be awfully crowded, pumpkin,” he replied. From here you see the sweep of the city, from downtown, past the greensward of Hancock Park, to the towers of Century City and all the way to Santa Monica. “Where would we put everybody? Isn’t LA traffic bad enough?”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said, somewhat exasperated with his obtuseness.
“What do you mean, then?”
“I mean…” she said, choosing her words with great care, “I mean, why would anybody live someplace where the weather is always terrible and the people are always angry?”
The phone buzzed again, and he knew he couldn’t ignore it, much as he wanted to. Say what you would about what kind of man Eddie Bartlett was, nobody could say he wasn’t a good father. Given the confidential and often turned away from his little girl as he spoke. Or rather, as he listened. He already knew who it was. Because only one person ever called him on this line.
“It’s Tom Powers. Are you watching this?” As usual, the voice was soft, low, scrambled for security.
“No. I’m in the park with my kid.”
“Then grab Jade’s iPhone and I’ll stream it to you.”
The phone was a gift from the man who was on the other end of the line. A man whom he’d never met face to face. “Tom Powers” was what he was calling himself today. “Jade—can I borrow your phone?”
Jade looked up from the cactus she was inspecting. “You’ve already got one, Daddy.”
“I need yours, baby. Just for a minute.”
Jade fished in her backpack and pulled it out. “How’s the reception up here?” Eddie asked her.
“Loud and clear, sir,” she replied, handing it to him.
He started the streaming video, and it took only a nanosecond thereafter to realize the purpose of the call. “Is this a go situation?” he asked as, on the screen, a man with heavy Slavic accent rolled off a list of demands: “…Abandonment of the Zionist entity. Withdrawal of all forces from the ummah…”
“Albanian Kosovar, maybe Azerbaijani,” said Eddie softly.
“…The abolition of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization…Finally, and most important…” With the whole world watching, the camera came in for a tight close-up. Randomly, Eddie Bartlett thought of the last scene of The Blair Witch Project, except that movie wasn’t scary. “We call upon President Tyler to publicly embrace and accept Islam on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial no more than twenty-four hours from…now.”
The camera pulled back. The man’s features were very clear: eastern European, unsmiling. His eyes were not the eyes of a fanatic, but rather of a man whose purpose was clear and deadly serious.
“This guy looks familiar. Running face-recognition scan now,” said Powers. “The demands are bullshit, of course. What do they really want?”
The terrorist spoke again: “Until then, we demand the removal of all your police forces from this area. No helicopters, no sharpshooters. Turn off all your klieg lights, infrared scopes, electronic surveillance devices. The air space over the school must be kept clear. And we insist that your spies and operatives lay down their arms and identify themselves.
“My comrades and I are not afraid to die. Neither are we afraid to kill all your children. For we have many children each. And you—weak, decadent, intent on your own pleasure—have only one or two. To you, death is an unutterable tragedy. To us, it is the meaning of ing up everything in the NSA/CSS arsenal: Echelon video feeds, RSS chatter sorters, real-time simultaneous translations of Internet café activity in China, India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, key-word trigger-coded for instant relay. All conversations could be heard live or as downloaded audio, and read as saved transcriptions in both the original language and in English.
He sampled a few, dipping in and out. He’d lost track of how many languages he spoke fluently, because when you started toting up you had to factor in dialects, subdialects, and even random bastardizations like Hawaiian pidgin and Marshallese. Nothing about what was happening in Edwardsville. Plenty of the usual stuff—angry but idle threats against the Great Satan, obscure religious and cultural diatribes, boastful European white supremacist rants, obscure American-sourced swagger—but nothing that stood out. No trip wires. And trip wires were his business.
Nearly a decade after September 11, the American security apparatus had come a long way. Plenty of attacks had been foiled, some—especially early on, when al-Qaeda had the tactical advantage—particularly horrific. There was the Arab cell that had come down from Canada, trying to pass themselves off a
s American Indians on one of the upstate New York reservations while they waited for the activation codes on a low-yield nuclear device they had smuggled from the former Soviet Union to Halifax, financing the operation by bootlegging cigarettes from the reservation to the outside world and pocketing a fortune in tax avoidance.
The good guys had lucked out on that one: an alert cop in Watertown had noticed the ink on the phony tax stamp rubbing off on his hand, and grabbed the “Indian,” who had led him to the other cell members. The cop was shot and killed during the rendezvous, but he had been smart enough to order backup and so the group was rounded up and sent to some especially nasty rendition prisons in Egypt and Slovakia. The cop’s widow got a handsome payout from the feds; he got buried at Arlington and the public was never the wiser.
The phone stayed stubbornly silent. Just as well, probably.
Tom Powers stood up and stepped out of the secure room. The rest of his house on North West Street was equally secure, although less dramatically, so he didn’t seal the room as he did when he left home.
To enter the front door, for example, he inserted the key into the lock, but rather than aligning a series of tumblers, the key’s real work was done by his fresh thumbprint on the head of the key, which was read by the scanner in the door to allow entry.
Once inside, he would glance at the mirror/retinal scanner, which flashed his eyeballs. Anyone who somehow had gained unauthorized entry via the front door—an intruder who forced him to open the door at gunpoint, for example—would miss that beat, with the result that a security gate would descend from the ceiling and trap him in the antechamber, where he could easily be neutralized or dispatched. Video cameras connected directly by dedicated fiber-optic cable to NSA/CSS headquarters in Maryland could be called up on any video screen in the house, and the giant wall-mounted flat screen in the den doubled as a backup, fail-safe control module in a worst-case scenario. Even an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) blast couldn’t knock out his communications.
He looked out the window, into his backyarart of northern Virginia. But what almost nobody knew was that, at the edge of the backyard, a small marker, buried in the brush, once marked the southern tip of the District of Columbia. Originally laid out on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia, the District was conceived as a diamond, bisected by the Potomac. Virginia got its land back when the federal district stopped at the river. But there the marker was—a signpost to what might have been—surveyed, the local legend had it, by none other than George Washington himself.
He looked through the doorway at the black phone and wondered again whether he really wanted to hear it ring.
Chapter Eight
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Marine One had barely hit the South Lawn when President Tyler bounded out. Pam Dobson, Senator Hartley, General Seelye, and Augie Willson bounded behind him in his wake. He really was very fit.
The media jackals were shouting at him—he thought he caught something about “saving kids” and “will you convert to Islam for the children?”—but he ripped a page out of Reagan’s playbook and feigned a sudden, inexplicable attack of deafness. Hand cupped behind his ear, pearly whites flashing, Jeb Tyler was the very image of a modern American president: deaf, dumb, and blind to everything he didn’t wish to register.
“What’s our readiness status?” he snapped at Colonel Al Grizzard, his principal military attaché and the man who controlled the football. Jeb Tyler mistrusted the military and tried to keep “Grizzy” as far away from him as possible and as close to the vice president, Norman Snowden, as constitutionally permissible. Snowden had been a brigadier general in his earlier life, with just enough combat action to make him seems a plausible running mate for a man whose military credentials were, charitably, nonexistent. As far as Tyler was concerned, all military men were trigger-happy maniacs until proven otherwise. He certainly never let the Veep sit in on important affairs of state.
“FBI’s in place, sir, and we have special ops airborne now. Delta, Rangers, SEALS, Xe—”
“No Xe,” barked the president. “We can’t take the hit if this thing goes tits over teacups.”
“No Xe,” repeated Grizzy, barking into his cell phone.
“And get the FBI and everybody else the hell away. You heard the man.”
This time, Colonel Grizzard didn’t bark into his cell phone. He couldn’t believe his ears: the president of the United States adhering to a terrorist’s demand? “Sir?” he said softly.
“You heard me, Colonel. Until we can get a handle on this thing, I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to let these bastards harm a single hair on any child’s head.”
“Special ops, stand down, the Oval Office. His face grew visibly redder, and then he exploded, “God fucking damn it, how the fuck did something like this fucking happen?”
Chapter Nine
VADUZ, LIECHTENSTEIN
Paul Pilier switched off the president of the United States, then laid the remote gently upon the polished-crystal table, next to the vase of white roses, careful not to muss the surface in the slightest. “Sir?” he asked.
The man to whom the question was addressed didn’t so much as look up from the banks of laptops purring in front of him. They were neatly arrayed on his teak desk, each one tracking a different international financial market in which he had an interest—which was to say, all of them. As was his habitual wont, he was sipping a glass of Russian tea, the red-hot glass protectively surrounded by a burnished silver holder that was probably worth five thousand American dollars all by itself.
Emanuel Skorzeny was past seventy, but he had the physical vigor of a man half his age and the intellectual firepower of two of them combined. His longstanding talent for multitasking had not deserted him, and so it was that he could listen to the president’s speech, monitor its effect on the Nikei, the Dow, the Dax, and the Bourse, make trades, and play a game of simultaneous chess (anonymously, of course) against twelve other players from around the world and still find time to polish his nails. He was very vain about his appearance. “What other news?”
Pilier looked at him from across the room. “May I approach?”
“You may.”
The aide placed a sheaf of papers on the desk, printouts of e-mail communications with one of Skorzeny’s most trusted lieutenants, being careful not to so much as brush the wood with his fingers or the vase of white roses that adorned the boss’s desk as well. Skorzeny had an abhorrence of body oils, and anyone who left so much a trace of his DNA on anything he owned was summarily fired.
Skorzeny glanced through the papers—he was a speed-reader, and could memorize anything on sight. He nodded and then said, “Shred them.”
“Yes sir,” said Pilier, immediately feeding the documents into an NSA-strength security shredder that sat concealed within a sideboard. He had been with Skorzeny for nearly three years, and was the only one who didn’t have to wear gloves at all times. This was a very great sign of trust indeed.
“Have the board members arrived?”
Instinctively, Pilier took three respectful steps backward. “Yes, sir, in the antechamber.”
“Show them in, please.”
As he awaited his board members, Skorzeny roamed around the room, making sure everything was in its exact place. The furniture, the rugs, and, most important of all, his peerless collection of the he wanted and he was prepared to pay whatever it took to get it.
Take, for example, the work of Blake’s that caught his eye now, his favorite. The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun. Not the one made famous from that sensational novel in which the psychopath ate it. That painting was still hanging in the Brooklyn Museum: The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun. Different title, different work.
True, his painting was only on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. And the number of chits he had had to call in to get it was almost higher than he was willing to pay. But when it came to Blake, there was almost no such thing as almo
st. Because Blake understood, as no one else did until Emanuel Skorzeny came along, the misery and mystery of man. That was why his temporary acquisition of it had made headlines around the world. It also reminded people how rich and powerful he was.
Regretfully, his gaze traveled from Blake’s masterpiece, out the window and over the mountain-ringed city. Skorzeny International occupied the top three floors of the Tiefen-thaler building, which Skorzeny himself owned via one of his many subsidiary companies, and boasted a spectacular view of the Alps in every direction. The boardroom was on the penultimate floor, a state-of-the-art conference chamber from which Skorzeny could rule his vast multinational financial and philanthropic empire. Below were the staff offices. Skorzeny’s personal chambers were on the top floor, the penthouse, where only he and a few selected guests were ever allowed entré.
Skorzeny moved the short distance from his desk to the chairman’s seat, at the head of the mahogany table, which also boasted a crystal vase of white roses—refilled daily, like all the others—as its centerpiece. The table had been a gift from the Sultan of Brunei, in gratitude for some particularly astute investment advice Skorzeny had given him. The rest of the gifts, including the women, Skorzeny had parceled out among his lieutenants: his appetites generally ran to less earthy pleasures.
The board members trooped in and took their seats. No one said a word.
Skorzeny let the silence speak for him. It was, he knew, a subtle but telling way to exercise and display power. No one could speak until he spoke; no one could speak unless spoken to; and every conversation began and ended with Emanuel Skorzeny.
“Gentlemen, thank you for coming. As you know, there’s been an incident in America that I believe will affect all of us. It will certainly affect the Skorzeny Foundation, as the New York Stock Exchange is quite sensitive to these sorts of dislocations, especially these days. Monsieur Pilier?”
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