Day Zero

by Marc Cameron

  “We’re not holding court here,” McKeon cut her off. “I’m sure that, as with most issues, there are multiple layers to everything that has happened over the last few months. But what we must not forget is that there are yet moles within the government and it is imperative to the President that we root them out immediately.”

  “Thank you, Lee,” Drake said, almost dismissively. McKeon would have to talk to him about that. “I’d like each of you prepare a list of everyone you’ve ever seen with Winfield Palmer.” He raised an eyebrow at Virginia Ross. “And I’m not interested in your opinions. I just want names.”

  “That bitch has flown straight off the reservation,” Drake said after the two directors had gone. “I thought she was one we could trust to toe the line—if only out of self-preservation.”

  “As did I.” McKeon nodded. “But that does not appear to be the case. We should start thinking about a suitable replacement.”

  The Japanese woman stood stoically at her post along the wall.

  “She seemed like such an empty suit,” Drake went on. “What do you think prompted her little show of team spirit for Palmer?”

  “Integrity, I’d imagine,” McKeon said.

  “Well,” Drake said, “we can’t have that screwing up our plans. What’s your take on the Uyghur prisoners? Do you think turning them over to Pakistan will be enough to push Chen Min over the edge?”

  “I do,” McKeon said. He shot a glance at Ran, who rolled her eyes. She could not stand Hartman Drake and begged McKeon to let her kill the man every night when they went to bed. “We cannot be too brash.”

  McKeon knew his words were falling on deaf ears. Drake was the very picture of brash. Everything he did was flamboyant, from his colorful bowties to his firebrand speeches. McKeon’s biological father had dreamed of the day when one of his children—or the children he’d placed in positions of power—made it to the White House. It had taken years of patience and planning to make it happen. But it would take much more patience and planning to make it worthwhile. A sitting president, even one bent on the fall of the United States, had to work slowly. He could not, for instance, just hand the bomb to Iran, normalize relations with North Korea—or declare war on China. Everything had to appear to come from the outside. If he moved too quickly or acted outside the apparent best interest of the nation, there were still plenty of wary members of Congress who would bring impeachment charges in a heartbeat.

  No, there were better ways to bring down a government, insidious ways that would see the American public clamoring for—even demanding—the very actions that would bring about their own destruction.

  “Chen Min will rise to the bait. There is no doubt of that.” McKeon took a deep breath, too fatigued to rehash things they’d discussed ad nauseam. “Ranjhani’s plan will help us keep up the anti-China rhetoric with the public.”

  “Another bomb.” Drake snorted, his dismissive tone rising to the surface again. His tone made McKeon consider letting Ran have her way. But he needed the imbecile for a while longer.

  “A bomb, indeed,” McKeon said. “But not just any bomb. A simple explosion destroys only steel and bone. My father was a brilliant man. He knew that America was strong enough to fend off any outside encroachment of Islam. We have seen how good this country is at stopping attack after attack. But my father knew, and stated many times, when this country falls, it will be because it rips itself to pieces from within.”

  Drake laughed to himself, as if he’d just thought of something funny. His feet slid off the desk and fell to the floor. Turning slightly, he took a moment to check out the reflection of his shoulders in the Rose Garden window. “I think my biceps might be shrinking. I have got to get down to the gym.” He glanced up. “Anyway, good thing we’re keeping an eye on Virginia Ross. We do have eyes on her, don’t we?”

  “Yes,” McKeon said, suddenly more tired than he had ever been. With a partner like Drake, he might as well be doing this alone. “We have eyes on everyone we know of who had a relationship to Winfield Palmer. But the time for watching is over.”

  “Damn, Lee.” Drake gave him a condescending grimace. “I’m surprised you ever got elected to public office. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you have a creepy way of saying things?” He grabbed a gym bag from under the desk and stopped to look at the Vice President. “Every time you talk about this thing we’re doing, I expect you to follow up with an evil laugh. ‘The time for watching is over. . . . Bwahahahahah.’ I mean, shit, give me a break. . . .”

  Ran tensed at the insult. She took a half step forward. Thick veins throbbed at the base of her neck. Drake was so caught up in his own joke that he didn’t notice how close he was to dying. McKeon gave an almost imperceptible shake of his head, stopping her. He mouthed the word soon as the President continued his mock laughter and walked past the Secret Service agent posted outside the door.

  Chapter 11

  Pentagon City, Virginia

  Fashion Center Mall

  Kim and Mattie Quinn made the perfect mother-daughter pair. Both wore blue ALASKA GROWN T-shirts and denim shorts. Their hair styled in classy, off-the-shoulder updos, the two were virtual twins but for the fact that Kim was a blonde and Mattie had coal-black curls like her father. Mattie also happened to have two working legs, where her mother sported a metal prosthetic limb where her left leg had been amputated above the knee. She was back to using a cane again for a few days while she grew accustomed to the newly fitted prosthetic.

  Five months after a sniper’s bullet that was meant for Mattie had torn through her thigh, Kim knew that she had more swagger with one leg than she’d ever had with two.

  Of course, it hadn’t started out that way. When she’d first come out of anesthesia after surgery, the look on Jericho’s face had told her the leg was gone. She’d hated him in that moment, a difficult thing to do with Jericho, though she didn’t let him know that. Considering the sort of work he did, it was not a hard case to make that her ex-husband was responsible for bringing the assassin’s bullet ripping into their family. But Kim knew that life was much more complicated than that.

  Despair and grief over the loss of her leg was compounded by the fact that she’d chased Jericho away with the lines she’d drawn and then dared him not to cross. Neither of them had ever been good with ultimatums—but she’d given them anyway. For a week after the surgery, she’d felt absolutely alone and feared that without two good legs, she’d never be attractive to any man, let alone Jericho. It didn’t really matter. She’d kicked him out, driven him away with her wild fears about him getting killed. In her quiet, solitary moments, she told herself it would be better to have a little of him, than none at all—that Mattie deserved to have a father, and she deserved to have at least some semblance of a husband, even if he was gone more than half the time to godforsaken hellholes where everyone wanted to kill him. At least then, she had been able to call him hers. But then, he’d come around and her stubborn streak would rise up like some kind of bitchy dragon lady that she couldn’t control—sending him retreating back into the arms of his new girlfriend. It didn’t matter now.

  Kim had just started to come to grips with that when the phantom pains began. They roared in like a river of molten lava, searing the bones of her missing limb and peeling back the toenails of the foot that was no longer even there. The docs had given her something to quiet the nerves and, in time, the phantom pain had retreated, but never quite disappeared.

  Kim worked her butt off in rehab, learning how to walk on her new leg, enduring hours of painful stretching therapy. She walked for miles around the halls of the hospital, first with, then without the assistance of a cane.

  Jericho was apparently good friends with the former national security advisor and Mr. Palmer saw to it that she had the finest in aftercare for an amputee. Sadly, years of war ensured that military hospitals received a great deal of experience in replacing lost limbs. At first, Kimberly Quinn had been welcomed at Walter Reed because she was a friend
of the White House. Later, after the horrible accusations against Jericho, it seemed like the new administration wanted her there so they could keep an eye on her. She had to make this “new normal,” as they called it, work for her before she could do anything.

  Surrounded by servicewomen who’d had bits and pieces of themselves blown off in war, Kim had remained quiet about how she’d lost the leg. All the other patients in her ward had lost limbs as a result of roadside bombs or mortar attacks. She’d always felt a certain amount of pride at being married—at least for a time—to a member of the military. Now, for the first time in her life, Kim found herself truly embarrassed that she was not herself a veteran wounded in the service of her country. She’d been shot at a wedding, for crying out loud. For weeks, she didn’t talk to anyone but her roommate, a female US Army corporal named Rochelle, who’d lost both legs in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan.

  Then, a month after the shooting, Rochelle and four of her girlfriends, all amputees, cornered Kim in the gym with a dozen roses and a Wounded Warrior challenge coin. Kim had cried, protesting that she didn’t deserve to be grouped with these brave women.

  “Are you kidding me?” Rochelle had said, standing there on her twin prosthetic legs. “You took a bullet intended for your own kid. You’re a wounded warrior if ever one wore a skirt. So strut that leg proudly. Wear shorts, go dancing, kick ass. I’m sure going to.”

  The love and companionship of those women was like nothing Kim had ever experienced. More even than the surgery, they had saved her life.

  They’d given her the confidence to get out, to do things like go shopping with her daughter.

  Mattie ran ahead, completely unbothered by the shiny stainless-steel “leg” that stuck out from the hem of her mother’s denim shorts. She was happy to go to the mall, but happier still to be out with her mom. She darted back to hold Kim’s hand and check on her every few seconds. They’d returned from Alaska so Kim could spend the last two weeks at Walter Reed, being fitted for her new, computerized prosthetic leg. This one adjusted to her changes in gait as many as fifty times per second. Kim had been so busy with doctors’ appointments and physical therapy that this was their first day out together since coming back to DC.

  “How about some supper at Johnny Rockets?” Kim asked, pointing Mattie toward the escalator around the corner from the Apple Store where they’d just spent the last hour picking out the perfect case for Mattie’s iPod.

  “That sounds great, Mom,” Mattie said, skipping around the corner ahead. It did Kim’s heart good that her daughter didn’t try to coddle her—even if the extra exertion caused her to sweat through the armpits of her T-shirt. Her physical therapist had warned her that a prosthetic for an AK—above the knee—amputation would use far more energy than a normal leg. That, combined with the body’s loss of all the pores on the missing limb, meant the rest of her was likely to perspire more in an effort to regulate her temperature. The other girls in her ward called it “glistening.”

  Mattie stopped in her tracks as soon as they’d rounded the corner.

  “I forgot my new shirt at the Apple Store,” she gasped. Stricken, she grabbed Kim’s hand and spun her around, oblivious to how tricky such a move was on a prosthetic leg.

  “Are you sure it was there?” Kim asked. “Maybe you left it somewhere else.”

  “No.” Mattie shook her head. “I’m sure I had it there. We have to go and get it.” She clutched Kim by the hand and led her back the way they’d come, rounding a square support pillar and nearly running headlong into a startled man walking directly toward them.

  He was about Kim’s age, in his mid-thirties, with a sullen flap of blond hair and an intense look she recognized from her ex-husband. He wore faded jeans and an unremarkable button-up shirt with short sleeves—loose, like the kind Jericho always wore to hide his gun. And this was the fifth time she’d seen him since they’d been in the mall. She felt a twinge of fear rising up in her stomach. Maybe living with Jericho for all those years had made her paranoid, but either this guy had the same taste in shopping as a seven-year-old girl, or he was following them.

  Chapter 12

  Alaska

  “Two of them are holed up in the Kwikpac building.” Ukka did a quick peek around the corner of the weathered plywood fuel shed where he and Quinn were hidden.

  Seventy-five meters away, the image of a weatherworn clapboard building ghosted through the curtains of drizzle and fog. It lay at the base of the village on a narrow spit of gravel that made it easier for boats to come up on the riverside and offload their commercial catch. The icy winds that shrieked off the frozen Yukon through the long winters made it impossible to keep paint on any of the buildings in Mountain Village. The blue splotches the fish buyers had slapped on their building the previous summer were now little more than a scoured memory.

  According to Ukka’s cousin, two of the contractors had grabbed a young schoolteacher named April John to use as a hostage when they’d come up from the river and dragged her into the fish plant.

  While Ukka kept an eye on the Kwikpac building, Quinn lay on his belly, facing the opposite direction, making certain they weren’t ambushed by the still unaccounted-for pilot.

  Ukka wiped the rainwater off his round face. “I think I saw some movement through the front window. It’s tough to tell in this fog.”

  “Okay,” Quinn said. “Use those hunter’s eyes of yours to watch our six for a minute. If there are only two accounted for in there, we still have a variable out here.” He maneuvered around so he could get a look at the fish house while Ukka took up the job of rear guard.

  “Tell me more about April John,” Quinn said, watching the wide gray ribbon of the Yukon tumble along behind the Kwikpac building. He’d met her a couple of times over the last few months and knew she worked at the school. A sturdy-looking girl, she’d taken a moose during a late winter hunt that had filled the larders of a couple of village elders—but that didn’t mean she was equipped to handle being a hostage.

  “She’s the kind of girl who’d beat a guy to death with a walrus pecker if he crossed her,” Ukka said. “She’ll not be one to boohoo to her captors, if that’s what you mean. They’ll have to tie her up or knock her out to keep her from fighting.”

  “Good.” Quinn gritted his teeth, thinking through his options. “That gives her a chance—”

  “Wait!” Ukka hissed, his voice a tense whisper. “I got movement five houses up from the fish plant. Looks like a boot sticking out from under Myrna Tomaganuk’s house. I’ll lay odds it’s the pilot.” State policy said village public safety officers were supposed to be unarmed, but he’d grabbed his favorite hunting rifle before leaving his house. It was a Winchester Model 70 chambered in 30.06. It was battered, and even a little rusty around the base of the Leopold 3X9 scope, but Quinn had seen the man use it to shoot a moose in the eye at over a hundred yards.

  Quinn glanced down at the submachine gun in his hands. He had two extra magazines in his pocket and the Severance sheathed on his hip. These guys had obviously done their research and believed he’d come to the hostage. With two of the contractors barricaded with their backs to the river and the third hiding under Tomaganuk’s home, ready to blow his brains out when he approached, a frontal assault was impractical.

  The nearest armed backup were the Alaska State Troopers stationed in Saint Mary’s, nearly an hour away by truck over a bumpy, pothole-filled road. It was more swamp than road this time of year. Even if they knew what was going on, the troopers would never get there in time to help. In some ways, the absence of law enforcement made Quinn’s next moves that much less difficult.

  “Okay,” Quinn said a moment later, mulling through the specifics of his plan. “You know that cute Samoan girl from Mountain View you used to horse around with back in high school?”

  Ukka looked at Quinn as if he’d lost his mind. “Yeah, but I don’t see—”

  “Remember how you had to sneak out of her bedroom window and tipt
oe out the back alley to get past her father and two humongous brothers to keep them from killing you?”

  Ukka groaned. “I sure do.”

  “Think you can pull off that same level of stealth and work your way over to Myrna’s house? I need you to take care of the number three guy.”

  Ukka nodded. “I can shoot his nose hairs off if you want me to,” he said.

  “Outstanding.” Quinn had seen the big Eskimo in enough sticky situations to know he could stalk up to a dozing grizzly if the situation warranted.

  Quinn flicked open his ZT folding knife and reached for a length of water hose coiled around an old truck wheel that was bolted to the rear of the fuel shed. He cut a piece about a foot long, then returned the ZT to his pocket before blowing into the tube to make certain it was free of obstructions.

  “What the hell kind of plan are you pondering here?” Ukka’s cockeyed grimace was clear evidence of his doubts. “Looks like you’ve decided to attack them with a blowgun.”

  Quinn tucked the length of hose in his waistband behind his back. He tapped the magazines in his pocket, then the Severance in the sheath at his hip before taking up the MP7 again. “It’s okay if you make a little noise when you take out the pilot,” Quinn said. “In fact, I need those other two to be looking in that direction in five minutes. Can you do that?”

  “Five minutes?” Ukka said, still shaking his head slowly. He peered down at Quinn through narrowed eyes.

  Quinn pointed a knife hand toward a ratty copse of willows fifty meters upriver from the fish house. “River’s moving fast,” he said. “I should be able to drift down there in much less time than that, but you better give me five minutes to make sure I’m up on the back dock and ready to go.”