The Threat

by David Poyer

* * *

  Five hours later, exhausted, drained, he was back in the counterdrug office, untouched coffee in front of him, CNN on the office television. He’d watched with Mary, Ed, and Luis as smoke rose over the terminal buildings and shots crackled. Now wavery telephoto images caught clumsy figures in masks and hoods circling a smoking aircraft in the brown-and-gold UPS livery. A fire truck was laying curtains of dirty foam. Behind it response trucks and an armored personnel carrier—not a Bradley, an M113, he thought—stood off.

  “A team composed of local and Kentucky State Police SWAT teams assaulted twenty minutes ago. We are still waiting for some indication as to exactly how much of this dangerous material, thought at this time to be radioactive waste, this aircraft contains. Preliminary indications are that the hijackers were members of an armed terrorist group. The destination of the aircraft has not been released.”

  The camera cut to a woman in a dark suit. Dan thought at first she was a news anchor, then saw that she stood at a podium, the FBI seal behind her.

  “Regional Director Claire Bruffi announced the plot had been uncovered by a joint team from the FBI and the CIA. The aircraft’s takeoff was earlier than expected. This morning FBI raids are being launched in Pomona, California, where the explosives and other materials involved were stored prior to loading the aircraft.”

  The voice-over stopped and the woman said, “It is simply fortunate that we managed to catch the aircraft on the ground, before explosives could be rigged for detonation. We owe thanks to the valiant officers of the Guard and the Kentucky State Police who boarded the plane, once it had landed to refuel, and to the patient and dangerous investigative work by Bureau agents that resulted in the disclosure of the plot.”

  Lynch, Alvarado, and Harlowe growled, glanced at Dan. They looked outraged. He said nothing. Just swirled his coffee, feeling a strange amalgam of relief and anger. Relief that they’d managed to foil the threat. Anger that ass-covering and lies would prevent his people from getting any credit. What had Sebold said? About how much of what went on inside the iron fence never went public? Now he understood.

  “Those fuckers,” Lynch said. “They had nothing to do with this. We put it together. You put it all together.”

  Dan said, “You really think they can say that? That a bunch of field-grade bozos in White House counterdrug stapled this together in their spare time?”

  “They should give us credit—”

  “You know what the media’d do with that,” Marty Harlowe said. “They’d say: Why do our wonderful intelligence agencies need so much funding if they missed something this big?”

  Alvarado said, “It’s a good question.” They looked at him and he said, “Well? Isn’t it?”

  The phone rang. The slick-headed admin sergeant answered it. Ouderkirk’s eyes flicked to Dan, who started to get up. But the receptionist held up his hand. Said, “Yes, ma’am. Right away, ma’am,” and hung up.

  To Dan he said, “That was Mrs. Clayton, sir. She just got in. She’d like to see you in her office.”

  III

  EAST WING

  031331Z JAN

  SCHOLAST:

  //Logging on. See Amicable, Hellgod, Blue Danube here already. Thanks for promptness. Welcome Seaward to the group. Gents, I’ve already placed Sea in the picture regarding both security and aim of our enterprise.

  031331Z JAN

  AMICABLE:

  //Welcome, Seaward.

  031331Z JAN

  HELLGOD:

  //Welcome to the history behind the history.

  031331Z JAN

  SEAWARD:

  //Hope to be able to contribute. Any way I can.

  031332Z JAN

  SCHOLAST:

  //BD, your report.

  031332Z JAN

  BLUE DANUBE:

  //The candidate is motivated and moving into position. Actually there were some lucky breaks in this regard. Unplanned by us, but I’d be happy to take credit.

  031332Z JAN

  HELLGOD:

  //My question same as three-four sessions ago. We can create conditions, but how do we make him move? What exactly is your hold on this guy? Who we need a name for. Not real name, but some kind of handle.

  031332Z:

  SCHOLAST:

  //Call him Forthright.

  031332Z JAN

  BLUE DANUBE:

  //OK. The point is, HG, not so much to make Forthright do what we want as to make it believable afterward that he did. See the diff? We’ll put him into position where it would be perfectly credible that he does what he does. If he doesn’t, then we go to Plan B, but he still remains the presumptive actor.

  031333Z JAN

  HELLGOD:

  //BD and I have discussed this between us & with one other interested party. That is, how to make it happen if our buddy doesn’t operate as planned. Don’t trigger off, Schoolboy, the other party was not made privy to any of the rest of the enterprise & is just as security conscious as we are.

  031333Z JAN

  SCHOLAST:

  //Not happy to hear you discussed any part of this outside the group. But trust your judgment. Wd like to hear more on this between us, let’s meet.

  //Reminder for everyone: close hold, close hold, CLOSE HOLD.

  031333Z JAN

  AMICABLE:

  //It’s still only a contingency plan. Right?

  031334Z JAN

  HELLGOD:

  //Nobody seems to be listening, but I’ll say it again: it’s past time to retire this player. Don’t poll me when G wants to execute, you know where I stand.

  031334Z JAN

  SEAWARD:

  //What happens to Forthright?

  031334Z JAN

  SCHOLAST:

  //Okay, everyone has his piece of the pie to work. Let’s get to it. Out here.

  ***LOGOFF***

  031334Z JAN

  AMICABLE:

  //Off.

  ***LOGOFF***

  031334Z JAN

  BLUE DANUBE:

  //Out.

  ***LOGOFF***

  031334Z JAN

  HELLGOD:

  ***LOGOFF***

  031334Z JAN

  SEAWARD:

  //Scholast? You still there?

  031335Z JAN

  SEAWARD:

  //Signing off.

  ***LOGOFF***

  16

  The first thing he noticed was how much quieter it was. No tourists, no journalists, no camera crews shouting and trailing cables and pointing lights. There wasn’t much going on in the hallways. The doors stayed closed. The carpet was the same dark blue, the walls the same marigold cream, but it seemed like the far side of the moon after the West Wing. He hesitated at a double door of polished mahogany, then pushed through.

  To a small front office, a desk, but no one at it. In a back room, neither large nor very well appointed, two uniformed men sat on a sofa that was obviously a retread from some other part of the White House. One, hunched forward till his uniform jacket hooded over his bull neck, was a buzz-cut, broad-shouldered Marine lieutenant colonel. His large yet startlingly delicate fingers held pages from a loose-leaf binder. The other was Mike Jazak, the Army officer Dan had met jogging with De Bari. They exchanged nods.

  “They tell me I’m going to be working over here,” he said, extending his hand as the light colonel got to his feet.

  The buzz cut grunted. “I just wish not as the Wusso’s replacement.”

  Dan nodded. Moncure “Wusso” Pusser had been the president’s Navy aide until two days ago, when a hit-and-run driver had connected in the lower level of the Pentagon City Mall parking garage. Now he had a broken hip and might not, Bethesda said, ever fly F-18s again.

  If not for that, Dan thought, he might be off the Eighteen Acres entirely. First the Nuñez and Tejeiro affairs. Then Srebrenica, news the administration hadn’t wanted to hear. Last, but not least, the way he’d gone through the guardrails about what was already being called the Louisville Incident, the
subject of intense attention in Congress and the media. He figured pigeonholing him in the East Wing was part of Holt’s spin. Stopping the terrorists had been a last-minute save by the intelligence agencies and the Guard, protecting America at a discount under the inspired leadership of Robert L. De Bari.

  “I’m Chick Gunning,” the marine said. “Senior mil aide. Let’s go on down to the PEOC, and we’ll start your briefing-in.”

  * * *

  “The fact that the potentially disastrous consequences of your glory hunting did not occur can’t excuse operating outside normal procedures,” Gelzinis had said coldly at the termination interview. They were in the assistant’s eight-by-ten office adjoining Mrs. Clayton’s. “We’ve had our differences, you and I, but this is beyond personal. Procedures are there for a reason. They reflect statutory limits on the executive side and, most particularly, on the executive staff. General Sebold briefed you, first day you were here, on our standards. Did he not?”

  “I was warned,” Dan said.

  “Well, when a member violates those—the reason, good, bad, or indifferent, that’s beside the point—he’s violated the trust Congress and the people placed in us. You’ve been cautioned before. Failed to exercise restraint. Therefore—” He finished with a symbolic handwashing.

  Dan was thinking that if he’d exercised restraint, they’d all be glowing in the dark right now. But he didn’t say anything. He didn’t expect a sea command anymore. A training billet, recruiting duty in the Midwest—he didn’t care. As long as he was out of this cesspool.

  “Well, he has the Yankee White clearance. He’s the right rank,” said a man beside Gelzinis’s desk. One Dan hadn’t been introduced to, though he’d seen him before in the hallways, usually deep in low-voiced conversations. A short, fiftyish guy with a gnomelike head a couple sizes larger than it ought to be. Thin hair the color of wet sand. Khaki pants and a Navajo-style bolo tie with a clasp the shape of a thunderbird. Just now he was slouching in the chair with one hand-tooled western boot propped on a knee. The stick of a lollipop protruded from his jaw. He was examining Dan, but not talking to him, as if Lenson were livestock he wasn’t sure he wanted to buy. “The congressional, at photo ops—that could offset some of the criticism about the military relationship.”

  Dan turned to squint at the little guy. What was this? The gnome winked at him, but didn’t say who he was or what he wanted.

  “The president’s relations with the military are excellent,” Gelzinis said, with utter and outraged conviction.

  Dan wondered what universe the deputy adviser was living in. He sat back, trying to relax. He’d tried, maybe too hard, and it hadn’t worked. Well, he’d already lasted longer here than he’d thought he would.

  They were both studying him now. “I’m not sure what we’re talking about here,” he told them.

  Gelzinis frowned. “Garner hasn’t told you?”

  “I came up here as soon as I got your note, sir. Should I have seen General Sebold first?”

  “Of course, he’s … oh, never mind. There’s a requirement over in the East Wing.”

  The little guy said around the lollipop, “Garner’s the one who said you might be the square peg. And since I took over the military side…”

  Dan started to ask what requirement, the “military side” of what, but before he got a word out. Gelzinis said, “You won’t be there long. They’ll move the guy’s replacement up. All you need to do is fill the hole a month or two. Then you’ll be on your way.”

  A tap at the jamb. Sebold came in, apologizing for being late. He nodded to the little guy. “Charlie. How you doing?”

  A piece fell into place. Charles Ringalls, “Charlie Wrinkles,” one of De Bari’s aw-shucks cronies from the oil business he’d started, after the firefighting but before the governorship. A special assistant, one of the expediters and behind-the-scenes fund-raisers. Ringalls had moved up to director of the White House Military Office, the uniformed support group that ran comms and other operations around the Eighteen Acres, on the strength of a few years as a National Guard noncom. The word was he’d smile, then rip your balls off.

  “Good enough. How’re you, podner?”

  “We were bringing your lad here up to date. On his transfer.” Gelzinis ran his fingers through his hair. “If you want him, that is,” he added to the gnome.

  “His clearance good?”

  “Oh, his clearance—you won’t find any problems with that,” the deputy said, with one of the most finely crafted smirks Dan had ever seen.

  “How about uniforms? He got all that ready to go?”

  “Dan’s an Annapolis man,” Sebold said with proprietary pride. “A thousand percent performer. Meticulous attention to detail. You’ll be very happy with him.”

  With that, Dan understood. Leaving the West Wing in the evenings, he’d seen the uniformed aides greeting the glamorous, the famous, and the powerful. They took their wraps and escorted the guests through the endless marathon of formal dinners, parties, teas, receptions, and entertainments that took up so much of the Residence permanent staff’s time. They greeted arriving heads of state on the South Lawn. Guarded catafalques at state funerals. They were tall, good-looking young officers in full dress and white gloves, selected for poise, resourcefulness, and charm. No doubt it was important, and more onerous than it might seem … but. “Sorry. I don’t dance,” he told them. “Back problems. And I’m not so good at small talk.”

  Sebold chuckled. “Those are the social aides. No, I don’t think you’d fit in there either, Dan.”

  “Then what are we talking about?”

  “We’re talkin’ about the military aide position,” the little westerner said, cowpoke-astonished, as if it had been evident the moment he walked in.

  Dan sucked in his breath.

  Whenever you saw the commander in chief in public, one instantly recognizable figure was never far away. He carried a black briefcase, his expression giving no clue what was in it. Dan dropped his head, trying to organize his objections. He had not the slightest desire to follow the man he hated around with Doomsday handcuffed to his wrist. “I didn’t screen for that,” he told them.

  “You screened for White House duty.”

  “It’s a high-visibility position,” said Gelzinis, sounding as if that were above all what counted on this earth.

  “I don’t want to work on the Eighteen Acres any longer,” Dan said, finally losing patience. “And I definitely don’t want to serve in that capacity.”

  “Can I have a word with him?” Sebold said. Gelzinis waved his hand in annoyance, fanning them out of his office. The little guy smiled again, and Dan saw where the “Wrinkles” nickname came from.

  In the corridor the general pulled him close. “I had a tough time getting them to consider you for this. Two agency heads called Tony direct about that crap you pulled in the Sit Room.”

  “If you mean Louisville, I’d do it again. Gelzinis keeps talking about how us staff pissants mustn’t poke a toe outside the chop chain. If Jenny Roald and I had followed the flow diagrams, a lot of people would be dead.”

  “So you’re exempt from those rules?”

  “That’s not what I was saying.”

  “Then what were you saying? Exactly?”

  “That occupying a position of responsibility means knowing when to bend those rules.”

  “I’ve noticed that before about you Navy people,” the general said, pursing his lips in disapproval. “And I want you to know just how far out on a limb I’ve gone covering your ass around here. You owe me. And you’re still in the military, Commander.”

  Dan said, feeling his lips draw back from his teeth, “I realize that, sir.”

  “And you’re going to take this position and do an outstanding job until we can organize somebody else.”

  And once again, as so often since he’d put on a uniform, he said, against his desire and better judgment, but that was what taking orders meant: “Aye aye, sir.”

&
nbsp; * * *

  He’d heard of the Presidential Emergency Operations Center. Rumor said it was so deep beneath the East Wing you had to ride down on an elevator. It was much less well known than the Sit Room. In fact, few outside the Eighteen Acres knew of it, and Dan hadn’t heard it or the agency responsible for it, the Contingency Operations Office, discussed much even in the West Wing.

  And in fact there was an elevator. Gunning said that both the mil aides and the uniformed detail were allowed to use it, but that at the moment the cables were being checked. So he followed the colonel down a steep, dimly lit, musty, poured-concrete stairwell whose white paint didn’t look as if it had been touched up since the Cuban missile crisis.

  At its bottom Gunning tapped a code into a keypad. From the way Dan’s ears popped as they went through one heavy steel door, then another, he figured the space was under positive pressure. Like the new destroyers, which maintained a higher air pressure inside the skin of the ship to exclude gas or biological agents. He signed a shelter log, then followed the colonel into a brightly lit air-conditioned warren. He hadn’t realized how big it was, or how many people worked down here.

  Gunning started with the comm spaces, introducing him to the duty dudes and the shelter maintenance guys. They didn’t wear uniforms, but they were military. Air Force, most of them. The displays showed they had connectivity with the agencies that mattered. Gunning said that if an aide was with POTUS when a short-fuze alert came down, or if there was any armed intrusion, it would be Dan’s responsibility to get him down here into shelter.

  “Uh, what degree of hardening have we got? What kind of hit could we take?”

  “Pretty much anything conventional, but a nuclear attack—well, you don’t want to stick around for that. If we get enough warning, we’ll bring in Marine One and airlift out of D.C. Go out to Mount Weather, out near Berryville. Or if you’re at Camp David, you’ll go to Site R, if you’re not already in the air.”

  Gunning went on outlining the warning and evacuation procedures while showing him a stark little bunkroom the military aides used. They stuck their heads into the Emergency Boardroom. It was larger than the one in the Sit Room complex, but with an even more ominous feel. The ceilings were higher, the walls white instead of dark paneling.