The Threat

by David Poyer

  Sure. Who was the only guy the Secret Service couldn’t search? Couldn’t touch? And wouldn’t even suspect? The dude who carried the football.

  He sat there for a few minutes. Felt his smile fade, like the Cheshire cat in reverse.

  Christ, he was getting paranoid. Upshaw had opened the satchel in the secretary’s office. Gone through it while he’d looked over her shoulder. Nothing there that hadn’t always been there.

  He glanced at the agents again. Neither McKoy nor Leigh was looking at him now. The lead agent was gazing out and down to where the Beltway, like a Robert Heinlein roadcity, lay flashing and streaming across the Wilson Bridge.

  You are so fucking nuts, he told himself savagely. You really ought to turn yourself in. He’d fought it for too long. Self-loathing overwhelmed him.

  He looked at the satchel again. Pulled it out with the toe of his shoe. Bending, he fiddled with the catch, trying to look casual. He set the combination, and popped the first latch.

  Only it didn’t pop.

  He pushed harder, but it didn’t move. He frowned. Checked the combo. The numbers were lined up dead center on the indicator marks. But neither latch was opening. He spun it, set it up again, pushed the latch again.

  Nada.

  He cleared his throat. Glanced at the agents. They were ignoring him, lost in the vibration and noise. De Bari and Weatherfield were in their own world, arguing. Mrs. De Bari stared into eternity somewhere above all their heads.

  Why would they change the combo without telling him? The duty dog had to be able to get to the radio. And the handbook, if the warbler went off. Plus the other stuff in there. There wasn’t much room, but Jazak sometimes left Power Bars and the small-size Gatorades in there. When he found them Dan had no qualms about drinking the juice, though he drew the line at the Power Bars.

  You’re around the bend, he told himself. Nutzoid. The lock’s jammed, that’s all. Or Upshaw had reset the combination by accident.

  Only he didn’t see how. All she’d done was spin the dials, as they all did when they closed the PES, so that even if it was stolen it’d still be locked.

  Son of a bitch! What if that warbler went off right now? Or the president asked to look at the manual? He broke into a sweat, glancing toward De Bari and Weatherfield as if they could read his mind. But the next minute he thought: They don’t care. What had Jazak said? Bad Bob didn’t have a clue. Had sent the Gold Code to the dry cleaners in his pants.

  But even as he thought that, he knew he was skating around the truth and his duty. Because if Robert De Bari didn’t give a shit, that was no excuse for Commander Dan Lenson to cut corners or look away.

  Moving as casually as he could, he leaned to look down through polished bulletproof plastic. Now forest bordered the gleam of river, and the glowing mercury of the Chesapeake broadened ahead.

  He snapped open his seat belt. Took a step forward, toward the cockpit; then, as if he’d forgotten, came back and bent and took the satchel along, and set it casually on the step up to the pilots’ compartment. He rapped on the sliding port. A face glanced back. The port slid open.

  “Anything from the White House?” he shouted up into significantly louder noise.

  The marine shouted back, “Nothing yet.”

  “No truck bombs?”

  “Not that they’ve told me about.”

  “Where we headed?”

  “Oh, we’re just flyin’ around, down toward Pax River. Looking for a recall any minute, unless they want me to shoot for Thurmont.”

  Dan looked past him, into the cockpit, and saw what he’d hoped to. “Can you hand me that?” he shouted, pointing.

  “Hand you what? The fire extinguisher?” the pilot yelled, twisting in his seat. The copilot, who had the stick, glanced back too, eyebrows raised.

  “No. No!” He didn’t dare look back at the agents. “The extraction tool.”

  The colonel followed his finger to a steel crowbar-and-cutter on the bulkhead. “What do you need that for?”

  Dan patted the satchel. “Fucking latch is jammed.”

  He saw the marine’s lips purse as he took it in: who Dan was, what he was saying. “That’s not good.”

  “No kidding. I got to get it open.”

  “I heard that thing’s set so it goes off if you fuck with it.”

  “I heard that one too,” Dan said. “But there’s nothing in here but a manual and a radio.”

  The colonel unclipped the crash bar and poked it through to him. Dan tried to keep his body between the case and McKoy and Leigh. The less he had to explain, the better. There was professional pride involved, too.

  For a second, as he put the bar to the latch, he wondered: Am I going off the deep end? Then he shrugged. If he couldn’t get it open, then it’d be time to go to general quarters. Though all he really had to do was have the pilot call back and explain the situation, and have Gunning meet them with the spare.

  The latch was stout. Brass-coated steel, and hardened to boot. It was even difficult to get the tip of the crash bar in position. When he exerted force it slipped off suddenly, gouging a rip into the top grain leather.

  “Shit,” he muttered. But the pry bar was hardened too, sharpened and tempered for getting jammed hatches open, not just briefcase latches.

  The first latch popped, but it took all his strength. The second broke, leaving the catch jammed in the lock. But finally he got the lid open. He peered in, with the sun pouring through the window plastic lighting everything with perfect clarity.

  Well, he thought. That was a lot of angst over nothing.

  Everything was there. The black plastic of the radio case. The spare battery. The red plastic of the Decision Handbook. The Beretta, in its nylon holster. The other notebooks, with comm data and the rest of his essential knowledge.

  He was closing it up when he froze.

  He had the duty Beretta. Stuck into his belt. Where it had been since he took over from Upshaw.

  There hadn’t been any pistol in the satchel he’d inventoried with her. He called back the picture, and saw it clear in his mind. No. The gun compartment had been empty.

  So why were there suddenly two pistols?

  Son of a bitch! He felt for the gun under his blouse. Making absolutely sure he wasn’t forgetting something. But there it was, steel-hard against the bone of his hip. Right where he’d wedged it when they were running through the Residence.

  Yet here was another one. He pulled the holster out just to make sure there was a gun in it. Yep.

  At his shoulder McKoy said in an unfriendly tone, “What are you doing?”

  “Barney—I’m still trying to figure this out—but I think somebody switched satchels on me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The woman agent was unbuttoning her jacket, moving to put herself between him and the still obliviously arguing De Bari and Weatherfield. Dan said, glancing at her but speaking to the lead agent, “I’m seeing something funny here, Barn. I have a handgun in my belt already, from the aide I relieved, from the case she turned over to me. But here’s another one. The only thing I can think, somebody switched cases on me.”

  “Why would they do that?” said the baby-faced agent. He was watching Dan narrowly. Flicking a warning glance at the woman.

  “Look, relax. I’m not doing anything threatening. Here. Take it.” He held the holstered pistol out. McKoy hesitated, then shook his head. Dan thrust it back into the satchel’s fitted compartment. Then swung around and put the case on the sofa bench.

  “What’s he doing?” the woman said. Her jacket was open, her hand within.

  “I’m inventorying the PES,” Dan told her. “Making sure everything’s okay here.”

  Both agents were standing now, between Dan and where the president, the secretary of defense, and the first lady sat. They swayed as the aircraft pitched. He cleared his throat, a little nervous, though he still didn’t think he had anything to be nervous about. He was more puzzled than anythin
g else. He started lifting things out and lining them up on the seat. Red handbook. Black handbook. Another black handbook. Transceiver.

  His fingers halted. The radio, with its handset and little stub UHF antenna, hadn’t come all the way out. A black wire led from it to the spare battery beneath. He blinked at it.

  Beside him McKoy said, “Everything okay?”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered. “Wait a minute.”

  Then he understood, not wanting to, but comprehending nonetheless. And the knowledge felt like a rush of cold descending air.

  He stood cradling the thing. Trying not to move anything else, to jiggle anything. Trying to think of some other way, any other way around it. But he couldn’t.

  There’d never been any wires between the spare pack and the transceiver.

  If this was really what he was beginning to think it was … the battery pack, compact yet heavy as a brick, could hold three or four pounds of plastique or RDX. That might not sound like much. But it would be enough high-energy explosive to turn Marine One, and everyone in it into an enormous fireball, peppered with very small parts.

  Beside him McKoy was frowning at the transceiver. Dan was still holding it, a few inches above the open satchel. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” he said.

  “It’s a fucking bomb,” Dan muttered. “We’ve got to get this thing out of here.”

  “What are you talking about? An explosive device?”

  Of course McKoy didn’t see it. The protective detail had never been allowed to look inside the PES. As far as the lead agent knew, this was how everything was supposed to look.

  Yes. It was very clever.

  “This wire isn’t supposed to be here,” Dan said. “The black one, looks like a power cord? It isn’t. And this isn’t my satchel. Somebody switched it. This thing’s a bomb.”

  The agent’s face went still. “Don’t touch anything,” he said. Dan glimpsed the female agent over his shoulder, face so pale she might have just patted it all over with flour. Behind her De Bari guffawed, at something Weatherfield had said, apparently.

  McKoy put his face close. Said, just loudly enough to carry over the engine noise, “You sure about this, Lenson?”

  Dan had to admit it didn’t look dangerous. What they could see of the cord looked like part of the set. Only if you were familiar with the equipment would you know it didn’t belong.

  Doubt wormed into his brain. Could the Military Office comm people have upgraded the radio without telling him? Put some kind of improved rig in there? But damn it, there was already a battery in the transceiver. Why wire another battery to it?

  “Yeah … well … pretty sure,” he said, but his voice wasn’t as certain as it might have been.

  McKoy caught that undertone. “You mean it might not be?”

  “I think it probably is. But no—I can’t be sure. There’s something funny going on here, though. I’m sure of that much.”

  Shit! If it was a device … he glanced at the window. The smart thing would probably be to just pop a window or the door and chuck it out. But looking out now, he saw to his horror that they weren’t over forest anymore. The pilot had taken them back over civilization. He didn’t know where—Annandale, Alexandria—but it wasn’t woods down there but houses, streets, people. Plus, if it was just some upgrade they’d forgotten to tell him about, then throwing out the secret transceiver, with encryption and release codes for the nation’s nuclear command structure, didn’t sound like a brilliant idea.

  Another possibility slammed into his brain like blunt metal. Wired to a radio, a bomb could be command detonated. Like the way Israelis killed terrorists with cell phones. Which meant it could go off any second.

  His thoughts darted like a trapped sparrow, but met a wall wherever they flew. He couldn’t cut the cable. It was perfectly possible, no, probably likely, that something this sophisticated would be booby-trapped.

  “We’ve got to get on the ground,” he told McKoy. “Like, ASAP. Right now.”

  And it looked like the agent had come to the same conclusion in the same fragment of time, because he was already charging between De Bari and Weatherfield, banging on the pilot’s door. The two men regarded him with amazement. When the colonel slid it back he yelled up. Dan saw the marine’s eyes flick to the open satchel. To him.

  Then the elevator went down. Fast.

  Suddenly a lot was happening at once. He was grabbing for things as they floated up off the seat. Then, forced to his knees by g’s going the other way, felt his trousers tear as they snagged on something. The woman agent was hanging on to a strap, shouting into a small radio that had appeared from nowhere. Weatherfield was shouting too.

  He clung to the seat, weightless, as they fell again, this time in a long, endless, terrifying drop, like Lucifer banished from heaven. Realizing in those seconds that if whatever they’d packed his satchel with went off, he’d never feel it. Never realize he’d just stopped living.

  But much worse than that, for who could object to painless and instantaneous death, he understood in those screaming seconds that if it did, he’d be known forever as the assassin.

  Someone had switched satchels with him. That was the only possible conclusion. And he suspected now it had been whoever had gone into the office while he’d been talking to Ouderkirk. Remembering that glimpse of a back, walking away. Gunning? Sebold? He couldn’t swear to either. But whoever it had been, he’d been toting a cardboard box.

  The luggage switch. A classic. The guy carried in Bag A, in the cardboard box, and set it down next to Bag B. Swapped them out, bent over to mask the switch, and walked out.

  But no one had seen it. So he’d be blamed. And he had a motive! The president was boffing his wife!

  John Wilkes Booth, Leon Czolgosz, Lee Harvey Oswald. All loners, misfits with a grudge. That was how they’d paint Dan Lenson.…

  Turbine whining, transmission making tortured noises, the huge machine dropped like a meteor, the slanted ground rushing up so fast it seemed impossible they could ever stop.

  * * *

  No more than a minute could have passed since he’d told McKoy they had a problem. Each of those seconds had been filled with so much terror and noise it had seemed ten times longer than its objective existence. Just now, the fingers of one hand digging into the seat fabric so hard he felt his nails breaking, he was helping the agent stuff things back into the satchel with the other. His hand shook as he very cautiously slid the radio and battery inside. McKoy held out the red book. Dan shouted, “You keep that. I’ll get off with everything else.”

  “Oh no. I’ll take it.”

  “Who’s staying with the president?”

  “She is.” McKoy jerked his head, and Dan saw Leigh crouched and braced, pistol pointed, between him and the De Baris. She looked ready to use it.

  Out the window he glimpsed cars and box buildings, the storefronts of a megamall. They flared out over a traffic-crowded highway, barely missing a web of power lines. He saw the pilot’s intent: to set them down in a sprawling lot ahead.

  Unfortunately it was packed with vehicles. Glancing up, he saw the colonel speaking fast into his throat mike. The copilot was stabbing his finger earthward with great emphasis.

  The elevator dropped again. Asphalt rushed up with sickening velocity. The roofs of individual SUVs and minivans took shape out of the glitter. Dan didn’t know where they were. Somewhere in northern Virginia, but from the huge logos on the great brick fronts, Goodyear, Applebee’s, Barnes & Noble, Circuit City, they could be anywhere from Maine to California.

  * * *

  They touched down a hundred yards from Sears on a ring road. He was braced for a hard landing, but at the last minute the colonel flared again and they settled with hardly a bump. A station wagon skidded to a halt, tires smoking. A woman dragged two children back by their collars. Faces stared openmouthed up through windshields. A crewman dropped the door and sunlight flooded in.

  McKoy whipped around. Before
Dan could react, he’d snatched the satchel from his hands. “Stay here,” he bawled. His feet hammered down the ladder.

  Dan followed without hesitation, even as the engines wound up again and the wheels lifted. He leaped off the rising steps, ignoring the woman’s shout behind him. Stay here? Right. He’d brought the thing aboard. He’d be the prime suspect. Was McKoy in on this? What if he disappeared with the case?

  He fell ten or twelve feet and hit the asphalt so hard it slammed the breath out of him. He sprawled forward, feeling, though not yet accompanied by any pain, the rough pavement plane the skin off his outstretched palms, hearing the seams rip in his uniform.

  If there really was a bomb in that satchel, a lot of things that had happened lately might not have been what he’d thought they were. His transfer to the East Wing—the previous Navy aide’s accident in the parking garage—

  He ground his teeth, trying to get his feet under him. Maybe even what he’d thought, or been led to think, about Blair and De Bari.

  Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to set this up. If the PES disappeared—and how easy that would be, in this chaotic swirl of cars and shoppers—they might never find out who’d rigged it. Who’d tried to kill the president, and everyone else aboard.

  McKoy had his ID folder out, his badge. Flourishing it, he was screaming at what was becoming quite the little gathering of suburban rubberneckers, pushing shopping carts and baby strollers. It wasn’t every day Marine One touched down at the mall. Everyone within a quarter mile was headed their way.

  The satchel sat on the asphalt not far from a branch bank. Customers stared from the ATM line. Behind Dan the turbine-howl grew again to an earsplitting roar. He looked up to see the huge machine passing over them, a few hundred feet up, blowing down hot smoke and rotor-wash.

  Dan hesitated, looking at McKoy. Then at the satchel. It looked lonely, sitting deserted between the painted lines of an empty parking space.

  Swallowing the bitter metal-taste of fear, he took a step toward it.

  McKoy hollered over his shoulder at him, cheeks distorted with rage. The engines were howling overhead, so Dan couldn’t make out the words. He figured the Secret Service agent was telling him to back off. Leave it alone.