by Jack Mars
But that day, David had asked her to fly in and be by the President’s side. Thomas’s approval ratings had cratered, and the Speaker of the House had just called for his impeachment. He was under siege, all because he didn’t want to go to war with Iran. Of course, the Speaker was Bill Ryan, one of the leaders of the coup, who at this moment was in a federal prison, preparing to be transferred to death row.
She remembered how she and Thomas were poring over a map of the Middle East right in this office. They weren’t talking about anything, just bantering about this or that. It was a photo op, not an actual strategy meeting.
Suddenly, two men burst in.
“FBI!” one of them screamed. “I have an important message for the President.”
One of those men was Agent Luke Stone.
Her life had changed in that instant, and had not returned to normal since then. Her previous life might never come back, she realized. Her marriage had nearly been destroyed by scandal. Her daughter had been kidnapped. Susan had aged ten years in six months, as she weathered one terrorist or political attack after another.
Now she was faced with sleeping in this drafty old house, alone. They had spent a billion dollars renovating the place, and she did not want to live here. Hmmm. She would have to talk to Kat, or someone, about this.
“Susan?”
She looked up. It was Kurt Kimball. His sudden appearance snapped her back to reality. Kurt was tall and broad, with a head as round and smooth as a cue ball. His eyes were bright and alert. He was the picture of vitality and health at fifty-three. He was one of the people who thought fifty was the new thirty. Until she became President, Susan would have agreed with him. Now she wasn’t so sure. She was two years shy of half a century herself. If things kept up the way they had been going, by the time she got there, fifty was going to be the new sixty.
“Hello again, Kurt.”
“Susan, Agent Stone is here. He interviewed Don Morris in Colorado last night. He thinks he may have intelligence we want to hear. I haven’t spoken with him yet, but my people tell me he was involved in an incident when he arrived back in Washington early this morning.”
“An incident? What does that mean?” It didn’t sound good. But then again, when wasn’t Agent Stone involved in an incident?
“There was a shootout in Georgetown. Two men in a truck apparently tried to murder him. Luke killed one. The other escaped.”
Susan stared at Kurt. “Was it related to Don Morris?”
Kurt shook his head. “We don’t know. But it happened about two blocks from the apartment of Trudy Wellington. Wellington has disappeared, as you know, but it seems that Stone went to her apartment as soon as he landed from interviewing Morris. The whole thing is very… unusual.”
Susan took a deep breath. Stone had saved her life more than once. He had rescued her daughter from the kidnappers. He had saved countless lives during the Ebola crisis, and during the North Korean crisis. He had even done the world a favor and assassinated the dictator of North Korea while he was there. He was an invaluable asset to Susan’s administration. More than that, he was Susan’s secret weapon. But he was also unstable, he was violent, and he appeared to involve himself in things that he shouldn’t.
“Anyway,” Kurt said. “We have him here, and he has a report to give. I think we should break in the new Situation Room right away and debrief him.”
Susan nodded. It was almost a relief to have something to sink her teeth into. The Situation Room here at the White House was a dedicated space, nothing like the converted conference room they had been using at the Naval Observatory. It was a totally renovated and updated command center, with the latest in high-tech wizardry. It would expand their strategic capabilities tremendously—or so she was told.
The only problem? It was underground, and Susan liked windows.
“Give me a few moments to get changed, okay?” Susan indicated the fancy, one-of-a-kind designer dress she wore. “I don’t know if this thing works for an intelligence meeting.”
Kurt smiled. He made a show of looking her up and down.
“Nah. Come on. You look great. People will be impressed—you came right in from the dedication and went to work.”
* * *
Luke rode the elevator with a crowd of people in suits, down to the Situation Room. He was tired—he had spent two hours being interviewed by the DC cops, then caught a few hours of fitful sleep. He had missed the dedication ceremony entirely.
Things like the rebuilt White House and its reopening just weren’t on his mind. He barely noticed the place, or the crowds ooohing and ahhhing over it. He was lost in a forest of dark thoughts—about himself and his life, about Becca and Gunner, and about Don Morris, his choices and the end to which he had come. Luke had also killed a man last night, and he still had no idea why.
The elevator opened into the egg-shaped Situation Room. It was smaller and more cramped than the former conference room they’d been using over at the Naval Observatory. It was also less ad hoc, less tossed together. The place looked like the command module on a Hollywood spaceship. It was set up for maximum use of the space, with large screens embedded in the walls every couple of feet, and a giant projection screen on the far wall at the end of the table. Tablet computers and slim microphones rose from slots out of the conference table—they could be dropped back into the table if the attendee wanted to use their own device.
Every plush leather seat at the table was occupied—mostly with middle-aged, overweight decision makers. The seats along the walls were filled with young aides and even younger assistants, most of them tapping messages into tablets, or speaking into telephones.
Susan Hopkins sat in a chair at the closest end of the oblong table. At the far end stood Kurt Kimball, Susan’s National Security Advisor. A sprawl of usual suspects took up the seats in between them.
Kurt noticed Luke enter and clapped his big hands. It made a sound like a heavy book dropping to a stone floor. “Order, everybody! Come to order, please.”
The place quieted down. A few aides continued to talk along the wall.
Kurt clapped his hands again.
CLAP. CLAP.
The room went dead quiet.
“Hi, Kurt,” Luke said. “I like your new command center.”
Kurt nodded. “Agent Stone.”
Susan turned to Luke and they shook hands. Luke’s big hand swallowed her tiny one. “Madam President,” he said. “Good to see you again.”
“Welcome, Luke,” she said. “What do you have for us?”
He looked at Kurt. “Are you ready for my report?”
Kurt shrugged. “That’s why we’re here. If it weren’t for you, we’d all be upstairs enjoying the festivities.”
Luke nodded. It had been a long day, and it was still early. He wanted to finish this up and go out to the country house he had once shared with Becca. Everything was too much right now, and what he most wanted to do was take a nap. Just nap on the couch, and maybe later, in the late afternoon, sit outside with a coffee and watch the sun set over the water. He had a lot to think about, and a lot of planning to do. An image of Gunner appeared in his mind.
All eyes were on him. He took a deep breath. He repeated what Don had told him. Islamic terrorists were going to steal nuclear weapons from an air base in Belgium.
A tall heavyset man with blond hair raised a hand. “Agent Stone?”
“Yes.”
“Haley Lawrence. Secretary of Defense.”
Luke had known that. But until this moment, he had forgotten it.
“Mr. Secretary,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
The man gave a slight smile, almost a smirk. “Please share with us how you think Don Morris obtained this intelligence. He’s in a federal high-security facility, the highest security we currently have, held in isolation in his cell twenty-three hours a day, and has no direct contact with anyone except the guards.”
Luke smiled. “I think that’s a question for the guar
ds to answer.”
A ripple of laughter went around the room.
“I’ve known Don Morris a long time,” Luke said. “He’s probably one of the most resourceful people alive in the United States at this moment. I have no doubt that he receives intelligence, even in his current location. Is it accurate intelligence? I have no idea, nor does he. He doesn’t have any way to confirm it or discredit it. I guess that’s our job.”
He gave Kurt a sidelong glance. “Those are all the details I have. Any thoughts?”
Kurt paused for a moment, then nodded. “Sure. This will be a little bit on the fly, but mostly accurate. Belgium has been much on my mind in recent years, for obvious reasons.” He turned to an aide standing behind him. “Amy, can you bring us up a map of Belgium? Key in on Molenbeek and Kleine Brogel, if you don’t mind.”
The young woman fiddled with her tablet, while another aide turned on the main display monitor behind Kurt. A few seconds passed. The monitor ran through a few internal tests, then showed a blue desktop. A quiet buzz of conversation started again.
Kurt watched his aide. She nodded to him, and then he looked at the President.
“Susan, are you ready?”
“Ready when you are.”
A map of Europe appeared on the screen behind him. It quickly zoomed in to focus on Western Europe, and then Belgium.
“Okay. Behind me, you see a map of Belgium. There are two locations in that country I want to call your attention to. The first is the capital city, Brussels.”
Behind him, the map zoomed again. Now it showed the dense grid of a city, with a ring highway circling it. The map moved to the upper left-hand corner, and several photographs of cobblestone streets, a government building from the nineteenth century, and a stately and ornate bridge over a canal.
He turned to his aide. “Bring up Molenbeek, please.”
The map zoomed again, and more photos of streets appeared. In one, a group of bearded men marched carrying a white banner, fists pumping the air. The top of the banner had Arabic characters written in black. Below that was the apparent English translation:
No to Democracy!
“Molenbeek is a suburb of about ninety-five thousand people. It is the most densely populated section of Brussels, and parts of it run as high as eighty percent Muslim, mostly of Turkish and Moroccan descent. It’s a hotbed of extremism. The weapons used in the Charlie Hebdo magazine attack were cached beforehand in Molenbeek. The 2015 Paris terror attacks were planned there, and the perpetrators of that crime are all men who grew up and lived in Molenbeek.”
Kurt looked around the room. “In short, if there are terror attacks being planned in Europe, and we can safely assume there are, there’s a pretty good chance that the planning is taking place in Molenbeek. Are we clear on this?”
A ripple of agreement went through the room.
“Okay, let’s see Kleine Brogel.”
On the screen, the map zoomed out, scrolled to the right a short distance, then zoomed in again. Luke could make out runways and buildings at a rural airfield not far from a small town.
“Kleine Brogel Air Base,” Kurt said. “It’s a Belgian military airfield located about sixty miles east of Brussels. The village you see there is the municipality of Kleine Brogel, hence the name of the base. The base is home to the Belgian Tenth Tactical Wing. They fly F-16 Falcons, supersonic jet fighters, which among other capabilities, can deliver B61 nuclear bombs.”
On the screen, the map disappeared and an image materialized. It was of a missile-shaped bomb, mounted on a wheeled trundle and parked beneath the fuselage of a fighter jet. The bomb was long and sleek, gray with a black tip.
“Here you see the B61,” Kurt said. “Not quite twelve feet long, about thirty inches in diameter, and weighing in at about seven hundred pounds. It’s a variable yield weapon that can put as many as three hundred forty kilotons on a target—roughly twenty times the magnitude of the Hiroshima explosion. Compare that yield to the megatons of the large ballistic missiles, and you can see that the B61 is a small tactical nuke. It’s designed to be carried by fast airplanes, like the F-16. You’ll note its streamlined shape—that’s so it can withstand the speeds its delivery craft are likely to reach. These are American-made bombs, and we share them with Belgium as part of our NATO agreements.”
“So the bombs are onsite there?” Susan said.
Kurt nodded. “Yes. I’d say about thirty of them. I can get you the exact figure, if we need it.”
Another ripple went through the gathered crowd.
Kurt raised his hand. “It gets better. Kleine Brogel is a political football in Belgium. Many Belgians hate the fact that the bombs are there, and want them out of the country. In 2009, a group of Belgian peace activists decided to show everyone how unsafe the bombs were. They breached the security of the base.”
The map reappeared on the screen. Kurt indicated an area along the bottom edge of the base. “To the south of the airfield there are some dairy farms. The activists walked across the farmland, then climbed the fence. They wandered around the base for at least forty-five minutes before anyone noticed they were there. When they were finally intercepted—by a Belgian airman with an unloaded rifle, by the way—they were standing right outside a bunker where some of the bombs were stored. They had already spray-painted slogans on the bunker and put up some of their stickers.”
Chatter erupted in the room again, louder and more pronounced this time.
“Okay, okay. It was a serious lapse in security. But before we get carried away, let’s recognize a few things. For one, the bunkers were locked—there was no danger the activists were going to get inside. Also, the bombs are stacked in chambers underground—even if the activists did somehow make it inside, they wouldn’t have been able to operate the hydraulic lifts to bring the bombs to the surface. The activists were on foot, so even if they managed to operate the lifts, they wouldn’t have gotten very far carrying a weapon that weighs seven hundred pounds.”
“So, with all that in mind, what is your assessment of the risk level?” Haley Lawrence said.
Kurt took a long pause. He seemed to stare at something very far away for a moment. To Luke, it was if Kurt’s mind was a calculator, currently attaching numbers to the various elements he had just described, then adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing them.
“High,” he said.
“High?”
Kurt nodded. “Yes, of course. It’s a high-level threat. Could a group be planning to steal a bomb from Kleine Brogel? Sure. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this idea—it arises from time to time in terrorist network chatter that NSA and the Pentagon pick up. A terror cell in Brussels might have a contact or contacts at the airbase who can help them—in fact, this is a very likely scenario. Yes, the bombs aren’t operational without the nuclear codes, and yes, they’re meant to be delivered by supersonic aircraft. But what if the Iranians want the bombs simply to reverse engineer them, or even just to mine them for the nuclear material? The militants in Molenbeek tend to be Sunnis, and they hate Iran. Our militants could be mercenaries, willing to hire themselves out to the highest bidder.
“Or consider this,” Kurt continued. “The Somali air force has a handful of obsolete supersonic jets. Most are in disrepair, but I bet one or two could still get airborne. The Somali government is weak, under constant attack from radical Islam, and teetering on the verge of collapse. What if militant Islamists commandeer one of these aircraft, mount a bomb on it, and crash the entire plane in a nuclear suicide attack?”
“Didn’t you just say the bombs won’t work without the codes?” Susan said.
Kurt shrugged. “Nuclear codes are among the most advanced encryption on the planet. To our knowledge, they’ve never been broken, leaked, or stolen. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be. In worst-case-scenario planning, I’d say the safest assumption is that one day the codes will be broken, if they aren’t already.”
“So what do you suggest we do?”
Kurt didn’t hesitate. “Beef up security at Kleine Brogel Airbase. Do it immediately. We have troops there, but they’re in a constant state of tension with the Belgians. To get any meaningful increase in security, we’re going to have to step on some toes. I’d also reexamine security measures at the other NATO bases where American nuclear weapons are stored. I think we’ll find that these are in pretty good shape. For lax security, the Belgians really take the cake.
“Finally, I’d do something that I’ve wanted to do for a while—put a few special operatives on the ground in Brussels, specifically Molenbeek. Have them poke around and ask some questions. This is the kind of thing the Belgians should be doing on a regular basis, but don’t. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be a secret operation—it might even be better if it isn’t. Just have the right agents go in there, ones who don’t normally take no for an answer, and lean hard on a few people.”
Nearly exhausted, Luke was only half-listening. He was mostly trying to hang on until the meeting ended. Slowly, he became aware that many of the people in the room were staring at him.
He raised his palms and leaned back.
“Thanks,” he said, “but no.”
* * *
“So who’s trying to kill you?” Susan said.
Luke sat in a high-backed leather chair in the sitting area of the Oval Office. Beneath his feet was the Seal of the President of the United States. The last time he was here, the Secret Service had him face-down against that seal. But of course, that was a different carpet—although it looked identical, this was an entirely new room. The other one had been destroyed. For a moment, he had forgotten that.
Man, he was tired.
An aide had brought Luke a cup of coffee in a Styrofoam cup. Maybe that would help him wake up. He sipped it—the President’s coffee was always good.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Last I heard, they were running some DNA and fingerprint tests on the dead guy.”
