by Bryan Devore
He closed his eyes and raised his gun. Focusing on every slight sound, he adjusted his aim to it. Nothing else existed. Only this one shot mattered. Protecting the president was everything. A slight breath escaped the unseen target, making the last sound David needed for the final adjustment. He squeezed the trigger once. From above him came a sharp gasp, followed by the thud of a body and the clatter of a dropped weapon.
Opening his eyes, he listened for any further sounds from above. Nothing. At any minute, other men would likely arrive on the platform. The gunfight had made too much noise, and he assumed that the men had radioed to others in their group during the fighting. He had bought the team the time they needed. Now he must rejoin them as fast as he could and help them escape before more men descended on them.
39
THE GUNFIRE HAD STOPPED, BUT John didn’t dare move. Standing on the shelf by the closed elevator shaft door to the fifth floor, he had one hand on the back of the ladder, the other holding the president against the concrete wall. Rebecca was a level below them. They waited in silence, hearts racing in the dark. He had heard Marks fall to his death. At least five or six bodies had fallen past them, one even clipping the shelf just above them.
“What should we do?” the president whispered.
“We wait.”
“Where’s David?”
He didn’t answer. There was still no sound from above. They could wait thirty seconds more; staying any longer would be too risky. They had to keep moving.
A single pistol shot broke the silence, followed by a distant clank and clatter. For several seconds, no other sound followed.
“All clear!” David yelled from above.
John felt a wave of relief, but it passed—they had to keep moving.
“Okay, ma’am, back on the ladder. Slow and steady, like before. Three points of contact at all times. We’re more than halfway down. Seven more floors down to sublevel three.”
Staying two rungs below her, he focused on every step she took as they made their way down the remaining levels. Rebecca was back on the ladder, too, moving below them. And he could hear David climbing down from far above. It struck him for the first time that everyone else from the team was gone, but he didn’t have time to dwell on it. They still had the president, and right now that was all that mattered.
He noticed some red emergency lights below that reflected off something metal. It could be the top of the elevator. If they were nearing the bottom of the shaft, he wanted to make sure there was nothing threatening.
“Ma’am, please hold,” he said.
She stopped climbing down and leaned her head against the ladder as he pulled his Service-issue miniature Maglite from its case. He was in no hurry to turn it on, but he had to see what the roof was like before moving the president onto it. Shining the light downward, he saw, perhaps ten feet below, the top of the elevator—and the grisly mash of mangled bodies. Blood and viscera were spattered across the roof and several feet up onto the shaft walls.
Stepping down onto the roof, he found it slick but stable. Careful not to slip on the wet surface, he checked to make sure the bodies were all dead. It was a quick check. Then he dragged the bodies and parts to the other side of the attached cables, squeegeeing off as much gore as possible each time. After clearing the area, he opened the top hatch into the elevator car.
“Secure it,” he said to Rebecca.
She had been waiting on the lower shelf, protecting the president while John cleared the roof. Stepping down over the pulped corpses, she holstered her gun and grabbed the sides of the hatch to lower herself into the cargo elevator.
As she climbed inside, John flashed his light onto the side of the shaft where the door led to the hallway. It was closed. He kicked the emergency release lever hard and pulled it back.
“Okay, it’s ready to open,” he said.
Rebecca grunted and heaved against the elevator door, pushing it open while John knelt by the hatch, gun trained above and past her, ready to cover her if they didn’t like what they found on the other side. She slipped through the open door and out into the hallway.
Time felt frozen as John waited, praying he wouldn’t hear gunfire.
She appeared again. “Clear,” she said.
“Okay, ma’am,” John said, looking up at the president. “Please step down onto the edge. Slowly. I’m going to lower you down.”
The president moved away from the ladder and carefully picked the least bloody way toward him. He took both her hands and, spreading his legs over the opening—lowered her down into the elevator. Rebecca helped ease her safely down from inside the car.
“David’s coming,” he said to Rebecca. “Secure her in the hallway. We’ll be right down.”
“What are you doing?” she replied.
“The football is compromised. With Colonel Marks dead and no reason to believe this attack is from a sovereign nation, I’m not about to have one of us keep lugging this thing around. Not with just three of us left to protect her.”
“How long do you need?”
“Not long.”
As Rebecca took the president out of the elevator, he moved to the far corner of the roof and dug through the pile of corpses until he found the briefcase, still attached to Colonel Marks. Besides Marks, John was the only other person around the president who knew the combination to open it.
He knew the protocol intimately. On her first day in office, the president was given a plastic card that had on it instructions and her nuclear launch codes. It was essentially the only thing that she ever carried on her person. Even if someone else had the football and the codes, they still couldn’t launch an attack. The briefcase was used to communicate with the US Military Launch Command Center, at NORAD headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado Springs. The president’s launch codes were only the first of many steps that an actual nuclear launch had to pass through. A number of generals and military commanders were involved in the tightly controlled process. It wasn’t as if the briefcase had a missile launch button. It was more like a sophisticated, superencrypted communicator for the president to signal approval to Launch Command. If anyone else tried to signal with it, the US military at NORAD would use caution in case the device had been compromised—especially during an attack on the president’s life.
But even though there was no threat of the attackers using the Football, it still contained classified information that shouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. He pulled the metallic Zero Halliburton briefcase out of its leather cover and opened it. Inside was the gray communication box with keyboard and display, four red break-plastic cards with sealed nuclear launch codes, a thin soft binder with eighty documents in plastic folders, and the Black Book. The first few pages of the binder were instructions on the communication protocol for using the football to link up with the nuclear launch command center at NORAD. The other documents were detailed inventory and locations of all top-secret nuclear site centers in the United States and Europe—all highly classified information for the US military. And the Black Book, roughly the size of the binder, contained over seventy pages of nuclear retaliatory options.
A clank came from above. He jerked his head up and saw David just one floor up, climbing down the ladder.
“The top’s secure for now, sir,” David said, stepping down onto the elevator roof. “But there could be others soon.”
“Stay there,” John said. Turning back to the football, he removed the plastic launch code cards and the paper manual with the printed classified nuclear site documents. He broke the plastic cards and removed the nuclear launch codes sealed inside them.
“Sir?” David said.
John ignored him, working fast. There wasn’t much time. He set the open briefcase next to him as he cracked open the last two launch codes. Then he reached for the switch to the nuclear communication device.
“Sir! You’re not authorized to do that!”
John looked back and sa
w that David had removed his gun from his holster but was still pointing it down at his side. John supposed that seeing any unauthorized person messing with a nuclear launch device would be unnerving, even if there was no way he could initiate a launch. Despite all the tensions and horror of this night, he still couldn’t avoid a chuckle. “Relax, rookie. I’m disarming it. I don’t know what this attack is, but I don’t think the president’s going to need to start a nuclear war tonight because of it. Since there’s not many of us left and no clear escape route, I don’t want to risk us getting caught by the attackers with this on the president.”
He smashed the keyboard with the butt of his gun and slipped the leather-wrapped cable off Marks’s wrist. Then, pulling a miniature flare from the military aide’s belt, he popped the cap and lit it. A bright orange glow lit up the inside of the shaft. He used the heat from the flare to set the classified codebook on fire and burn the plastic launch codes into unrecognizable melted globs. Then he handed the football, now containing only the communication equipment with a smashed keyboard, over to David.
“Find a space along the shaft to slide this past the elevator. It’ll land somewhere underneath. That way, they won’t find it, and it’s disarmed anyway. And we can keep moving without worrying about it.”
“You want me to drop the nuclear football down to the bottom of an elevator shaft?” David asked.
“Do it.”
“Holy crap, John! You’re sure?”
John grimaced and nodded.
“Roger that.”
David leaned back against the dark elevator shaft and dropped the briefcase into the dark gap between the wall and the roof of the elevator car. After a few clattering bangs, he heard it land with a clap on the floor below.
“I can’t believe I just did that.”
“Let’s keep moving,” John said, jumping down into the elevator.
40
PRESIDENT CLARKE WAS PUSHED AGAINST the cold concrete wall in the hotel basement. Agent Reid pressed her into a dark slot, shrouded in shadows and protected from both ends of the long hallway. She watched Reid glance right and left continuously, scanning for any approaching threat. She heard John’s voice through the open elevator door, but he still hadn’t jumped down into the car. The light from the elevator flickered in a jarring, strobe-like pattern, which distracted her more than anything now that the fighting had stopped. The flashing light seemed to be matching the pulse of her heart, or her breathing, or some other internal rhythm within her. She couldn’t explain this bizarre fascination with the light, but she stared at it in what she vaguely supposed must be shock or madness or hallucination. It was a feeling of light-headed euphoria that she hadn’t experienced in over a year. That past moment had marked one of the greatest nights of her life.
A time with her family.
Flash-flash-flash.
A time of celebration.
Flash-flash.
A time of hope for the future.
Flash.
* * *
The celebration had begun with a boom of music and the rampant flashing of the auditorium’s elaborate lighting effects. Rainbow confetti and big, bright balloons floated down from the rafters.
“You did it!” her husband yelled at her over the cheering crowd.
“Mommy! Look!” her younger daughter, Jessica, shouted excitedly, pointing at the deluge of balloons about to engulf them.
Her older daughter, Stacy, just stared with moist eyes and an enormous smile, facing the sea of campaign staff and supporters stretching out from the stage.
President-elect Clarke smiled because the cameras were on her, and waved at the jubilant cheering crowd. She contained her desire to jump up and down and scream, because the world was watching and she must uphold the dignity of the office she had just won. She stood strong and composed, but the unfathomable prestige now being bestowed on her was something impossible to prepare for. Even now, in this historic moment, in the lights and under the microscope of the world and her own people, she thought about how her every action and gesture and expression would be perceived by others. Even in this moment, she wasn’t allowed to be truly herself. She had to be calculating in her response: modest, intelligent, passionate—a stateswoman and a leader. But inside, she felt both excited and, to her surprise, terrified.
She had run for the office of president of the United States because she had witnessed the failures of other leaders and believed she could do the job better. But now she worried that the job was impossible for anyone to succeed at. How could any one person be expected to lead such a diverse, complex, powerful nation? She loved America deeply, and she suddenly felt terrified that its immediate future now depended more on her than on any other citizen. What if she couldn’t do the things she had promised during her campaign? What if the system of government continued to be too difficult and divisive for her to lead? What if her political and economic ideas were wrong? What if she inadvertently hurt the country in her efforts to help? For the first time, she felt the weight of the power she had been given, and was astonished at just how heavy it was.
But she had to hide these fears. She waved at the crowd again, smiled, hugged her husband, and kissed both her children on the forehead.
Then she turned and walked toward the left side of the stage, to a group of supporters who had been cheering loudest. She wondered if they understood, amid their jubilation, that plenty of Americans out there would be disappointed, frustrated, even angry that she had won. She smiled and waved but was haunted by the knowledge that only slightly more than half of all Americans supported her.
Near the corner of the stage, standing in the shadows, was the Secret Service special agent in charge of her protection detail throughout the campaign. His cool gray eyes had been watching the crowd, but for a brief second she noticed him glance at her and smile when their eyes met.
Rock music was booming again, and the crowd seemed distracted by something on the image board behind the large stage. She seemed to have a moment until the crowd would settle down enough for her victory speech, so she took the opportunity to step over to Special Agent John Alexander, shake his hand, and thank him for his work. She knew it wasn’t protocol, but in this moment of uncontrollable celebration, many protocols throughout the auditorium felt relaxed.
“Congratulations, Governor,” John said with a smile. “I mean, Madam President-elect.”
Abigail gave him a joyous grin. “I hope you’ll stay on with me, John.”
“It’s the director’s call, not mine,” he said, “but I hope so, too. It would be my honor.”
“How many presidents have you served protection for?”
“Three, ma’am.”
“Any advice for me?”
“It’s not my place to say, ma’am.”
“Please. I’d like very much to hear it. Before they swallow me up.”
“Agents aren’t political, ma’am. We serve our country by keeping our protectees safe.”
“Just this once, John. If that’s against protocol, I won’t ask for your thoughts again. But before I walk back out there, I’d like to hear some straight advice from someone not playing the political game. And you’ve probably been close to more presidents than anyone else here.”
He nodded. “We’ll, ma’am, if you’re asking me to be frank—the way I see it, our country has been divided for a long time. Politicians always say they’ll unite us, but they never do. Maybe it’s impossible. But you’ve been given the honor to try to help, despite all our differences.” He paused, stone faced and sincere. “I like to think of the American flag, ma’am. It’s not one solid color—it’s sliced up by stripes and dotted with stars—all those different pieces crammed together onto one flag. But it is one flag, all of it bound together. And it’s our flag—yours, mine, all those who voted for you, and all those who voted against you. Those who have died before us, and those who will live on after us. You need to try to be like that flag, ma’am.
Your presidency needs to be like that flag.”
“Holding all those parts together,” she said.
“Yes ma’am. We need you to hold us all together.”
Behind her, a familiar patriotic rock song blared as it had at many campaign events over the past year. More colored confetti drifted down from the rafters like rainbow snowflakes. Balloons rolled and bounced along the stage like giant leaves at the end of autumn. People cheered and called out her name. Many blew into loud, fringed party horns. Large lenses of television cameras lined the room and followed the excitement of this latest historic moment. Her husband was back on stage with her children and the vice president elect and his family. They all waved at the crowd. Then her younger daughter looked around, searching, found her with her eyes, and waved with a big smile for Abigail to come back to the stage.
“I should get back out there,” she said to John.
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “You’ve got a country to take care of now.”
“And you’ve got a president-elect to take care of.”
He laughed. “You protect our country, ma’am, and I’ll protect you.”
“Deal,” she said, shaking his hand to seal their compact.
Then she turned and walked back out onto the stage, waving to the crowd and to the cameras broadcasting this moment to the world. Picking up Jessica, she kissed her on the side of the head and said, “Look at all those balloons, honey.”
“It’s like a big birthday party,” Jessica squeaked excitedly.
“You’re right.”
“You have lots of friends, Mommy.”
Abigail laughed. She loved the way her children saw the world. Despite the excitement of the victorious election night, it all would have felt hollow if her family weren’t here to share in the celebration.
