Collateral Damage

by Stuart Woods

  Holly sat down. “While you were there, some unusual events occurred, and Stone Barrington had a conversation with you about them. Remember?”

  “Of course I remember.”

  “Then stop remembering,” Holly said. She took a pad from her jacket pocket and uncapped her pen. “I want the names of everyone to whom you have spoken about those events.”

  Kelli looked her in the eye. “Stone asked me not to speak of that, and I have not spoken of it.”

  “How about your boyfriend, James Rutledge? What did you tell him?”

  “I told him I had a grand time at The Arrington, nothing else.”

  “What about Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair?”

  “I don’t work directly with him, but I haven’t spoken with my editor about it, either. I just turned in my piece, which mentioned nothing about it.”

  “Who else have you not told about those events?” Holly asked.

  “The entire world,” Kelli said. “They are all among the people I have not told about that experience. One of the men who brought me here said that this was my first destination. What did he mean by that? Where is my next destination?”

  “You have two choices,” Holly said. “One is wherever you wish in Manhattan. The other is the Guantanamo naval base, on the island of Cuba, for an indeterminate time.”

  “I’ll take Manhattan,” Kelli replied, “never mind the Bronx and Staten Island, too.”

  Holly allowed herself a small smile. “I appear to have made my point.”

  “You certainly have,” Kelli said.

  “One other thing,” Holly replied.

  “What’s that?”

  “For the remainder of your life on this planet, you will not experience a remembrance of those events.”

  “What events?” Kelli asked.

  Holly got up, rapped on the door, and it was opened from the outside. “Take the elevator to the basement,” she said to Kelli. “A car is waiting for you.”

  “And my destination?”

  “Anywhere in Manhattan. Back to the restaurant, if you like.”

  Kelli consulted her watch. “My friend will either be gone by now or very drunk. Home will do.”

  “Home it is. Thank you for your cooperation, Ms. Keane.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “You neither,” Holly said, pressing the elevator button.

  Holly used an empty office and called Kate Lee on a secure line.

  “How was the helicopter ride?” Kate asked.

  “Spectacular.”

  “And your mission?”

  “Accomplished. The lady has suffered a complete and permanent memory loss regarding those events. I believe she fully appreciates that necessity.”

  “Keep an eye on her anyway,” Kate said. “I’m sending the chopper back for you tomorrow morning for a ten A.M. departure, sharp. I’d like you to bring Stone Barrington, Dino Bacchetti, and Mike Freeman with you.”

  “I’ll get right on that,” she said, thinking of Stone.

  “There’ll be a quick lunch and a briefing at the White House. The chopper will take you directly there.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Holly said.

  “Confirm ASAP that the others will arrive with you. Good-bye.” The director hung up.

  Holly dialed Stone’s office and got Joan, his secretary.

  “Hey, Holly,” Joan said, “always glad to hear from you.”

  “Thanks, Joan. Is he available?”

  “Certainly.”

  He picked up. “Stone Barrington.”

  “It’s Holly. How are you?”

  “As well as can be expected,” Stone said.

  Holly laughed. “If you can scrape up the energy, I have two invitations for you.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “The first: you’re invited to take me to dinner tonight, then do terrible things to me in bed.”

  “I can handle that.”

  “The second: please call Dino and Mike Freeman and ask them to be at the East Side Heliport tomorrow morning for a ten A.M. departure for Washington. There will be lunch at the White House, followed by a briefing.”

  “What sort of briefing?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “Oh, that kind of briefing.”

  “Right. And don’t tell, either. Make sure that Dino and Mike know that. Top secret. They’ll be back for dinner.”

  “You intrigue me.”

  “Of course I do, silly, why else would you want to do terrible things to me in bed?”

  “When are you coming?”

  “I’m already in town, but I have some calls to make. I’ll be at your place around seven.”

  “Use your key. I’ll be upstairs.”

  Stone called Dino and Mike; the mention of the White House got their attention and their consent to travel and their promise to shut up about it.

  —

  Holly let herself into Stone’s house a little after seven and took the elevator up to the master suite. “Hello? Anybody there?”

  “I’m in the shower,” Stone yelled back. “Join me or make yourself at home.”

  Holly stripped off her clothes, threw them on a chair, and joined him. Big hug, big kiss.

  “What brings you to town?” Stone asked, scrubbing her back with a soft brush.

  “You do. You and Kelli Keane.”

  “Are you sleeping with her, too?”

  “Nope, just you. She and I had a chat.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I had that chat with her in L.A.”

  “The director was anxious that your suggestions to her be underlined in a memorable way.”

  “Did you slap her around?”

  “It didn’t come to that—she got the message.”

  “But you would have slapped her around, if she had been slow to catch on?”

  “I don’t slap people around, I have people who handle that sort of thing.” She was scrubbing his back, now, then his front. “I see that I have excited your interest,” she said, stroking him to fullness.

  “You are very perceptive.”

  “Are we clean enough now?”

  “I believe we are.”

  Holly turned off the water, stepped out of the shower and toweled herself, then she grabbed a dry bath sheet and worked on Stone.

  “This is the most fun I’ve had for some time,” Stone said.

  “Stick around,” she said, “it’s going to get better.” And she was right.

  —

  When they had exhausted themselves, then showered off the sweat, Holly sat on the bed, toweling her hair. “Where are we dining?”

  “The Four Seasons all right?”

  “That seedy old joint? I wish we could go to Elaine’s.”

  “So do I, but in the circumstances, the Four Seasons will have to do.”

  —

  They dined for two hours at one of the world’s most elegant restaurants, then returned to Stone’s house for a repeat performance of their earlier assignation.

  “Holly,” Stone said when they had finished, “is something bad going to happen?”

  “I and my people work hard every day to see that nothing bad happens, and we’re good at it.”

  “I feel so much better,” Stone said, snuggling up to her and falling asleep.

  The group convened at the East Side Heliport in time to see the sleek new helicopter set down.

  “Wow,” Stone said, “what is that?”

  “I know what it is,” Mike Freeman said. “We’ve already ordered one.” Mike was the CEO of Strategic Services, the largest private security firm in the world, and he often knew about things like this before others did.

  “Why am I not surprised?” Stone asked.

  Holly directed Stone to the left cockpit seat, while she sat in the rear with Dino and Mike.

  Stone looked at the instrument panel and controls. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you how all this stuff works,” he said to the pilot. />
  “Thanks,” the pilot replied, running through a checklist. “Ever flown a helicopter?”

  “Once,” Stone said. “I’d rather not think about it.”

  The engines revved, and the chopper leaped off the pad and turned down the East River, gaining altitude quickly. Next thing Stone knew they were over Cape May and turning for Washington.

  The pilot was constantly on the radio, and Stone could hear the conversations on his headset. It was obvious that this was no ordinary flight; they were getting special treatment from Air Traffic Control.

  “How do I get them to talk to me like that when I’m flying my Citation Mustang?” Stone asked.

  “Easy—just have the White House file your flight plan.”

  They had descended rapidly over the city, and Stone saw the White House directly ahead. A crowd was gathered under the West Wing portico, and someone was speaking into a small forest of microphones.

  “That press conference is for your benefit,” the pilot said. “Keeps the press around that side while I’m unloading you on the presidential pad.”

  Then the helicopter was on the ground, and they were hurrying toward a door held open by a Secret Service agent. Shortly, they were in the Oval Office, where menus from the White House Mess were distributed. Everybody ordered sandwiches, and as they were delivered, the president walked into the room and sat down in a comfortable chair.

  “Good morning, Holly, Stone, Dino, and Mike, and thank you all for coming.”

  Everybody voiced greetings, then they were handed trays, and the president’s mouth seemed always too full for him to speak. The trays were taken away, and he stood up. “Come on, we’re going to have coffee downstairs.”

  Stone thought that meant the White House Mess, but when they got on the elevator it went down quickly for a greater distance than he had anticipated.

  They stepped off the elevator and into a vestibule, where a naval officer distributed picture IDs that were hung around their necks, then they were ushered into a large conference room with many screens on the walls.

  Stone immediately recognized Steve Rifkin, who had been in charge of the presidential Secret Service detail at The Arrington; Tim Coleman, the White House chief of staff; and another two men whom he knew to be bomb specialists, along with a man Stone recognized from newspaper photographs as the head of the Secret Service. Kate Lee was already seated at the conference table, at the opposite end from her husband, the president. She was the first to speak.

  “Good morning, Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen. You will have noticed that the group around this table—the president, the chief of staff, the chief of the Secret Service, and I excepted—were in the suite at The Arrington when a nuclear device was discovered in a trunk. The people responsible for building and delivering it are now deceased, so those of you in this room are the only persons with direct knowledge of that day’s events. You’ve been asked here for what we hope will be the final briefing on this subject, so that all of you will understand what could have occurred at The Arrington if you had been less vigilant, and the vital importance of keeping every detail of those events confined to the people around this table. No other person in the government not in this room has the knowledge that you are about to possess. I’ll turn you over to Steve Rifkin now.”

  “Thank you, Director,” Rifkin said. “Since you were all present at the scene you know what occurred. Our purpose today is to fill in the blanks that some of you may not know. Our chief bomb technician here has put together a short film, cobbled together from photographs, film and sat shots, along with computer-generated animation, that will give you an accurate idea of what might have happened that day. He was the only person to work on the film, and he is the narrator. What you will see is the only existing version of the film. All the other materials have been destroyed, and after you see it, it will be sealed, placed in a vault at the new Will Lee Presidential Library, which is about to begin construction in Delano, Georgia, and not made public until fifty years after the death of President Lee—and then, only with the consent of whoever is president at that time.”

  The lights went down and the film began, displayed on four screens in the situation room, so that no one would have to crane his neck to view it.

  The first image was the planet from outer space; the shot zoomed in to contain California, then farther, to embrace Los Angeles. The zoom slowed as the grounds and buildings of The Arrington came into view.

  “This was to be the origin of the worst attack of any kind on the United States in the country’s history,” the bomb chief’s voice said, as the view zoomed in farther to the building containing the suite, then traveled into the bedroom, where a closet door opened to reveal a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk.

  “This is the suite occupied by this man”—a photograph appeared on-screen—“born Ari Shazaz, but known to others as Hamish McCallister, who was born of a Scottish mother and an Algerian father, then raised in Britain and educated at Eton and Oxford. We now know that his father, who was divorced from his mother and remarried, fathered another son and a daughter, and was a close associate of Osama bin Laden from a time when they were both students together in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Shazaz was caught up in a sweep of al Qaeda operatives by CIA and MI-6 personnel in a house in Cairo and was almost immediately transported to the naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba. He was held there for nearly three years, during which time he never disclosed his identity, in spite of enhanced interrogation. He died there of a stroke, after having been waterboarded more than fifty times. His sons and daughter, all of whom had had intensive Islamic education, became radicalized by his capture and death.

  “Al Qaeda operatives made contact with them, and a cell was formed, funded by Osama bin Laden personally. After bin Laden’s death in a Navy SEAL raid last year, they dedicated themselves to perpetrating a monumental terrorist attack on the United States in revenge for the deaths of their father and bin Laden. They enlisted this man”—another photograph appeared—“Dr. Ahmed Kharl, who had been a highly placed scientist in the Pakistani nuclear program and who later worked on both the Iranian and North Korean programs. When the Pakistani program was shut down, he became a freelancer. He designed a device that would fit into a large trunk and had various parts machined at diverse shops, so that no one person ever knew what was being constructed. The parts were smuggled into the United States, along with three kilograms of enriched uranium, and Dr. Kharl traveled to Palo Alto, California, where he met with the three Shazaz siblings and assembled the device in an apartment rented by them.

  “The device and three smaller, non-nuclear bombs were transported to Los Angeles from the San Jose airport to a hangar at Santa Monica Airport. The three smaller bombs were assigned to McCallister’s three coconspirators, all of whom had gained employment at The Arrington. We now know that their purpose was purely diversionary—to make us think the attack was a conventional one. The device in the trunk was transported to The Arrington in a hotel vehicle by one of the three coconspirators and placed in the suite reserved by McCallister.

  “As you know, the presidents of the United States and Mexico were resident at the hotel for a conference and the signing of a treaty on security and immigration. Hundreds of other prominent people were either resident in the hotel or taking part in its grand-opening festivities. Two of the three smaller bombs were discovered by our teams before they could be detonated. The third was detonated in the Santa Monica Airport hangar, destroying the Caravan and killing its pilot and the third coconspirator. We believe this was the work of McCallister, who was covering his trail.

  “McCallister then set the bomb to go off at eight-thirty in the evening, near the end of a concert in the Arrington Bowl, attended by fifteen hundred people. He left the bomb in the closet, as you see it, then was driven to LAX and boarded a flight for London.

  “A magazine reporter who had met McCallister and had had sex with him in his suite accidentally saw the trunk in question and that evening, when she
heard that we had been searching for a large piece of luggage, informed Mr. Freeman and Special Agent Rifkin of the presence of the trunk in Mr. McCallister’s suite. You all know what transpired after that. The following is what would have happened if the device had not been stopped from detonating.”

  The camera then zoomed out to an apparent altitude of several thousand feet, and an animated version of the nuclear explosion began.

  Everyone started as the explosion of the device filled the screens. First there was an intense white light, followed by a fireball consuming the entire twenty-acre site of the hotel, and beyond, obliterating the Bel-Air neighborhood. This was coincident with a huge roar, shaking the speakers, and a visible shock wave that spread in all directions, destroying nearly all the buildings at UCLA, across Sunset Boulevard, and extending for miles farther. Fires broke out everywhere.

  Everyone took a breath, but the event was not over. Up Stone Canyon, two city reservoir dams broke, and a high wall of water swept down the canyon, through the UCLA campus, and past Wilshire Boulevard.

  The chief bomb technician’s voice rose again. “The three and a half billion gallons of water in the two reservoirs would have had the effect of extinguishing most of the fires caused by the initial fireball.”

  The camera zoomed slowly upward, exhibiting the enormous swath of ruin left by the explosion.

  “We estimate that more than a million people would have died in the first hour after the blast, and that as many as two million more would have died within ninety days from their injuries or from radiation sickness.”

  The camera continued to pull back, and the scar on the face of Southern California was still visible as the curvature of the earth came into view. The room went dark, and then the lights came up slowly.

  The president spoke for the first time. “I want to thank all of you who had a part in finding and disabling this device before it could be set off. The entire country—indeed, the entire world—owes you all a debt of gratitude that can never be fully expressed. Indeed, it will never be expressed, since no one will know until most of us are dead. The public knowledge of this incident will be limited to the announcement that two bombs were discovered and disarmed on the site of the hotel and that one was set off by a coconspirator at Santa Monica Airport. After that, the airplane carrying McCallister to London was diverted to Kennedy Airport in New York, where his brother attempted to help him escape. Both were shot and killed by a CIA team dispatched to stop them. Dr. Kharl met his death a few hours later in Dubai, shot by a CIA sniper, who then made good his escape.