“Use this.” Kiera handed Rob a pen. They both knew it contained a hidden wireless flash drive—strictly verboten.
“Send me the files tonight.”
“And if I’m caught?”
“If you get caught then you aren’t as good as you keep telling everyone you are. Oh. And Rob? You’d better do it quick. Before someone tampers with the video.”
LATER THAT AFTERNOON, long after I should have recovered from my run outside, uncomfortable heat surged up my neck into my face. I ignored it until the third instance left me gasping and fanning myself.
Chantelle looked over at me. “Are you okay, Jayda? Your face is all red.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll run to the restroom and wash my face with cool water.”
I couldn’t wait and bolted from my chair. I remembered some vending machines in the next building, tucked into an alcove off the main corridor. I quick-walked to the machines.
“Nano. Pull down a can of soda for me—and remind me to pay the machine back at the end of the day.”
I grabbed the can as it came out and pressed it to my cheek. “Ahhhh.”
All the way to the restroom, I rolled the can across my forehead, cheeks, and back of my neck. When I reached the restroom, I ran the cold-water tap and splashed water on my face until I felt halfway normal. Then I folded several paper towels together, soaked them in cold water and laid them across the back of my neck.
As I was finishing, I decided to use the opportunity to scrub the video feeds. I had the nanomites pop open the paper towel dispenser. I laid my badge on the stack of folded paper towels and closed the dispenser. Under the nanomites’ cover, I raced to the Safety and Security Department, tiptoed to the receptionist’s desk, sent the nanomites into the system to expunge any video oddities, and waited.
Done, Jayda Cruz.
I crept from the Safety and Security Department, ran to the restroom, grabbed my badge, and came back out. Minutes later I was at my desk.
“Better?” Chantelle asked.
“Yeah. Don’t know what got into me.”
Chapter 12
A WHITE HOUSE STEWARD finished pouring two glasses of iced tea in the Oval Office. When he left, President Jackson and his Chief of Staff took their glasses in hand and sipped. Axel Kennedy stood apart from them, unobtrusive but vigilant.
“It’s been a long day, Marcus.”
“That it has been, Mr. President.”
“What’s my schedule like tomorrow?”
“National security briefing, 7 a.m. Breakfast with Secretary of Energy Mellyn at 8:15. Protocol officer at 9:30 to discuss Independence Day activities. Meeting with the party heads after lunch. Speaker Friese at 3:45. Oh, and I’ve penciled in Congresswoman Ballard at 2 p.m.”
“She asked for a meeting?”
“Yes, sir. Fifteen minutes.”
Jackson slid his eyes toward Kennedy while Park was referring to his day planner. Kennedy gave a slight nod, and the President returned his attention to Park.
“Fifteen minutes is enough time to angle for VP consideration, I would think.”
“Mr. President, until you make a selection, I think we can count on all possible candidates putting themselves forward.”
“It’s a year and a half to the next election. I’m tempted to let the position ride until then.”
“Do you dare keep the Speaker of the House, a member of the other party, next in line to the presidency?”
“I don’t think his own party would be happy to see him in office.”
Making it less likely they’ll try to get rid of me, Jackson added to himself.
“Agreed, sir, still . . .”
“Let’s leave it for now, Marcus. I’m due for dinner with the First Lady in a quarter of an hour. Tomorrow, then?”
“Yes, sir. Have a good evening, sir.”
As Park departed, Jackson motioned to Kennedy to take his seat.
“Sounds like I have three candidates to sound out tomorrow, Axel.”
“The most interesting fact, sir, is that all three are women.”
Jackson stared at the ice floating in his glass. “A woman nominee could garner a few votes that might otherwise be cast along party lines.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The daunting aspect of this process is not knowing which candidate conceals my enemies’ cat’s-paw.”
Kennedy nodded.
“Well, until tomorrow, then?”
WE WERE ON OUR WAY to the dojo. I didn’t know how Zander felt, but I craved a challenging workout for relief from the stress of a long and difficult day. In spite of my run during lunch, I needed some demanding physical exertion.
“I’m not sure how you do it, Jay. A couple of times today at the White House, I thought I would hyperventilate, I was that nervous.”
“I had my share of hairy moments early on, Zander. Over time, you get better at navigating the visible while invisible and better at working with the nanomites. After a while, your confidence grows, and it stops bothering you so much.”
My phone rang. “It’s Gamble.”
I put him on speaker. “Hey, Gamble.”
“Hey yourself. Just got off the phone with Agent Kennedy, the upshot being he pressed me for twenty minutes on how you, Zander, made those dirty agents sick to their stomachs. All I could tell him was that it had to be the nanomites—which only led to further questions such as how could the nanomites continue to make the agents sick for days afterward if they are with you and can’t leave your bodies for extended periods. I ended up telling him to back off, that I couldn’t help him because you guys keep aspects of the nanomites secret, even from me.”
“Good answer, Gamble.”
Zander chuckled. “Sending those traitors home with barf bags was the best part of my day.”
Zander Cruz, your order of barf bags will be delivered Wednesday by USPS. Do you wish this order to be added to your monthly subscriptions?
Zander and I lost it. We dissolved into laughter so gut-clenching we couldn’t catch our breath—which left Gamble grousing on the other end of the call.
“If you two clowns are done holding a laughfest at my expense, could you see your way to explaining just how you managed to make those guys sick? To satisfy my own curiosity.”
“We weren’t . . . we weren’t . . . laughing . . . at you, Gamble.”
“Y-y-yeah,” Zander stutter-laughed. “N-n-not you.”
“I’m so relieved—and touched. Now, how did you do it?”
I sobered before Zander did. “Turns out that two places in the brain—the ‘bilateral vomition centers’ in the medulla, to be exact—are what ultimately trigger vomiting. If you apply electric stimuli to those centers, you can elicit the desired reaction.”
“Let me get this straight: You sent the nanobugs to the agents’ brains to zing them and make them puke?”
“The nanomites gave the order to the array, and the nanobugs applied the stimuli.”
“Over and over,” Zander added with ill-disguised glee. He wiped tears from his eyes and blew his nose—and that set me off again.
“You two are . . . terrible!”
Zander and I tried hard to dredge up some shred of contrition, but it wasn’t happening. Instead, we lapsed into soundless, shoulder-quivering mirth.
A long, quiet moment passed before we heard Gamble chuckle to himself. “But I gotta say, I love it.”
“CAN’T WAIT TO GRADUATE to real sticks,” Zander said about six times during our drive to the dojo. “When do you think Gus-Gus will let me?”
His enthusiasm for stick fighting had endured all week, and he’d insisted that we order training shoes and a variety of sticks.
“When you’re ready for him to hit you with a ‘real’ stick,” I grumbled.
Oh! How well I remembered!
“Huh. I hadn’t thought about it that way.”
I worked hard that evening to regain the speed and agility months without training had sapped from me, and I made s
low but definite progress on that front. Zander, on the other hand, seemed born to exceed any skills I had labored so hard to cultivate.
I sat out a round and watched his sure, fluid movements and the incremental improvements Gus-Gus’ instructions prompted. Of course, the nanomites were helping Zander with stamina and tempo, just as they helped me, but it was obvious that my guy was a natural and would easily outstrip me.
Sighing, I admitted, “He’ll be able to beat me soon—probably by next week.” Then I smiled. Zander’s moves were so smooth and elegant, I couldn’t help but admire him in motion.
How had I landed such a hunk?
And he was grinning with such delight when we left the dojo that I had to grin with him.
“Do you think we’ll ever need to fight this way?” he asked. “I mean, the way we can draw current and throw it around, why would we need to stick fight?”
“I can’t foresee when we’d need to, but you never know. Like the nanomites keep drilling into us, we must become and remain ‘optimal.’”
EACH SUMMER, SIGHTSEERS brave the hot, sticky weather and flock to D.C. monuments, memorials, museums, and houses of government. Tour buses run from Union Station, across the front of the Capitol Building, down Independence Avenue to the Washington Monument, around the Tidal Basin and the Jefferson Memorial, past the Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lincoln Memorials, and up Constitution to the Ellipse, dropping passengers along the way, picking up others.
While the museums and other buildings lock their doors each evening, the National Mall—featuring most of the iconic, open-air monuments—is accessible twenty-four hours a day. This makes the Mall many a tourist’s nighttime destination, a means of beating the heat and the daytime crowds at the same time. Fitness buffs, too, frequent the bicycle- and jogger-friendly trails winding around the Mall and the Tidal Basin.
Two solitary figures, a man and a woman, meandered the paths around the Korean War Veterans Memorial. They seemed no different than other visitors wandering the mall in the late evening. That they met on the tree-lined walkway at the far end of the Memorial where the shadows were deeper garnered no attention. The two “tourists” walked together for exactly five minutes.
“You asked for this meeting, Danforth. I assume it’s of importance.” The woman’s voice, low and breathy, exuded an understated sensuality, a tool more than a dozen men had fallen prey to.
Danforth was not taken in by it. Back in their field days, he’d witnessed her in action, and a colder, more heartless agent he’d never known. Her tongue could whisper the sweetest of enticements one moment and flay the skin from a man’s bones the next.
He had no desire to be on the receiving end of such a lashing.
“Some in our ranks are asking if there is any possibility that Jackson discovered Harmon’s plan and, somehow, turned the tables on Harmon,” he began.
“Oh? Are they questioning the autopsy results?”
“No. The autopsy proves that Harmon succumbed to an undiagnosed condition, but they are questioning the coincidence of his coronary event occurring on that particular morning. A fluke too convenient to be random.”
She took his arm and leaned into him as a foursome of laughing, giggling teens approached. The couple lapsed into silence while the teens jostled by them. For a few moments, neither of them spoke.
When the teens were a safe distance away, the woman, retaining the man’s arm, replied, “I admit to the too-neat convenience of it. However, I can conceive of no means by which Jackson or any of his staff could have discovered or been alerted to the specifics of our plans. Only one of the four of us could have given them away.”
The man wished she would release his arm. Her cloying closeness made him sweat more than the heat of the night did.
Years ago, on a breathless evening such as this, the air redolent with the fragrant scent of flowering frangipani, he’d witnessed her rendezvous with a lover they’d discovered was a double agent. She had melted into the man’s arms, her hands tugging up his shirttail and caressing and teasing his skin—before she’d slid a hiltless stiletto into his liver.
The blade had been so sharp and narrow that, as she’d pressed herself harder into her lover’s embrace, he’d not felt its penetration until she pulled away. By then the knife was too deeply embedded for him to find it and yank it out. Even if he’d managed to grasp its end, he would not have been able to remove the knife—with its barbed blade—without shredding his blood-rich liver.
She’d watched him with curious disinterest as he vainly tried to extricate the instrument of his death. As he bled to death.
Danforth jerked his attention back to his whispered conversation with the woman.
“Could Harmon have given himself away? Robert Jackson is no fool.”
“Harmon was the consummate politician. He could have lied to his mother and gotten away with it.”
Danforth went at the concerns from another direction. “There is the question of the vial Harmon carried into his meeting with Jackson. Our people searched Harmon’s clothing before he was transported to ensure he was carrying nothing that would arouse suspicions. When we realized it was missing, we immediately dispatched assets to his office and home. Same result. Where did it go?”
She sighed. “That is indeed perplexing, and I have given it much thought. Perhaps . . . perhaps there is a simple answer. Housekeeping could have picked it up in the Oval Office and thrown it away, thinking it left behind by the paramedics.
“I suppose, too, that Harmon could have aborted the plan and tossed the vial before he arrived at the White House. He was, we must admit, untested in such a close and personal action. Not,” she smiled up into Danforth’s face, “like you and I.”
Danforth averted his eyes. “With respect, we see no evidence to support such a supposition. Harmon was committed to his role and there was no reason to abort the plan—which is why the vial’s disappearance is most troubling. Its compound could be traced back to our man at USAMRIID. Worse still, if Jackson were to have found the vial and realized what it was, it would mean that he was aware of Harmon’s intentions.”
“Calm yourself. I agree that Harmon aborting the mission makes little sense. On the other hand, had Jackson and his people suspected Harmon, how could they have arranged his coronary incident? That, too, seems unlikely.”
The woman thought for a moment. “Have our assets within the house noticed anything out of the norm? Has Jackson’s behavior changed in any manner?”
“Nothing has been reported.” He did not mention the flu bug running through the Secret Service ranks. She would have read some kind of nefarious action into it.
“Then we shall proceed on our alternate course. We will take the White House as planned—although our people may need years to worm their way into Bickel’s lab and regain the ground we lost there. And I remain most disappointed in the loss of that girl. The nanotechnology she carried was imperative to our objectives. I am quite disappointed indeed.”
The man, knowing the criticism was aimed at him, did not immediately answer. Harmon had been General Cushing’s handler. After the Vice President’s unexpected demise, the woman had pushed direct oversight of Cushing’s operation up to him, but it had been too late: Cushing had vanished.
When he did respond to the woman, it was to deflect her jab.
“It seems clear, in hindsight, that Harmon had lost control of Cushing prior to his death. As I reported earlier, General Cushing, before she blew herself up—taking the girl with her—had gone rogue. Totally incommunicado. Even her team lead could not reach her.”
The woman jerked her arm from his, giving vent to her anger. “Yes, yes, so you’ve said, and on more than one occasion. Does that replace the nanotechnology you lost? No! What Cushing destroyed is irreplaceable.”
The woman withdrew several feet and worked to gather herself. The man breathed easier when she squared her shoulders and continued walking.
“Now, what about Harmon’s replacement?�
�
Mercurial. The woman’s temper could flash and dissolve in seconds.
Glad of the change of direction, the man answered, “As you well know, Jackson’s greatest challenge is choosing a VP whom Congress will confirm. That narrows the field for him but works for us. As you directed, we are prepared to present the President with several candidates he should find amenable and whom we believe can be confirmed. They will, of course, be candidates we can control.”
“Jackson must select a VP of our choosing, and I expect you to ensure the right outcome.”
“Certainly.” As if I’d be fool enough to answer otherwise.
They parted company then, strolling in different directions. The male made for his vehicle parked at a distance east of the mall. The woman turned toward the Lincoln Memorial, deep in thought.
No, I don’t believe in coincidences, either, Mr. Danforth. If Harmon’s death was due to natural causes as the autopsy shows, then what became of the compound that should have been on his person? On the other hand, Harmon’s death was far too convenient, the timing too neat for happenstance. If it was a deliberate act, that would explain the disappearance of the vial.
Two irreconcilable sets of circumstances: One must be true and the other false.
Her snort of skepticism was followed by grudging acknowledgement.
So. Jackson had to have known Harmon intended to poison him—and forewarned is forearmed. But, if Jackson knew, how did he uncover the plot? The exact details and timing of the operation were limited to the four of us—Harmon, Danforth, Morningside, and myself. If, by some means, Jackson did find out, how had he arranged a “natural” death for Harmon?
Her thoughts returned to the galling loss of the nanotechnology and the last exchange she’d had with Harmon. It concerned a call between Harmon and Cushing on a secure line from within a SCIF—a call that resulted in Harmon unilaterally moving up the operation’s timeline.
She slowed and stopped, dropping to a bench near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, trying to solve the disturbing puzzle.
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