by Tom Clancy
THIS ONE HE found under a bush while moving a ladder from one part of the west face to another. The firefighter had been on duty for seven straight hours. He was numb by now. You can take only so much horror before the mind starts regarding the bodies and pieces as mere things. The remains of a child might have shaken him, or even a particularly pretty female, since this fireman was still young and single, but the body he’d accidentally stepped on wasn’t one of those. The torso was headless, and parts of both legs were missing, but it was clearly the body of a man, wearing the shredded remains of a white shirt, with epaulets at the shoulders. Three stripes on each of them, he saw. He wondered what that meant, too tired to do much in the way of thinking. The fireman turned and waved to his lieutenant, who in turn tapped the arm of a woman wearing a vinyl FBI windbreaker.
This agent walked over, sipping at a plastic cup and wishing she could light a cigarette—still too many lingering fumes for that, she grumbled.
“Just found this one. Funny place, but—”
“Yeah, funny.” The agent lifted her camera and snapped a couple of pictures which would have the exact time electronically preserved on the frame. Next she took a pad from her pocket and noted the placement for body number four on her personal list. She hadn’t seen many for her particular area of responsibility. Some plastic stakes and yellow tape would further mark the site; she started writing the tag for it. “You can turn him over.”
Under the body, they saw, was an irregularly shaped piece of flat glass—or glass-like plastic. The agent snapped another photo, and through the viewfinder things somehow looked more interesting than with the naked eye. A glance up showed a gap in the marble balustrade. Another look around revealed a lot of small metallic objects, which an hour earlier she’d decided were aircraft parts, and which had attracted the attention of an NTSB investigator, who was now conferring with the same fire-department officer with whom she’d been conferring a minute earlier. The agent had to wave three times to get his attention.
“What is it?” The NTSB investigator was cleaning his glasses with a handkerchief.
The agent pointed. “Check the shirt out.”
“Crew,” the man said, after putting them back on. “Maybe a driver. What’s this?” It was his turn to point.
There was a strange delicacy to it. The white uniform shirt had a hole in it just to the right of the pocket. The hole was surrounded by a red-rust stain. The FBI agent held her flashlight close, and that showed that the stain was dried. The current temperature was just under twenty degrees. The body had been thrown into this harsh environment virtually at the moment of impact, and the blood about the severed neck was frozen, the purple-red color of some horrid plum sherbet. The blood on the shirt, she saw, had dried before having the chance to freeze.
“Don’t move the body anymore,” she told the fireman. Like most FBI agents, she’d been a local police officer before applying to the federal agency. It was the cold that made her face pale.
“First crash investigation?” the NTSB man asked, seeing her face, and mistaking her pallor.
She nodded. “Yes, it is, but it’s not my first murder.” With that she switched on her portable radio to call her supervisor. For this body she wanted a crime-scene team and full forensics.
THE TELEGRAMS CAME from every government in the world. Most were long, and all had to be read—well, at least the ones from important countries. Togo could wait.
“Interior and Commerce are in town and standing by for a Cabinet meeting along with all the deputies,” van Damm said while Ryan flipped through the messages, trying to read and listen at the same time. “The Joint Chiefs, all the vices, are assembled, along with all the command CINCs to go over national security—”
“Threat Board?” Jack asked without looking up. Until the previous day he’d been President Durling’s National Security Advisor, and it didn’t seem likely that the world had changed too much in twenty-four hours.
Scott Adler handled the answer: “Clear.”
“Washington is pretty much shut down,” Murray said. “Radio and TV announcements for people to stay home, except for essential services. The D.C. National Guard is out. We need the warm bodies for the Hill, and the D.C. Guard is a military-police brigade. They might actually be useful. Besides, the firemen must be about worn out by now.”
“How long before the investigation gives us hard information?” the President asked.
“There’s no telling that, Ja—Mister—”
Ryan looked up from the official Belgian telegram. “How long since we’ve known each other, Dan? I’m not God, okay? If you use my name once in a while, no body’s going to shoot you for it.”
It was Murray’s turn to smile. “Okay. You can’t predict with any major investigation. The breaks just come, sooner or later, but they do come,” Dan promised. “We have a good team of investigators out there.”
“What do I tell the media?” Jack rubbed his eyes, already tired from reading. Maybe Cathy was right. Maybe he did need glasses, finally. Before him was a printed sheet for his morning TV appearances, which had been selected by lot. CNN at 7:08, CBS at 7:20, NBC at 7:37, ABC at 7:50, Fox at 8:08, all from the Roosevelt Room of the White House, where the cameras were already set up. Someone had decided that a formal speech was too much for him, and not really appropriate to the situation until he had something substantive to deliver. Just a quiet, dignified, and above all, intimate introduction of himself to people reading their papers and drinking their morning coffee.
“Softball questions. That’s already taken care of,” van Damm assured him. “Answer them. Speak slowly, clearly. Look as relaxed as you can. Nothing dramatic. The people don’t expect that. They want to know that somebody’s in charge, answering the phones, whatever. They know it’s too soon for you to say or do anything decisive.”
“Roger’s kids?”
“Still asleep, I expect. We have the family members in town. They’re at the White House now.”
President Ryan nodded without looking up. It was hard to meet the eyes of the people sitting around the breakfast table, especially on things like that. There was a plan for this, too. Movers were already on the way, probably. The Durling family—what was left of it—would be removed from the White House kindly but quickly, because it wasn’t their house anymore. The country needed someone else in there, and that someone needed to be as comfortable as possible, and that meant eliminating all visible reminders of the previous occupant. It wasn’t brutal, Jack realized. It was business. They doubtless had a psychologist standing by to assist the family members with their grief, to “process” them through it as best as medical science allowed. But the country came first. In the unforgiving calculus of life, even so sentimental a nation as the United States of America had to move on. When it came time for Ryan to leave the White House, one way or another, the same thing would happen. There had been a time when an ex-President had walked down the hill to Union Station from his successor’s inauguration to get a train ticket home. Now they used movers, and doubtless the family would fly out on Air Force transport, but go the children would, leaving behind schools and such friends as they had made, returning to California and whatever life their family members could reconstruct for them. Business or not, it was cold, Ryan thought while staring mindlessly at the Belgian telegram. How much the better for everyone if the aircraft had not fallen on the Capitol building ...
On top of all that, Jack had rarely been called upon to console the children of a man he knew, and damned sure hadn’t ever taken their home away. He shook his head. It wasn’t his fault, but it was his job.
The telegram, he saw on returning to it, noted that America had twice helped to save that small country within a space of less than thirty years, then protected it through the NATO alliance, that there was a bond of blood and friendship between America and a nation which most American citizens would have been taxed to locate on a globe. And that was true. Whatever the faults of his country, whatever he
r imperfections, however unfeeling some of her actions might seem to be, the United States of America had done the right thing more often than not. The world was far the better for it, and that was why business had to be carried out.
INSPECTOR PATRICK O’DAY was grateful for the cold. His investigative career had stretched over almost thirty years, and this was not his first time in the presence of multiple bodies and their separated parts. His first had been in Mississippi one May, a Sunday school bombed by the Ku Klux Klan, with eleven victims. At least here the cold eliminated the ghastly odor of dead human bodies. He’d never really wanted a high rank in the Bureau—“inspector” was a title with variable importance in the sense of seniority. In his case, much like Dan Murray, O’Day worked as a troubleshooter, often dispatched from Washington to assist on touchy ones. Widely recognized as a superb street agent, he’d been able to stick to real cases, large and small, instead of high-level supervision, which he found boring.
Assistant Director Tony Caruso had gone along another track. He’d been special agent-in-charge of two field offices, risen to head the Bureau’s Training Division, then taken over the Washington Field Office, which was sufficiently large to merit “AD” rank for its commander, along with one of the worst office locations in North America. Caruso enjoyed the power, prestige, higher pay, and reserved parking place which his status accorded him, but part of him envied his old friend, Pat, for his often dirty hands.
“What do you figure?” Caruso asked, staring down at the body. They still needed artificial light. The sun was rising, but on the far side of the building.
“You can’t take it to court yet, but this guy was dead hours before the bird came down.”
Both men watched a gray-haired expert from Headquarters Laboratory Division hover over the body. There were all manner of tests to be carried out. Internal body temperature was one—a computer model allowed for environmental conditions, and while the data would be far less reliable than either senior official would want, anything prior to 9:46 P.M. the previous evening would tell them what they needed to know.
“Knifed in the heart,” Caruso said, shivering at the thought. You never really got over the brutality of murder. Whether a single person or a thousand, wrongful death was wrongful death, and the number just told you how many individual records had been tied. “We got the pilot.”
O’Day nodded. “I heard. Three stripes, makes him the co-pilot, and he was murdered. So maybe it was just one guy.”
“What’s the crew on one of these?” Caruso asked the NTSB supervisor.
“Two. The earlier ones had a flight engineer, but the new ones don’t bother with it. For really long flights they might have a backup pilot, but these birds are pretty automated now, and the engines hardly ever break.”
The lab tech stood and waved in the people with the body bag before joining the others. “You want the early version?”
“You bet,” Caruso replied.
“Definitely dead before the crash took place. No bruising from the crash trauma. The chest wound is relatively old. There should be contusions from the seat belts, but there aren’t, just scrapes and gouges, with damn little blood there. Not enough blood from the severed head. In fact, not enough blood anywhere in the remains right here. Let’s say he was murdered in his seat in the aircraft. The belts hold him in a sitting position. Postmortem lividity drains all the blood down to the lower extremities, and the legs are torn off when the bird hits the building—that’s why there’s so little blood. I got a lot of homework to do, but quick-and-dirty, he was dead three hours at least before the plane got here.” Will Gettys handed over the wallet. “Here’s the guy’s ID. Poor bastard. I guess he wasn’t a part of this at all.”
“What chance you could be wrong on any of that?” O’Day had to ask.
“I’d be real surprised, Pat. An hour or two on time of death—earlier rather than later—yeah, that’s possible. But there’s nowhere near enough blood for this guy to have been alive at time of impact. He was dead before the crash. You can take that to the bank,” Gettys told the other agents, knowing that his career rode on that one, and comfortable with the wager.
“Thank God for that,” Caruso breathed. It did more than make things easier for the investigation. There would be conspiracy theories for the next twenty years, and the Bureau would proceed on its business, checking out every possibility, aided, they were sure, by the Japanese police, but one guy alone had driven this aircraft into the ground, and that made it extremely likely that this grand mal assassination, like most of the others, was the work of a single man, demented or not, skilled or not, but in any case alone. Not that everyone would ever believe that.
“Get the information to Murray,” Caruso ordered. “He’s with the President.”
“Yes, sir.” O’Day walked over toward where his diesel pickup was parked. He probably had the only one in town, the inspector thought, with a police light plugged into the cigarette lighter. You didn’t put something like this over a radio, encrypted or not.
REAR ADMIRAL JACKSON changed into his blue mess jacket about ninety minutes out from Andrews, having managed about six hours of needed sleep after being briefed on things that didn’t really matter very much. The uniform was the worse for having been packed in his travel bag, not that it would matter all that much, and the navy blue wool hid wrinkles fairly well anyway. His five rows of ribbons and wings of gold attracted the eye, anyway. There must have been an easterly wind this morning, for the KC-10 flew in from Virginia, and a muttered, “Jesus, look at that!” from a few rows aft commanded all in the forward part of the aircraft to crowd at the windows like the tourists they were not. Between the beginnings of dawn and the huge collection of lights on the ground it was plain that the Capitol building, the centerpiece of their country’s first city, wasn’t the same as it had been. Somehow this was more immediate and real than the pictures many of them had seen on TV before boarding the plane in Hawaii. Five minutes later, the aircraft touched down at Andrews Air Force Base. The senior officers found an aircraft of the Air Force’s First Heli Squadron waiting to take them to the Pentagon’s pad. This flight, lower and slower, gave them a better look still at the damage to the building.
“Jesus,” Dave Seaton said over the intercom. “Did anybody get out of there alive?”
Robby took his time before responding. “I wonder where Jack was when it happened....” He remembered a British Army toast—“Here’s to bloody wars and sickly seasons!”—which referred to a couple of sure ways for officers to be promoted into vacant slots. Surely quite a few people would fleet up from this incident, but none really wanted advancement this way, least of all his closest friend, somewhere down there in the wounded city.
THE MARINES LOOKED very twitchy, Inspector O’Day saw. He parked his truck on Eighth Street, S.E. The Marine Barracks were thoroughly barricaded. The curbs were fully blocked with parked cars, the gaps in the buildings doubly so. He dismounted his truck and walked toward an NCO; he was wearing his FBI windbreaker, and carrying his ID in his right hand.
“I have business inside, Sergeant.”
“Who with, sir?” the Marine asked, checking the photo against the face.
“Mr. Murray.”
“You mind leaving your side arm here with us, sir? Orders,” the sergeant explained.
“Sure.” O’Day handed over his fanny pack, inside of which was his Smith & Wesson 1076 and two spare magazines. He didn’t bother with a backup piece on headquarters duty. “How many people you have around now?”
“Two companies, near enough. There’s another one setting up at the White House.”
There was no better time to lock the barn door than after the horse got out, Pat knew. It was all the more grim since he was delivering the news that it was all unnecessary, but nobody would really care about that. The sergeant waved to a lieutenant who had nothing better to do—the NCOs ran things like this—than to conduct visitors across the quad. The lieutenant saluted for no more re
ason than being a Marine.
“Here to see Daniel Murray. He’s expecting me.”
“Please follow me, sir.”
The inner corners of the buildings on the quad had yet another line of Marines, with a third on the quad itself, complete with a heavy machine gun. Two companies amounted to upwards of three hundred rifles. Yeah, President Ryan was fairly safe here, Inspector O’Day thought, unless some other maniac driving an airplane was around. Along the way, a captain wanted to compare the photo on his ID with the face again. It was being overdone. Somebody had to point that out before they started parking tanks on the street.
Murray came out to meet him on the porch. “How good is it?”
“Pretty good,” the inspector replied.
“Come on.” Murray waved him in, and led his friend into the breakfast room. “This is Inspector O’Day. Pat, I think you know who these people are.”
“Good morning. I’ve been on the Hill, and we found something a little while ago that you need to know,” he began, going on for another couple of minutes.
“How solid is it?” Andrea Price asked.
“You know how this works,” O’Day responded. “It’s preliminary, but it looks pretty solid to me, and we’ll have good test data after lunch. The ID’s already being run. That may be a little shaky, because we don’t have a head to work with, and the hands are all ripped up. We’re not saying that we’ve closed the case. We’re saying that we have a preliminary indication that supports other data.”
“Can I mention this on TV?” Ryan asked everyone around the table.
