by Jack Mars
She glanced around the room. The faces were out of place, so much so that it took Susan a moment to recognize them. Here was Brent Staples, a long-time party campaign strategist. He had been instrumental, in fact, in getting Thomas Hayes and herself elected. There, in another corner of the room, was William Ackland, a major party fundraiser. He was as far from Brent Staples as possible while still being in the room with him. Susan knew that the two men hated each other.
“I’m sorry,” Susan said. “Did I call this meeting?”
“No,” a voice said. “I did.”
On Susan’s left, a man pushed up out of his chair. He had once been a very good-looking man, and he had retained some of that into his old age. His name was Ronald “Dutch” Evans, and he was the godfather of the party. A long-time Senator from California in the 1970s and 1980s, in 1992 he seemed like a shoo-in to become President. Then he was photographed by a newsstand tabloid with his young, bikini-clad mistress on a fishing boat aptly, if unfortunately, named Hanky Panky. His mistress was barely older than his daughters.
Even after that debacle, he had gone on and become the Chairman of the Party for nearly a decade. He had built a gigantic fundraising machine that included people like William Ackland, and a political machine that won dozens of state legislatures and governorships, courtesy of people like Brent Staples. Whatever his flaws, Dutch Evans was a powerful man.
“Hi, Dutch,” Susan said.
“Hi, Susan.” He gestured at her chair. “Won’t you sit down?”
“Dutch,” she said, “I’d like to remind you that this is my venue. You’re the visitor.”
“Susan, I was sleeping in the Lincoln Bedroom back when you were running for Prom Queen. You’re just a renter here. I own the place.”
Susan shook her head. She had never liked Dutch. It was galling, the amount of arrogance he could display.
“The Lincoln Bedroom is for special guests,” she said. “When we get the White House rebuilt, I’ll consider inviting you to sleep there again. Personally, I’ll be sleeping in the President’s quarters.”
She shrugged and smiled. This time, the smile felt genuine. “That’s where the President of the United States sleeps. Now how can I help you, Dutch?”
Dutch Evans sat back down. Only then did Susan find her own chair.
“Susan,” Brent Staples said, “we’re very concerned about what’s going on here. You might not feel like you owe Dutch anything. I believe you owe him a debt of gratitude for the way he has built this party, but you may not agree. That’s fine. But you know what I did for you and Thomas Hayes. Arguably, you wouldn’t be here if not for me.”
Susan stared at Brent. He was a weak-looking middle-aged man with thinning hair. He had a long nose and no chin to speak of. His body was thin and utterly without muscle tone. He wore ill-fitting suits that he seemed to swim inside of. And all of this belied the truth: he was one of the shrewdest political consultants alive. On the campaign trail, he was a warrior. He was vicious, relentless, and without remorse. He had personally engineered the strategies that made Thomas Hayes President, while at the same time demolishing the opposition.
“What are you telling me, Brent?”
“I’m telling you that you’re out on a limb right now. You are all by yourself. I’m telling you that you don’t hold secret midnight meetings where you appoint a member of the opposition as Secretary of Defense. We know that Ed Graves was here last night. Forget what you think you know about Ed. He tried to kill you a couple of months ago. He was successful in killing Thomas. The only reason he’s not in prison right now is he’s too dumb to learn how to use the internet. And his fingers are too fat to press the buttons on a keyboard.”
Dutch Evans raised a hand. “You also don’t simply throw the Chinese ambassador out of the country on your own initiative. Overnight, the Chinese expelled our ambassador to Beijing, and all of our embassy staff, including the United States Marines who guard the place. They have twelve hours to leave. Once the last of our people are out of there, the Chinese special police will have free run of the place. If we can’t get all of our computers out, and it’s really up to the Chinese whether we can or not, then the entire system will have to be destroyed. I hope I don’t have to tell you the kind of secrets housed inside that embassy.”
Susan stared at them. She was having trouble thinking of a rebuttal.
“All Americans in Hong Kong have been placed under curfew,” said William Ackland. He had white hair, bleary eyes, a thick nose lined with burst blood vessels, and a frame that people used to call “husky.” He wore a three-thousand-dollar suit, but he looked more like an alcoholic movie detective than the high-level fundraiser he was.
“After ten p.m., they can’t be on the streets. They’ve been told that their residence status will be reviewed with seventy-two hours. People are scared, Susan. We’re talking about friends of ours in the banking industry. People who helped you get elected, and who may or may not help you again. People who could help build a supermajority for you in the House of Representatives.”
Susan had walked into a trap. She had no friends in this room. That much was clear. She glanced at Kat Lopez. Kat’s eyes were on the floor. Kat was Susan’s chief-of-staff, but the party had brought Kat to her. She looked at Kurt Kimball, normally so confident, looking sheepish and hangdog now.
“Kurt?” she said.
He shrugged. “Susan, I wish we could have talked about this before you went and did it. You’ve brought the real war hawks on board, the worst of them, and I feel like I was boxed out of this decision.”
Susan shook her head.
She took a deep breath. “I don’t make my decisions,” she said, “based on the needs or the fears of rich bankers in Hong Kong. I also don’t base my decisions on what campaign consultants and fundraisers think.”
“Careful,” Dutch Evans said. “There are people in this room who made your career, and who can just as easily unmake it.”
“Don’t threaten me, Dutch. I’m not here to be threatened by you.”
“I’m curious,” Brent Staples said. “What do you base your decisions upon?”
She stared at Brent. “I base them on what I believe the American people want.”
Brent shook his head slowly, as if speaking to a small child, or maybe an imbecile. “Susan,” he said, and now his eyes were on fire. His eyes bore no relationship to his infirm body. His eyes were strong and fierce. “I decide what the American people want. I tell them what they want. I do it. Me. I am the American people.”
Now Susan shook her head. She almost laughed. “Men! Oh my God. You guys are so full of yourselves. Brent, you’re not the American people. Look at you. You don’t represent the hopes and dreams of millions. You’re a huckster in a traveling medicine show, right down to the bad suit.”
She looked at Dutch Evans now. “Okay Dutch, you’re the man behind the curtain, right? The Wizard of Oz. But why are you behind the curtain? Because the American people didn’t want you up front, that’s why. Once they got a real good look at you, and your boat, and your girlfriend, not even people like Bill Ackland and Brent Staples could save you. Am I right? Am I right?”
Dutch Evans shook his head. “We’re your friends, Susan. We’re trying to help you. The last thing you want is to find yourself without friends. Bad things could start to happen.”
“There you go again, threatening me,” Susan said.
Evans stood. He was just the slightest bit shaky on his feet. Susan noticed that he carried a cane with him. It was a handsome cane of polished wood.
“I don’t want to see your approval rating tank any further than it already has,” Evans said. “And I definitely don’t want to see you get impeached. You might want to consider resigning before such a thing can happen.”
“Resigning?” Susan said. “Dutch, you’re out of your mind.”
“Think about it, Susan. It wouldn’t be the worst thing that can happen.”
With that, he limped out
of the room. Brent Staples followed him with two aides. After a moment, William Ackland packed up and left by himself. One by one, people were leaving the Situation Room. They were all party insiders. Outside of Kurt Kimball, there wasn’t a foreign policy person to be seen.
The last person to leave was Michael Parowski. He smiled at her. He looked like the cat who had just swallowed the family bird. Susan gazed at him in astonishment. They had pushed him on her. His formal announcement as Vice President was tomorrow morning. And already they were talking about impeachment, or resignation. They were moving him in, and moving her out.
She shook her head. She wouldn’t let it happen.
“You’re done, Susan,” he said quietly. “You know that, right?”
“Mister, you don’t know what done looks like.”
The room was empty now, except for Susan, Kat Lopez, and Kurt Kimball. Neither Kat nor Kurt would look directly at her.
“If we’re going to continue,” she said, “I need to know something from you two. Are you on my side, or aren’t you? We’re coming to find out that everyone is expendable around here. Kat, I shit-canned my last chief-of-staff with five minutes’ notice. Kurt, I’m sure the RAND Corporation has a pretty deep bench. I’m sure Jane’s does, too. My point being you’re not the only national security expert on the planet.”
They both looked up and stared at her now.
“If you’re on my team, you’re on my team.” She gestured at the men who had just gone out the door. “Not theirs. And I need you to say so.”
“I’m here to help you, Susan,” Kurt said. “But you have to let me do that.”
Coming from Kurt, that was good enough. Susan looked at Kat.
“I’m on your side, Susan.”
Susan smiled. “Good. Kat, the primary order of business for you today is to arrange Michael Parowski’s first trip abroad as Vice President. Thursday afternoon, I want him out of here. A good place for him to start will be Ethiopia. They have a tribe there, the women wear these giant plate things pierced through their lips…”
She glanced at Kurt.
“The Mursi,” he said. “They’re a desert tribe.”
Now Susan’s smile was broader than ever. “Yes. The Mursi tribe. We haven’t engaged in any diplomacy with them in a long while. They’re important friends of ours, and I want them to know that. Arrange for Michael to spend a week or so with them. Make sure we send a good photographer. I don’t want to miss a moment of it.”
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
7:21 a.m.
Ocean City, Maryland
“Luke? Luke, we might have something.”
Sometime before, the sun had risen in yellow and pink over the Atlantic Ocean. Luke had taken his T-shirt off and wrapped it over his eyes. He lay across a lounge chair on the roof deck of Swann’s penthouse.
He felt the early morning sun warming the skin of his upper body. He enjoyed the feeling. For the moment, he didn’t want to know anything but this feeling. He didn’t want to open his eyes. He didn’t want to think about yesterday, or about what might happen today. He just wanted to stay here, feel the sun, listen to the call of the gulls, and smell the sea breeze.
Was that too much to ask?
“Luke?”
“Yeah, Swann. I’m awake. What is it?”
“We might have something for you.”
Luke took the shirt off his head. The sky was bright—almost too bright to look at. Swann stood above him. He wore all the same clothes as last night. Same BLACK FLAG T-shirt, same aviator glasses, same jeans. His feet were now bare. He smiled. It was a sickly, wan smile. Swann looked like hell.
Behind Swann, the ocean stretched from left to right, a 180-degree panoramic view.
“Have you been up all night?” Luke said.
“Yes. Me and Trudy. We’ve been working.”
“Where’s Ed?”
“Here,” came a voice from behind Luke. Luke turned just slightly, and there was big Ed about ten feet away, bare-chested, sitting in Swann’s hot tub. The hot tub was embedded into the roof. Three shallow steps led up to the lip of it. Luke realized he had been listening to the sound of the tub’s water jets for a while now. It had been so subtle that he barely noticed it—he might have been dreaming it.
“You want to see what we dug up?” Swann asked.
Luke sighed heavily. He was more tired than he had been in a while. It surprised him a little that he was the last one to wake up, and that Swann and Trudy hadn’t slept at all. “Sure,” he said.
He pulled his T-shirt on and followed Swann through the open sliding glass doors.
Trudy sat in Swann’s little command center. At some point in the night, she had ditched the orange jumpsuit. Now she was wearing cast-off clothes from Swann. She had a pair of faded jeans on, the cuffs rolled up to a ridiculous point, the waistband cinched tight with what looked like a length of Cat-5 computer cable. She also wore an old Cincinnati Bengals T-shirt. She had apparently washed her hair as well—the ponytail was gone, and her hair hung down in curls.
She looked stunning. Exhausted, but beautiful.
“Does that T-shirt belong to Swann?” Luke said. “How does it even fit you?”
“I’ve had that shirt since high school,” Swann said. “It’s one of those shirts where the bottom is cut off to show people your tight abs. If it was a normal length, it would be down to her knees.”
Luke looked at Swann.
“Good morning to you, too,” Trudy said.
Luke shook his head. “Good morning, Trudy. Good morning, Swann. Let’s see what you guys have for me.”
Luke sat in a rolling office chair that Swann pushed toward him. He pulled up next to Trudy at the desk. She had both computer monitors going, stacks of windows open on each one. Swann disappeared into the kitchen for a moment, then reappeared carrying another coffee cup, steam rising from it. He handed it to Luke.
“Okay, Luke?” Trudy said. “Ready? I’m going to assume no prior knowledge.”
Luke nodded. “Fair enough.”
“Swann pulled me down intel from everywhere. People have been poring over massive amounts of data from the target lists you guys found in Atlanta, as well as the attacks themselves. There’s an effort underway to link the style of these attacks to known cyber-war and hacking tendencies. A major problem here is neither of the hacks were terribly sophisticated. They were both low-hanging fruit, although the DC Metro hack was a bit more advanced than the dam.”
“The dam was child’s play,” Swann said. “Quite literally, a couple of smart twelve-year-olds could have done it.”
Trudy raised one finger. “Except that the hackers masked their location by bouncing their signal all around the world, through a long series of both real and fake IP addresses.”
“True,” Swann said.
Trudy went on. “I spent most of the night coming up to speed on the case as the analysts understand it so far. The government has people from NSA, FBI, CIA, and Naval intelligence digging into this. Because of the capture of Li Quiangguo, it seems that most analyses start from the assumption that the Chinese are behind this. Either the Chinese government, Chinese criminal gangs, or maybe the Chinese doomsday cult that you uncovered. Since those bases are well covered, I decided to come at it from a different direction.”
“That’s why we hired you,” Luke said.
“I assumed that the Chinese didn’t do it, and began by looking for evidence that might confirm this. I didn’t have to look too far.”
“Show me,” Luke said.
Trudy clicked on the screen. An image appeared of a thick male body lying face down on some wet tiles. The man’s entire upper body was a mad tangle of ink.
“This is Li Quiangguo, moments after he was found dead in the shower. As you can see, he is covered in tattoos.”
“Yes,” Luke said. “Somewhere on there he has a tattoo indicating he’s a member of the Eastern Lightning cult.”
“Yes he does,” Trudy said. “It’s on h
is left shoulder. Who told you that?”
Luke smiled. “I’m not at liberty to discuss everything. Let’s just say someone I spoke to was familiar with this case.”
“Well, the guy has tattoos all over his body. He has his life story inscribed on his skin. I’m guessing someone was assigned to decipher all these messages, but I haven’t seen that analysis. So I did some myself. And here’s what I came up with. Li Quiangguo wasn’t Chinese. He was Korean, and specifically, he was North Korean. If there was the time, or the inclination, I’d bet a thousand dollars that DNA testing would confirm this. Koreans, generally speaking, were isolated on the peninsula for a long time. Despite their close proximity to both the Japanese and the Chinese, they have a very unique DNA signature that makes them distinct from other groups.”
“Okay,” Luke said. “But since we’re not going to do a DNA sample, how do you know he’s North Korean?”
Trudy made an open hand gesture. “As I mentioned to you, I spent eighteen months listening to Chinese transmissions after I got out of school. When that was over, I spent nearly a year monitoring transmissions from the North Koreans. That… was a grim year.”
“So you’re an expert,” Luke said.
She shook her head. “I know a little bit. Enough to see that our man Li has his North Korean pride all over his body. A lot of it is mixed up with the two dozen other tattoos he has, but there’s enough here to make sense of it. For example…”
She clicked on the image, and the screen zoomed in on Li’s upper back. He had an image there of a blue lake surrounded by craggy, snow-capped peaks. It was a well-done, highly professional tattoo. Beneath it were some Asian characters.
백두산
“The body of water is called Heaven’s Lake. It’s at the top of Mount Baektu, which is an active volcano on the border of China and North Korea. The hills you see surrounding it are actually the rim of the volcano. The mountain has been disputed territory between the Chinese and Koreans since the dawn of time. Mount Baektu is also the legendary birthplace of Kim Jong-il, former Supreme Leader of North Korea.”
