Zero Day

by Ezekiel Boone

  Manny tried to be patient, but it was all he could do not to shake Specialist Green, to yell at her to hurry. He could feel it, knew there was something important there. The way Steph had been surprised that Cannon knew about Matthew 5:45; that Cannon thought it might save them from Broussard; and the very fact that this was something Manny didn’t know about.

  “Okay, so this is the last couple, not just forty-five, but it goes something, something, ‘Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,’ something, something, then ‘he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.’ ”

  As she got more comfortable, her voice rose and fell, the cadence of a preacher’s kid coming through; by the time she finished, Manny thought maybe she’d missed her calling by picking the military.

  “That’s it,” she said. “It’s the part about the rain. ‘He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.’ Mom was big on that, the idea that you couldn’t just pick and choose God’s love. It fell everywhere.”

  Manny’s heart was beating hard in his chest. It was too soon for the caffeine to have kicked in, he knew. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Exactly!” Specialist Green said brightly.

  “No, I . . . Never mind,” Manny said. He started walking briskly back toward the town house.

  He didn’t run, because he wasn’t in the shape for that, but he didn’t dither either. At the front door, he paused only long enough for the Secret Service agents to verify him, and then hustled up the steps. Inside, he tucked the paper bag full of soda under his arm so that he could hold the open Diet Coke and have one hand free to jab impatiently at the elevator button. He thought for a second about taking the stairs, but he didn’t want to get to Steph’s room and have to catch his breath before going in. When the elevator arrived with a charming ding, Manny stepped in and hit the button for Steph’s floor. The ride couldn’t have been more than ten seconds, but it felt like an eternity. The entire time he kept saying the words over and over to himself: “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”

  As always, there were a pair of Secret Service agents standing sentry outside the president’s door. He ignored them and knocked hard. Pretty much the same way he’d started the day, he thought. And once again it was George who opened the door. Manny’s knocking had clearly woken the president’s husband. He was wearing a pair of surprisingly nice pajamas, royal blue with thin red pinstripes. The pajamas threw Manny off for a moment. Had the pajamas been waiting inside this room the whole time, in case the president needed to use this top secret hideaway? Had whoever planned these New York City bunkers been that thorough? No. Eyes on the prize.

  “I need to talk to her,” he said. “Five minutes.”

  “She just fell asleep, Manny. Can it wait?”

  Manny didn’t say anything, and he didn’t need to. George blinked as he realized that Manny wouldn’t have knocked in the first place if it were something that could wait. He stepped back and let Manny in, hesitated, and then stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind him to give Manny and Steph privacy to talk.

  Steph was already sitting up and leaning against the headboard by the time he got over to the bed. He saw her glance at the clock on her nightstand and then at him. He sat down on the edge, holding the paper bag on his lap.

  “They’re back?”

  “This isn’t about the spiders.”

  “What is it?” She didn’t waste any time. Like George, she knew Manny wouldn’t have woken her if it were for something small.

  “Matthew 5:45. ‘He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust,’ ” Manny said. “As we were leaving the USS Elsie Downs, Billy said you could exercise Matthew 5:45.”

  “Manny . . .”

  “This isn’t the time, Steph. Look, I’m a big boy. I’m okay with the idea that there are things the president knows that I don’t. I figure from your surprise when Cannon said it that not that many people know about whatever this is. The number of people who know about Operation SAFEGUARD is minuscule, but I know about that, so I figure that whatever this is, it must be an even bigger deal. But I asked a soldier about Matthew 5:45. The Bible verse. It rains on ‘the just and on the unjust,’ right? Cannon was talking about a way to disable our nuclear weapons, and I was thinking of Operation SAFEGUARD, but that’s single authorizations. This is something that cuts across the whole nuclear program, isn’t it? Like a master switch?”

  Steph reached out and took a sip of water from the glass on her nightstand. “I don’t know how Cannon found out about it. It was one of those pie-in-the-sky ideas, you know? The entire program was designed for a scenario like this one.”

  Manny was taken aback. “Spiders? Really?”

  Steph gave him a long, slow blink. “No. Of course not spiders. No, the entire thing was designed around the worry that we would have a coup. Our military is as good as they get, but you always have fringe elements, and, well, our last president was both paranoid and unpopular, so it was a worry for him. Besides, great democracies don’t stay great if they aren’t vigilant, and our military is so large that bad actors do occasionally slip through the cracks. Anyway, after the Vail incident, my predecessor wanted to make sure we had a way to shut everything down as needed. He didn’t get a second term, but the Matthew 5:45 project was almost complete by the time I took office. I decided that, in light of Vail, it wouldn’t hurt to have a backup to Operation SAFEGUARD.”

  She didn’t mean the ski town. The Vail incident had happened three years before she’d taken office, and it was so classified that he knew only the general outlines: a lone mentally unstable officer in the United Kingdom had, for an extremely brief period—less than three minutes—gotten control of the entire British nuclear arsenal and initiated a system-wide launch protocol. Thankfully, three minutes was not long enough for anything other than a good scare, and the British government did such a good job of keeping it quiet that not even a whisper had gotten out to the public. In fact, that was all Manny knew about what happened. He didn’t even know why it was called the “Vail” incident. But he knew that in the very small circles of those in the United States government who knew the details—and they were small circles indeed if they didn’t include Manny Walchuck—there was real concern that something similar could happen in the United States. What Steph had said was right. As good as the military was—and he fervently believed it was the best in the world—among the hundreds of thousands of men and women wearing the uniform, not all of them could be trusted.

  As evidenced by Broussard and those who were following him.

  “And?”

  “And, Manny, quite obviously, yes, Matthew 5:45 is designed to shut down our entire nuclear system in the event that there is some sort of internal breach.” She crossed her arms, frowning. He couldn’t tell whether she was pissed because he’d woken her up or because of something else.

  “There’s more to it, I’m guessing,” Manny said. “Otherwise you would have already initiated it, right? Because I’m sure Broussard and his folks are working really hard right now to circumvent things.”

  “We’ve got a couple of days until Operation SAFEGUARD goes down. You could have waited to ask me about this until the morning.” She looked down at his lap. “Are you holding a grocery bag full of Diet Coke?”

  “Steph. We don’t have a lot of time.” He leaned down and put the bag on the floor. “I just talked to Cathy Silverberg. Back-channel stuff. We’re losing the NYPD. Broussard’s message is echoing. She thinks, best case, we’ve got forty-eight hours. And right now the soldiers we’ve got surrounding
us are loyal, but there’s no guarantee they’re going to stay that way. You’re the president. For now.”

  Those last two words sounded bad, even to Manny, and he could see Steph flinch as he said them.

  She ran her fingers through her hair and was about to speak when they both heard a noise behind them. Manny looked back to see George sticking his head through a crack where the door was open.

  “Need a few more minutes?”

  “Sorry,” Manny said. “I know it’s late.”

  “Well, I’m awake now. Maybe I’ll go down and see if I can find some ice cream.”

  They waited for the door to close. Steph smiled a little ruefully. “Poor George. I don’t think he ever really believed I’d win the presidency.” She bit her lip. “Manny, am I doing the right thing here? Could Broussard be right? Maybe it’s better to go down swinging.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Manny asked.

  She considered. “No. Normally, I’d say yes, but if Broussard gets his way, there’s no hope. We kill the spiders, but we kill ourselves, too.” She chuckled and stared at her hands. “It’s actually funny, believe it or not, because Matthew 5:45 works in this case. The reason the program is called Matthew 5:45 is because of the idea that rain falls on both the just and the unjust. You know, the idea that nuclear weapons don’t discriminate. Supposedly we’ve got nukes as a way of keeping the peace. The whole idea is that they’re such powerful weapons that we’ll never need to use them. Mutually assured destruction. That’s the thing, isn’t it? During a nuclear war, it’s going to rain on the just and the unjust alike.

  “I don’t think anybody ever thought we’d deliberately use nuclear weapons on our own citizens as a protective measure. But it fits here, doesn’t it? Broussard thinks he’s doing the right thing. But in blowing the hell out of the spiders, the just will suffer as well.” She looked up from her hands at Manny. “After the Vail incident, the worry was that we’d have a single officer or a small number of officers who go rogue and are able to wrest control of the entire nuclear arsenal. Operation SAFEGUARD is terrific in terms of managing individual nukes, but that assumes the president is in control. So yes, there’s Matthew 5:45. But the problem is that if I initiate Matthew 5:45, there’s no rewind. It’s a one-way street.”

  “So what? If it locks Broussard out from using nuclear weapons, it buys us—”

  “No, Manny, you don’t understand. It won’t lock only Broussard out. It will lock everybody out. Permanently. There’s no take-backs on this. It’s some sort of computer virus. Once we set it in motion, we’re crippling ourselves permanently. I can’t order this and then decide a couple of days from now that I do, in fact, want to keep nuking those goddamned spiders. Look, when this first started, Broussard and all the brass were pushing hard for me to go nuclear, and I pushed back. I was adamant that we weren’t going to use nuclear weapons. The thing that appealed to me about the Spanish Protocol was that it seemed like a way to protect America from herself. We could carve the country up with minimal casualties. Give those parts of the country that hadn’t been infested the best chance to survive. Cripple some of America and hope that we’d last long enough to heal.

  “We tried. I thought it was a good plan, and I think maybe, if we’d done it sooner, it might have made a difference. If we’d initiated the Spanish Protocol in the hours after that container ship spilled its spiders onto the streets of Los Angeles. Despite second-guessing, nobody really thought nuking LA at that point in time was the right thing, but I could have ordered something more aggressive than a quarantine and a full stop of domestic flights. But you know how that turned out. And you know how the Spanish Protocol turned out. We crippled our highways and infrastructure and it barely slowed those monsters.

  “I don’t regret ordering those nuclear strikes. I don’t,” she said, and she was quiet for a second, staring at Manny beseechingly.

  “You did the right thing. You did what you needed to do,” he said.

  “I know, but that doesn’t make it feel any better,” she said. “And what if it comes down to that? What if we reach a point a few days from now when it’s clear that we’ve lost? When it’s clear that I should have followed Broussard’s advice? If I initiate Matthew 5:45, I’m not giving myself any leeway.”

  Manny realized he was still holding his open can of soda, and he took a sip, but Steph was waiting for him to respond. He thought for a second and then remembered one of the first times he realized Steph was going places.

  “Do you remember, in college, when you threw your medical-school applications in the trash? I asked you how you knew that you didn’t want to be a doctor. Your parents were both doctors, and you had spent your entire life—your entire time in high school and up to the beginning of your senior year of college—planning to go to medical school. And there you were, dumping your applications in the trash so that you could instead apply to law school, because you’d decided that politics was your calling. I mean, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life at that point, but you were so sure of yourself. Do you remember what you said?”

  Steph gave a little shake of her head. She was looking down at the covers of the bed, but he knew he was getting to her. She had a small, warm smile on her face. “No. I honestly don’t remember this at all, but I’m guessing you’re about to tell me.”

  “You said that, for every person, there are only a handful of moments when you have to consciously make a truly important decision that will alter the entire landscape of your life. The trick, you said, is that when you make one of those decisions, you have to throw yourself entirely behind it. The moment you commit yourself to a direction, you have to act like it was inevitable, as if your entire life was leading up to that moment and that decision, and never, ever look back with regret. You said that to look back was to be like Orpheus.”

  “Orpheus? Really?” She laughed a little. “God. I was a smarty-pants, wasn’t I?”

  “A little. Total honesty here? I had to look up what the myth of Orpheus was,” he said, and that made him smile, too. Orpheus. The ancient Greek musician who charmed his way into the underworld to bring his wife back from the dead, and who lost her just at the moment of salvation because he looked back to make sure she was really following him.

  “That’s pretty good. Did I really say all of that?”

  “More or less.”

  She flicked her hand at him. “Okay.”

  “Okay, as in you’re going to initiate the lockout?”

  “Okay, as in it’s after midnight, I’m exhausted, and my husband is downstairs eating a bowl of ice cream. Get out of here, let me go back to sleep, and I’ll decide in the morning. We’ve got that long, don’t we?”

  Manny took his bag of Diet Cokes and left the room. His security detail—the two soldiers still carrying the other bags—followed him to his office, where he gave Champ the Diet Cokes and strict orders to reserve them for Manny’s personal use. There were ten people still waiting outside his office for an audience, and he moved through them as quickly as possible, finishing up about half past one in the morning. There was a bunk room downstairs in the basement that he could have gone to, but there was also a perfectly good couch in his office and he sent Champ to scare up a blanket and a pillow.

  Once Champ had come and gone and closed the door behind him, Manny closed his eyes and thought of Orpheus. It was a beautiful story, really. To love someone so much you’d literally walk through hell to bring them back? But it bothered him, too, because he knew there was more to the story—that there was something else that happened after Orpheus looked back. He couldn’t remember what it was, but he was sure it was another tragedy. Wasn’t it always that way with the Greeks?

  Operation SAFEGUARD, Undisclosed Location, Top Secret

  The most important job in the world was wildly boring. Or it had been until very, very recently.

  As far as the general public, his family, and his girlfriend were concerned, Lieutenant Colonel Lou Jenks had ea
rned his silver bars through distinguished service in the air force. Which wasn’t completely untrue. What was completely untrue was that he commanded a company that was essentially a roving force responsible for maintenance of helicopters and planes used in active-duty SpecOps missions. As cover, it worked well. All he had to say when asked was that he couldn’t divulge any details about where he was or it might compromise the safety of the SpecOps forces. Sometimes, if he wanted to seem particularly mysterious, he would add that he couldn’t even tell them whether he was working with SEALs or Rangers or Air Force Special Tactics or whomever this trip, because all of it was just so darn sensitive. Loose lips sink ships and all that.

  His cover story even explained why he was gone for six weeks out of every eight; he was, ostensibly, in the field. His girlfriend didn’t like that he was gone, but she did seem to get a kick out of the whole international-man-of-mystery thing. She asked him constantly where he’d been just so that he would have to say, “No, sorry, I can’t even give the smallest hint, no, not even to you, sweetie, even though we’ve been dating for three years and of course I trust you, but we’re talking about a sacred trust that the United States government and the fighting men of our armed forces have given me to keep the faith. I’m sorry. I just can’t tell you.”

  Of course, even if he’d been allowed to tell his girlfriend or his family or his friends where he’d been, he couldn’t tell them. He had to submit to a sedative and a hood that blocked out all visual stimulation both coming and going. His job was simply to spend six weeks out of every eight sitting in a bunker that was so secret, he doubted there were more than a thousand people in the entire military or government who even knew it existed; heck, it was so secret that even though he worked and lived there, he didn’t actually know where there was. All he knew for sure was that when he went to the bunker, he had to fly from where his family lived in Denver to Washington, DC, and from there he was draped with a hood and sedated, and then he woke up in the bunker. When he left the bunker, he always woke up to his hood being pulled off in the same nondescript room in the Pentagon. He was pretty sure the bunker was somewhere on the East Coast, maybe in North or South Carolina, or Georgia, but even then he was guessing a bit. So if his family and friends and girlfriend thought he was out in the field supporting SpecOps, well, that was fine. Besides, when it was all over with, he’d be able to at least tell them what his real rank was. In public, he was Air Force captain Lou Jenks, but the truth was that part of the deal for being assigned to Operation SAFEGUARD was that he’d been promoted well past captain, to the rank of lieutenant colonel. So what if he hadn’t been near an actual aircraft in an official role in more than two years, and so what if he didn’t have even a single man under his direct command?