by Jack Mars
Begley lowered his voice. “I’ll be honest with you. People are already questioning Don’s judgment for bringing you up here. The Special Response Team is Don’s pet project, right? The whole thing could get broken up and scattered to the winds faster than I even thought it would. You did me a favor today.”
Begley rose from his crouch. “Get the cuffs off these guys,” he said to someone nearby. “Then walk them out of here. Straight out to the elevator, then down to the street. No pauses, no chit-chatting, no looking right or left. If they give you any trouble at all, shoot them both in the head.”
“Sir?”
Begley shrugged. “That’s my little joke.”
Two men pulled Luke to his feet. He caught a glimpse of Begley and Myerson leaving the room. The cops uncuffed Luke, then handed him his gun and his badge. Ed Newsam stood just to his left, receiving the same treatment.
Luke glanced at the computer, his external hard drive still attached to it. The horizontal bar was almost entirely green. The file transfer was nearly done. Luke caught Ed’s attention. Ed’s eyebrows arched for a split second.
“Let’s go,” a cop said. “Out.”
Ed walked first, Luke following. Ed’s broad back filled Luke’s field of vision. They took two steps out of the room. To the right, Ali Nassar sat in an accent chair. He was back inside his plush white robe, talking on his cell phone. A female cop injected a local anesthetic into his hand, and immediately began setting his fingers in temporary splints. Nassar made exaggerated winces from the pain.
Suddenly Ed dropped to the ground. His head hit the floor with a thud. His eyes rolled back, showing the whites. A violent tremor went through his body. His head and arms jerked. Within a few seconds, a trickle of white foam began to flow from his mouth.
“Oh, Jesus,” Luke said. He kneeled by Ed’s side.
Begley had turned around. “Get out of there, Stone!”
Luke stood and backed away, his hands in the air. The cops moved in.
“What’s the matter with him?” Begley said.
“He has a seizure disorder. He was in a Humvee that took a direct hit in Afghanistan, and he sustained a serious head injury. Slight brain damage, altered brain waves. I’m not really sure. You just have to keep his airways clear. It should pass in a few minutes.”
“You guys have an agent in the field that gets seizures?”
“I don’t make these decisions, Ron.”
“Okay, step back. These guys know what they’re doing. They’ll take care of it.”
Luke took a step back. Then another. A circle of cops kneeled and stood around Ed. A few seconds passed, and Begley returned to his conversation with Myerson. Luke floated backwards slowly, as though he were standing still. He retreated into the office. He darted to the computer, pulled out his hard drive, and dropped it into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants. He picked up a blue pen off the desk.
He turned. A cop stood in the doorway.
Luke held up the pen. “Almost forgot my pen.”
The cop gestured out the door. “Come on.”
In the main room, Ed had stopped foaming at the mouth. He lay on his side, barely moving. His eyes closed, and then slowly opened. A couple of cops helped him to a sitting position. He blinked his eyes again. He seemed like a person who did not know where he was.
“You okay?” someone said. “You hit your head pretty hard.”
Ed took a deep breath. He was clearly embarrassed to be vulnerable in front of all these macho cops. “I don’t know, man. The stress. The lack of sleep. This only happens when I’m rundown.”
Luke glanced around the room. To his right, Nassar was off the phone. He stood talking to the cop who had splinted his fingers. Luke made a beeline for him.
“Stone!”
Luke held out his left hand to Nassar, as though he wanted to shake hands. Nassar, grim-faced, ignored the gesture. Luke reached out, grabbed him by his robe, and pulled him close. They were face to face, close enough to kiss.
“I know what you did,” Luke said. “And I’m going to take you down.”
“You will be unemployed by this afternoon,” Nassar said. “I will see to it.”
Then the cops were everywhere, separating them. A big burly cop put Luke in a full nelson and swung him around.
“Enough!” Begley shouted. “Get these clowns out of here!”
In the elevator down, they were surrounded by cops. It was quiet, everyone watching the numbers descending rapidly.
“You okay?” Luke said.
Ed shrugged. “I’m tired. I haven’t had one of these in a couple of years. They wipe me right out. My whole body is still shaking.”
On the street, the cops let them go. They walked side by side along the tree-lined street, back to the waiting SUV. Luke didn’t speak until they were fifty yards away from the cluster of cops.
“A seizure?” he said. “You’ve never had a seizure in your life.”
Ed smiled. “Seizures are my standby. But to make it work, you have to sell it.”
“You sold it, all right. When I heard your head hit the ground, even I wasn’t sure. I swear I felt it in my feet.”
“Right. Good thing I have a hard head. And I always keep a couple of foaming pills on me to double it down. How’d you do?”
Luke shrugged. “I got the hard drive. And that last little bit? The confrontation with Nassar? That’s an old pickpocket move.” He reached into his cargo pants and pulled out a new smartphone in a white plastic case. “I took the man’s cell phone out of his robe.”
Chapter 16
7:20 a.m.
Site R - Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania
“Gentlemen, the meeting will now come to order.”
Fourteen men had gathered in a quiet chamber deep beneath the surface of the earth. The chamber was mostly bare, with a large conference table in the center, a poured concrete floor, and rounded stone walls and ceiling. LED lights were mounted in recessed ceiling fixtures. Oxygenated air was pumped into the room through several small vents. The complete lack of windows gave the room the sense of being the dead end of a cave, which is exactly what it was. A claustrophobic wouldn’t last five minutes in there.
There was no audio or recording equipment in the chamber. An intercom attached to the facility-wide communications system had been removed a decade before. Built into one wall was an old interactive computer projection screen, which at one time would display both a map of the world and a map of the United States. It could be used to plot the location of troop deployments, aircraft, even missile launches. Theoretically, the device still worked, but the theory was untested. No one had turned it on since 1998.
The chamber was behind a double-thick steel door at the end of a metal catwalk. The catwalk teetered three stories above a dim and cavernous command and control room operated around the clock by a skeleton crew of military personnel. This was the deepest part of the sprawling facility, first opened in 1953, and hardened to withstand repeated direct hits from Soviet-era nuclear ballistic missiles.
Ten of the men sat in padded office chairs around the conference table. The men represented various intelligence organizations and branches of the American military, both traditional and special operations. Against one wall, four more men sat in folding chairs. These men represented four broad civilian industries, including coal mining, oil and natural gas, banking and finance, and aerospace and defense.
The group operated in secrecy, even from itself. No one in the room wore identifying markers of any kind. There were no name plates, no indications of rank, and no combat ribbons or medals in evidence. Indeed, there were no uniforms. The military men all wore dress shirts and slacks. Although most of the men knew one another to some degree, two of the men were strangers, and had affiliations that were unclear to the rest of the group.
A silver-haired four-star general, once a commander in the Army Special Forces, stood at the head of the table. He rubbed an old, long-faded scar on his forehead.
“You all know me,” he said. “You know my role here. So I’ll get right to it. Events have moved forward quickly in the past twenty-four hours, faster than we could have anticipated. In response to these events, and to ensure continuity in the event of a major attack or disruption, we have updated the evacuation plans for all high-level elected and appointed civilian government personnel. The plans are in effect as of 0600 hours, approximately one hour and twenty minutes ago. They will remain in effect until further notice. Please pay attention because they are a departure from previous plans.”
He glanced at a single sheet of paper in front of him on the desk.
“During an attack or disruption, President Thomas Hayes and Vice President Susan Hopkins will be evacuated by helicopter to the secure Mount Weather civilian government facility near Bluemont, Virginia. In the event of the death of President Hayes, Vice President Hopkins is number two in the line of succession and will take the Oath of Office at Mount Weather. Civilian cabinet members, including the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of State, and the Secretary of Education, will be evacuated to Mount Weather, either by helicopter or military convoy, depending on circumstances and availability of aircraft. These individuals represent numbers five, six, and eight in the line of succession, respectively.”
He glanced at his notes again.
“In an attack, the Speaker of the House of Representatives will be evacuated by helicopter to this facility, Site R. The Speaker is currently William Ryan of North Carolina. In the event of the deaths of both the President and Vice President, Speaker Ryan is number three in the line of succession, and will be administered the Oath of Office here as our guest.”
He looked around the room, meeting each set of eyes in turn.
“In the case of an attack or disruption, the Senate President Pro Tem will board the Airborne Communications Command aircraft, codename Nightwatch, at Joint Base Andrews. The aircraft will remain at a cruising altitude of forty thousand feet, with an escort of fighter jets, for the duration of the crisis. In the unlikely event of the deaths of the President, the Vice President, and Speaker of the House, the Senate President is number four in the line of succession, and will take the Oath of Office aboard the airplane. The Senate President Pro Tem is Senator Edward Graves of Kansas, current Chairman of the Congressional Armed Forces Committee.”
A hand at the table was raised. The general recognized a man much older than himself, a former Navy admiral, a man so ancient that once upon a time he led a Marine Corps unit through the shit storm at Pusan Reservoir during the start of the Korean War. There was an iconic photograph from the event, which had never been declassified, but which the general had seen. It showed the admiral at nineteen years of age, shirtless in a muddy trench, his eyes wild, his face and upper body painted dark red with the blood of dead communists.
“Yes?”
“You haven’t mentioned the Secretary of Defense. Normally, he would board the Airborne Command.”
The general shrugged. “The Secretary of Defense will come here.”
“Do you anticipate that will cause any problems?”
The general picked up the paper in front of him and began to carefully shred it into long narrow strips. “We don’t anticipate,” he said, “any problems at all.”
Chapter 17
7:40 a.m.
Joint Counter-Terrorism Command Center - Midtown Manhattan
“How the hell did Begley know where we were?”
Luke stood in the doorway of the small room SRT controlled at the command center. Trudy and Swann were here, along with a few guys from the New York office. They stared at him with big doe eyes. Someone in the room was playing innocent. That, more than anything, made Luke see red.
“What?” Trudy said.
“Begley. He turned up at the Iranian’s apartment with the police. Nobody called him. He just showed up. How did he do that?”
Swann shook his head. He gestured at his machines. “This stuff is encrypted. I’m on my own network. There’s no way Begley’s people could break the code in the short time we’ve been here.”
“Trudy?”
She put her hands in the air as if he had pulled a gun. “No way, Luke. Don’t even go there. I despise Begley. You think I’m going to rat you out to him?”
Ed slipped by him and into the room. “I think you want to stay focused, man. No sense chasing rabbits into holes in the ground. I don’t believe anybody here sold you down the river.”
Luke nodded. Ed had a point. “All right.” He walked over to Swann and placed the contents of his pockets on Swann’s table. “I copied the hard drive from his computer. This is his cell phone. I need you to pull the data from it, then destroy the phone and make it disappear. Do that first.”
Swann shrugged. “They’ll know anyway. It’s an iPhone. They’ll trace its location right to us. They probably already have.”
“That’s fine,” Luke said. “But let’s not be holding it in our hands when they come looking for it. Okay?”
“Okay, Luke.”
Luke glanced at the doorway, half expecting to find Begley standing there. “What have you found in the bank account?”
“A lot. Ali Nassar is a busy man. There are a ton of transactions going on with that account. Money comes in, money goes out. Geneva, Nassau, Tehran, Paris, Washington. A lot of it is anonymous, impossible to trace. Well, not impossible, but it would take more time than we have.”
“Anything interesting that we can see?”
“There’s this. Over the past six months, Nassar has paid more than eight million dollars to something called the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, which is a company owned and operated by the Chinese government. They build military-grade robotic drones, pretty high-end stuff. The drones can carry air-to-surface missiles and bomb payloads, do surveillance, satellite data links, you name it. And China sells them dirt cheap, to people who probably shouldn’t have them. North Korea comes to mind. African dictators. Non-state actors. Their CH-3A drone is similar in mission capability to our MQ-9 Reaper, but has a price tag under a million dollars. You see the picture?”
Luke saw. “Could you put a dirty bomb on board one of those things, and say… crash it into something?”
Swann pursed his lips. “Maybe. But keep in mind it would be hard to fly a large payload drone in an area like Manhattan, with so many tall buildings around. These aren’t backyard hobbyist drones. They’re big. We’re talking about eight to ten meter wingspans, depending on the aircraft. These drones need room to maneuver. They take off, fly, and land like airplanes. They have three-mile ceilings, but if you flew one that high, air traffic control would pick it up on radar in a minute.”
Luke tapped the hard drive with Nassar’s computer files on it. “See if he’s got anything on it in here.”
“Before or after I do the phone?”
“Phone first, but move quickly.”
Swann sighed. “No one at this job has ever told me to move slowly. Relax, Swann. Take your time and do a thorough job. Those are words I never hear.”
“If you want to hear those magic words, I think you better go work in the private sector.”
Swann made a face. “What? And make five times the salary? I won’t hear of it.”
“Luke?” Trudy said.
He turned to her. Her eyes were wide. She held a cell phone out to him.
“It’s Don,” she said. “For you.”
Chapter 18
Luke held the phone to his ear and walked out into the hall. The buzz of conversation echoed to him from the main control room. He didn’t want to take this call. Part of the reason was he didn’t want to go home, not now, not after everything that had happened this morning, not when so much was at stake. But there was more to it than that, a lot more.
Luke remembered the day he met Don. Luke was a twenty-seven-year-old Army captain. He had made captain six months before, and he had just been accepted into Delta Force, the Army’s elite speci
al operations and counter-terrorism unit. It was his first day, and Luke was nervous. Don was his new commanding officer. Don was giving him some instructions, as Luke stood at ease in front of Don’s desk.
“Yes sir, Colonel,” Luke said at one point.
Don sighed heavily. “Son, let’s get one thing perfectly clear. You’re not in the regular Army anymore. This is Delta Force. We’re going to live together, we’re going to fight together, and one day we might die together. So you call me Don, or you call me Morris. You can call me fuck-head. I don’t care. But two things you don’t call me are sir and Colonel. You save that for dealing with the other branches of the military. You understand?”
“Yes…” Luke caught himself before he said sir again. “Don.”
Don smiled. “Good. Fuck-head will come in time.”
Years later, when Don left Delta to form the Special Response Team, Luke was among his first employees.
“Don?” he said now.
“Luke. How are you holding up?”
“Good. I’m good. How did the briefing go?”
“It hasn’t gone yet. We just got off the chopper ten minutes ago. It looks like I’m going to be here a while before anything happens. You know how these things go. Hurry up and wait.”
“Right,” Luke said.
“I think they’re going to put me out to pasture,” Don said.
Luke nodded. “Yeah. I know.”
“The Director called me a little while ago. Ron Begley’s boss at Homeland called him. I heard all about the diplomat.”
“Don, I got a little carried away. If you lose SRT over it, I will feel badly about that. But I’m not sorry I did it.”
“Relax, son. Why do you think I called you last night? So you could come in and play by the rules? If that’s what I wanted, I would have let you sleep. We’ve got plenty of those guys in government. More than we need. No, I’m not concerned about that. I wouldn’t have expected any less from you.”
“Begley knew where I was,” Luke said. “He came waltzing in with the city cops.”
