White: A Novel

by Christopher Whitcomb

  “Good.” Venable nodded. “We need to reassure people without getting too dramatic. Don’t want to overstate our downside.”

  “Best if you stick to the script, Mr. President,” Chase suggested. David Ray Venable was a brilliant executive, but his mouth sometimes found it hard to contain a stream of consciousness that flowed like the Niagara. “Get in and out quickly.”

  “Spineless cowards,” he growled, practicing the high points of his speech. “Unrelenting commitment to justice . . . will not stand . . . track them down wherever they hide . . . national resolve . . . individual integrity . . . renewed vigilance . . .”

  The president practiced his hand movements as he walked. He had worked as a speech coach during the early days of his political career and considered the public demonstration of emotion one of his greatest strengths.

  “You tell whoever is operating that teleprompter that I pause a lot for effect, understand? Long pauses sometimes. They need to pay attention so I don’t look like I’m reading this thing, especially when we get to the part about individual integrity.”

  “I’ll supervise it personally,” Chase said. She continued highlighting salient features of the intelligence reports, prioritizing and organizing.

  “Matthew?” the president asked. “Anything new I need to know?”

  Matthew Havelock struggled to keep up. He gave up more than eight inches of leg to the six-foot-three commander in chief and had made the mistake of changing into brand-new shoes for the speech. The leather soles slipped so badly on the slick wool rug, he had to shuffle on his heels to keep from falling.

  “Uh, yes, sir,” Havelock said. He forced his natural tenor down a couple stops to lend his voice substance. “Homeland Security apparently has a good lead on a radical Islamic group associated with a Columbus mosque. They have been under surveillance for some time, and the FBI is working on a FISA warrant for their . . .”

  “FISA warrants? Goddammit, I told you to speak English. I don’t have time for . . .”

  “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” he spit out. “A secret sneak-and-peek warrant. No notification of service. They think this group may be related to our bombers, and we don’t want to tip our hand.”

  “Good.”

  The president suddenly looked a little less exhausted.

  “Pencil in ‘cautiously optimistic’ where I talk about the best efforts of our law enforcement and intelligence communities,” Venable said. He carried no copy of the speech; years of campaigning had refined his near photographic memory to a keen edge.

  “To place our trust in a just and righteous God!” He cocked his head, trying to decide on the proper inflection, then said it again. “To place our trust in a just and righteous . . . where the hell is Alred, anyway? He should be here in case we get anything at the last minute!”

  Chase shook her head. She had intentionally winnowed the president’s immediate circle down to Havelock and herself. Now almost forty hours without sleep, Venable had fallen a bit too susceptible to suggestion. Reducing the number of voices in the president’s ear allowed her to control a few more variables. If she could just get him through the speech and into bed, the national security staff would manage the details of this crisis while he slept.

  “We have him in constant contact, sir,” she said. “Vick as well. Anything happens, you’ll be the first to know.”

  “Good,” Venable said. “How’s my color?”

  He stopped abruptly to consider himself in a gilt-framed mirror that dated to the Taft administration.

  “Color’s fine, sir.” Chase nodded. She lied, of course. He looked sallow and spent despite a healthy application of pancake stage makeup.

  “All right.” Chase changed the subject. “I’ve just gone through the latest intelligence estimates, and we have one issue that didn’t make the speech.”

  Venable adjusted his tie, listening.

  “Ali Fallal Mahar, the leader of Jemaah Islamiya, has been found in a jungle somewhere in Indonesia. He was killed during an arrest attempt along with two other senior terrorists.”

  “That’s good news, right?” Venable said. “Gotta be. Jemaah what?”

  Chase wrote Jemaah Islamiya in large letters on a yellow legal pad. “Here, I wrote it down for you. Adlib no more than two sentences near the end as confirmation that we’re onto these guys. Got it?”

  “Got it.” He adjusted his lapels and lifted his chin to properly position the tie knot.

  “Good. Let’s do this.”

  Chase stopped outside the Roosevelt Room. Inside, a lone broadcast-feed camera faced a mahogany partners desk and a Federal parlor chair. Venable had argued that he should stand for the speech, but Chase prevailed. Sitting made him look more relaxed.

  “The country is ready for you, Mr. President,” Chase said. She offered up a look of complete confidence.

  Venable nodded and started toward the chair.

  “Is it Islameeeya or Islamiiiiya?” he asked, taking his seat.

  “Remember what I told you,” Havelock answered. The national security advisor swelled up with pride at standing second to a statesman about to face his country. “America wants gravitas . . . a president willing to make the tough calls and stand behind them. Stay away from that spy crap; it will just confuse them.”

  JEREMY LEANED BACK into his chair, staring at a perfectly acceptable plate of chicken cordon bleu served with steamed asparagus, fennel, and an arugula salad. The meal sat on bone china, with a cloth napkin, leaded glass goblet . . . and a plastic fork.

  What a difference nineteen men with box cutters have made, Jeremy thought. He turned his head out the window and looked down on a sea of storm clouds, which seemed endless from where he sat. The slow drone of the 747’s four monster engines coaxed back toward what would have been twelve hours of sleep without the connection in San Francisco.

  How different the world seemed since 9/ 11.

  It wasn’t the grandmothers spread-eagled at airport magnetometers that shocked him; not the color-coded terror alerts, the massive new spending, not even the broad indifference with which most Americans considered the threat.

  No, what amazed Jeremy was the sea change in his government’s willingness to get dirty. Things only whispered in years past were now discussed openly in strategy sessions. Renditions that once had depended on host-country approval now occurred without so much as notification. Torture had become routine. Warlords were bought outright; shot when they reneged.

  Assassination, the nasty-sounding administrative action outlawed by Gerald R. Ford in executive order 12333, had gained a new sparkle. Now called “neutralizing targets of military importance,” the deliberate execution of individuals fell within a rubric known as “military actions other than war.”

  What struck Jeremy most of all was the lack of oversight and interest. No one seemed to question rule of law in the war on terror. Not Congress, not the media, not even average Americans. It signified a revolution in matters of state, a shift in the collective will of a wounded democracy. Some things needed to get done; better to beg forgiveness than ask permission.

  This new philosophy reached all the way from the White House to the shielded analyst pods at Fort Meade and Boling Air Force Base; from coffee shops in Enid, Oklahoma, to the seventh floor of the Justice Department in Washington. When the military dug up anyone they deemed a “terrorist,” the CIA conducted the interrogations so the FBI wouldn’t have to look the other way. When the FBI fingered a suspect, they turned evidence not to a grand jury, but to a Joint Special Operations Command mission-planning cell, which meted justice from a Cobra gunship. What had been handled in open court now shuffled quietly through a maze of FISA warrants, “material witness” detentions, and national security obfuscation.

  Lethal covert operations, Jeremy thought. The world had become a place he poorly understood anymore, a world of ambiguous allegiances and trapdoor truths where the most difficult job was figuring out how the hell to add it up.

/>   “Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has illuminated the fasten seat belts sign,” a soothing young voice interrupted. “This signals our initial descent into the Washington DC area. FAA regulations require that passengers remain seated during the last thirty minutes of flight, so please do not get up or we will be forced to divert to an alternate airport.”

  Jeremy checked his belt. A flight attendant walked over and gathered up his untouched meal.

  “Not hungry?” the petite woman asked. She wore little makeup and her hair pulled back so tightly it left a permanent smile. A Singapore Airlines badge above her tiny left breast read Minge.

  Jeremy shook his head. It wasn’t the meal that took his appetite. It was the plastic fork his government had given him to eat it with.

  LOS ANGELES SCOFFED at the inability of the nation’s capital to function in inclement weather. An unfair accusation of course: it barely rained in Southern California. But the entertainment industry held little respect for Washington’s censor-hungry bureaucrats. Washington was a city of narrow-minded politicians; the Left Coast had its own agenda. Which meetings had more impact on the world, after all, those held in stuffy Senate hallways or those in Beverly Hills over glasses of designer water?

  The man with the pistol in his hand was unlike most Californians, however. To him, Washington was an objective. A target. Though it may have been three thousand miles away, he felt intimately connected to its people and their immediate future.

  “There’s no point in calling out,” the man with the pistol said. A frightened-looking Saudi cleric named Ashar al Bayad sat beside him with his hands secured behind his back. Drool ran out of the Arab’s mouth at the corners, where the rubber ball stuck in it left gaps. “These walls are insulated. No one will hear you.”

  The man with the pistol double-checked the ligature—simple hemp cord at the wrists and ankles. It might not hold as well as the triple-bar police cuffs he carried in his day job, but it would burn completely in a fire. There would be no trace of bondage.

  “I apologize for this disrespect, Brother,” the man with the pistol said. “But it is all for the good of our cause. God is great. You will see.”

  The captor opened a four-by-four-foot wooden box filled with fifty pounds of Czech-made Semtex—a special batch designed for use in land mines. He adjusted the detonator to make certain it would fail to function as designed. Under normal circumstances, this massive I.E.D. would devastate everything within two hundred feet, but that was not the plan. This device would “squib,” or explode in a low-order detonation. There would be flames, but little boom.

  When he felt certain that all details had been checked and double-checked, the man with the pistol picked up a long red-and-white Snap-on toolbox, pulled a California Electric cap onto his head, and stepped out of his box truck.

  The work order in his pocket called for service on a transformer atop the LAX Radisson. The sun shone brightly in the late-afternoon sky. Santa Ana winds blew down from the mountains, ruffling his shirt and filling his nose with desert smells.

  “Allah huakbar,” he mumbled under his breath. A 767 wide-body inbound from some destination east roared over his head as Ibrahim hefted the thirty-pound toolbox.

  Heavy but effective, he assured himself of the .50 caliber Barrett inside. No matter. It was just a short trip to the elevator and then an effortless pull of the trigger.

  “FASTEN YOUR SEAT belt, please,” Minge the flight attendant politely coaxed one of the other first class passengers.

  Always someone, Jeremy thought. Shouldn’t the wealthy, successful, and well traveled behave a little better up here in the good seats?

  He wouldn’t have known, of course. Only the unexpected generosity of a sympathetic ticket counter clerk in Bangkok had saved him from a 10,000-mile ride in coach.

  “Well, hello again, folks, this is your captain,” a voice announced over the intercom. He sounded Midwestern, to Jeremy’s surprise. Singapore Air with an American crew? “We’re about to start our final descent into the Washington DC area, and as I said before, they have a pretty significant storm down there.”

  Jeremy had seen nothing but darkness and streaks of snow in his window for the past fifteen minutes. Modern planes could land in anything, right? Surely they’d divert if it were too dangerous.

  “The tower has cleared us for landing, but it might be a little rough. Tighten up those belts, if you will, and we’ll have you on the ground in just a few minutes. And thanks for flying Singapore Air.”

  Tighten up those belts? Jeremy laughed quietly to himself. It had never occurred to him, waiting there in that Bangkok hotel room, that the most perilous part of this mission would be flying home.

  THREE NETWORKS AND all the cable news channels preempted regular programming for the president’s address. Most of them simply integrated it into nonstop coverage of the terrorist attacks, anyway, providing an eight-minute respite for threadbare producers, anchors, reporters, experts, and bookers who hadn’t had so much as a coffee break since the first bomb exploded.

  Vice President Beechum watched the speech from her West Wing office, a relatively bland space distinguished by low ceilings and a view of the Washington Monument. Despite early resolutions to add color and a little feminine flair to the nation’s second-most-exclusive suite, she hadn’t gotten around to so much as new curtains.

  “That man scares the hell out of me,” the vice president said, leaning back into a cordovan leather chair that weighed as much as her Mercedes.

  “Brian Williams or the president?” James asked. He punched up the volume.

  “Take your pick.” She laughed. The NBC anchor sat behind the traditional desk on the network’s Nightly News set in New York. General Monte Derak flanked Williams to the right; two of their so-called terrorism experts on his left.

  “It’s all such a spectacle, you know?” Beechum said. “This is exactly what they want . . . the terrorists. They’d be nothing but a bunch of Third World thugs if we didn’t pump them up with round-the-clock coverage. The richest corporation in America couldn’t afford this kind of advertising.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the president appears to be ready to . . .” The anchor started an introduction, but the president interrupted him.

  “My fellow Americans,” Venable began. “I speak to you tonight with a heavy heart . . . but with a mind bent on justice.”

  “Well, he’s off to a good start,” James said. “Gotta give him that.”

  Beechum nodded. Speeches had always been his strong suit.

  “Less than twenty-four hours ago, spineless cowards attacked us in our heartland. They murdered innocent women and children. They brazenly took credit for these barbaric acts. They demonstrated the depravity, the evil, that some will stoop to in the name of religion.”

  The president looked troubled yet resolute. Chase had been wrong about his color; from the healthy vigor in his cheeks to the tone of his furrowed brow and the firmly knotted tie beneath his jackhammer Adam’s apple, Venable looked as telegenic as any Hollywood actor. Prime-time perfect.

  “He’s good, but I just don’t get the feeling that I can trust him,” Beechum observed. “I’m not sure what it is, but something just strikes me as wrong.”

  “The only things I trust are you and the good Lord.” James smiled, only half kidding. “But whatever bothers you has nothing to do with his looks. This guy’s hair is perfect.”

  THE WASHINGTON SNIPER felt the plane before he saw it, that disembodied roar sneaking out of the north. It grew quickly, filling the air around him like the echo of some mountain beast, raising goose bumps on the back of his neck. Or was that the cold?

  “God’s will,” he said in English. The roar grew louder; thunder rolling down the frozen Potomac.

  Every detail had been covered. The snow-draped sniper sat cross-legged behind the rooftop parapet, hidden by the night. A Barrett .50 caliber rifle rested on a matte steel bipod, tight against his shoulder. He’d just called the Indone
sian up to the roof under ruse.

  “God’s will.”

  He placed his eye against the cold rubber bellows of his scope reticle.

  What do the other shooters have in their sights right now? he wondered. But then the nose cone appeared in his crosshairs and all other matters of this world left him.

  JEREMY HAD NOTHING to read, so he sat and stared out his window as the 747 descended into the teeth of the storm.

  Daddy’s home! Jeremy could hear his kids yelling as he played out the homecoming in a slow-moving daydream. Daddy’s home!

  Caroline and the kids would be there at the front door when he walked in. He’d called them with a flight number and an ETA, hoping to make it somewhat close to on-time. He’d missed so many of these welcome-home parties, flying off from one mission to another without even stopping for a hug and change of clothes.

  Daddy’s home! he heard himself calling out. The 747’s landing gear whistled as the pilot alternately throttled up and back, trying to gauge the miserable conditions.

  Jeremy watched snow streak his frosted window, imagining that his suburban DC home lay out there beneath him. The roads would be a nightmare, he knew, but that would barely slow him down. Tonight, nothing was going to come between this endlessly traveling FBI agent and a family that still found ways to love him.

  VENABLE LOOKED BRAVE yet caring; angry yet composed. Like the best of politicians, he made up for in appearance what he lacked in ability, but according to the FBI and CIA, the government, this series of bombings may be just the beginning of something much worse.

  “You know, it’s damn scary to sit here behind the curtains, watching the Wizard pull the levers,” James said as he and Beechum watched the speech. “You want to believe in your government and all its resources, but then you see what really goes on behind the scenes and wonder what in hell keeps it all together.”

  James had worked in Washington long enough to understand that no one person ever had all the answers. The “big picture” was a myth; to chase it, folly. “He looks good, but when it comes right down to it, this guy is way out over his skis. We’re in trouble here, aren’t we?”