White: A Novel

by Christopher Whitcomb

  With that, Mitchell replaced the pistol in its case.

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” he said. “But imperative can serve as a stern taskmaster.”

  He left the room.

  “You sonofabitch,” Sirad cursed under her breath, realizing full well the curse had nothing at all to do with Mitchell.

  XVI

  Friday, 18 February

  06:09 GMT

  President’s Apartment, The White House

  “HE’LL BE JUST fine,” Doctor Hernandez assured the first lady. Victoria Venable tucked a down comforter under her husband’s chin and brushed hair away from his face.

  “Thank you, Elizabeth,” she said, turning to the vice president. “This is the first time I’ve seen him at peace in days.”

  “I hope you understand that we had no choice,” Beechum explained. “His behavior was beginning to show signs of . . .”

  “Oh, I understand completely.” The first lady pulled the blinds tight and unplugged the phone. “In fact, it took real courage to do what you did. God forbid that the American people would have seen him like that.”

  The doctor checked the president’s pulse with two fingers on his wrist and a gold Rolex Daytona.

  “Vitals are strong,” he observed. “By this time tomorrow, he’ll be back on his feet as if nothing ever happened.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” the first lady said. “Could I ask you to give the vice president and me a moment alone?”

  The doctor closed his bag and walked out. He pulled the door shut behind him.

  “What will happen if this leaks out?” Victoria asked Beechum once they were alone. She had lived a life at a politician’s side and knew better than most how power could turn on a dime.

  “No one will find out,” Beechum said. “Only Andrea, Havelock, the general, and I know. The doctor, of course, and the Secret Service, too, but they are beyond reproach.”

  “The cabinet will ask questions, especially after what happened downstairs. Congress will look for direction; the country will expect some sort of public reassurance.”

  “You let me worry about that, Victoria.” Beechum tried to comfort her. She reached out and held the concerned wife by her shoulders. “I know this town, and I know how to handle secrets. By the time David wakes up, we’ll be ready to hand him a scenario that he will be proud of. No one will be the wiser.”

  “Thank you,” the first lady whispered. “He’s a good man, you know.”

  “I know,” Beechum said as they leaned forward and held each other in a quiet embrace. That’s what’s going to make what I have to do so much harder.

  JEREMY ARRIVED AT Washington’s Reagan National Airport just before two o’clock Friday afternoon and rented a midsized Chevy using his undercover identity. Ellis had driven him and Caleb to Dallas, briefing them along the way.

  Come on, come on! Jeremy yelled silently, frustrated at Fourteenth Street Bridge traffic, which had slowed down to little more than a trickle. At present, he was caught in this four-lane parking lot between a Lawn Doctor tank truck and a poorly tuned transit bus.

  Though Ellis had revealed little of the larger operation, Jeremy knew its ultimate objective would be a catastrophic attack on the Washington area. Events of the past few days had been carefully orchestrated to lay blame on Islamic fundamentalists, but from what Jeremy had learned in Texas, that was merely a ruse. The real intention was to force a response by the United States government—a response that would trigger widespread reprisals from not only networks like al Qaeda, but also smaller regional groups.

  “Just like the Boston Tea Party,” Caleb had bragged, comparing his father’s brainchild to Samuel Adams’s famous 1773 raid in which the Sons of Liberty dressed up as Mohawk Indians and tossed thousands of dollars worth of English Darjeeling into the harbor. “This will go down as one of the most creative and successful psychological operations in this country’s history.”

  But that was tea Samuel Adams and his fellow saboteurs had splashed, not airliners.

  “Let’s go!” Jeremy yelled through his windshield. He honked his horn like everyone else around him and inched forward across the bridge. It was already almost two o’clock in the afternoon, and his instructions carried no room for excuses. By sunset, Jeremy had to “procure” a concrete mixing truck and drive it to a warehouse in Southeast DC. One of the other Phineas priests—a “cutout”— would meet him there with further instructions.

  “That tattoo on the back of your eyelid buys you a tryout,” Ellis had told him. “But if you really want to join our struggle, you will have to prove yourself.”

  This apparently was the first test.

  “Get that piece of shit out of the road!” a passing motorist yelled.

  Jeremy saw that the source of the traffic jam was a two-car fender bender that should have been settled at the other end of the bridge. The drivers involved seemed much more intent on returning obscene gestures to passing cars than they were with the slight damage to their own vehicles.

  Where the hell am I going to find a cement mixer? Jeremy wondered to himself as traffic suddenly shot forward. Washington opened out in front of him, the top of the Washington Monument rising over the Lincoln Memorial.

  A dozen questions filled his mind, half of them centered on GI Jane.

  What was she doing at the Homestead? What possible ties could this woman have to the very men she had ordered killed in Indonesia? If she were simply an undercover player, why hadn’t CIA or FBI briefers told him to expect her. If she was playing both sides against the middle, why hadn’t she turned him in?

  Jeremy stomped on the gas, racing toward a destination he hadn’t even decided on. Somewhere out there among the city of monuments, Caleb was laying the groundwork for a cataclysm. The attacks of the previous days had been just a warmup, he bragged. What lay ahead would be taught to grade-school children for centuries to come.

  Schoolchildren.

  Jeremy’s knuckles turned white around the steering wheel. In all the movement and confusion, he hadn’t even thought about the possible consequences to his own family. Caroline and the kids lived just 42 miles south of the city, oblivious to potential danger.

  “You sonofabitch,” Jeremy cursed, wrapping Ellis and Caleb and their entire cabal of Phineas priests into one present evil.

  Call Caroline, was the first thought that popped into his head. But that was impossible, right? What if this was just a test of his allegiance? What if Ellis had sent someone to follow him?

  How’s Ellis going to know? Jeremy wondered, allowing emotion to argue with professional logic. He and Caroline both carried the new Quantis phones, which only Borders Atlantic and Jordan Mitchell could listen in on. Mitchell knew about all of this anyway.

  Jeremy pulled his cell phone out of a jacket pocket. Caroline would be at her office now. All he had to do was call the house and leave a message. Something simple, like “Get the hell out of town before the world goes to hell!”

  He checked his rearview mirror for signs of surveillance. Nothing stood out. He changed lanes quickly, trying to “clean” himself—right on Independence Avenue, then right again toward L’Enfant Plaza. No one exposed themselves.

  Do it! Jeremy prodded himself. Ethicists might argue that he had no right to save his own family and not those of his teammates and friends. But then again, ethicists seldom had to deal with the potential deaths of their wives and kids.

  “Hello, you’ve reached the Wallers,” Maddy’s seven-year-old voice chirped in Jeremy’s ear. Despite a mouthful of missing teeth she’d taken just two tries to lisp out the message. “We’re all outthide playing right now, so leave uth a message after the beep.”

  “Hi guys, it’s Dad,” he said, trying to decide what to say. “Look honey . . . something’s come up. I think you should go see your folks for a couple days. Tonight. Really . . . tonight, OK? I’ll call when I can . . . but go NOW. Love you.”

  He hung up the phone.

  “What kind o
f message was that?” Jeremy scolded himself. He’d never been much good with nuance.

  But then a car drove slowly past him, and Jeremy turned his attentions to a different kind of subtlety. The driver had looked a little too long at the phone. His eyes showed a little too much concern.

  You’re just being paranoid, the emotional voice rang out in Jeremy’s head, but then the professional logic took over. Just because you’re paranoid, it said as Jeremy pulled a U-turn and raced toward Adams Morgan, doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

  SIRAD DROVE NORTH again on the Merritt Parkway trying to sort through what Mitchell had told her. Though the CEO had assigned her oversight of the Quantis project, Mitchell kept her in the dark about many of its most important elements. On top of that, the enigmatic leader had known from the start about her real employer—the CIA. Borders Atlantic, like a surprisingly large number of U.S. corporations, had for years cooperated with the intelligence community, offering executive positions to case officers. Nonofficial cover, the Agency called it: NOC—an elite cadre of spies inserted into manufacturing, financial services, import/ export, and communications sectors to gather information more traditional officers simply couldn’t gain.

  The downside felt steep at times. Traditional CIA covers were mostly diplomatic. The communications officer in a foreign embassy, for example, would carry a State Department credential and enjoy diplomatic immunity if exposed or “outed.” An NOC would have no such immunity. If discovered as a spy, they could go to jail for life, or worse.

  Despite the stakes—or perhaps because of them—elite case officers placed a premium on NOC duty. Foreign governments already watched diplomats with great scrutiny, limiting intelligence gathering to cocktail chats, open-source inquiries, and anecdotal observation. Business executives, however, came with promises of money. Since money tempted greed and greed trumped scrutiny even in the most suspicious countries, NOCs ended up free to cajole, proposition, and outright buy anyone they weren’t clever enough to steal. In a world ruled, now, by multinational corporations worth more than the gross domestic products of many countries they did business in, money—not nationalism—had become the ultimate allegiance.

  Sirad and her Agency controller—Mr. Hoch—had known all about this when Mitchell handed her the Quantis project, of course. But Mitchell’s cooperation with the CIA had gone much deeper than she understood. Though no one had told her at first, the Borders Atlantic executive had earned his chops at the Farm, too. After graduating Dartmouth College in the late 1960s, he had been hired into a Cold War that took him first to an academic cover in Peru and then to a deeper cover running an import/ export business in Chile.

  Mitchell used $400,000 in ITT seed money to buy a Grumman Goose, hire a pilot and secretary, and move vital information in and out of the South American country. Working with multinational ITT, he had helped orchestrate the overthrow and eventual murder of Salvador Allende in 1972. ITT got the copper it needed for phone lines; the CIA got intelligence-gathering networks in a part of the world they desperately wanted to protect from Soviet expansion.

  Thirty years and billions of dollars later, Borders Atlantic had grown into a diversified behemoth among international businesses. They had representatives in 117 countries and a network of spies who ranked second to none. Borders Atlantic’s NOC cadre played both sides of the line, offering the company what it needed to build market share and the U.S. government what it needed to increase security.

  Borders Atlantic is full of secrets, but they’re all mine.

  Mitchell had known all along that someone inside the White House—perhaps the president himself—was behind the attacks on Quantis. But how? And why had he wasted so much time and effort, dedicating his top programmers and cryptanalysts to the task?

  What did he really want her to find? All that business about dueling and long-dead statesmen and honor had seemed like more of hubris, standing there in that dark-paneled conference room.

  Borders Atlantic is full of secrets . . .

  Something caught Sirad’s eye as she drove. Just a reflection, a glint of light in the corner of her windshield, but it flashed in her head like a lightning bolt. Suddenly everything made sense—the beatings, all the talk of dueling and honor . . . even the attacks on Quantis.

  Borders Atlantic may have lots of secrets—she smiled as she yanked the steering wheel and raced up to the security gate—but it seems that Jordan Mitchell has finally cleared the way for me to keep a few for myself.

  NO ONE NOTICED the Montagne Mountain Goat STOL circling carelessly over a frozen stretch of tundra one hundred miles south of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. These stout workhorses of Alaska’s bush pilot trade were familiar sights in a state that boasted more aircraft per capita than any other. This was a particularly isolated geography, too—just north of the Arctic Circle and dozens of miles from any human habitation.

  “How about that snowfield right down there?” the copilot suggested. He pointed to a shiny section of wind-matted snow that looked hard enough to support the plane’s skis.

  “You’re the navigator,” the pilot answered. He throttled back the lone engine and circled right, dropping the aircraft into a steep descent.

  “You gotta love these buggers,” the copilot said, impressed with the easy handling and responsive throttle. The Mountain Goat, a relative newcomer to Alaska Air, boasted heavy payload capacity, 160-mile-an-hour cruising, and a stall speed of just 25 knots. That made it the perfect craft for today’s flight.

  “Hang on,” the pilot advised. “Ya never know what’s under this crust.”

  But there was no need to worry. The plane landed softly, turned right, and stopped, facing into a giant steel snake that ran eight hundred miles from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez.

  “Twenty minutes,” the copilot said. The logistics cell had worked out every detail of this operation, from Alyeska Pipeline Service Company surveillance flight schedules to weather forecasts.

  “I won’t be late,” the pilot answered, pulling the hood of his heavy parka up over his wool cap. “It’s colder than a well digger’s ass out there!”

  The two men climbed out of the plane, shouldered eighty-pound backpacks, and started in opposite directions. Their job was pretty simple, actually. The Trans Alaska Pipeline may have been one of the engineering wonders of the twentieth century, but it lay dreadfully vulnerable to the simplest sabotage. Of its eight-hundred-mile length, more than four hundred miles lay aboveground, often propped atop ten-foot stilts designed to afford migrating elk and caribou a free range.

  More than 9 million gallons of crude oil lay in the pipeline at any given time, flowing six miles per hour, pressurized at up to 1,180 pounds per square inch, heated and treated with additives to reduce drag. At forty-eight inches in diameter, each forty-foot section of concrete, steel, and insulation weighed some seventy-five thousand pounds.

  First came the explosives.

  Each man went to work on risers spaced about twenty-five yards apart. They wrapped two coils of lead sulfate flex linear shaped charge around each upright. The blasting caps had already been affixed, as had the detonation cord, which strung the whole thing together like a 750-foot length of pyrotechnic Christmas tree lights.

  Attacking the pipeline would have been difficult if they had gone after the conduit itself, but the risers made everything much easier. All they had to do was cut the narrow legs out from under it and let its massive weight come crumbling down. By the time system engineers down in Valdez registered a flow disruption and shut down pump stations to the north and south, they would have lost a couple million barrels.

  Next came the detonators—just one for each man’s string. They were simple devices, radio activated with backup batteries and redundant firing mechanisms. Of military design, they were built with components that could quickly be linked to bombs used in other attacks during the previous week.

  By the time the two men met back at the plane, their hands and faces were numb with cold. Fortunately,
the plane came equipped with a more-than-adequate heater.

  “Damn this weather,” the pilot said, throttling up. “Can you imagine living out here?”

  “Well, at least it’s pretty,” his partner said. He made sure the packs were stowed behind his seat and visually checked their work.

  “Pretty for now,” the pilot said. He pointed the nose into a twenty-mile-an-hour wind and fire-walled the engine. “But I’d hate to be an Eskimo in an hour.”

  COLONEL ELLIS WAS running students through CQB drills in the Kill House when Heidi found him with a cell phone. He knew when he saw her that it would be important. Everyone knew better than to bother him when there were firearms and tuition checks on the line.

  “Excuse me, fellas,” he said, stepping off to the side while one of the other instructors carried on as if nothing had happened.

  He took the phone from his daughter without asking for clarification. He could tell by the look on her face that this was no courtesy call.

  “Hello?” he answered.

  “He placed a call,” the voice said. Ellis recognized it as one of the Cell Six members, a former platoon leader with the Tenth Mountain Division. His new element had already moved into DC to help with logistics for the final stages of the operation.

  “Is that a problem?” the colonel asked. He had expressed his concerns about operational security, but Jeremy had a life. It could have been anything.

  “We think so,” the man said. Ellis could hear children playing in the background as the man talked.

  “And?”

  “Caleb thinks this is a priority. He’s broken off from planning to deal with it.”

  Ellis shook his head. Enemy infiltration had always been a possibility in his line of work, from Phoenix operations in the jungles of Indochina to compartmented projects at the Pentagon. He thought check valves built into the leaderless resistance model of the Phineas Priesthood had minimized the risk. Maybe he was wrong.

  “To deal with what, exactly?” he asked.