Anonymous Sources (39 page)

Carspecken scanned it and went rigid. “I believe most of you know Dick. Our director of the Secret Service. Please share this with everyone,” the general commanded hoarsely.

Dick held up the papers. “It's our visitors' record. Everyone who's been cleared in and out over the last week. Shaukat Malik was here. Two days ago. His photo's in the system and everything. Same guy as on that Virginia driver's license.”

I gasped and clamped my hand over my mouth. “He said that. This morning. He said he was in the White House.” I struggled to remember
the exact words. “He said . . . something about a video. About making a video, so everyone would know it was a Muslim bomb.”

“What, like a martyrdom video?” said Bruce. “That would make sense. All the jihadi groups do them. If he actually got inside the White House to film one . . .” Bruce puffed the air out of his cheeks. “Holy shit. That would be one hell of a terrorist recruitment tool.”

The general held up his hand for quiet. “Let's get back to the facts. How did he get cleared in?”

Dick scanned his records again. “He was on a VIP guest list. Special access, along with another guy, for an after-hours tour. Says here he was sponsored by”—Dick bit his lip—“by Lowell Carlyle's office.”

I glanced around. Mr. Carlyle was not in the room to defend himself.

“I know about that too,” I said softly. “It was Thom Carlyle who set it up. He didn't know about—”

But the general held his hand up again to stop me. “We can sort out who did what and why later on,” he ordered. “Right now we need to understand who we're dealing with. What do we know about Shaukat Malik? Where did he come from? And is he dead, or not?”

“Oh, he's dead, all right,” I muttered.

“If our journalist friend could control herself for a moment, I'll be glad to brief everyone on the professional assessment of the US intelligence community,” C.J. spat.

I rolled my eyes. “Sure. All yours.”

C.J. started holding forth on how Shaukat Malik and Nadeem Siddiqui were believed to be one and the same person. The consensus view at the CIA and the National Counterterrorism Center was that he had used the name Nadeem for his daily life in Pakistan and England, and the Shaukat Malik moniker for everything to do with the clandestine nuclear plot.

“Yeah, fine, but is he dead?” Carspecken interrupted after a minute.

“Well”—C.J. shot me a look—“we just picked up a body in northwest DC. At the Dumbarton Street address she gave us. Positive identification
will take some time. But it looks like it could be him. Meanwhile, we're working with MI6 to paint a picture of his movements over the last several weeks. . . .”

I sat half-listening and trying to put my finger on why all this seemed irrelevant. It wasn't just that I already knew most of what C.J. was saying. It was that whatever Nadeem's precise role had been, it was over. Yes, that was it. Nadeem or Shaukat or whatever we were supposed to call him was now irrelevant. What was urgent at this moment was to figure out where the bomb was.

C.J. was droning on about the exact nature of Nadeem Siddiqui's work at the nuclear facility back in Pakistan when Dick, the Secret Service chief, popped his head around the door and said, “One more thing. You asked us to find Ed Tusk. He's not picking up his phone. So I just put a dog team on it. K9 unit. They'll find him.”

General Carspecken looked pained. “Is he still on White House grounds?”

“His badge hasn't scanned out. He's around.”

“Good. When you find him, bring him here. We'll get this nonsense straightened out.” Carspecken looked severely at me.

Dick turned to go.

Suddenly I stiffened. “You said he hasn't scanned out? That's the wrong question.”

“Why?” Carspecken asked testily, as though he was regretting having argued for me to stay.

“Forget whether he badged out.” I looked at Dick. “Where did he badge
in
? Where and when? Did he drive here?”

Carspecken looked confused. “Does it matter?”

“Well, I don't know, Mike. I guess only if you care about trying to track down the bomb,” I snapped. Then I took a deep breath and tried to adopt a more polite tone. “You can build a nuclear weapon with less than forty pounds of weapons-grade uranium. Tusk told me that. That's not much. The whole thing would fit in the trunk of a car.”

Bruce, the FBI man, cut in. “No. It's not that simple . . . . The Soviets used to get everybody pissing their pants over this stuff. You guys remember that old crackpot KGB general—General Lebed, was it? He used to talk about suitcase nukes. How they'd lost dozens from the stockpile. And how they lacked the standard safety devices to prevent unauthorized detonation. Turns out it was a total fantasy. They never existed.”

“Just because the Soviets didn't have them doesn't mean they don't exist now,” somebody piped up from the back of the room.

“Okay, fine. But you can't just slap one together. This banana shipment hit US soil on Tuesday. That's three days ago, people. You're telling me that's enough time to assemble and deliver a precision, self-contained nuclear device?”

“That's the point! It doesn't have to be precision.” I whipped my notebook out of my bag and flipped through until I found the right page.

“ ‘It doesn't have to be reliable,' ” I read out. “ ‘Even if it fizzles and doesn't work that well, you've still succeeded at producing a complete fucking catastrophe.' ” I paused. “That's Edmund Tusk. His exact words from yesterday. Direct quote.”

Everyone turned to look at General Carspecken. He was rocking back and forth in his chair, his lazy eye cocked crazily at the ceiling, his good one twitching with anger.

“Goddamn it.” He slammed his fists down onto the table. He turned to Dick. “Find out, will you? Where he badged in. We need that right now. And I need you to get POTUS and FLOTUS to a safe location. Actually, I need you boys to get this whole damn complex evacuated. The West Wing, the Residence, the Executive Office Building, everything. We gotta get people out of here. Immediately.”

The Secret Service director nodded and scurried from the room.

“Not us,” added Carspecken. “We stay here and see this through. Everybody, get your superiors up and on the line. I want the highest-ranking person at every relevant agency in Washington, either here in person or on secure video where I can see them. Fast as you can.”

Staffers started grabbing papers and screaming on telephones. A bank of video monitors began lighting up, illuminating tense faces at the State Department, at the Pentagon, at Treasury, all over the city. The door to the Situation Room banged open and shut. Outside I could see the evacuation order being carried out. Uniformed Secret Service guards were hustling people down the hallway, yelling at the men to drop their briefcases, yelling at the women to kick off their high heels, yelling at everyone to run.

A FEW MINUTES LATER I
joined the swarm.

Whatever temporary authorization Lowell Carlyle had secured for me was deemed to have been overtaken by events. Captain McNamara was ordered to get me off White House grounds, along with everyone else. The corridors were thronged with people. McNamara bustled me along, one hand on my back, the other clamped over his earpiece, listening.

At the bottom of the stairs back up to the main level, he stopped and held his finger to his lips. His face screwed up in concentration. “Gotta turn around. Other way.” He spun me back into the hallway.

“Why?”

“They found the car.”

“Tusk's car?”

He nodded, still listening.

“And? Where is it?”

“Here. In the staff garage under the Old Executive Office Building. He badged in this morning at the Seventeenth Street gate. So we're being diverted from that side. This way, let's move.”

“But have they looked inside? Is there—” I was starting to panic.

“Shh,” he barked. “They've got a NEST squad on it.”

I stared at him blankly.

“Nuclear Emergency Support Team. Now come on, keep moving.”

“But don't you all check?” I asked, clammy now with fear. “I mean, can somebody just drive a car packed with nuclear explosives right into the White House complex, without someone noticing?”

“If you've got his level of security clearance? And you're in an official Agency vehicle? Yeah, you can.”

He was dragging me along by the elbow.

“They would have swept underneath the vehicle with mirrors,” McNamara mumbled. “But they wouldn't have suspected . . . You know what? Wait a second.” He stopped in his tracks. “I'm thinking down that hall might be fastest. Yeah. This way.”

And he led me down another corridor, twisting beneath the White House.

    

    

T
he Nuclear Emergency Support Team had found Tusk's car easily, once they knew what they were looking for.

He had hidden in plain sight.

A VIP parking space right in the front row. The white, unmarked SUV was riding low on its chassis due to the freight packed behind its tinted windows. A complete nuclear bomb. Explosives nestled around a core of highly enriched uranium, the whole package tucked neatly behind the backseat.

The team's most senior engineer stared at it. The whole thing could be booby-trapped, wired to blow at the slightest vibration. There might
be proximity sensors, registering when someone moved too close. You couldn't just start unscrewing bolts.

Eyeballing it he could see that the design was sophisticated. He had trained on similar models. But who knew what lay under the casing? The engineer signaled for X-ray and infrared-imaging tools. He needed to know what they were dealing with.

EDMUND TUSK HURRIED UP FIFTEENTH
Street, his mind working fast.

He could not quite comprehend how the day had managed to go so spectacularly wrong.

He was trained to turn on a dime when events did not go to plan. They rarely did in the clandestine world, and no one made it to the senior ranks of the CIA without learning how to fix a situation gone bad. Or at least how to cover it up, how to bury it so deep that it would take generations of congressional investigators and Agency Inspector General reports to unravel all the threads.

But what
were
all the threads at this point? How much had Alex James figured out? And what exactly might Siddiqui have divulged to her, before she somehow managed to waste him with his own gun? Tusk shuddered. He had understood he was in extreme danger when she appeared this morning and locked eyes with him across the Situation Room. He had felt his bowels turn liquid. So he had bolted.

But now he was not sure. Perhaps—perhaps—the plan could still proceed. Why not? He would just have to move more quickly. The bomb was still in place, after all. They might not be able to find and disarm it in time.

And he had planned his escape quite carefully. At the private airstrip out in Prince Georges County, his plane stood fueled and ready. A Cessna 172, single-engine, four-seater. He had registered it months ago under one of his cover names, Anthony Blunt. Early this morning Tusk
had driven out and dropped his duffel bag. And into the front passenger seat he had strapped Philby, mewing inside his cat carrier. Tusk had stroked his fur and left the window cracked for air.

Once he was airborne and at a safe distance, he would dial the cell phone connected to the arming switch he had left in the SUV. It could all still work. He could execute within ninety minutes, depending on traffic out to the airstrip.

It was not ideal. It was a goddamn million miles away from ideal. But there might still be time.

MCNAMARA AND I RUSHED DOWN
the hallway, weaving our way through the tide of people evacuating. He paused for a moment to help a man struggling with crutches, then took my elbow again. “Almost there. Just around this corner and then we can—”