Sabotage (13 page)

I
n the end, President Morgan did speak at the same time Sabotage did. He had no other choice, really. The president can do many things but appearing to plan his schedule around terrorists is not one of them.

He stood in the White House press room, cameras snapping, and thought about how different it was than his other times in the room. Just as he was to begin, he decided to stop. He had always been an extremely talented gauge of how he needed to come across, and so he chose to make his remarks without a teleprompter.

“You know,” he said, resting his elbow on the podium in a way he never did, “I’ve been in this room many times. I was here as a Congressional aide back in the seventies, and I was here as a Congressman in the eighties. I’ve been here and spoken to these same faces hundreds of times in the last few years. Most of the time, and certainly during my time as president, for every challenge that we have, every situation that needs to be fixed, there’s still a joy and an energy that comes with being here. There’s a sense of where we’re going and what we’re going through.

“But today, you know that some animals have torn at us in a way that we’re not used to. They’ve hit us where we live, literally. As I stand here today, I am telling you that we are at the very beginning of getting to the bottom of this. Today is not a day of joy in this room. It is a day of resolve. This country has given everything to me. Its people are an endless source of pride and joy to me and to everyone who works in Washington, no matter what side of the political divide they may fall on. We may have bickered yesterday. Today, we hang together.

“I don’t have answers for you right now. I only have the supreme confidence of someone who has seen this nation at work. We will put a swift end to this. We will restore this nation’s safety. I ask everyone to report any suspicious activity and to join in whatever relief efforts you can. Now is the time to show these …” he searched for the right, PG-rated word, “vermin what we are made of. They will find out.”

He thought about saying more and then thought of his days as a prosecutor. He had hit the right notes. Better to end a few words too soon than a few words too late.

He took a deep breath. “May God bless the United States of America. Thank you.”

Jones met the President in the corner of the room. She turned and walked with him. “Best speech I’ve ever heard you give. Nothing like the bland rhetoric Sanders gave you.”

Morgan gave a laugh, straight from the gallows. “Yeah, too bad nobody saw it.”

T
raffic in Las Vegas was never a source of pleasure, but the normal traffic paired with the panic in the air from the word spreading about all the attacks plus a nasty rear-ender about ten cars ahead made it unbearable.

Britt tried to remain calm. He knew he should have hired a helicopter. He knew it, but he didn’t want to file another flight plan, and he traveled the streets enough to believe that the time he allotted himself would be more than enough to make it into the air prior to his next move.

He wanted to get out and exact justice. He wanted to shoot the person who was so careless to not even notice that there was a car stopping in front of them in the face. He wanted to blow their brains out. He wanted to see it and do it himself.

But he knew he couldn’t. He couldn’t risk everything to satisfy his need for vengeance. The whole plan was still there. He was sure he would make it on time. He looked around for anything in the limo to calm him down. A drink? No, that was not going to help. He turned on the TV. He watched the flames and the crying. It wasn’t perfect, but it helped. He was in control of that.

He calmed his mind. He wasn’t going anywhere for a few minutes. He had time to reflect and nothing more important to do. He slowed his breathing and let his thoughts collect. After all, the most fun part about this entire endeavor was the thinking and the guessing. Will they or won’t they? Will they stop trading on the stock? Will they inflate the price? He didn’t think so. In fact, he hoped they wouldn’t. Would others do the job for him? He rigged the entire situation so he couldn’t lose whether the stock hit the target or not. He was going to rain the same hell down on everyone regardless of what they did. An interesting experiment in predicting what would happen in unpredictable situations.

You put the game in motion, and then you get to see how they respond. They went along with his model for the most part. Britt thought that the president might stand a little taller, talk a little more boisterously at the press conference, which he tried to listen to while simultaneously watching his own fun, but his Sabotage game made it difficult to respond—too much shock and awe, to use their phrase. He had them completely off-balance. He congratulated himself for that.

Britt placed bets in every direction, most of them with other people’s money. He used bots to do most of it and hired hackers to place computer loops inside viruses. When you clicked on the Nigerian prince e-mail or the one promising nasty photos of your neighbor, you were giving him entrance to your computer. You created a stock account you didn’t know existed. You were making him small amounts of money for months, and, now, you were about to make him a fortune.

Of course, Britt already had a fortune. He had more money than he needed even if he never touched a bomb. But this was only partly about money. It was much more interesting than that.

Britt had money—lots of it. His father was the stately Connecticut patriarch who invented a new type of laser printer that made architects’ jobs very easy. This was back in the eighties, when everything was bright and suburban, and his dad just let his alcoholic mother run the show at home while he made the money and screwed the help. Britt grew up with no grounding, no roots. He didn’t want to be his worthless dad, and he certainly didn’t want anything to do with his simpering mother. He was free to roam the neighborhood and do pretty much anything he wanted. So he came up with a plan. It was very simple, really. He wanted to be James Bond.

That’s what he trained for. He was circumspect enough not to tell anyone, but every maneuver was calculated to become a spy: good grades, good looks, good choices. Spies needed to be spotless, and he was just that.

He made it into the FBI because he knew a friend of a friend. It was a first step, but they didn’t see him as special. All the tools needed to become a player in today’s law enforcement were not the skill set he planned for. Diplomacy, multi-cultural schmoozing, analytical ability—these were the coins of the realm now. Many agents never even fired a gun. The life Britt dreamed of no longer really existed.

So he was going to create it. Years ago, when he was still working within their rules, for the most part, he was halfway through a complicated but utterly harmless maneuver which would have made him a hero. That was when he was confronted by Grant Fucking Miller. Britt gave some information on bad CIA agents to deep cover men. It would raise his profile with the CIA and get him out of the FBI. They claimed it compromised deep cover. He doubted that seriously, but Miller confronted him. At that time, he was in the middle of his 9/11 poster boy power trip. He was an asshole, and he wasn’t wise, or kind, or even reasonable with the knowledge he gained. He stuck it to Britt when he didn’t have to do that. He ruined his career. Miller had it all wrong; he thought the bad guys were good. When he came in and started waving his gun around, that was how it had to be played. Britt and two of his confidants were cashiered out of the service; with the cover story, they resigned instead of face criminal prosecution. He secreted a letter in a safe from the deputy director of the CIA that acknowledged no official wrongdoing, but that didn’t help. He would never be able to play again in spy ops. He was worthless as a clandestine, and everyone knew it.

For all of those years, being a spook was a fairly good replacement for having parents worth a shit, or real relationships, or any kind of balanced life at all. Grant Miller set him adrift and did so without an ounce of humility or any common sense. He didn’t have any mercy or even take the time to hear him out. Britt knew he was technically guilty of what he was accused of, but these were not good guys. Grant never gave him the chance to show that.

Britt spent six months at the bottom of a bottle, figuring out just how much of his identity was wrapped up in his choice of career. He lost his edge with women, and he became painfully aware of how few friends he really had. Sometimes people find out these issues over time, one after the other. Britt was not so lucky. One day he was a fast-climbing spy with cover personas and an exciting, interesting life. The next day he found himself very rich and with his entire life gone. He needed a new purpose, or it would end badly.

Then it came to him: instead of being Bond, he would have to be a Bond villain. Over time, he came to see that as nearly as intriguing. No moral code to adhere to, and you still got the girl, if you wanted that and, he had to add, if you could get it up. You got more money, and the power was fucking off the charts. Britt began his plan to rid the world of Grant Miller. At first, it was that simple. Then, like any good businessman, he decided to expand his operations. He used his former connections and his looks to begin to carve out a plot. He enjoyed putting on the Muslims. That was fun for him, but he never forgot Miller.

When he found out that Caitlin moved to Vegas, he worked it into his plan to sleep with Grant’s fiancée.
She was rather worth at least some of the trouble
, he thought. He imagined her running back to Grant about now. She would soon find out he was dead, as well.

O
mega Flight 723 was an hour and a half into its journey, carrying 220 passengers between Las Vegas and Chicago. As they flew through the late afternoon summer haze, passengers were on their second cocktail, and flight attendants, having put away the snack carts, played on their phones. By the time they would land, it would be nearly dark.

Sitting in first class, Amanda Beezer was a redheaded goddess going to meet her new boyfriend in Chicago for a weekend to be spent exclusively between the sheets. She had her eyes closed and her thoughts clearly set to naughty. It was her first time in first class, and she could only afford it because the new boy paid. She tried to ignore William Mentzler, a Bermuda shorts-wearing retiree sitting next to her. He wanted desperately for her to talk to him and was being downright haughty since she did not reciprocate the feeling. He pulled out a John Grisham novel and pretended to read.

In the back of the plane, Rikki Vanover sat with her two small children, Jack and Grace, who were six and four. They were meeting Daddy in Chicago for a weekend at Wrigley Field and the Field Museum. The kids traveled often and were very well-behaved, and her neighbor, Naomi Felder, complimented her several times. “They are so much better than my children were!” she kept saying in a way that made Rikki truly wonder about how bad Ms. Felder’s children had been.

They began the boarding process shortly after the first attacks, and the pilot had told them they were going to proceed since none of the attacks had involved aircraft. With all the new technology aboard planes, the tech-wired could keep tabs on all the activities and the wild theories that started circulating. In the process, at least one unlucky fellow would surely burn up his computer trying to guess Sabotage’s password. They were watching the massacre in real time if they chose to.

Omega Flight 723 was chosen because those who were charged with putting the freight—where the airlines really made their money—on the plane had long ago become lax. For six months, a small electronics company from Las Vegas called American Securities sent packages on this flight every Thursday. They were always the same number and weight, and, for some reason, they always set off the bomb detector. For the first four months, the employees took the packages apart and meticulously inspected them. Time and again, they consulted with the company, who could not explain why they set the bomb detectors off.