White: A Novel (10 page)

“Wow,” she said. Maybe this reentry would be different.

Jeremy watched her face as she unwrapped it, but all he could see were the fires back out there in that jungle. Even through the flash of the Thermit grenades, he could see the men inside the huts, burning up. The pools of blood where they had died washed away in the thickening rain.

“It’s beautiful,” Caroline said. She slipped the glass-bead bracelet over her arm and held it up for him to see.

“It was made by local tribesmen in . . .”

Jeremy stopped. All of a sudden, the circles under his eyes seemed darker. This mission, like so many of the others, was classified. There would be no places, dates, or times. Not even for his wife.

“I’m glad you like it.”

Jeremy tried to rid his mind of the images: Americans falling forward where French shot them. He saw the survivor—the albino called Caleb—running across the clearing, passing through Jeremy’s crosshairs, disappearing into the jungle.

“Bastard,” Jeremy muttered before realizing that the jungles were behind him. Caroline stood there in front of him, helpless against the voices she could only guess at.

“Are you OK?” she asked. Though Jeremy had returned home, her husband remained somewhere farther away than she could reach out to. Killing had changed this man. It had taken him from her.

“Yeah.” Jeremy nodded his head and stood up from the bag. “Yeah, I’m just really tired is all. I haven’t slept much in . . .”

But then the phone rang. Caroline turned toward the sound but didn’t dare answer. They both knew who was calling.

“WHAT IN HELL
is going on out there?” the president demanded. He burst into the Situation Room, where his vice president had already taken command. Neon clocks glowed with times around the world. Wall monitors broadcast time lines, news reports, flash traffic. Landlines rang. Keyboards chattered. Voices rose.

“Three planes down, all foreign carriers,” she said. Beechum held one phone to her shoulder and another to her ear. If anyone found it odd that the vice president was placing her own calls, they didn’t say so.

“L.A., Miami, and National,” the shift commander added. “The FAA has grounded domestic flights. They are in the process of checking all carriers for reports of in-flight emergencies.”

Venable nodded, trying to decide where he wanted to stand.

“Were these planes shot down?” he demanded. “Is that possible?”

“We don’t yet know where NBC is getting their information about the shooters,” his press secretary said. The man looked surprisingly calm, considering the onslaught his office now faced. “None of the other networks have gone with it, and we have very little good intel yet from the crash sites.”

“Alred!” the president yelled. Of all the agency heads he had met during the past three weeks, this FBI director seemed the most capable.

“Sir?” Alred responded. He hurried in from outside, where he had been conferring with a runner from the National Joint Terrorism Task Force.

“I thought you had these people under surveillance. How the hell are we losing airplanes all over the country if you have them under surveillance? Goddammit, how?”

Alred glanced down at a briefing paper he had just been handed, then shook his head. “We’re still working on document exploitation, Mr. President. These things take time. Our surveillances have shown nothing that makes us . . .”

“David!” the vice president interrupted. She had dropped one of the phones but held the other up in the air. “Looks like we can confirm that NBC story. I have the DC police chief on the phone. He says they have a suspect in custody.”

The room went quiet.

“An Indonesian male. Twenty-seven. Here on a student visa.” Beechum paused for more information. “They found him on the roof of a building in Alexandria. He had a rifle.”

“Well, where is he now?” the president asked, staring at Alred. The embarrassed FBI chief shrugged his shoulders.

Beechum repeated the president’s question into her phone and waited for the answer.

“DC General,” she finally said. “The morgue. They tell me the shooter is dead.”

WITHIN AN HOUR
of the first plane crash, credible and actionable leads had begun to flow in to crisis coordinators.

The FBI’s Strategic Information Operations Center—a state-of-the-art command post on the Hoover Building’s fifth floor—served as a clearinghouse for all local, state, and federal agencies involved with any of the attacks. The CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, on the third floor of the new headquarters building at Langley, took care of all foreign assets and leads. The Joint Terrorist Threat Integration Center in Bethesda, Maryland, served as a clearinghouse, classification collaborative, and data-processing hub for thousands of international intelligence and law enforcement entities.

Elsewhere, the U.S. government’s list of specialized task forces, squads, and units loosed a cascading deluge of intelligence unlike any other in history. The Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center in Beltsville, Maryland, began poring over every known individual, group, and government who might merit further scrutiny. The Centers for Disease Control mobilized its jump teams in anticipation of potential health emergencies. The Department of Energy’s Nuclear Emergency Search Team geared up in anticipation of radiological contingents. The FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group in Stafford, Virginia, called in profilers from its National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime to produce behavioral assessments, and to provide logistical support technicians from the Crisis Response Unit and negotiators from the Crisis Negotiations Unit.

SWAT teams, bomb squads, evidence response techs, EMS crews, hospital staffs, and Red Cross volunteers raced around in a maelstrom of flashing lights, sirens, and screeching tires. The National Transportation Safety Board got to crash sites any way it could. Above it all, the Domestic Emergency Support Team circled the empty skies over West Virginia in a rapid-deployment platform—a specially configured 737 called Gatekeeper—awaiting orders on where to land first.

None of this mattered to Jeremy Waller.

By the time he arrived at the Hostage Rescue Team’s compound, tucked away in its corner of the FBI Academy on the Quantico Marine Corps Base, one detail had risen to the top: three men had been discovered in connection with the airliner crashes. All three were Muslims; all three had been caught with or near Barrett .50 caliber rifles. Unfortunately, only one of them was still alive.

“Hey, buddy, when did you get back?” Fritz Lottspeich was the first to greet Jeremy. They met in the parking lot, which had become a congested mess of vehicles, snowdrifts, and running men.

“About an hour ago,” Jeremy said, tossing him a knuckle knock. “I leave the country for a few weeks and look what happens.”

Lottspeich laughed his haphazard chuckle and badged his way through the front gate. Inside the single-story industrial-shell building, they found a hornet’s nest of activity.

“All team leaders in the classroom,” Billy Luther said, grabbing Jeremy before the door had fully closed behind him. “Why do you always look like shit when you roll back into town?”

Jeremy smiled and followed Billy into the HRT classroom. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard comments like that.

“Waller, glad you could make it,” the man at the front of the room said. Les Mason had run HRT for three years. As one of the team’s plank holders, he had mounted out on more missions than any other operator.

“Been kind of busy, boss.” Jeremy smiled. “Miss me?”

The HRT commander smiled. Rank meant little inside this room. At times like this, it all came down to mission.

“All right, what do we got?” Mason asked, turning to the team’s S-2 intelligence officer. The former Hotel Team assaulter had received the job after recuperating from a gunshot wound he received in Kabul, Afghanistan.

“What do we got, boss?” the S-2 repeated. “Well, according to HQ, I’d say we’ve got us a situation.”

“I DIDN’T ASK
you if you wanted a lawyer! I asked you your goddamned name!”

Whack!

Ashar al Bayad recoiled from the open-hand blow. His head snapped backward, then down onto his chest as he tried to recover his senses.

“I-I am an A-American citizen,” he stammered. He could no longer feel his fingers or toes. Mist rose from his mouth when he spoke. “I have done nothing wrong.”

Whatever conviction his voice once held had left him. That hardly mattered. These people did not believe him, whatever his tone.

“Give him some more water,” a male voice spoke out. The hose coughed a couple times, then squirted liquid ice.

Bayad shook his head back and forth, trying to avoid the water long enough to gasp what little breath his lungs would allow. Second- and third-degree burns covered 25 percent of his now naked body, and they hurt beyond comprehension.

“What’s next?” another voice demanded. None of these men had given names. None of them had offered ID or read him his rights. This looked nothing like what he had seen on TV. Some foolish show.

“Where is Ansar ins Allah? What are you planning to do next?”

The water stopped long enough for him to answer, but he didn’t. What was he to say? Bayad tried to clench his jaw against the relentless shaking. Los Angeles was warm with the Santa Ana winds, he thought. They must have put him in some kind of industrial cooler.

“Listen, you motherfucker,” the first man said, “you are going to tell us what we need to know. Sooner or later, you’re going to talk; take my word for it.”

“Aaaaaahhhhhhhh!” Bayad yelled, trying to cleanse it all from his mind. This had to be a nightmare. How could he wake up?

“I don’t know nothing!” he yelled back. His voice had grown small for a time; gut yelling seemed the only way to make his vocal cords work. “I was working at my job when this man steals me at gunpoint. He holds me in his van, and then the van blows up and burns me. I am victim, here. I do nothing wrong. I am naturalized citizen, sworn in by George W. Bush. I love USA.”

This was the truth. Why would they not believe him?

“Fuck you, skinny,” one of the men said. “You deserve what you got coming.”

With that, they stopped the beating, opened the door, and left. Bayad sat in the chair by himself, scared and hungry and cold.

What will my family think?
he wondered.
They must be worrying sick about me by now.

He let his head hang down on his chest. The room smelled of urine and mold.

God is good,
he promised himself.
A just and mighty God. Allah huakbar.

PRESIDENT DAVID VENABLE
had only been there a handful of times, but he already hated the Situation Room. All the noise, the frenzy of information—he hated the way it fed his claustrophobia, how everyone looked to him, demanding answers.

Answers?
He hadn’t even come up with any decent questions!

“So let me get this straight,” he said. His immediate circle of advisors followed him up the stairs toward the Oval Office. The cadre had grown and shrunk in the past twenty-four hours, but a core seemed to be emerging. “We have found Islamic fundamentalists at all three sites? Two of them were dead when we got there, but one is still alive. Is that correct?”

“Correct,” Alred agreed. “He was a local cleric, badly burned when a bomb he planned to set off malfunctioned. He’s undergoing interrogation as we speak.”

The FBI Director, Havelock, Chase, Beechum, and now the press secretary, a polished former CNN reporter named Noah Engle, encircled the president.

“Two were found lying next to .50 caliber semiautomatic rifles made by Barrett Manufacturing Company,” Alred continued. “I’m told these guns are capable of piercing the windshield of a 747, which is supposed to be pretty tough. Only someone with specific expertise would know that.”

“How the hell did they use a rifle to shoot something moving three hundred miles an hour?” Venable asked. He walked deliberately, but slower now. Beechum had begun to think of him as a shark moving relentlessly through the water. He looked menacing and strong as long as he kept moving, but threatened to drown if he stopped.

“Planes move considerably slower on final approach,” Havelock said. He’d held a private pilot’s license for twenty years.

Alred spoke up again.

“They selected buildings that lined up at very steep angles relative to the glide path,” he explained. “That gave them an almost straight shot, which took speed out of the equation. People I talked with on our Hostage Rescue Team say it would not have been really difficult for a competent shooter.”

Venable led them into the Oval Office. Workmen had brought in couches and were wrestling with an electric pump organ the president had insisted be brought down from the governor’s mansion in Connecticut. He had spent many an introspective moment at its dual-level keyboards and expected to need it in the nation’s corner office.

“You be careful with that!” he barked at the workmen. “That’s an 1890 Estey reed harmonium my great-grandmother bought new in Brattleboro, Vermont.” The president walked over to show them a thing or two, then remembered himself and turned back to his staff. “That’s a family heirloom.”

“We need to consider courses of action,” his chief of staff said, once the workmen had departed.

“What are we supposed to do, put guards on every building?” Venable’s voice trailed off as he wandered over to his podium. “I mean, there are only so many things you
can
do in a free society. We’ve already got guards inside the planes. Really—what are we supposed to do?”

“You’re right, sir,” Noah said. “I think the American people understand that. They want to know we’re going after the people behind these attacks. They’re not interested in details.”

Havelock seemed to puff up, empowered by the press secretary’s validation of his “spy crap” theory.

“Who’s interrogating this suspect?” Venable asked.

“Defense Department people,” Beechum said, hoping he wouldn’t ask for more detail. There would always be things the president didn’t need to know. “We’re holding him as a material witness, which means we don’t have to divulge his location, file charges, or even acknowledge that we have him.”