White: A Novel (27 page)

“Something’s wrong, huh?” she said.

“No,” Jeremy said. He put his hands on her arms, more like a coach than a hopeful lover. “Nothing’s wrong.”

Her eyebrows dipped just a bit as if she knew that wasn’t so.

“I just didn’t expect this,” he said. “You’re a beautiful woman. Stunning, really. And I . . . I don’t really feel like I know what I’m supposed to do.”

It was all he could think of. Killing was easy. Adultery was hard.

“Well, why didn’t you say so, you silly boy?” Heidi giggled. The light twinkling in her eyes had nothing to do with the moon or stars. She bounced on her toes a couple times as if someone had just played her favorite song. “Follow me!”

Heidi wrapped her arms around Jeremy’s waist and pressed her lips against his with a newfound confidence. There was nothing timid in her affections this time. She used her tongue to find his, moving tight against his weight, drinking him in with the danger and the delightful surprise of finding something wonderful in a landscape of cactus and stone.

“HOW IS HE?”
Beechum asked. The president’s secretary had worked for Venable since his first political campaign almost twenty years earlier. From the Connecticut legislature to the U.S. House of Representatives and then back to the statehouse in Hartford, the soft-spoken widow had devoted her career and, in many ways, her life to a man she revered.

“I’m getting worried about him,” the secretary said. “He just won’t sleep.” A private door connected her desk to the Oval Office, and she had watched over him like a worried mother.

“I know,” Beechum said. “Is he alone?”

“Yes. The secretary of state just left.”

“Give us a couple of minutes, will you?” Beechum asked.

The secretary nodded her head and turned to an endlessly ringing phone.

The vice president knocked twice on an open door and found her boss sitting at the harmonium, hands in his lap, staring blankly at the keys. He looked every bit as torn and disheveled as the room around him.

“A word, David?” she asked.

“Umm, yes . . . Elizabeth. Please . . .”

The vice president walked in and sat on one of the two opposing couches.

“Is there news?” he asked.

“Nothing imminent,” she lied. Financial markets were tanking around the globe. Americans were running stores dry of duct tape, bottled water, and ammunition. The FAA still hadn’t untangled domestic flight schedules. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies were drowning in a sea of leads. Congress had gone into indefinite recess for fear of making themselves a target.

“How do you feel, David?”

The president nodded a little too enthusiastically.

“Good. Good.” He shook his head as if trying to clear a daydream. “Do you hear that?”

The president stood up from his harmonium, ear cocked to one side, and crossed the room. “I can’t seem to place it.”

Beechum heard nothing.

“Place what?”

“That symphony,” he said, wandering around the room, searching. “It sounds like Haydn, but I’m not. . . . Listen to the oboes; they’re absolutely ethereal.”

He shuffled around the Oval Office on unsteady feet.

“There, you hear it?” he asked again. The president reached out to the wall and ran his hand along the plaster as if the music were coming from invisible speakers.

“David, it’s not Haydn,” she blurted out. “It’s your mind playing tricks on you. You need sleep.”

Beechum held a vial of white powder in the palm of her sweaty right hand. The White House physician had agreed with her assessment but insisted on administering the proper dosage himself. She had argued that the president would not willingly take a sedative; the doctor’s presence would do nothing but alarm him. Only the threat of allowing Venable access to TV cameras settled the argument. The physician agreed to wait outside in the Roosevelt Room until Venable nodded off.

“Sleep? Nonsense!” Venable barked, still cocking his ear toward the sound only he could hear. “We have a national crisis on our hands, in case you haven’t noticed! What do you expect me to . . .”

He trailed off, searching again for the symphony.

“David, sit down and talk to me.”

Beechum realized that dosing the president would not be easy. The powerful sedative in her hand was supposed to be odorless and tasteless, but getting it into his body might prove tricky. If her first attempt didn’t work, someone would have to administer an injection, and that presented a whole new set of problems.

“Please, David, sit with me and have a sip of coffee.” She waited until he turned toward the inaudible hum and poured the powder into a cup on the now ever-present service tray.

“Coffee?” he asked, as if the idea hadn’t occurred to him. “No, I’ve . . .”

The symphony again.

“Here,” she said. Beechum poured steaming liquid into the White House china and mixed in a little cream, just the way he liked it. “We need to talk about the radioactive isotope theft.”

“Where’s Alred?” the president asked. “He’s the only one of them who knows anything about . . .”

He lost his train of thought. The president wandered over to his second in command and sat. She handed him the drink.

Beechum poured herself a cup and sipped it with exaggerated interest.

“Very nice,” the president said. He stared into the cup until he’d finished it.

“There’s something I want to discuss with you, David. Please sit with me for a minute.”

The president followed her suggestion like a man in a hypnotic trance.

“We have a source inside a group . . . ,” she began. But there was no point in finishing. Before she could wonder if it had worked, the president of the United States slumped onto the center cushion. The cup fell from his hand and broke on the hardwood floor. His secretary heard it and hurried in.

“Oh, my . . .” The elderly woman gasped. She started toward the couch.

“It’s all right, Millie,” Beechum reassured her. “He’s just decided to take a nap.”

The doctor stepped in too, a stethoscope already around his neck.

“Tell the Secret Service we need to get the president to bed,” Beechum ordered. “Quickly, please. We don’t want to start any rumors.”

JORDAN MITCHELL LOVED
his country so much he had allowed it to hate him. From
USA Today
to
Imus in the Morning,
commentators, pundits, and unnamed government sources pointed to his Quantis phone as the facilitator of insurgent plots. Nothing could have been further from the truth of course. If not for information he had gathered through critical intercepts, America would have had to rely on bureaucrats at the FBI and CIA. What a tragedy that would have been.

“How close are we?” he asked.

“Just a couple of miles, Mr. Mitchell,” Trask answered. They sat next to each other in the back of a month-old Maybach 62. The elegant 543 horsepower sedan—Mercedes’s recent contribution to the handmade automobile market—smelled of grand napa leather, wool carpet, and French polished rosewood. A bottle of Pellegrino and two Waterford tumblers rested between them, untouched.

“Lovely in the snow, isn’t it?” Mitchell asked. He held the prospectus of a successful biotech in his lap but let his eyes wander to scenery passing by his window. Borders Atlantic had never ventured into the life sciences, but from everything he had seen in recent months, biogenetic engineering looked like the newest frontier of venture capitalism.

“Just like James Taylor says,” Trask observed. “‘The Berkshires seemed dreamlike on account of that frosting . . .’”

“Who?” Mitchell asked.

“James Taylor. He’s a singer. Wonderful, really.”

Mitchell pushed the prospectus aside and picked up another folder that he had studied well during the past week. It held a half-inch stack of top secret military records and CIA after-action reports. The first document was a xeroxed copy of an Advanced Research Projects Agency file dated January 3, 1983. The title line read “Civil Defense Scenario 4: Project Megiddo.” Beneath that someone had stamped
TOP SECRET,
then
CODE WORD PROTECTED: ZORA.

“Odd that we settled so close to each other, isn’t it?” Mitchell asked. He opened the folder to an army personnel file.

“Like you said, this part of the country looks lovely in the snow,” Trask said. He typed away at a laptop—part of the car’s business center, which included a fax, wireless Internet, and, of course, the company’s secure Quantis communication system. Its electrotransparent rear roof, DVD player, and twin flat-screen televisions provided entertainment. A twenty-one-speaker Bose stereo offered music so powerful, its output was measured in terms of horsepower.

“That’s it, there.”

Trask pointed up the road to a modest but neatly kept gambrel-roofed house of 1970s vintage. The mustard-colored aluminum siding had faded unevenly, and the garage door looked ready for replacement, but the home fit nicely on its lot. The owner had parked his Ford F-150 in the driveway under a dusting of snow. His bright-yellow Fisher snowplow looked brand new from the dealer.

“I think I expected something a little more . . . a little nicer for this guy,” Mitchell remarked. Most of the information in his file was two decades old, but his investigators had catalogued the basics. The man had made enough money to live larger than this.

“You know people and their money,” Trask said, powering down his computer. “There’s no accounting for taste.”

The driver pulled in behind the pickup and hurried around to open Mitchell’s door. Trask followed his boss up the concrete front steps and rang the bell.

“Yes?” the man of the house answered. He stood behind an aluminum storm door, clad in wide-wale corduroys and a threadbare cardigan. “May I help you?”

He looked at Mitchell, then at the car.

“Do you know who I am?” Mitchell asked.

“I read the papers,” the man said. He showed no reaction one way or the other.

“Would you mind if we come in to speak with you for a moment?”

The man’s knuckles tightened where he held the door. He looked up and down the street, then back at a man any of his neighbors would have recognized as well.

“What is it you want?” the man demanded. He craned his neck, peering up and down the street again. “Why should I let you in?”

“Because you were a patriot once,” Mitchell told him. “And you have something I want.”

This is a man who acquires billion-dollar corporations,
the man in the cardigan thought.
Magazines reported about how Jordan Mitchell had spent years tracking heirlooms for his weapons collection. This man asks for things politely, but anyone can see in his face that “no” is just a waste of time.

“What could I have that you would want?”

“Details about the Megiddo project,” Mitchell said.

“The what?”

This man either had no idea what Mitchell was talking about or he was a damned good liar.

“This is very important,” the Borders Atlantic CEO said. “I think you know I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

Mitchell lifted the ARPA folder and held it up to the glass door. It was open to page twenty-two, a black-and-white photocopy of a man in OD fatigues and a green beret. The picture looked old and dated, but there was no mistaking the face.

“I’ll be damned,” the homeowner said. “They told me that guy had disappeared forever.”

XIII

Friday, 18 February

02:10 GMT

Cabinet Room, The White House

FIRST NEWS OF
the attack came via the U.S. government’s principal intelligence-gathering agency: CNN. Andrea Chase was talking on an STU-III secure telephone to General Oshinski in the War Room at the Pentagon when Wolf Blitzer went live with footage of emergency crews in California.

“Havelock!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. The national security advisor’s office was at the far end of the hall, down past the VP’s suite. She didn’t care who heard.

“Andrea have you seen . . .” The press secretary literally ran into her in the doorway as the chief of staff bolted from her desk.

“Assemble the cabinet,” she said, ignoring the thought that the executive branch’s spokesman would soon have his own problems to deal with. “I want the National Security Council in the SITROOM. Now.”

“TV is reporting power outages across the west,” he said, running after her. “Seventeen states . . .”

“Where’s the vice president?” Chase asked.

The president lay upstairs in a drug-induced coma, law enforcement and the intelligence community were already pushing the limits of their resources, Washington was just limping back into a city paralyzed by snow, and most of the White House staff was running on fumes.

“Where’s the vice president?”

The press secretary knew he had ended up in the wrong place at the wrong moment, but there was no way out now.

“I don’t know. It’s getting late, she’s probably in . . .”

“Andrea, the western grid is down,” Havelock said, charging out of his office. Most of the staff had already gone for the day. The three senior officials stood in the white pall of overhead fluorescent lights and shuddered with dread.

“I want Alred and Vick over here as soon as possible,” Chase said. She slapped fingers into her palm as she counted out directives. “We need to find the vice president and keep her here. Get the Secret Service shift commander and the military communications director to meet me downstairs right now.”

She paused to run mental triage on the wave of political casualties flowing into her head.

“We’ll run this out of the Oval Office, understood?” she said. “The West Wing will be crawling with press corps, and I don’t want them asking why the lights aren’t on in there. Go!”

The press secretary and the national security advisor hurried off in opposite directions to begin making calls.

Twenty-four hours,
Chase yelled within her own head.
How could I have been so stupid?

“SHHHHHH, HE’LL HEAR
us,” Heidi whispered. She dragged Jeremy by the hand, back behind the main house, toward a secret place where she knew no one would interrupt. “I swear that man can hear the sun rising.”