White: A Novel (30 page)

“Where?”

“Atlanta. 1998. I did five years as an accessory because all they had was one eyewitness who heard me talking at a pay phone. There was no physical evidence.”

“Why, because you were innocent?” Ellis asked.

“No, because I was good,” Jeremy bragged. “I’d do it again tomorrow, except I wouldn’t talk on a pay phone.”

Ellis and the others seemed interested in Jeremy’s story.

“Why did you come here?” one of the men asked.

“To learn how to fight. You saw that I can shoot, but I need more knowledge of tactics if I’m going to stop these murderers from killing any more innocent babies.”

Jeremy looked each of the hooded men in the eye.

“Judging from what I see here, I’ve come to the right place.”

The colonel said nothing for a moment. He turned to the man on his right and exchanged something without words.

“What do you mean, the right place?” the colonel asked.

“I mean that what I’m seeing in front of me confirms everything I was told in prison. I’m a Phineas priest. I came here to find you.”

Another exchange between the colonel and what had to be his second.

“What do you know about the Phineas Priesthood?” the man asked. He sounded younger than the colonel by a decade or more.

“I know what I needed to know when I committed my Phineas acts,” Jeremy said. In the past week he had read everything Richard Kelly Hoskins had written. He had studied Christian Identity Movement dogma. He had committed to memory virtually everything the FBI had learned through a decade of white supremacist and fringe religion investigation.

“I’m a warrior for Christ, just like you,” Jeremy proclaimed. “I came here to serve. And now I suppose we’re going to get down to the business of proving it.”

“Prep him,” Ellis ordered. He motioned with his hand, and the sixth man in the circle produced a pair of three-bar handcuffs. One of the gunmen waved the muzzle of his rifle toward a chair, and Jeremy sat. He was no stranger to interrogation. They always seemed to start the same way—shackles, a seat to keep you upright, and a dull ache of foreboding.

“What can you tell me about Numbers?” the colonel wanted to know. The men held their semicircle, but the fifth man moved closer. Jeremy noticed that he looked different through the eyeholes of his hood. One eye was pink as a rabbit’s; the other was covered by gauze. A black leather case in his left hand told Jeremy that this man would administer the encouragement.

“‘And Israel abode in Shittim,’” Jeremy recited from memory. “‘And the people began to commit whoredom with the daughters of Moab. And they called the people unto the sacrifices of their gods: and the people did eat, and bowed down to their gods. And Israel joined himself unto Baalpeor: and the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel. And the Lord said unto Moses, take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun, that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel. And Moses said unto the judges of Israel, slay ye every one his men that were joined unto Baalpeor.’”

Jeremy held still as the fifth man moved closer. “Book of Numbers twenty-five, one through five,” he said. “It’s our motto.”

“That proves nothing,” Ellis said. “You could have read that in Hoskins’s text. Memorizing the Bible doesn’t make you a Phineas priest.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Jeremy agreed. “But committing Phineas acts does.”

The first blow came from an open hand. The fifth man’s palm struck Jeremy squarely atop his left ear, popping the drum and leaving a slow rivulet of blood seeping down the side of his neck.

“The first real interrogation I ever witnessed took place in the back of a North Vietnamese deuce-and-a-half, two klicks inside Cambodia.” Ellis talked with a certain nostalgia. “Nineteen sixty-five. I was the one-oh of a spike team out of an A base in the mountains north of Ben Het: two Americans and six Rhade Montagnard tribesmen. We had this kid named Yuk Ayun, claimed he was a sorcerer. Well, we got ahold of this Vietcong captain one evening, and our kid sorcerer set into him.”

Jeremy thought back on HRT selection and the way they had beaten him, leading up to the “water board.” It wasn’t the pain he dreaded; it was the anticipation.

“I’m not going to be much good to you with a broken head,” Jeremy said. He could feel the blood dripping onto his bare shoulder.

“‘He got ghosts in him,’ this sorcerer kept saying,” Ellis remembered aloud. “‘He got ghosts in him.’ Well, this kid liked to work with electricity, and we had found this Soviet hand-crank dynamo in one of the hooches, so our sorcerer started to light this captain up. He’d give him a little juice, then bend over—real quiet like—and listen to the gook’s heart. I guess he was trying to hear whether or not those ghosts were still in there.”

The colonel nodded, and the fifth man turned toward his bag.

“I’m a spiritual man,” the colonel said. “But I’m no sorcerer. And I’ve never been much interested in inquiring into a man’s relationship with pain.”

Jeremy watched as the fifth man opened the bag.

“That ear thing was for trying to take advantage of my daughter,” Ellis said. “Heidi lured you down here for us, by the way. Don’t read anything into her intentions.”

The robed torture expert reached into the bag and pulled out two stainless-steel surgical instruments. One had a scissors joint and abraded tongs at the business end, some sort of retractor. The other looked like one of those probes dentists use to check for cavities.

“This is my way of listening to your heart,” the fifth man said. He held the dental probe in the palm of his left hand and the retractors in his right. He carried the instruments gingerly, a professional who knew his way around trembling flesh.

“Do you have anything you want to tell me before we do this?” the colonel asked.

“I came here to offer myself for the one true and righteous God,” Jeremy said. “I never thought it would be a bloodless fight.”

“Well, you thought right.” Ellis nodded.

The fifth man leaned in and held Jeremy’s face still with a viselike grip.

“You have the most striking blue eyes,” he said. “Let’s see what they look like on the inside.”

The torturer’s free hand came forward with the forceps, but Jeremy saw no point in trying to wrestle free. Like he said, this wasn’t going to be a bloodless fight.

“SORRY I’M LATE,”
Beechum apologized, hurrying into the West Wing Cabinet Room with Havelock and Alred in tow. James had run back to her office for the latest NSA updates. “General, what do we know?”

She pulled out a chair at the head of the table and poured herself a glass of water.

“Excuse me, Elizabeth, but shouldn’t we wait for the president?” the secretary of state suggested.

“Ah, yes . . . the president,” she said. “As you know, David has been working around the clock since this began. He finally decided to get some sleep and left orders not to be disturbed except in the case of dire emergency.”

“And this would be what?” the secretary of agriculture asked. The former senator from Arizona didn’t know Black Angus from ass backward, but that had never stopped him from speaking his mind.

“Albert, I understand we have fifty-seven DoD installations in the affected areas,” Beechum said, turning to her secretary of defense. “How do we . . . ?”

“Elizabeth, I have to object,” the agriculture secretary interjected. “Nearly half this country has been paralyzed by a terror-induced blackout. I think the president would want to know.”

“Then you go up and wake him!” Beechum erupted. She had no interest in trying to placate the hollow concerns of a man who oversaw cheese subsidies. “The president has been on his feet for more than ninety hours, and these attacks may be long from over. He’s a human being, goddammit. In order to remain effective, he’s going to need a few hours of rest.”

The secretary’s lower lip drooped onto his chin.

“Now about those bases,” Beechum continued. “I want to know exactly how much we’re going to have to draw down the strategic oil reserves in order to keep them running on backup generators. Because if we keep taking hits like this, auxiliary power is about the only thing any of us are going to have.”

CAROLINE WALLER LAY
on the living room couch, watching cable news with Christopher in her arms and the channel changer in her right hand. Her parents lived in Buena Park, California, and after more than two hours of trying, she still hadn’t contacted them.

Where the hell are you?
she wondered about her husband.
Why is it that every time something happens, you run off to save the world but never get to help your own family?

She had never been one to complain, but this was getting a little ridiculous. Life had been so different in Missouri. People there shared a sense of community that meant open doors and open arms in times of need. Many a night Jeremy had gone off to work a bank robbery or a kidnapping only to have one neighbor or another arrive with a covered dish and a comforting smile.

The Springfield FBI office had been great, too. With just six agents and two secretaries, everyone looked out for each other as if their lives depended upon it. Which they did. Men and women who carried guns for a living always knew the risk. In the best of times they laughed it off as an acceptable part of the job, but when tragedy struck, they shared a truly personal sense of loss.

Just a call,
Caroline wished.
Just a few words to know that he’s all right. Surely this assignment has something to do with the horrific series of attacks that has devastated the country. First the bombings, then the plane crashes, now this. Seventeen states, the news said. Radiological dispersion device—the dirty nuke everyone has talked about for so long.

Well, it had finally come. Now what in the world would they do about it?

Ring . . . ring . . .

Caroline snatched up the cordless, trying to avoid waking Christopher. It had taken so long to get him to sleep.

“Hello?” she asked. Caroline knew it must be her parents, but she held a thin flicker of hope that it might be her husband.

“Hi, Mrs. Waller,” someone answered. “This is Les Mason.”

Oh my God.
She silently gasped.

A knot the size of a golf ball rose in her throat. It was after midnight. The HRT commander had never even called her during the day. Why now, if not with terrible news?

“WE ARE EFFORTING
to assess damage to operational readiness,” the SECDEF advised his interim boss. It was the first time in history an American cabinet member had briefed a female commander in chief.

“Meaning, you don’t know?”

“Communications are down in some areas,” he said. “I can tell you that nuclear assets are secure and that our command and control staff is in contact with the War Room, but in terms of any actual damage assessment, we just don’t have anything solid at this time.”

Beechum turned toward her attorney general. “What about law enforcement?”

The former Iowa governor looked lost without his FBI chief.

“Well, ah . . . we have no real, uh, constitutional issues right now that I’m aware of,” he stammered. Beechum dismissed him with poorly veiled disgust.

“Forgive my disinterest in our forefathers,” Beechum said, “but we’ve got an acute national crisis on our hands. I want to know just what the hell we’re doing to protect the integrity of our national infrastructure!”

“I, ah . . . I’ll have to defer to our individual law enforcement heads,” the attorney general said, writing ferociously on a yellow legal pad. “The Justice Department is . . .”

“What about our allies?” Beechum asked. She turned to Venable’s secretary of state, a former ambassador to the United Nations.

“The Saudis are fully aware that we’re looking at them,” he said, much more confidently than his Justice Department counterpart. “The royal family believes that this administration wants to lay blame on them in order to leverage OPEC. The Crown Prince will announce tomorrow that he plans to roll back production by five million barrels a day unless we back down.”

“Cost to us?” Beechum asked.

“We’re talking twenty percent of daily consumption. That means five-dollar-a-gallon gas, maybe more. Same for heating oil, which could create real problems this time of year.”

The interior secretary popped up.

“Anticipate widespread economic repercussions,” he said. “The Saudis have about one trillion dollars in our financial institutions, and that doesn’t include Saudi-friendly Mideast partners.”

Beechum well knew the danger of a move against American markets.

“Treasury?” she asked.

A Brooks Brothers catalogue model tilted his head to one side.

“We’re six months into the first recovery in five years,” he said. “We anticipate substantial weakness in the dollar, a collapse in consumer confidence coupled with inflationary pressure as a result of rising energy prices. Transportation sectors have already been dealt crippling blows. Worker productivity will show significant decline as a result of . . .”

“All right, all right.” Beechum stopped him.

“Excuse me . . .” The door swung open and the press secretary entered. He looked visibly shaken. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s something you need to know.”

Beechum waved him in, knowing that an inquiry at this hour could only mean more trouble.

“I just got a call from the
Washington Post,
” he said. “They’re citing a confidential source who says there are ‘irregularities’ in the president’s military record.”

“That’s nothing new,” Beechum huffed. “Tell them we dealt with that during the election and have a national crisis to address.”

“I did, ma’am,” the worried man told her. “They have been working this for a couple months and have found several people who say they do not recall him serving in their unit during his Vietnam tour.”

“The president’s military records were destroyed during the 1973 Military Personnel Records Center fire in St. Louis,” Beechum said. “They know that.”

“They claim the fire only affected personnel discharged prior to 1964. The president was discharged in 1972. They are going to run this up on their Web site, and MSNBC has already pushed it into heavy rotation.”