White: A Novel (38 page)

The former Special Forces spook turned to look out his window as the car pulled away from the arrivals ramp.

Hostage Rescue Team?
he thought. This guy might prove to be more trouble than he was worth.

JEREMY RETURNED TO
the body shop five minutes early. He’d spent most of the previous three hours reading a paperback over soggy French fries and microwaved McDonald’s burgers. A sharp pain lingered just behind his sternum, some combination of gutter-food indigestion and apprehension.

“You ready for a driver?” he asked, knocking and entering with a confidence he hoped would sustain his cover.

“Hold it!” Malachi said. He stood near the back of the concrete mixer with a prohibitive hand in the air. The other two men stood behind him, wearing heavy rubber gloves and closed-circuit aspirators—the kind used by hazardous materials handlers.

“Smells like springtime on a dairy farm,” Jeremy noticed aloud. He remembered working on his buddy Eric’s farm as a kid. How could he ever forget getting up at the crack of dawn to hand crank diesel fuel into the big John Deere tractors as Eric loaded Agway phosphates into the “honey wagon”?

“Don’t you worry about nothing besides the driving,” Malachi scolded.

“Whatever you say,” Jeremy told him.

He tried to assess the scene without looking overly curious. One of the masked men had climbed a ladder and was leaning into the mixing drum. A suitcase-sized black storage case rested on the ladder platform. It looked as if he had emptied its contents into the ANFO.

“How long before you’re done?”

The other man bent over something near the truck’s rear wheel well. Jeremy assumed it had to be the detonator.

“Five minutes,” Malachi said, checking his watch. “Your contact should be here by now.”

“I am,” a voice announced. Jeremy recognized it immediately.

“Colonel?” he responded, turning toward Ellis and another man he had never met. “Didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

“Well, I’ve learned that expectations can present serious liability,” Ellis said. “Especially when dealing with strangers.”

Jeremy thought he heard threat in the man’s voice, but dismissed it as his own misgivings.

“We’re all set, Colonel,” the body shop foreman announced. He made no other attempt at conversation and came no closer.

“Thank you, men,” Ellis said. “That will be all.”

The three Phineas priests left through a side door—to decontaminate, Jeremy assumed. Ellis’s bodyguard waited until they were gone, then caught his boss’s eye and exited as well.

“So, are we still on schedule?” Jeremy asked when they were alone. He cocked his head toward the newly loaded concrete mixer. “Looks like everything is ready to go in here.”

“That’s what I understand,” Ellis said. He talked through clenched teeth. “Our intelligence cell assures me that all elements are good to go.”

Jeremy heard doubt, a sound he had learned to loathe in men of action.

“Do you have my orders, sir?” he asked.

But before the colonel could answer, the door opened and another man walked in.

“This is a busy place tonight,” Jeremy remarked.

Caleb walked up beside his father. Jeremy saw that the albino had stripped off the gauze bandages and replaced them with a black eye patch. The man’s pale, almost translucent skin glowed phosphorescent in the dimly lit garage.

“Your orders have changed,” Ellis said sarcastically. He knew something. Both of them did.

Jeremy felt adrenaline surging into his chest, pumping like it had during the Yemen mission and the Puerto Rico hostage rescue and the Irian Jaya hit. This time, he had no rifle, no weapons at all except presence of mind.

“Changed? How?” Jeremy pushed his hands into his pockets to keep from showing nervous energy.

“We have your family,” Caleb announced without further explanation. The words almost buckled Jeremy’s knees, but he maintained a poker face.

“I don’t have a family,” Jeremy said. “What are you talking about?”

Caleb held up his right hand and showed Jeremy where blood had seeped through a bandage around his knuckles.

“You know how I got this?” he asked. “Dragging your son Christopher out of that nice little house down in Stafford. Your wife cried like a mongrel bitch when I took him, but then Satch got her and everything went real quiet.”

Jeremy lunged at the albino. It was a reflex; a hammer blow to his head, which dropped the man in a rumpled heap.

“Stop or they’re dead,” Ellis said. His words came quietly, little more than a hiss. Jeremy might not have been able to restrain himself if the colonel had shouted, but the ease of his tone shocked him.

“What do you want?” Jeremy asked. He was talking to the colonel but standing just inches from Caleb as the albino regained his feet. Jeremy stared into the man’s single remaining eye. It was pink.

“I want you to understand the commander’s dilemma,” Ellis told him. “I want you to know what it feels like to decide between those things you hold most dear and the greater good of people you swore to protect. Do you follow orders to save your wife and children, knowing that those orders will kill thousands of other people? Or do you deny this mission, knowing we’ll kill your loved ones in the most brutal fashion?”

“You’re a sick fuck,” Jeremy said. Philosophy seemed beyond him at this point.

“No need to swear,” Ellis scolded. “And I’m not sick: in fact, I’m blessed with an almost prescient clarity of mind.”

Jeremy saw that Ellis held a Polaroid photograph in his hand.

“Thirty years ago in a bloody Asian rice paddy, I received an epiphany. My men were dying all around me. I had been shot several times, myself, bleeding, confused, scared, angry . . . raging against an enemy some politician defined for me. I knew I was going to die, never see my family again. I remember wondering about forgiveness—whether God would take me into heaven despite the numbers of people I’d killed.”

Jeremy didn’t care about the old soldier’s justification. All he could concentrate on was the Polaroid.

“And he came to me. A soft voice. Just a presence, really.”

Caleb stood motionless beside his father, ready to defend him at the least provocation.

“The Lord filled me up with a love I’d never felt before. Selfless, righteous love for something greater than my own desires. I had no idea what any of that meant, of course, except that I wasn’t going to die there in that rice paddy. The truth in that epiphany wasn’t revealed until later, once I’d gotten back to the world.”

“You have a point?” Jeremy asked.

“In your unfailing love you will lead the people you have redeemed, scripture tells us,” Ellis said. “In your strength you will guide them to your holy dwelling. The nations will hear and tremble; anguish will grip the people of Philistia.”

His face seemed to glow with resolution.

“The Philistines—the gutter gods of Islam—will never rest until they have taken from us what God has given. It is our duty to defeat them. The Phineas Priesthood is Salvation’s last defense.”

Caleb handed Jeremy the photograph. It showed Caroline, folded over backward on a tiled floor, stripped to her panties with hands and feet duct taped together.

“One hundred Independence Avenue,” Ellis said. He pointed to the truck. “You are going to make a delivery to the Capitol.”

Jeremy felt an overwhelming desire to end this right there and then, but that was impossible. Ellis would have more of his priests at the safe house. They’d kill Caroline and the kids before he could find them.

“There’s a big pour on the East Lawn,” Ellis responded. “It’s construction for a bunker they are building to protect the Congress against terrorist attack.”

“You’re going to kill them anyway, aren’t you?” Jeremy countered. “You blow up the truck with me in it—make it look like some suicide bombing—then you kill my family, too.”

“Not that quickly,” Ellis said. “We have something much more productive in mind for you. I have expectations of great things, still.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said, mustering a menacing smile. “Don’t forget what you told me about the danger in expectation.”

XVIII

Saturday, 19 February

02:17 GMT

Presidential Emergency Operations Center, The White House

“
WHERE AM I?”

The man who one week earlier had shone presidential emerged from a sparse, military-style bunk room in a state of complete disarray. His once perfectly groomed hair was matted across his forehead. Heavy blue-black bags hung beneath his eyes. Two days of gray-and-black stubble covered his cheeks and chin. The navy-blue robe he’d found at the foot of his bed was drawn tightly at the waist, inside out.

“This is PEOC, sir,” an Air Force communications sergeant said, jumping to his feet. Marine guards stood at either side of the bunk room doorway, but they seemed far less concerned.

“PEOC?” David Venable asked, stepping into a rude space full of whirring machines and artificial light. He looked well rested enough to understand these odd circumstances; sleep had humbled him. “I don’t know what PEOC stands for.”

“You’re in a bunker beneath the East Wing, David,” Andrea Chase said, walking toward him from a break-out room. She looked a little ragged herself.

“Presidential Emergency Operations Center, sir,” the airman added. He had been asked a question by the president himself and didn’t want to short the answer.

“What has happened?” Venable asked. He looked around the room at a staff of uniformed military personnel. All of them looked busy, none of them familiar.

“Airman, please call the vice president’s office and advise Ms. Beechum that the president is up,” Chase ordered.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

Chase took the president’s arm and spoke beneath the rattle of computer keyboards, telephones, and cable news reports.

“Are you all right, David?” she asked.

“I think so, yes,” the president responded. He appeared to be conducting a personal inventory, rebooting his faculties. “How long have I been asleep?”

“In here,” his chief of staff said. Chase led him into the break-out room she had just exited. “You’ve been down for twenty hours. It’s Friday evening. The eighteenth.”

“Friday?” he erupted. He tried to remember how he had gotten down here, then gave up, rummaging for the last memory of any kind. “The last I knew it was Monday.”

“Well,” Chase started to explain, but then she stopped. Nothing she could offer would sound reasonable at this point.

“Hello, David,” Beechum interrupted. “How do you feel?”

“I wake up in some kind of bunker feeling like I got cotton between my ears and something dead in my mouth. I’m missing three days, and . . .” Venable noticed that his robe was inside out. “Look at me! I want to know what in the name of God is going on around here.”

“There was another series of attacks while you slept—the Trans Alaska Pipeline, ships in the Mississippi, strategic natural gas reserves in Boston. The FBI is . . .”

“No, I mean with me!” The president slumped into a seat at a small conference table. “I want to know how I got here.”

Beechum didn’t miss a beat.

“You were sedated, David,” she said. “I authorized it. The White House physician gave you an injection.”

Venable nodded. He had suspected something like this.

“I took you on as vice president for the good of the party,” he said, placing both palms flat on the table. His mind seemed to be regathering itself at lightning pace. “I knew it was wrong, but I felt that I had no choice.”

“David . . .”

Andrea Chase tried to stop him, but he’d have none of it.

“I knew that you couldn’t function as second in command,” he said.

“You hadn’t slept in more than ninety-six hours,” Beechum argued. There was no apology in her voice. She was an old lawyer laying out an overwhelming case. “You were lapsing into what is called insomniac psychosis.”

“So you lapsed into what is called treason?”

“No, David.” Chase stopped him. “It wasn’t like that. We did what we had to do in order to . . .”

“Excuse me, Mr. President.” The Air Force sergeant knocked after the fact. “You have flash traffic from Fort Meade.”

“That’s NSA,” Beechum explained, reaching out for three pieces of paper in the sergeant’s hand. “We’ve been waiting for word on anything linked to Prince Abdullah.”

“This isn’t your war anymore, Elizabeth,” the president said, angrily snatching the papers from her hands. He tried to read the documents, then realized he had no glasses.

“Here, use mine,” Chase said. She handed him pink-framed reading spectacles that looked absolutely ridiculous on his haggard face.

“DEST? NEST? More of those goddamned acronyms,” he growled, trying to make sense of the National Security Agency missive.

“Domestic Emergency Support Team,” Beechum explained. She’d read enough of the NSA summary to know these developments had nothing to do with Abdullah. “DEST is a multiagency response element designed to coordinate large exotic attacks like what we’re seeing. DOD, DOE, HHS, CIA, FBI, DHS. They are staging out of a specially outfitted 737 called ‘Gatekeeper.’”

Venable grudgingly handed the paper back to his VP.

“Translate this,” he said. “Go ahead.”

“DOE’s Nuclear Emergency Search Team has identified a large radiological signature in Adams Morgan,” Beechum read. “They deem it a qualifying anomaly inside the NACAP reaction cordon, meaning it may present a direct threat to White House personnel.”

“Shit,” Chase said.

“What’s that mean?” Venable demanded.

“It means that FEMA is going to invoke the continuity of government protocols,” Beechum said. She had seen this coming. “One of us is leaving town.”

“Then pack your bags, Elizabeth,” he said. The president’s eyes cleared. He took off his robe and turned it right side out. “I don’t have time to deal with the reasoning behind what you did. For now, I’m ordering you off to that
secure location
I keep hearing about. We’ll see how easy it is for you to usurp my power from a concrete bunker deep inside some godforsaken mountain.”