White: A Novel (40 page)

“Matthew, could you help us out, here,” Venable said. As national security advisor, Havelock served as a one-stop-shopping update on everything that happened since Monday. Most thought the director of central intelligence or the new intelligence czar were America’s top spooks, but in reality, the national security advisor had long been the president’s chief intelligence officer.

“Three developments with the Saudis.” Havelock jumped in with a confidence Venable hadn’t seen in their first meetings. “NSA has picked up big increases in signals traffic with the Chinese. Most of these communications have involved Quantis phones so we can’t listen in, but they parallel wire transfers out of several U.S. financial corporations. Real money. The FBI puts the number at a little under five hundred billion.”

“Impact on markets?” the president asked.

“We anticipate a move on the dollar and sharp spikes in precious metals as soon as the news hits,” Havelock told him. “I’m hearing speculation of a ten-percent hit on the Dow once it opens again . . . maybe more.”

“What do the Chinese have to say?” Venable asked his secretary of state.

“They deny everything. It’s oil, of course. We know that, but there’s nothing we can do. The Saudis have cut production to pre-1976 levels, opened their southern quarter to every exploration company in the world but ours. Crude just topped seventy dollars a barrel. Our strategic reserves have dipped to their lowest levels since we started stockpiling.”

“Why? How did we let our reserves run so low?”

“The previous administration,” Havelock answered. “American oil companies reported record profits in the two years since Saddam Hussein was toppled. We’re talking about a Texas oil family with very close ties to the House of Saud. You can draw your own conclusions.”

“What’s the bottom line?” Venable asked. He was an insurance man. He understood actuarials and stop-loss quotients.

“We have a legitimate national security exposure here, Mr. President,” the chairman of the joint chiefs said. “Five-dollar-a-gallon gas may cause indigestion in Des Moines, but I’ve got jet aircraft and tanks that don’t run well on diplomatic hot air. If we don’t take hard, definitive action, and soon, we’re not going to care much about a few thugs with pipe bombs.”

The president tapped the back of his chair—that old nervous habit.

“You said three things,” he reminded Havelock. “What else?”

The national security advisor folded his hands in front of himself and turned to the secretary of energy.

“Our Capitol region NEST team believes they have found the radioactive materials stolen from Kentucky,” the energy secretary said. “Not all of it, but enough to initiate full-court surveillance.”

“I was going to tell you that, Mr. President,” the attorney general jumped in. He seemed thrilled with himself for having something to offer.

“We have coordinated with the FBI and DHS to maintain a safe standoff, but it is a hard perimeter,” the energy secretary continued. “The good thing about radioactive isotopes is that they are hard to move without leaving a trail.”

“They’re here in Washington?” Venable asked. He had assumed they’d come, but not this quickly. “You’re sure of that?”

“Yes, sir. CIA analysts say the best bet is several RDDs around the city. Remember, these terrorists want symbolic impact. We have to assume that this building will be a target.”

“What else . . . locusts and plague?” Venable asked. If he’d known things were this bad, he might not have gotten up from his nap.

“There’s a little good news, actually, depending on how you look at it,” Havelock said. “That HRT raid on the group in Columbus? Well, it may have been a black hole in terms of terrorism, but hard drive exploitation turned up access codes for some of Prince Abdullah’s close-hold accounts. The FBI and Treasury investigators may be able to freeze some of his assets. That could buy time.”

“Abdullah would scream bloody murder,” Venable rebuffed him.

“In private, maybe.” Havelock nodded. “But not publicly. Remember, he’s making a power play against his own family—trying to hoard enough of the royals’ money to establish a power base once the Crown Prince dies. He doesn’t want to see this story on Aljazeera.”

“Excuse me,” a uniformed marine interrupted. “Mr. President, the SITROOM has flash traffic for you, sir. A CRITIC message. Urgent.”

“What the hell now?” he grumbled. Venable started toward the door. “Matthew and Andrea, I need you in on this. Richard, I want State’s opinion on UN reaction to a military strike against Saudi Arabia. General Oshinski, I want a war plan on my desk by dinnertime.”

“All options?” the chairman asked.

“All options.”

Venable led his chief of staff and national security advisor out of the room, leaving the rest of his cabinet to ponder a grave possibility. “All options” was no code. In very open terms it meant that President David Venable had begun to consider launching the first proactive nuclear strike in more than sixty years.

JEREMY WATCHED THE
light turn yellow ahead of him. A crowd of late-night barhoppers waited on the sidewalk to cross; taxis weaved back and forth, looking for fares.

This is gonna hurt,
he decided, stomping down on the gas. The big diesel belched a cloud of black smoke and lurched ahead. The sparkly white Mercedes station wagon in front of him slowed for the light, but Jeremy kept his foot on the pedal, plowing into the back of it, pushing the car toward the crowded sidewalk.

Brakes screeched, horns honked, people screamed. The giant yellow concrete truck climbed up the back of the expensive German car like a car crusher at some redneck rodeo. Cars swerved in every direction, knocking into each other, dimpling, buckling, smashing—all burning rubber and broken glass.

By the time Jeremy realized no one had been seriously hurt, a DC Metro unit had raced up beside him, lights flashing. Capitol Hill was thick with marked units.

“License and registration,” the first cop said, walking up to the driver’s door.

Jeremy studied his mirror and the streets around him, trying to spot his tail. Had Ellis seen the accident himself? How long before he found out?

“Fuck you, asshole,” Jeremy said. He spoke softly, from behind a humble, I’m-so-sorry-officer smile.

“What did you say?” the patrolman asked. He was thin, African American. A pencil-thin mustache adorned his upper lip.

“I said, fuck you.” Jeremy smiled. He tried to look the model, obedient citizen. “I bet you like picking on white boys, don’t you, you tar-colored stoop nigger.”

The officer stood back and cocked his head, unable to believe what he was hearing. Sirens rose in the distance. Angry motorists were climbing out to assess the damage.

“Get out of the truck, sir,” the officer said. Jeremy could hardly believe the man’s resolute professionalism.

“You’d like that wouldn’t you, you fucking doughnut gargler,” Jeremy said, smiling as if talking about the weather. Anyone watching would have thought him a courteous, deeply regretful offender.

“What’s that smell?” the second officer asked, arriving at his partner’s side.

“Your mother, bitch,” Jeremy responded.

“Say what?” The partner recoiled.

“Get the fuck out of the truck,” the first responder ordered.

“Not until I use this gun I got to blow your black ass back to Rwanda.”

The second officer reached down to his hip to cover his weapon while the man with the pencil-thin mustache climbed up and jammed his gun through the driver’s-side window—its barrel pressed right up against Jeremy’s nose.

“Now how ’bout you get your cracker ass out the truck so we can discuss race relations here in the District,” the officer said. His eyes darted through the cabin, looking for the threatened gun.

“Happy to, officer.” Jeremy nodded. Any tail would believe him the wronged party in this mishap. He hadn’t defused the bomb yet, but he had certainly kept it from reaching the Capitol.

XIX

Saturday, 19 February

05:41 GMT

Mount Weather Special Facility, Clarke County, Virginia

ELIZABETH BEECHUM HAD
seen site schematics and read off-budget funding requests but had never actually visited the so-called secure location. Referred to as Mount Weather, Site Seven, or just “that place out west,” this unobtrusive collection of buildings and asphalt parking lots looked like any of a hundred military installations from the air.

Home to FEMA’s Emergency Assistance Center, Mount Weather began life as a meteorological observation and research facility. It wasn’t until the 1950s that anyone recognized its potential as a Cold War bunker. By the late 1990s, the 483-acre facility had become the federal government’s top secret capital—home to a shadow government so highly classified, not even those chosen to staff it always knew exactly what to do.

“Please hold on, ma’am,” the Marine Corps flight safety officer cautioned her as the big lumbering HMX-2 banked hard left and started to flare. “We get some pretty tricky crosswinds up here on the Blue Ridge. Hate for you to get bounced around.”

Beechum did as she was told, craning her head to look out the aircraft’s small round window. They had followed I-66 west, she knew, until it spilled into Route 50. Just the other side of Middleburg—where the mountains started to rise above the sprawling horse country mansions of Paris and Ashby’s Gap—where Route 601 turned south, then back upon itself. The decrepit two-lane carriage path wound its way up Blue Ridge Mountain Road to where chain-link and barbed-wire fencing formed an ominous corridor of restriction.

The helipad sat next to a cluster of maintenance buildings. Even through the diffused glow of spotlights, Beechum could make out an entrance gate and a three-story brick building with tall stone pillars, which she had been told was just a facade built to cover ventilation shafts. Heavily armed military men guarded the helipad, but ordinary-looking rent-a-cops in unadorned blue uniforms stood at the perimeter like onlookers at a red-carpet star show.

Enjoy the view while you can, Elizabeth,
the vice president told herself.
Might be a while before you feel the sun on your face again.

The Shenandoah Mountains stretched out before her as the HMX-2 settled into its landing hover. A Brigadoon-like fog rose off a blanket of white, draping the distant valley in an almost mystical scene of moonlit beauty. They were just forty-eight air miles from her office on Pennsylvania Avenue, but Mount Weather might as well have been a different world.

JORDAN MITCHELL HAD
always been a man of action. Waiting bothered him on a fundamental level.

“Is she there yet?” he asked. The Borders Atlantic executive rarely visited the seventeenth floor, but everything he needed to begin the endgame lay within its electronically shielded walls.

“Just set down,” Trask responded. The chief of staff stood at the other end of the room, trying to manage two phone conversations and an intemperate boss at the same time. There were just two other people in the room—a systems engineer who could help them navigate a daunting array of technology and Hamid, who had been in on the game from the start. He, better than anyone except Mitchell, understood the Swiss chronometer timing necessary to orchestrate the final hours of a delicately complex denouement.

“What about Waller?”

Jeremy Waller had turned out to be everything Mitchell had hoped for. And more. The HRT sniper presented a rare combination: a team player who functioned brilliantly alone, an intuitive thinker with the pragmatic mistrust of answers, a physical actor who understood the limitations of muscle. Any other man would have presented control problems, but Jeremy’s blue-collar work ethic and deep-seated patriotism kept it well in check.

“Hang on a minute,” Trask spoke into one of the phones. These calls were very important, but Mitchell remained his first priority.

“Jeremy has been arrested.”

“Arrested?”

Mitchell hadn’t foreseen this.

“He seems to have gotten himself involved in a car wreck,” Trask said, trading attentions between Mitchell and the source on one of the Quantis phones.

“What about the truck?” Mitchell asked. “Where the hell is that truck?”

“Right here, sir,” the systems engineer offered. He pressed a button, and Washington’s Seward Square popped up on a wall-mounted flat-screen television. “Secret Service security camera mounted on a utility pole. I can get you three different angles.”

The technician typed into his keyboard, and the screen broke into four isolation boxes: real-time video of cop cars, fire trucks, ambulances, and a crowd of curious bystanders.

The big yellow concrete truck sat perched atop the crumpled Mercedes like a rhinoceros tupping a hare.

“Do we know where they are taking him?” Mitchell asked.

Trask spoke into one of his phones and shook his head.

“It was DC Metro who arrested him. The precinct station is at Buzzard’s Point, down on the Potomac. Probably take him there.”

Mitchell tried to get inside Jeremy’s head and figure out what his best tactical operator was up to. Had he planned this out or was this just another variable he’d have to overcome?

“Where is Ellis?” Mitchell asked. He pointed to a blank TV screen. “Bring him up on three.”

The technician did as he was told. A street scene flashed on: point of view through a car windshield.

“That’s him in the Navigator, headed north toward the safe house in Adams Morgan,” Trask said. “We have a dozen people on him. Very low probability of evasion.”

“Caleb?”

Trask spoke into his phone, then responded to his boss.

“Still on Capitol Hill. We’re tracking him south on Independence. Appears that he is following Jeremy.”

“Mr. Mitchell?” a female voice inquired over a sophisticated system designed to identify the target voice from a database of sound prints and filter out ambient noise.

“What is it?”

“You have a visitor, sir. Ms. Malneaux.”

“Send her in,” Mitchell said.