White: A Novel (42 page)

Caroline thought about feigning ignorance, but this man seemed to know more about Jeremy than she did.

“You consider yourself a religious woman, Mrs. Waller?” His tone was soft, almost reverent. “Methodist from what I understand.”

“What are you going to do with us?” Caroline asked.

Maddy stared at him through hate-filled eyes. The little girl wanted so badly to kill him but didn’t know how.

“I want you to consider what the world would be like if you never had to worry again about getting on an airplane or a bus or a train. What if you never had to think about your babies growing up in a world where strangers meant them harm?”

The colonel walked close and squatted down like the Montagnard had taught him three decades earlier.

“What if names like al Qaeda and Al-Aksa Brigades and Jemaah Islamiya faded from public discussion? What if terrorism disappeared from the airwaves, leaving MSNBC and FOX and CNN to concentrate on sex scandals and celebrity justice?”

The colonel reached down and gently brushed hair out of Christopher’s face.

“What would you sacrifice to keep someone from coming after your family, the people you hold most dear? I’m not asking a rhetorical question; I really want to know.”

“Don’t try to make me understand your sickness,” Caroline said. She felt strength in having three children to protect.

“You would do anything, wouldn’t you? You would kill or die to save them . . . gladly give up your life to save the one last thing worth believing.”

Maddy climbed to her feet. They had taken her shoes, so she stood there in pink Powerpuff Girls socks.

“Well, that’s what I want you to think about: a better world where gutter gods don’t incite jihad. A world free of Muhammad and his false prophecies. No more suicide bombers and young minds stained with the promise of doe-eyed virgins.”

“My dad’s going to kill you,” Maddy said. She had balled her fingers into fists. Both hands.

“Ah, don’t hate me, darlin’,” Ellis said. “It’s an awful thing to bottle up inside a little girl’s heart. Someday you’ll understand.”

He stood.

“I do this out of love, you know,” he said. “Because only love will save us in the end. A Christian love. The love of a true and righteous God who would lay down the life of his only begotten son so that others might live. It’s the love of a mother who would stand up and kill me to protect her children. It’s a love so pure the devil himself would go to any lengths to stop it.”

The colonel turned toward Maddy.

“It’s a love that the lucky among us will die to save, sweetie,” he said. “Me, you, that daddy of yours. It’s a love for something better.”

He turned and started up the stairs.

“He’s still gonna kill you,” Maddy said again. There were no tears in her eyes. Her voice did not waver.

The colonel paused a step but didn’t respond. In a moment he was gone, leaving the Wallers with nothing but his words to haunt them.

“WE GOT THEM,”
Sirad said, marching into the seventeenth-floor operations center like a conquering warlord.

Mitchell turned toward her but then returned to something Trask had pulled up on the computer.

“I’ve got quite enough suspense already,” he said. “What did you find?”

Sirad walked up beside him and noticed what looked like a script on his monitor.

“I’m not sure you’re going to want to hear this in open forum,” she said. Sirad noticed reference in the script to something called Jafar al Tayar. A fluent Arabic speaker, she immediately translated the phrase.

Jafar the pilot?
she wondered.
Surely this has nothing to do with another airliner hijacking. Does it?

“Everyone in this room is cleared and has a need to know,” Mitchell said. He turned away from her to Trask, who remained at a workstation on the other side of the room. “Where’s Waller?”

“Just turned left on Florida Avenue,” the chief of staff responded. “Looks like they’re headed to the safe house.”

“Do you want this or not?” Sirad asked. She had come in with explosive news, news that would warrant Mitchell’s full attention.

“I’m listening,” he said. Mitchell, a man known for his ability to juggle complex issues, continued reading the script.

“We found a way through their firewalls,” she said.

“The White House?” Hamid asked.

“The White House Communications Agency,” Sirad clarified. “They control all remote and in-house links between the president and his staff.”

“And the football,” Mitchell pointed out.

“Yes,” Sirad agreed. “They control continuity of nuclear launch codes as well as all command and control conduits linking the Pentagon, Langley’s CTC, the FBI’s SIOC, the White House Situation . . .”

“Come to the point,” Mitchell demanded.

“The point is that we now have complete access to White House communications,” Sirad bragged. “We went in to try and identify the mole, but we ended up with access to everything the president and his advisors say, write, and type.”

Mitchell nodded approvingly. Sirad noticed that he did not seem surprised.

“And what have you learned so far?” he asked.

“The actual operator behind the intrusion is someone known as CAPSTONE3,” Sirad told him. “But that’s not really pertinent at this point. It’s what he is trying to do and the authority behind him that we have to worry about.”

“What do you mean?” Mitchell asked. “I would assume the authority for something like this would have to come from the president himself.”

“That’s the obvious assumption,” Sirad agreed. “Until you look at what they are really trying to do.”

“They’re trying to tap our secure lines of communication. We know that,” Trask pointed out.

“That’s what they wanted us to believe,” Sirad countered. “But that’s just a mousetrap, a ploy to lure us in so we wouldn’t discover their real intentions.”

“And what is that?” Mitchell asked. She had his full attention. “What is it you think this CAPSTONE3 hopes to accomplish?”

Sirad looked around the room. Mitchell’s story about the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr now made perfect sense. Despite its complexity, this whole thing really did boil down to an issue of honor.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you that,” she said. “Not yet.”

Everyone turned toward her. No one ever refused Jordan Mitchell’s orders.

“Can’t tell me?” Mitchell asked. “Surely you . . .”

“You told me long before this started that Borders Atlantic is full of secrets,” she interrupted. “And that they are all yours.”

Sirad knew she was taking a big gamble, but as Mitchell had said, sometimes the price for glory was sacrifice.

“Well, if you want to save this country from all-out holy war,” she said, “you’re going to have to trust me with one of my own.”

“WHAT IN GOD’S
name was that?” the president asked.

He was standing at his podium, strategizing with his chief of staff, his national security advisor, and the secretary of defense, when the explosion rattled the Oval Office windows.

Before anyone could answer, two Secret Service agents hurried in without knocking.

“We need to move you to the PEOC,” the shift commander called out. He sounded urgent though calm.

“What happened?” Venable asked.

The agents physically took him by the arms and pulled him away from the podium.

“Wait a minute,” he demanded, wrenching his arms free. “I’m not going back down into that godforsaken hole until we find out what just happened.”

“Please, David,” Chase argued. “They’re here to protect you. I’ll get your answers and meet you downstairs in ten minutes.”

“This is not a matter for discussion, Mr. President,” the shift commander said, resetting his grip on the chief executive’s elbow. There was no hint of courtesy in his voice. “We need you to come with us. Now.”

“WHY’D YOU COME
for me?” Jeremy asked. Every blue light and siren in Washington looked to be converging on Capitol Hill by the time Caleb turned right on Eleventh Street Northwest.

“What did you think, that I was going to let them take you down to an interview room so you could ruin everything?”

Caleb drove north on Eleventh Street with his right hand and held the gun with his left hand resting in his lap.

“Ruin what? Everything I know about your operation just went up in smoke.”

Caleb had to exaggerate the turn of his head to look at Jeremy. The loss of his right eye made side-by-side conversations difficult.

“You knew enough to get here in the first place,” Caleb said in an accusing tone. “The tattoo, the doctrine, the fact that the colonel had pulled all the Phineas priests together.”

“That you were working with the Indonesians?” Jeremy added.

Caleb twitched with surprise but offered nothing in response.

“Jungle clearing . . . Jayawijaya Highlands,” Jeremy said. “Some Pygmy fuck with a gourd on his dick and a string of teeth around his neck riding herd on a bunch of wannabe terrorists.”

The HRT sniper liked the fact that Caleb was the one rocking back on his heels now.

“I remember seeing you for the first time,” Jeremy recalled. “My rifle crosshairs resting right between those little bunny eyes of yours. I remember the way that white trash with you called out your name as they ran around with bags over their heads and the D boys chopped them up with their Mark Fours.”

BANG!

The pistol in Caleb’s hand jumped as a 9mm bullet tore through the top of Jeremy’s thigh. The copper-jacketed round barely grazed Jeremy’s femur, exiting in a mist of blood and tissue before lodging in the door’s plastic armrest.

Jeremy’s mind froze for a moment with the searing, white-hot pain, but he choked it down, shook his head, and continued as if nothing had happened.

“Did those poor bastards you were with know you were going to live and they were going to die?” he asked, trying not to let his voice break. “You can probably still hear their voices, can’t you? How’s it feel to know you’re still alive and people that trusted you are dead?”

“You’ll know soon enough,” Caleb replied. He focused on a passing driver who appeared to have heard the shot. The man drove alongside for a closer look.

It was Jeremy’s turn to twist.

“You’d better kill me now,” Jeremy said. HRT had taught him discipline, but every man had his margins. “Because if you don’t, I’m sure as hell going to kill you.”

“Like out there in that jungle?” Caleb said. “Who’s got the bullet hole in him now?”

He ran a red light and turned left on Florida Avenue.

“No, I’m going to do this right,” Caleb said. “I’m going to kill them in front of you so you can feel what it’s like to lose the one last thing in life worth believing in.”

Jeremy had passed the desire for comeback. He sat in the passenger seat, watching blood seep slowly down his pant leg.

There’s a time for everything,
he counseled himself. If he wanted to save his family and stop Ellis, he’d have to choke down ego and do things the best way he knew how: alone.

XX

Saturday, 19 February

06:10 GMT

Andrews Air Force Base, Prince George’s County, Maryland

COLONEL ELLIS HAD
never shied from violence. From the neighborhood fights his uncle had matched him in for wagers to the military battles to the black operation sanctions he’d led all over the world—violence had followed him like a shadow.

Focus on your job,
he scolded himself.
Only the one true and righteous God understands the course of man’s vainglorious plottings. Only the one true and righteous God can guide his chosen people to the promised land.

Ellis lay shivering in the snow, covered with white camouflage and a tangle of gathered brush. The chevron-shaped muzzle of a Barrett .50 caliber rifle poked out from his carefully constructed hide.

Soon it will all be over,
he told himself.
Soon, the true impact of all our sacrifice will be revealed.

He stared through his scope, down the length of Runway Two-three East. Somewhere down there beyond the carefully aligned C-141s, C-17s, jump-ready attack fighters, and heavily reinforced security stations, the Doomsday Plane would be getting its final run-through.

“Blessed be the peacemakers, for they shall be called the Sons of God,” he whispered to no one but his own conscience.

Soon this would all be over. Soon it would all begin again.

“IT WAS A
massive explosion with a radiological signature,” Andrea Chase said. “Death toll is one hundred and thirty-seven at this point, but emergency response crews are still sorting things out. They expect it to go higher.”

The chief of staff had followed the president into a corner of the PEOC’s central chamber. Staff had filled most of the seats already, and additional personnel—everything from communications specialists to crisis-management logisticians and security experts—were crowding in.

“Dirty bomb?” he asked.

“That’s the best bet at this point.” She nodded. “DOE had a NEST team nearby, working the other cache in Adams Morgan. They broke off to assess exposure.”

“And?”

“And, odd as it sounds, this exposure does not seem to pose a significant threat.”

The president turned to television coverage on several large-screen TVs. How troubling, he decided, that the best intelligence he had received since the start of this whole nightmare had come from journalists and their cameras.

“No threat to whom?” the president exclaimed. “Iowa? Are you seeing what I am?”

The damage looked massive. Most of the shops along Independence Avenue had been leveled or severely damaged. The Supreme Court looked to have sustained structural damage. Car, bus, and truck carcasses littered the streets. Body parts could be seen hanging from trees eight blocks away.

“I was referring to the radiation,” Chase explained. “It was obviously a horrific explosion, but the charge itself actually dispersed the radioactive material to less than lethal levels. DOE expects winds and snowmelt to effect decontamination naturally.”