White: A Novel (44 page)

Well, this was it. The battlefield revelation turned obsession. The final task.

“‘Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard,’” he whispered in recitation from Revelation 3. “‘He that overcometh, the same shall be clothed in white raiment; and I will not blot out his name out of the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father, and before his angels.’”

White.
Ellis nodded.
A new white: the color of good.

“WHAT KIND OF
piece of shit hits a little girl?” Jeremy asked. He had turned to Caleb and spoke in a voice his children wouldn’t hear.

“The kind that wants information,” Caleb said. He shoved Jeremy forward, almost dropping the wounded FBI agent.

“I told you he’d come back for us, didn’t I, Mom?” Maddy asked. She stood above her mother but only because she had been told to. The little girl trained both eyes on her daddy and waited for an answer.

“Daddy?” Christopher asked. The second-oldest Waller child lifted his head off his mother’s chest and sat up. “Daddy?”

“Hi, buddy,” Jeremy said. Despite the pain in his leg and the anger in his heart, all he could do was smile. “You just stay right there with your mommy for now, OK?”

Christopher wanted to jump up and run to the man he considered superhuman, but then he saw Caleb. The terror he felt for the white pirate absolutely paralyzed him.

“This is all very touching,” Caleb said once he had prodded Jeremy to within a few feet of his family. “But we don’t have a lot of time.”

He motioned with one hand, and the man with the shotgun knelt down to grab Christopher.

“No!” The little boy began to sob. He clung to his mother, tearing off the shirt that had been laid atop her. Caroline struggled to keep him, but the way they had tied her made any kind of intervention impossible.

“That’s enough!” Jeremy hollered. He poked out with his free hand, trying to stop the shotgunner, but Caleb pushed him to the floor.

“You leave my daddy alone!” Maddy called out. She threw her body over Jeremy, trying to protect her father from these wicked men.

“How much do they know about the Megiddo project?” Caleb asked.

Jeremy tried not to show how much the pain bothered him.

“I’ve never heard of any Megiddo project,” Jeremy answered. He pushed Maddy away, then used the wall to fight his way back up to his feet.

“Wrong answer number one,” Caleb said.

The shotgunner slammed his hardwood stock down on Christopher’s right foot.

“
EEEEaaaaahhhh!
” the little boy screamed. He fell to one side, unable to stand on the now-shattered limb.

Think!
Jeremy howled to himself as the man raised his shotgun for another blow.
Emotion will not get you out of here alive. Use what you have around you to defeat your enemy.

“There’s nothing I can do to stop you from hurting my family,” Jeremy told Caleb. He spoke in the calmest voice he could summon. “My orders were to stop you from carrying out further attacks. I never heard of any Megiddo project.”

“Is that why you helped prepare the concrete truck?” Caleb sneered. He spoke in a normal voice until Christopher’s agonized breath hold ran out. When the little boy began to wail again, Caleb shouted over him. “Is that how you stop further attacks?”

“I didn’t know what you were planning,” Jeremy reasoned. He tried not to look down at his tortured family. “You heard what Ellis told me! The only way I could figure out your plans was to go along until the last minute.”

“You’ve never heard of Jafar al Tayar?”

Jeremy tried to look surprised.

“Sounds Arabic,” he said. “Did you get that from the Indonesians or something?”

Caleb tried to make up his mind. Could a man of Jeremy’s upbringing stand there and lie while his family suffered so? Only one way to find out.

The albino nodded, and the shotgunner brought the butt of his weapon down on Caroline’s shin, snapping the tibia and splintering wood all over the concrete floor.

Caroline uttered a gasp but then choked down the vicious pain.
You’ve given birth three times,
she told herself.
Don’t give this sadist the satisfaction.

“Look what you’ve done!” Caleb yelled at the shotgunner, who held the broken gun by its foregrip. The man managed to finger the trigger, despite the damage, and pointed it menacingly at Caroline.

“Eeeeaaaahhh!” Christopher cried out again, unable to take the pain of his own wound. This was horror he had no way of understanding.

“Force suplex,” Jeremy said.

The words popped out of his mouth involuntarily, like a burp or hiccup. They sounded ridiculous in the context of all this suffering. Force suplex was a child’s game, something he and Maddy had shared in moments of laughter and love.

“Force suplex?” the little girl asked. Tears had spilled out of her eyes despite all her courage, but she wiped them away with the back of her hand. Maddy may have been a little girl, but she was her daddy’s girl and that meant a genetic predisposition for action.

“Hell ya!” the third-grade terror cried out.

Caleb was too surprised by the outburst to react as Maddy left her feet two body lengths from the shotgunner and flew through the air like a WWE professional. The impact of her sixty-pound physique barely moved the shotgunner, but that wasn’t the point.

Jeremy seized on the distraction. Standing to Caleb’s right, he got a full step before the one-eyed thug knew what was coming. Jeremy’s vengeful right fist caught the albino squarely on the chin and crumpled him to the floor.

BOOM!

The shotgunner fired a warning shot against the wall, spewing shrapnel into Caroline and Christopher. More screaming, more blood, more confusion. He worked the pump action, frantically trying to deal with the lack of a stock, the now deliriously violent Maddy, and, most important, the stunningly swift actions of an HRT operator trained in “immediate action” drills.

BOOM!

A second gunshot bounced off the wall, but this time it was from Jeremy. He lay on the floor with Caleb’s pistol in one outstretched hand. Smoke drifted up from the barrel. Blood and shattered bone dripped down the fifth course of concrete block where the shotgunner’s head had fractured against it.

“You’re too late,” someone said. The words sounded distant through the screaming and the echo of gunfire and the adrenaline and the pain. It was Caleb.

Jeremy turned the pistol on him.

“Not hardly,” the HRT operator said. He knew exactly what he had to do. Despite the fact that the white pirate had been the first to gain his knees, there was no debating who had control.

NO ONE DENIED
Jordan Mitchell access to anything.

“All right, you’ve got my attention,” he said, fixing Sirad in a stare that left no room for equivocation. They stood in the women’s bathroom, a one-stall closet lined with stainless steel and jade Ecuadorean tile. “Now what is this secret you think you can keep from me?”

“I told you, Mr. Mitchell—this is not something I can share at this point. You’re going to have to trust me.”

Mitchell caught his reflection in the vanity mirror. He looked composed considering the situation, but stress had begun to show around his eyes.

“Let’s look back on our professional relationship these past two years, shall we?” he asked, watching her in reflection. “You came to Borders Atlantic as a promising junior executive, but that was just a cover. Your real role was to work as a CIA NOC—a government-trained con artist hell-bent on infiltrating not just foreign governments but the very corporation that hired you.”

Mitchell paused to give her a chance to respond, but she crossed her arms to listen.

“I brought in the top experts in the field of deception,” he said. “Polygraphers, voice stress analysts, profilers—and you made them all look like fools.”

Sirad actually started to laugh.

“So I’m a good liar,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons you value me, isn’t it? The only problem is that I may be too good. That’s why you have kept me away from important assignments this past year. You wanted to find a way to test me, to see if you could build a framework of allegiance . . . something that would give you a measure of control.”

This time, Mitchell was the one who listened.

“And you were right,” she continued. “I understand the game better than I did that night in the War Room when you strapped me to a table and poured seltzer down my throat. I know, now, what you really want from me, and I am willing to give it.”

Sirad, a master seductress who had almost forgotten what it felt like to make the kill, moved close to the one human being alive who could prove himself better. She leaned in to whisper in his ear.

“I know what you’re up to,” she said. “I know about Jafar al Tayar, and I know the stakes. You taught me the art of the duel and the difference between honor and victory.”

“And?” Mitchell asked. He felt a chill run through his body. This woman was about to show herself worthy of everything he had once imagined.

Sirad touched his cheek with hers. She lingered there long enough for Mitchell to drink in her scent, to feel the heat of her breast, to taste the fruits of what he had planted and nurtured and grown.

“And it’s time to face off at ten paces. I’ve got that big English horse pistol in my hand,” she barely spoke. “Can’t you hear the hammer cocking?”

JEREMY WOULD HAVE
a lifetime to debate the justification of what he had to do next. Unable to walk and with a clock running on Colonel Ellis’s Megiddo project, he decided to work his interrogation of Caleb in full view of his family. There was no way around it, he decided. They’d suffered unspeakable trauma already. What were a few more screams?

BOOM!

The first bullet took out Caleb’s right knee. Jeremy held the muzzle against the patella, knowing that the contact shot would muffle the blast and spare his children’s already tormented ears.

“Who is Jafar al Tayar?” Jeremy asked.

Caleb laughed out loud. The pain changed his expression but not in ways Jeremy expected. The albino enjoyed it.

BOOM!

The second round took out his other knee.

Jeremy asked again and got the same reaction. Blood spurted out of the ragged holes, arterial spurts that both men knew would kill within minutes.

BOOM!

The third bullet shattered Caleb’s left elbow. He lay on the floor now, immobilized with horrible wounds.

“Who is Jafar al Tayar?” Jeremy demanded. He had never believed himself capable of torture, but then life had changed many perceptions in the past year.

“You can’t stop them,” Caleb said. The words slithered out of his mouth, and life spilled with them as blood pooled around the terribly injured man. His mind began to cloud. “It’s too deep. Too . . .”

Jeremy knew there was no point in arguing. Pain would not work against this man, but there had to be something. There were just moments before the murderous freak bled to death, taking the secrets of the Megiddo project with him.

“Phineas priest,” the FBI agent suddenly whispered. How could he have overlooked something so obvious?

Jeremy raced around the cluttered basement until he found what he needed: a razor-edged box cutter.

“Who is Jafar al Tayar?” Jeremy demanded. He reached down with his left hand and pulled Caleb’s good eyelid away from the pink and white flesh beneath it.

“No!” the albino managed to gasp. He understood what his last moments held and that there was no way into heaven without the symbol of his service to God on earth.

“I need a name,” Jeremy said.

He pulled the skin fold tight and pressed his blade against it.

“The president,” Caleb said in a voice too soft to hear clearly.

Jeremy leaned close and demanded it again.

“It’s the president who will save you.” Caleb shuddered.

Jeremy twisted the blade and took the eyelid anyway.

Fuck him,
he thought.
This man had no business anywhere but hell.

XXI

Saturday, 19 February

07:07 GMT

HMX-1, airborne over Washington DC

“
SO WHY DO
they call that the football?” the president asked. He sat in the back of a CH-53E, one of fourteen HMX-1 “white side” airframes regularly tasked with executive airlifts. Beside him sat a navy captain with a black leather case, which unlike assertions of popular folklore was not chained to her wrist.

“President Kennedy came up with the idea during the Cuban missile crisis, but Eisenhower was the first to have direct access, sir,” the captain said. She was a pretty blonde in dress whites, duty rigid yet personable. “The story goes that JFK was playing a touch football game in Hyannis when Bobby ran into one of their military aides. The attorney general dropped the ball, and the president joked that his brother juggled it like it was radioactive. After the game, Bobby joked that this was a nuclear football the president could never drop. The name stuck.”

“Interesting,” Venable said. He had been shown the contents of the suitcase but only briefly, during transition instruction by the White House Military Office. Inside the mysterious box lay a “black book” containing launch options as outlined in the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP-04), emergency action message “go codes,” an emergency procedures White House booklet that listed suitable “off-sites,” and a secure telephone. The White House Communications Agency had just added a Quantis cell.

“FEMA wants you to remain airborne for the first twelve hours after the strike,” Chase said, leaning toward the commander in chief. General Oshinski sat opposite them, alongside Havelock. “We’ll circle Midwestern states and land at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado if conditions permit.”

The president nodded his head.

“What about targeting options?”

“We have identified four remote villages in the southern quarter,” the general told him. “Low population density, poor communications, Sunni hotbed. We can sell it as al Qaeda.”