White: A Novel (47 page)

And then, with a cold shudder of realization, Jeremy understood a truth that almost buckled his knees.

“Thank you . . . ,” Beechum said in a loud, confident voice. She had anticipated this moment for so many years, it almost felt like deliverance. “I want to make the call to the first lady myself, and I want you to withhold any mention of this to anyone outside this room. Is that understood? Next I want you to connect me with the War Room at Raven Rock; then I want you to assemble the Congress or do whatever it is that you do to make this the provisional seat of government.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the FEMA officer said. His COG protocols outlined every link in the chain of governmental succession, but nothing had prepared him for a day like this. He turned, trying to stand erect, and nearly staggered out of the room.

“Jafar al Tayar,” Jeremy said, oblivious to the president’s immediate circle of guards. The words sounded thick and dirty in the dank air and fluorescent light of the underground bunker. “My God. You’re the one?”

Beechum spun with a look of an almost transcendental conviction. She stared at Jeremy but motioned toward her guards.

“This man has nothing to offer our terror investigation,” she said, nodding toward the head of her Secret Service element. “Get him out of my office before he bleeds on my rug.”

“DO WE HAVE
anything yet?” Mitchell asked. The room around him sizzled with apprehension, but years playing the pass line between financial ambition and patriotic duty had weaned him of any such weakness. It was his show at this point, and everyone in the room knew it.

“Nothing yet,” Sirad said, reading the WHCA communications flowing across her computer monitor. The keyboard at her fingertips allowed direct communications between the U.S. government’s highest officials and their most secure locations. The power of having tunneled into the WHCA’s data streams made her fingertips tingle.

“She should have moved by now,” Mitchell said. “Are you sure . . .”

“Wait, there it is,” Sirad interrupted. “Someone at Site Seven just mobilized U.S. forces in Europe. I’m not really sure about all the acronyms, but it looks like a stand-up for all U.S. forces to war footing.”

Sirad pointed to the screen, trying to find her place on a page of moving script.

“There’s something else . . . looks like the USS
Intrepid
has been ordered back out into the Indian Ocean.” She paused. “And there is another message—showing point of origin: POTUS. It’s addressed to . . .”

“To me,” Mitchell stated.

“Yes,” was all Sirad could say. And then she understood the brilliance of Mitchell’s plotting. She felt the chill of his power, how he had spun her in circles with the Quantis program and with the supposed intrusion and the links to the White House; how he had toyed with her, pushing her deeper and deeper into the encryption mechanics until Hammer Time and I Can’t Dunk and the others had helped her pirate the president’s own information pipeline.

Sirad turned from the screen and stared at a man powerful enough to seize the world.

“Read it to me,” Mitchell said.

“It says, ‘Project Megiddo complete,’” Sirad recited without looking back at her screen. “It says, ‘All secure to you. Beechum.’”

No one said a word. Only Mitchell showed any particular understanding, nodding to himself and smiling with an almost painful shrug.

AIR FORCE ONE
had leveled off at forty-one thousand feet before the president learned that because of as yet unidentified technical difficulties his command to level large chunks of Saudi desert had fallen on deaf ears. No cruise missiles had gone “over the horizon,” his chairman of the joint chiefs told him. No supposed al Qaeda training sites had been destroyed as ordered.

Fortunately, the president also learned that the FBI report had been corroborated by sole-source CIA intelligence gathered from highly placed assets inside Arab governments. A former Special Forces colonel named Buck Ellis had been identified as the head of a little-known group known as the Phineas Priesthood. FBI and DHS investigators were searching his Homestead Ranch outside Kerrville, Texas. Records there revealed the names of eighteen cell members—white separatists responsible for the worst wave of violence in American history.

Within an hour, the president had returned to Andrews Air Force Base to try to spin the all-too-visible launch of the Doomsday Plane and to begin rebuilding a battered nation.

“There’s one other issue,” Andrea Chase told him as Marine One met them on the tarmac for the next leg of their journey. With Washington’s federal buildings closed because of radiation contamination, all executive operations were being relocated to Site Seven at Mount Weather.

“To be perfectly honest with you, I’m not sure I can handle another issue at this juncture,” Venable said. As with any crisis, the ache of acute loss was giving way to a uniquely human hope for recovery.

“It’s about Elizabeth,” Chase continued. They fastened their seat belts inside the big Marine Corps helicopter and felt it lift off, nose dipping to the northwest. “There’s something about her that you need to know.”

THE VICE PRESIDENT
of the United States was sitting quietly behind her desk when the door opened and two Secret Service agents led Jeremy Waller back into the room. The clock on the wall read 12:04 Zulu—less than ten minutes until the president’s helicopter arrived at Site Seven.

“You know, it’s the windows I miss down here,” she said, standing and motioning for the guards to leave. “I like having a reminder that there is something out there still worth believing in.”

Jeremy stood before her, hands cuffed behind his back. The scene felt surreal, hard to grasp even within the framework of his own experiences.

“Windows . . . ,” he muttered. Better words failed him.

“I know what you’re thinking.” Beechum nodded. She reached into her top drawer and retrieved an object that Jeremy could not see. “You think I’m a traitor. You think I have betrayed this country . . . everything you have almost given your life to protect.”

“They tried to kill my wife and kids,” Jeremy seethed. Traitor hardly sounded strong enough. This woman was a mass murderer. She represented evil.

“Turn around,” she said.

Jeremy watched Beechum stand up and step out from behind her desk. She held something in her right hand, something small enough to fit inside a clenched fist.

“They’ll stop you,” he said, watching her, trying to decide what to do next. “Mitchell will figure it out. He’ll find a way to . . .”

“Turn around!” Beechum ordered. This time, she stepped close . . . close enough that Jeremy could see the torment in her bloodshot eyes. This was not the look of a politician but the conviction of a true believer—someone capable of doing anything.

“I don’t think so.” Jeremy shook his head. “If you’re going to kill me, you’re going to have to do it face-to-face.”

Beechum started to laugh. It was a nervous growl, more the product of irony than humor.

“Kill you?” she answered. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to set you free.”

With that, she stepped around behind him and used a handcuff key to release his ligature.

“I am Jafar al Tayar,” she said. “You’re right about that, but not in ways you understand.”

Jeremy rubbed his wrists as she pulled off the cuffs and tossed them onto her desk. He stood still and waited for her to move back in front of him.

“Twenty-five years ago, an army colonel approached an idealistic young lieutenant with a bold and intriguing idea. This country faced a threat from Communism, he said, a threat that reached beyond nuclear weapons and Cold War skirmishes in Third World countries. America faced the very real possibility that someone could infiltrate its government through the very democracy that defined it. What if someone rose to power through election? he asked. What if they . . .”

“I know the story,” Jeremy interrupted. “How the hell do you think I found you?”

“What if they worked within the system to bring it down?” Beechum walked to her desk and leaned against it. She seemed lost in thought, transfixed with another time and place. “What if our enemies came to realize that the greatest weakness of a democratic society is its own preoccupation with freedom?”

“How could it have gone so wrong?” Jeremy asked. “That’s what I don’t understand. How could the military’s best and brightest have gone so . . . how could
you
have done something so horrible?”

“She didn’t,” a voice interrupted. Jeremy recognized it without turning.

It was the president.

“Good to see you, David,” Beechum said. She walked toward the commander in chief and embraced him. “I imagine they’ve briefed you by now.”

“They have,” he said. “But someone apparently owes Mr. Waller, here, a bit of an explanation.”

Jeremy shook his head at first, but then he began to understand.

“You hadn’t identified the others.” He nodded, staring at Beechum. It seemed obvious now. “You didn’t know who else Ellis had recruited. It could have been the president, so you had to try to expose him.”

“Unfortunate for me, under the circumstances,” Venable said. He walked over to the desk and rearranged some of Beechum’s things atop it. “But I see, now, that there was no other way. There was no way to stop the terror attacks without jeopardizing the larger investigation. Millions could have died if we had degenerated into war with Islam.”

“When did you know?” Jeremy asked. He probably had no right to ask, but then again, he’d gotten this far.

“Not until Ellis actually tried to shoot down Air Force One,” Beechum said. “It wasn’t until then that we knew for sure that I was the highest-ranking candidate from the Megiddo project.”

“But why tell everyone that the president was dead?” Jeremy asked. “Why swear you in as president?”

“Fail-safe,” Venable said. “Once I learned of the whole plot, I decided not to take any chances. If any other of Ellis’s recruits had worked their way up through the Congress, they would have surfaced once Elizabeth seized control of the government.”

Jeremy shook his head in disbelief.

“Now if you’ll excuse us, Agent Waller,” the president said, “I’d love to stay and chat, but we’ve got a country to rebuild. I’m sure you understand.”

EPILOGUE

Six Months Later

Hurkamp Park, Stafford County, Virginia

“
DADDY! DADDY! LOOK
at me!”

Jeremy turned his eyes into the sun and squinted to find his daughter, Maddy, among the crowd of swimmers. The county pool had swelled to capacity in what weather forecasters called the hottest summer in twenty years.

“I’m watching, sweetie!” Jeremy called out.

His little girl stood with her toes over the edge of a one-meter springboard, bright as a lightning bug in her fluorescent-yellow bikini.

“Here I go!”

Maddy clasped her hands together above her head, checked one more time to see that her daddy was watching, then fell forward in what any Olympic judge would have rewarded with an ear-to-ear smile.

“Nice one, cute stuff!” Jeremy called out.

“My turn, Dad!” Christopher hollered.

It was good to see him happy, Jeremy thought. The nightmares had taken even longer to heal than the broken bones.

“Do you miss it?” Caroline asked. His wife sat next to him on a park bench with Patrick in her lap—the little boy didn’t seem interested in much else since the kidnapping.

“What?” he said, turning back to her from the diving exhibition.

“Do you miss the team? HRT?”

What could he say? Jeremy had agreed to leave only when the alternative threatened to destroy his family.

“Nah,” he lied. “I’m just glad to have my life back.”

Jeremy didn’t immediately recognize what turned his head. Perhaps it was sun glint on a windshield or a tree branch moving in the wind. But then he looked closer and knew. It was a familiar face, not just to him but to every American. The woman wore sunglasses and a broad sun hat and a pretty madras sundress. She sat in the back of a Town Car, glimmering in the hundred-degree heat like a desert mirage.

“Look, butterfly, Daddy,” Patrick said as a bright-winged monarch fluttered through the humid air and came to rest just a foot or two from his outstretched hand.

“Yeah, that’s a beauty,” Jeremy said, but his eyes held the car instead. There was another passenger in the back. A man almost equally recognizable.

“Honey, I’m going to run out to the car for a minute,” Jeremy said. He felt that dull ache in his stomach—the one he got the first time he stayed over at a friend’s house as a kid or when a teacher called on him in math class or at the start of a long competitive run. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, I’m fine. Get the kids some water, though, will you?” She smiled. “It’s so hot, I worry about them.”

“Be right back.” Jeremy stood up, sending the monarch off toward the sounds of children playing.

It was the man in the car who first saw Jeremy approaching. The woman in the sun hat and shades sat quietly beside him. She may have been the vice president of the United States, after all, but it was Jordan Mitchell who ruled the world.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank all my friends and colleagues at Little, Brown, particularly Michael Pietsch, who gave me the opportunity to publish fiction, and Geoff Shandler, who turned it into something I feel proud of. You have treated me like family and I will always appreciate that.

Thank you, Suzanne Gluck, for sticking with me despite my shortcomings. You are a loyal friend and an extraordinary agent. None of this would have happened without you.

A great debt of thanks to my family, which puts up with far too much, and to all the friends who have offered encouragement. The writer’s life, for all its magic, can be a lonely ride. You add music, laughter, and a smack in the head when I need it most.

Finally, I want to acknowledge all the faceless warriors out there fighting to keep us safe. The world has become a complicated place these days. Thank God there are still heroes brave enough to scout it.