Line of Succession: A Thriller (31 page)

Twenty miles down the road, they pulled into a truck stop. Nico waited in the pickup while Madge went inside, purchased four microwavable burritos, nuked them, and brought them out to the truck with a pair of cokes. They sat eating them in the parking lot until, having forgotten to grab napkins, Madge licked one of her chubby fingers. Nico grabbed her hand and licked her other fingers for her. One thing led to another in the expanse of the king cab’s spacious back seat.

“
I didn’t plan that,” Madge said as she buttoned up her shirt, “and I’ll have to pray on it. But Jesus my savior knows that my heart’s been with you for a long time. It’s only the liberal justice system that’s kept us apart.”

A few more miles down I-81, they passed a Ulysses convoy. “Isn’t it terrible what’s been going on?” she said.

“
Awful,” Nico said. He did not elaborate. He knew that if he told Madge what had really happened – that the President was dead, and that there was no such terrorist cell in Yemen responsible for all the carnage – that she would not believe him. That’s tomorrow’s conversation, he thought. Enjoy tonight.

Eisenhower Building

7:35 p.m.

Speers emerged from the tunnels through the narrow portal in the Eisenhower Building’s basement stairwell. The massive blast-proof door slammed behind him, and he froze. He held his breath and listened for boots, voices or gunfire. The Old Executive Building was an extension of the White House itself. It flanked the West Wing and had been renamed the Eisenhower Building decades ago, although most people still used the old name. The building had been completed in 1888 and was originally the State, War and Navy Building. Speers kept a cubicle in the West Wing for times when it was strategically important to be near the President. But on most days, he preferred to work here, where there were fewer interruptions.

Having heard nothing but the frantic booming of his own heart, Speers decided it was safe to proceed. He pulled his security badge from his pocket and swiped it on the elevator panel. The doors swung open. The elevator arrived at the third floor. Speers held the doors open. He craned his neck into the corridor to see if anyone was there.

By the look of the office, it was clear that the staff had been evacuated in a hurry. Doors were flung open. Lights were left on. Personal items – gym clothes, unused movie tickets, grocery lists – were out in plain sight. Piles of shredded paper and partially eaten breakfasts were everywhere.

Speers was famished. He could not resist a half-eaten Danish sitting on a colleague’s desk. He shoved the rubbery pastry into his mouth as he made his way toward his own office.

It was a relief to see that the office had not been ransacked. He booted up his computer and unlocked his lower desk drawer, which was full of grape lollipops. He unwrapped one and popped it into his mouth. His eyes rolled back into his head as the sugar began flowing through his body.

“
Curfew in twenty minutes,” a voice boomed. “You have twenty minutes to get indoors. This is a zero tolerance curfew.” Speers peered out the blinds and looked down on 17
^th
Street. The voice was coming from a speaker mounted atop a Ulysses patrol vehicle.

Speers turned his attention back to his computer as his mail came online. He spotted the message he had been looking for:

There were two attachments. Speers clicked on the first, a document containing a series of mechanical diagrams that were annotated in Farsi. The engineering schematics were beyond him, but he switched on a Farsi-to-English translator in his browser and soon realized that he was looking at a proposal for a state-of-the-art, Iranian-built desalination plant that had been prepared for General Wainewright. Further into the document, he came upon a map of the California coast. Xs near Mendocino, Eureka and Cambria seemed to mark future desalination plant locations.

The second attachment triggered a video on a private Web server. It took Speers several seconds to recognize Angie Jackson holding a copy of yesterday’s newspaper. She had the vacant look in her eyes of someone who had resigned herself to certain death. The video’s sound was scratchy as she put the newspaper down and began reading from a prepared script. Speers boosted the volume on his desktop speakers.

“
Yesterday,” she began, “I was rescued from Chesapeake Bay. It was clear that these men had no reason to harm me.”

Suddenly, the overhead lights flickered out, followed by the computer and printer. Speers went to the window, hoping it was some type of blackout. It wasn’t. The streetlights in the surrounding buildings were all on.

A banging noise sounded from one of the lower floors. Speers grabbed the few pages that had come out of the printer, crammed them into a folder and escaped down the hallway just as red laser targeting beams cut through the darkness.

Escape routes were few and far between. Getting downstairs to the tunnels would be tricky. The building had several staircases, but they were probably crawling with Ulysses. Elevators were also out of the question.

His thoughts turned to the late Vice President’s office in the large corner suite facing the White House’s West Wing. The office featured a hand-operated dumb waiter from a bygone era that was large enough to hold an entire Thanksgiving meal. The kitchen staff used it to send a regular stream of coffee and snacks up to the office whenever the Veep was in residence.

Speers made it to the corner office and found that the dumb waiter was deployed. Good. But as the building’s emergency lighting finally kicked in, he found that the contraption looked smaller than he remembered. Speers climbed in head-first and crammed his legs into the rickety platform, cursing himself for not losing the 30 pounds his doctor had prescribed last winter. Once his limbs were safely tucked in, he gripped the steel cable and began cranking himself slowly down.

His forearms were cramping by the time he arrived in the basement kitchen. He unfolded himself, wrung his hands and went once again to the tunnel entrance. He stooped and held his eye open for the retina scanner. “Access Granted,” the scanner said pleasantly as the portal opened.

Once back in the tunnels, Speers allowed himself a moment to rest. It was then that he realized how much pain he was really in. His body wasn’t cut out for this. His arms ached. His sinuses felt ready to burst. The balls of his feet were swollen and his socks were wet with the pus from the broken blisters on his toes and heels.

He eventually made his way through the tunnels until he came upon the portal to the Metro Center subway station. There he slipped seamlessly into the stream of passengers rushing to get home before the 8 p.m. curfew. The Blue Line to Franconia swooshed into the station.

Ulysses could not be far behind. Speers cut to the head of the line. Despite a palpable agitation among the passengers enduring a third night of martial law, nobody challenged him. In fact, his fellow commuters gave him wide berth. What was this, some show of respect? He wasn’t used to being recognized on the street. Outside the Federal Buildings, he was a nobody.

When the subway pulled in and Speers glimpsed himself in the car’s metallic reflection, he understood. He saw the chigger bites on his neck and head. The grass-stained shirt. The mud-caked shoes. The Albert Einstein hairdo. He smelled the mildew on his shirt. Nobody got out of his way out of respect. No. Quite the opposite.

Fort Campbell Gym

Elvir Divac writhed on the tattered brown incline weight bench. Agent Carver stood over him and clamped his dental pliers around one of Divac’s rear molars. The Bosnian was close to cracking.

Torture was far from Carver’s standard operating procedure. During his career with CIA, he had gladly employed psychological conditioning tactics to weaken prisoners’ resolve. He had never resorted to physical torture, however, and although the Supreme Court had decided that pulling a prisoner’s perfectly healthy teeth was simply called dentistry, Carver had no such illusions. What he was doing was not just morally repugnant; it was evil.

But the country was not merely suffering terrorist attacks from some foreign coalition or a few madmen. This was far more serious. Carver didn’t have the luxury of time, and he was willing to do anything he had to – including hurting Elvir Divac for a while – to get to the bottom of it.

Carver gave the molar a final yank and stood with the bloody prize between the tool’s pincers. Divac screamed so loud that Carver could hardly hear himself speak. “That’s two,” Carver said as he dropped the molar to the floor, where it bounced like a wet marble. “Just twenty-six more to go.”

Divac pursed his lips, determined not to let Carver’s pliers back into his mouth. Carver took hold of Divac’s right nipple, squeezed and turned it to the left. He waited until Divac screamed, then jammed the pliers in and gripped a third molar. He put his knee on the prisoner’s chest for leverage, and then began to tug on the tooth in earnest.

Divac muttered something that sounded like surrender. Carver pulled the pliers out and wiped the sweat from his forehead. The prisoner spit a mouthful of blood and saliva out onto his hospital gown.

Carver let him catch his breath, then asked for the third time, “Who gave you the Stingers?”

“
They’re going to kill me for this.”

“
I’ll kill you too, but much, much slower.”

The Bosnian spit more blood. His left cheek was puffy, pushed out by the swelling of his gums. “I was back from my third tour,” he started. “They had me in Walter Reed Hospital. I applied for a visa back to Bosnia. I just wanted to go home. One day a man came. I swear I don’t know his name.”

“
What did he look like?”

“
His head was smooth…shaved. He looked like he worked out a lot. I could see his muscles even in his neck, his face. Like one of those muscle men, sort of. But he also looked a little thin. And a little sick. I don’t know how to explain.”

Chris Abrams, Carver thought. He seemed to be everywhere. “Why did he come see you?”

“
I thought it was for the visa, but no. Instead he offered seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

“
For what?”

“
To learn a dead language. And stage a mock attack on the Secretary of Defense.”

“
Mock
attack?”

“
In Chesapeake Bay, yes. Secretary Jackson was to believe his life was threatened. But no one was to get hurt.”

“
You’re lying.”

Divac was insulted. “I have fifty-six kills between Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq. I shot down four helicopters. All my kills were by sniper rifle or Stinger Missile. Sometimes in winter weather. I ask you, how could I miss a white fishing boat on such a clear day?”

Carver heard the door. He looked up and saw Colonel Madsen. Eva was close behind him. She surveyed the bloody scene with an expression that was somewhat cold and practical.

The doctor was not so forgiving. He ran in behind her, spotted the bleeding prisoner, and pushed Carver away. “This is a war crime!” he said as he searched his medical kit for a piece of gauze. “I’ll be reporting this.”

But Eva had no time for it: “Doctor, get Mister Divac ready to travel. And you’ll be coming too.”

“
Travel?” the Doc shot back. “This man has been tortured!”

“
He’s living, breathing proof of a conspiracy to overthrow the government,” Eva said. “I’m not about to go into Rapture Run empty handed.”

Washington D.C.

11:10 p.m.

Just a block away from the typically hopping Adam’s Morgan nightlife, Speers crawled from a storm drain, scurried to the dark side of the street and stretched his back. The sidewalks were empty. Somewhere in the distance, machine gun fire crackled for an instant and then went silent. He eventually straightened himself and began walking cautiously toward home.

It was another hot and humid evening in the swampy Capitol city. The Chief got to his feet and made his way to the sidewalk. For the first time in years, Speers’ pants were actually a little loose around his waist. He stopped to tighten his belt a notch and fell off-balance, realizing his own exhaustion. Apart from the lollipop that he salvaged from his Eisenhower Building office, he had not eaten a meal in nearly twenty-four hours, and he had eaten only sparingly in the day and evening before that.

He spotted a water fountain. It had been at least eight hours since he had taken a drink of anything. He bent over the fountain’s cool stream of city-treated water and stood there a good long while to quench his thirst until his belly was so full that he felt the water sloshing inside as he began walking again.

Someone whistled. Speers looked left and saw a man with a dirty face peering out from a cardboard box. The man motioned him closer, but Speers kept his distance. “Stay out of the light,” the man called out. “They’re patrolling this street every couple minutes. They tried to knife me, but I got away from the bastards.”