Any Means Necessary: A Luke Stone Thriller (Book 1) (15 page)

“I need to call my wife,” he said.

The Secret Service man in front of him gave Luke a sharp jab in the stomach. It startled Luke into the present moment. He looked into the man’s hard eyes.

“Are you hiding any weapons?” the man said again.

“I don’t know. I was searched in the Oval Office. I think they got them all.”

“Who are you?”

That was an easy one. “Agent Luke Stone, FBI Special Response Team.”

“Where’s your identification?”

“I don’t know. Ask your buddies. They took everything. Listen, I really need to make a call, and I don’t have my phone.”

“You can make a call after you answer our questions.”

Luke glanced around. It was bright and sunny, but his exhaustion, and the events of the day, conspired to give the sky a dark cast. Above their heads, the choppers made shadows on the ground like circling vultures. Over by the entrance to the facility, the President had turned around and was walking back this way. He was easy to spot among the crowd because he was so tall.

The Secret Service man snapped his fingers in front of Luke’s face. “Are you listening to me?”

Luke shook his head. “Sorry. Listen, guys. I’ve had a long day. Just let me call my wife, and then I’ll tell you whatever I know.”

The man slapped him. It was a sharp, stinging slap, meant to get his attention. It did that and more. Luke struggled to get his arms free. A second later, he was on the ground, face down against the rough surface of the black tarmac. Two men held him. To his left, they had put Ed on the ground as well.

From his worm’s-eye point of view, Luke watched the President approach, walking fast, surrounded on all sides, left, right, front, and back, by Secret Service agents. He stopped ten feet away.

“Gentlemen!” he said in a commanding tone. “Let those men up. They’re with me.”

Luke soon stood inside the entryway to the Mount Weather facility. A crowd of people, many of them military in formal blue uniforms, swirled around him. The entrance was literally a giant tunnel drilled into the granite face of the mountain. The ceiling was arched stone three stories above them. The President had disappeared.

Luke raised his phone again.

“Hi, this is Becca. I can’t answer your call right now. Please leave a message after the tone, and I’ll call you back as soon as I can.”

Luke wanted to smash the phone on the cement floor.

“Damn it! Why doesn’t she pick up?”

He already knew the reason, of course. The phone wasn’t even ringing—it was going straight to voice mail. The cell towers were overwhelmed. All across the region, millions of people were trying to make calls at the same time.

Ed was standing nearby, also trying his phone.

“You get anything?” Luke said.

Ed shook his head.

Luke went into boss mode. “Listen, they’re going to take me downstairs in a minute. I need you to get in contact with Trudy and Swann somehow. We need to get our hands on Ali Nassar. If the NYPD won’t arrest him, we’ll have to put our own guys on him. Detain him, disappear him, and take him to a safe house. Under no circumstances can we let him get out of the country. And we can’t expect any help from Ron Begley.”

Ed nodded. “All right. Should I contact Don?”

Luke shrugged. “Yeah, if you can get him.”

“What should I tell him?”

Luke didn’t know how to answer that question. Don was one of his mentors, but he was more than that. Don had been like a father to him. Yet Don had also suspended him today, and Don had recommended that Luke go for an in-patient psychiatric stay. And on both counts, Don had been wrong.

Two large doors slid open in the walls about twenty feet away. The group started moving for the doors, and Luke moved with them.

“Tell him we’re alive, and so is the President.”

“What then?” Ed said.

Luke shrugged. “If you get all that done, find yourself a bite to eat.” He gestured at the elevator. “This shouldn’t take long.”

The freight elevator was large, and two stories high. Twenty people climbed aboard. The elevator moved slowly down and down, chiseled rock flowing smoothly upward just outside of its metal gates. A yellow sign on the gate read, in giant black letters: CAUTION—KEEP HANDS INSIDE. The elevator descended for several moments, sinking deeper and deeper into below the surface.

Luke glanced at the people around him. Men in suits. Men in uniform. Everyone was clean, everyone was smartly dressed, and everyone was electric with fear and determination. In comparison, Luke felt ragged, dirty, and worn out.

The elevator emptied them into a narrow hallway. They moved along it in a herd. It opened into a brightly lit situation room. Flat-panel video displays covered two walls. Each display could hold a dozen or more open windows, each with its own imagery or information. The displays were on, and a small team of technicians were at a touch pad console, loading images and video captures onto the screens. One video was of the White House burning, surrounded by fire trucks. Several were of mosques burning. A few were of scenes of riotous street celebrations, people chanting and bearded men firing AK-47s into the air.

One quick image caught Luke’s eye. It was a few seconds of video at the front entrance to the West Wing. A dark, fast-moving blur appeared from the top right corner of the screen, and crashed through the doors of the lobby. An instant later, an explosion blew the front of the lobby out onto the lawn and the driveway turnaround. The video repeated itself again and again in slow motion. Even slowed down, it was impossible to tell what the blurry object was.

A young man in a tan suit took Luke by the elbow and guided him further into the room. Ahead, a dozen people sat in high-backed chairs at a long table. Another thirty or so people—assistants, staff people, strategists, God alone knew who all these people were—stood along the walls. The President stood at the head of the table. The Vice President, a head shorter, stood beside him.

“Here he is,” President Thomas Hayes said, gesturing at Luke with a flat, open palm. His teeth were bright white and perfect. For a second, he reminded Luke of a game show host inviting the studio audience to take a look behind Door #3.

“What is your name again?” the President said.

Fifty faces turned to look at Luke. With all eyes on him, he felt even shabbier than before. “Stone,” he said. “I’m Luke Stone, FBI Special Response Team.”

The President nodded. “This is the man who saved our lives.”

Luke sat at the conference table. He sank back into the soft leather of the chair. An assistant placed a plastic-wrapped apple Danish in front of him. Someone else brought him coffee in a Styrofoam cup. Luke poured a packet of non-dairy creamer into the coffee. The light from the overhead fluorescents made the coffee appear green.

The facility was designed to survive a nuclear war. The food they served was also designed for that purpose.

A lieutenant colonel in Army dress blues stood in front of the center display screen. He indicated images on the screen with a red laser pointer. “At approximately 10:54 a.m. Eastern time, the White House was attacked with multiple explosive devices, including at least one radiological dispersion device, containing as of yet unknown radioactive agents. The West Wing, including the Oval Office, was almost completely destroyed. The Colonnade and the Presidential Residence suffered severe damage. The East Wing was not attacked, but has suffered ancillary damage from the force of the explosions, as well as from smoke and water.”

“Any word about casualties?” the President said.

The lieutenant colonel nodded. “Seventeen confirmed deaths as of now. Forty-three injured, a few of those in critical condition. Eight people missing. In the initial response, at least two dozen firefighters and other emergency personnel were likely exposed to radiation. We won’t know the extent of that for a few days. Since approximately 11:24 a.m., all fire and emergency personnel in the vicinity are required to wear Level One hazardous material protective suits. As you can imagine, this has considerably slowed the efforts to put out the fires and search for possible survivors.”

There was almost no sound in the room. The man coughed quietly, then went on.

“The attack has created widespread panic. We’ve established a radiation containment zone with a half-mile radius, and the White House at its center. Only authorized personnel are permitted inside. Even though there is currently no measurable radiation at the borders of the zone, basically everyone in the city has tried to evacuate at the same time. Meanwhile, the Metro rail system throughout Washington, DC, and surrounding areas has been shut down. Main streets and larger arteries in the city are closed to all but emergency traffic, creating massive traffic jams on secondary roads.

“These effects have rippled outwards through the region. Amtrak service in the Washington to Boston corridor has been suspended, and all major airports in the region are closed pending thorough security screenings. Further, mosques have been attacked in more than a dozen cities, and new reports of mosque attacks come in by the minute. It seems that many Americans believe the attack was carried out by Muslims, so people are burning mosques and attacking Muslims in retaliation.”

“It
was
Muslims,” Luke said.

The man paused. “I’m sorry?”

Luke shrugged. “It was Muslims. The people who did it.”

The speaker glanced at the President, who simply nodded.

“Can you clarify that statement, Agent Stone?”

“It’s as clear as I can make it,” Luke said. “My unit was brought in late last night to investigate the theft of radioactive material from a hospital in New York City. I’m sure you heard all about the theft on the news this morning. We were able to track it to a terrorist cell made up of at least two Americans and one Libyan, and organized by an Iranian diplomat attached to Iran’s permanent United Nations mission in New York. Watch that short video on Screen C there, the one with the blurry object hitting the West Wing? That’s either a fast-moving drone or a missile fired from a drone. The man in question has been using an anonymous bank account in Grand Cayman to buy millions of dollars in military drone technology from China.”

Susan Hopkins sat across the table from Luke. She stared at him. Luke could see what people liked about her. She looked like exactly what she was—a fashion model pretending to be the Vice President of the United States. In person, she was even more beautiful than on TV.

“Is this fact or conjecture?” she said.

“Everything I’ve said is fact,” Luke said. “My partner and I interviewed the diplomat this morning, but he was being protected by Homeland Security for reasons I know nothing about. We were forcibly removed from the scene before we could get much from him.”

She smiled and shook her head. “Was that the torture incident? I was briefed about that on my flight in from Los Angeles this morning. If it weren’t for everything else that’s happened, you and your partner would probably be one of the biggest news stories in America right now.”

It was either the hostility in her tone, or the coffee hitting his system, but whatever it was, Luke started to rouse from his fog. Less than an hour ago, he had saved this woman’s life. Being fickle was one thing, but…

“We questioned him,” he said. “He was a reluctant subject, and lives were at stake. Including, as it turns out, your life, the President’s life, and the lives of all the people at the White House. Believe me when I say that given the circumstances, we went easy on him. If I’d had a crystal ball, I would have gone harder.”

She nodded. “That’s very brave of you to admit, considering how much torture is frowned upon these days. It’s also quite courageous of you to decide that this was a Muslim attack, since we really don’t know anything yet. In fact, given the current state of international relations, to simply announce that the Iranians did it is more than just brave or courageous. It’s dangerously premature.”

“I said an Iranian organized it. He purchased drones. He paid the people involved. I stand by that.”

“Do you recognize that we are on the verge of war with Iran, and that there are members of Congress who want to impeach the President if we don’t go to war? Do you also recognize that a war with Iran likely leads to war with Russia?”

Luke shook his head. “That’s not my department. I’m just telling you what I know.”

The room erupted in background chatter.

The President raised his hands. “Okay, okay.” He looked directly at Luke. “Tell us straight out. We don’t have to act on your opinion, but I personally would like to have it. Do you believe the Iranian government is behind this attack?”

“I don’t make leaps of faith like that,” Luke said. “What I know is an Iranian organized the attack. I know that he’s a diplomat attached to their U.N. mission. And the last I knew, he is alive and still on American soil.”

The President looked around the room. “Again, we don’t have to act on Agent Stone’s information. But I would like him to continue gathering that information, and report his findings to this group, even if it results in some controversy.”

“It might be difficult for me to do that,” Luke said.

“Why?”

Now Luke shrugged. “I was suspended from duty this morning. I’m under investigation for alleged felonies I committed while investigating this case.”

The lieutenant colonel stared at Luke. “Is that all?”

Luke shook his head. “There’s also a warrant for my arrest in Baltimore.”

“What’s it for?”

“Murder.”

The entire room went silent. All eyes were on Luke again.

“I’ve had a busy day,” he said.

 “How’d it go down there?” Ed said.

They stood at the edge of the helicopter pad, watching a crowd of people climb off a just landed chopper and run for the safety of the Mount Weather entrance. Luke recognized the United States Representative from Vermont among them.

He shrugged. “I told them what I know. They told me thank you very much, we prefer to believe something else.”

“Sounds about right,” Ed said.