Any Means Necessary: A Luke Stone Thriller (Book 1) (22 page)

But how could someone put bombs inside the White House?

Everyone who worked there had high-level security clearance, from the maids and the maintenance men, to the dishwashers and onion peelers, to the press secretary and the President’s chief-of-staff. Everyone was vetted. If bombs had been planted, then that meant…

An inside job. All the way inside, inside the security apparatus, inside the intelligence community, far enough inside to take a group of explosives experts, erase their pasts, give them new identities, and get them jobs at the White House. Jobs without close supervision, jobs that gave them wide latitude to roam the hallways, especially at night when no one else was around.

In Luke’s mind, a whole series of assumptions began to give way. All day, he had been focused on a ragtag group of terrorists. They were minimally trained, but they were violent and they were clever. They were hiding, they were running, they were employing asymmetrical tactics, using their smallness as a weapon against a vastly superior enemy. Maybe those men even believed that’s what they were doing. They may have stolen the nuclear material. They may have flown the drone, and even blown up a part of the White House. Yet, still, they were but a small cog in a machine. They were being used by something much larger, something much more sophisticated.

What Ali Nassar said was true. It was the American government all along.

A strange feeling of heat began to radiate along Luke’s spine. It went to the top of his head and down along his shoulders and arms. He looked at his hands, half expecting them to burst into flames. A wave of nausea passed through him. For a second, he thought he might vomit. He didn’t want to do that, not here, not in front of Paul.

“How can I stop it?” Luke said.

Paul shook his head. “My friend, you don’t stop Operation Red Box. You get the hell out of the way. This isn’t your fight, Luke. If you try to make it yours, you will fail. You will fail in a way that will probably feel spectacular while it’s happening, but in the end will be much closer to pathetic.”

“Then give me enough to do that.”

Paul grunted, and then laughed. “You’re a fool. You have no knack for self-preservation. You’re like one of these Japanese kamikaze pilots from World War II, flying an airplane full of bombs into the side of an aircraft carrier. Except in this case, the plane you’re flying is a bathtub toy.”

The old man paused, thinking for a moment, seeing Luke would not back down.

“Okay. You’re looking for a way to die? Get in touch with a man named David Delliger. He’s the Secretary of Defense, in case you don’t know. He was roommates with the President at Yale. There’s no way he’ll be in on the plot, but he will be very, very close to it, probably without knowing. The pieces will only become clear to him after the fact, but he’ll see them. Maybe he has no knack for self-preservation either. If so, the two of you will make quite a pair.”

“What about the President?” Luke said.

Paul shrugged. “What about him?”

“He’s safe now, isn’t he?” Luke pressed. “He’s ten stories underground.”

Paul smiled. “I need to be going. It’s getting late for an old man to be out and about. These parks can be dangerous at night.”

“The President is safe,” Luke insisted, grabbing his arm, frantic, needing to hear him say it.

Paul slowly shook his head and removed Luke’s hand.

“You don’t understand,” Paul replied, his voice hoarse, before turning around, drifting back into the silver and gray fog. “If this is truly Operation Red Box, then the President is already dead.”

8:53 p.m.

Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center - Bluemont, Virginia

An earnest young man poked his head into the room.

“Mr. President? We are going live in seven minutes. We’d like to have you on the set two minutes early.”

Thomas Hayes sat in a leather barbershop chair in what amounted to his dressing room. The room was shaped like an oval. The walls were bare, except for the mirror in front of him and a long dressing table. In the mirror, he could see his Chief of Staff, David Halstram, trying to relax on the couch.

David seemed to have two speeds—Go, and Go Faster. He couldn’t relax in the calmest of circumstances. Today had been anything but calm. He was fidgeting a lot. One of his shoes was tapping out a machine gun rhythm on the cement floor.

The President held the final draft of his speech in his hand. Old-fashioned paper for President Hayes—he had never fully adapted to the digital revolution. David had the same speech on an iPad.

Two young women were putting the final touches on Hayes. One was smoothing his makeup in such a way that it would look like he wasn’t wearing makeup. The other was fluffing his hair so that it was neat and presentable, almost but not perfect. He had nearly been killed today. He should seem at least a little bit windblown.

“What does that mean?” he said to the young man who had spoken. “Is it a math problem?”

“It means five more minutes, sir.”

“Okay. We’ll be there.”

When the man left, President Hayes looked at David again through the mirror. “What do you think of this phrase he uses toward the end,
greatness awaits us
? He’s got it in there three times. It sounds like the advertising tag line for a no-fee checking account. I mean, what am I supposed to do with that?”

Hayes was nervous, as he should be. In a moment, he was going to go on air and talk to the American people about the crisis they were facing. He could only assume that nearly every single adult in the country, and hundreds of millions more abroad, would see him or hear his voice. Every TV network was pre-empting their broadcasting. Nearly every radio network was. YouTube was streaming it live.

It was the biggest single speech he was ever likely to give, and it had been whipped together this afternoon and evening by a lead speech writer that Hayes probably would have let go weeks before, if only he didn’t have so many other things on his mind.

“Thomas,” David said, “you are the best public speaker I’ve heard in my lifetime. No, I wasn’t around for John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, but that doesn’t matter. No one alive right now even comes close to you. Someone tried to murder you today. They destroyed the White House, and killed nearly two dozen people. The American people want to hear from you. I say speak to them. Speak from your heart. Move them, and lead them. Use this speech as a guide if you want, or throw the whole thing out and wing it. I’ve seen you speak off the cuff and bring entire rooms to tears.”

Hayes nodded. He liked the idea of winging it. He liked the idea of taking leadership. And when he thought about leading, he realized what was missing now. That sense of dread, of trepidation, of being pulled apart like a piece of saltwater taffy. It was gone. The attack today had focused his mind. He felt confident. He felt that he could be a leader again. He no longer cared what the House of Representatives thought, or what people like Bill Ryan did.

Thomas Hayes had been elected to lead by the people of the United States of America. Lead was what he intended to do.

“Do you suppose Susan will show up for this?”

David nodded. “I know she will. I talked to her late this afternoon. She doesn’t like you very much right now, but that’s neither here nor there. We’ll get that patched up later. In the meantime, she’s going to do her job. When your speech ends, and you are greeting and chatting with the most powerful people in America, and everyone gathers together for a show of unity in front of the cameras, she will be right out in front and very, very visible.”

“Okay, David. I feel badly about today. I do want to patch it up.”

David nodded. “You will.”

When the time came, Hayes rose from the chair, shrugged into his suit jacket, and marched out of the room. David was with him, a half step behind. Hayes entered the underground TV studio. His podium, with the seal of the President, was on a raised stage a foot high, with blue carpeting. It was surrounded by cameras and lights.

Hayes felt good, he felt energetic, and he felt powerful. He felt that surge of electricity he used to get before a race, back when he was the captain of a nationally ranked rowing team.

He resisted the urge to run up onto the stage like a game show host.

Behind him, David’s phone started to ring. He glanced back at his Chief of Staff. David was looking at the caller ID. He glanced up.

“It’s Luke Stone.”

The President shrugged. “Take it. We have a couple of minutes. And anyway, I can handle this. I’ve done it before a million times.”

He stepped up to the podium and looked out at all the bright lights.

*

Luke stood by the water’s edge. He had taken exactly five steps from the bench where his father had left him sitting. He could barely see a thing. The fog was so dense he was lucky this call had gone through.

The phone rang and rang.

“Halstram,” a voice said.

“David, I need to talk to President Hayes.”

“Luke, I’m sorry. You and your partner did an amazing thing today. But the President is going live on the air in two minutes. If you want, you can leave a message with me, and I’ll get it to him as soon as this is over, probably an hour from now. Listen, you should go somewhere with a TV set and watch the show. I’m expecting dynamite from him. They tagged us one, but we’re not out of the fight, not by a long shot.”

“David, we’ve got big trouble.”

“I know. I was there today, remember? We’re going to work hard and we’re going to dig our way out of it. And you’re going to be a big part of that, believe me.”

Luke didn’t know how to handle people like David Halstram, at least, not over the phone. David tended to talk a blue streak, pause for breath, then start talking again. He was energetic, hyperkinetic, and probably very smart. He was certainly convinced of his own abilities, and he was convinced that people should listen to him and do what he said. It was hard to slow him down long enough to listen.

If Luke were there in person right now, he might put the business end of his gun against David’s forehead, and grab him by his thinning hair. Or, if he were feeling relaxed, he might just give David a karate chop to the collarbone. Either thing would likely focus David’s attention. But over the phone? It was hard.

He spoke slowly, as if to an imbecile. “David, you have to listen to me. The President’s life is in danger.”

“That’s why we’re underground right now.”

“David…”

“Luke, listen, I need to be available here. If you don’t have a specific message you want to leave, I need you to call me back in… let’s say ninety minutes, okay? If you don’t get me, try me a half hour after that.”

“You have to get out of there.”

“Okay, Luke, we’ll talk about it. He’s coming on right now. I have to go.”

The line went dead. Luke stared at the telephone. He fought the urge to throw it into the river. Instead, he started to walk to his car. A minute later, he started to run.

Was he really going to drive out to Mount Weather, now, after almost forty hours without sleep?

Yes.

How she would love to be almost anywhere but here.

She stood outside the gaping maw of the Mount Weather facility’s entrance, smoking a cigarette and holding her smartphone to her ear.

The smoking was one of those secret things that the American people were never supposed to know. Susan Hopkins enjoyed a cigarette now and then, and she had done so ever since she was a teenage supermodel. Especially in times of stress, nothing could beat it, and this was probably the most stressful day of her life. No one had ever tried to murder her before.

She wore a red skater dress, one that was maybe a tad sexy for the occasion. They had choppered it in from the Nordstrom store in the mall near the Pentagon, along with a seamstress to do the fitting. It was David Halstram’s idea. It was for the people watching on TV, so they could easily spot her. That way, after Thomas’s speech, no one in the world could miss the fact that Susan Hopkins was in a tunnel deep underground, hanging on the President’s every word. It was a good idea. But it was also a cool night, and the mountain air went right through the dress’s material.

She shivered. Three very big Secret Service men stood right nearby. They loomed over her. She hoped that none of them offered her their jacket. That kind of chivalry made her want to puke.

Pierre was talking at the other end of the phone.

“Honey,” he said, “I would really like to see you get out of there. It’s making me nervous. I can send a plane to whatever municipal airport is closest to you. You could be on the way back out here an hour from now. I’ve doubled security. The electric fence is on. It would take a small army to get through. You can just tell everyone that you need a couple of weeks off to regroup. Relax by the pool. Get a massage.”

Susan smiled at the thought of Pierre holed up in his thirty-room mansion, safely behind his electric fence. Who did he think he was trying to keep out, fraternity pranksters? His fence and his entry gate, and his eight (instead of four) retired detectives wouldn’t even slow down the people who had almost killed her.

Good Lord.

“Pierre…”

He kept talking. “Just let me finish,” he said.

She thought of the early times with him. She had already done
Vogue
,
Cosmo
,
Mademoiselle
,
Victoria’s Secret
, even the
Sports Illustrated
young masturbators issue. But she was starting to age out. She could feel it, and her agent told her as much. The covers had stopped coming. She was twenty-four years old.

Then she met Pierre. He was twenty-nine, and his start-up company’s initial public offering had just turned him into an instant billionaire. He had grown up in San Francisco, but his family was from France. He was beautiful, with a skinny body and big brown eyes. He looked like a deer in the headlights. His dark hair always flopped down in front of his face. He was hiding in there. It was unbearably cute.