Extinction Machine (6 page)

He glanced at Sziemesko and their eyes held for a moment. Then slowly, wordlessly, they began backing away from the trammeled grass. They backed up almost to the White House itself, then they stopped. Nunzio heard Sziemesko say something under his breath. A denial, maybe. A curse. A prayer. He wasn’t sure.

For his own part, Nunzio had no idea what to say. What words would really fit?

The grass was not haphazardly smashed down. The blades looked folded. Nunzio knew that there was a name for something like this, but his mind did not want to think it. That name was connected to something that had nothing at all to do with the White House, and the president, or anything in Nunzio’s world.

Except that maybe it did.

The name, those two words, despite all his denials, whispered inside his head anyway.

This was a crop circle.

Chapter Ten

Aboard the
Secret Escape
Chesapeake Bay, off the coast of Virginia
Sunday, October 20, 3:28 a.m.

Linden Brierly was still awake. He lay in his bunk, staring up through the skylight at the infinite starfield that was spread like a jeweler’s display above the Chesapeake. His boat, a thirty-six-foot custom Beneteau, rocked gently, keeping him at the edge of sleep but not yet tumbling him over. His wife lay curled against him, soft and warm and beautiful. Her hair was still tangled from lovemaking, and the cabin smelled of her expensive perfume, superb wine, and sex.

Brierly stroked her hair, careful not to coax her to the surface of her dreams. By starlight her naked body was alabaster perfection. After nine years of marriage he still marveled at her, lost in the graceful lines and curves that only he knew with such intimate familiarity.

He glanced at the luminous face of the bedside clock and watched it turn from 3:29 to 3:30. He and Barbara were three and a half hours into the tenth year of their marriage.

Nice.

The boat rocked on a series of small, slow rollers.

And then Brierly’s cell phone rang.

His hand snaked out and snatched it off the night table, his thumb hitting the ringer mute halfway through the first jangle. He cut a look at Barbara, but she was still down deep. Then Brierly looked at the screen display and his heart lurched in his chest.

No name. Instead there was a coded symbol: ***!!!***

Jesus Christ,
he thought.
No, no, no …

He answered the call.

“Brierly.”

“Sir,” said Lyle Ames, “we have a
Jackhammer
situation. Please verify that confidential protocols are in active play.”

Brierly’s heart was thundering now.

Jackhammer.

God almighty.

He punched in the three-digit code that activated the scrambler.

“The blanket is down,” said Brierly.

“Verified.”

“What’s happening?”

“Linden,” said Ames in a voice that was strained to the breaking point, “the president is missing.”

Beside him, deep inside a dream, Barbara Brierly groaned as if in pain.

Chapter Eleven

The White House
Sunday, October 20, 5:12 a.m.

Two hours later, Linden Brierly ran up the stairs of the White House. A phalanx of agents followed him, and even with everything that was going on, Brierly wondered how many of them were eyeing his back and wondering if they would fall with the director? Brierly was the youngest man ever to hold the position as director of the Secret Service. There had been a lot of controversy over his appointment. Too young, they said. Not enough experience.

God.

He fitted a speaker-bud into his ear and adjusted the gain to a restricted channel. It was abuzz with chatter but no one was saying anything he wanted to hear. Talking about finding Jackhammer.

Jackhammer
.

Each president has two code names assigned by the Secret Service. At all other times, this president was Spider-man. But now, with him missing and the chance that someone could possibly hack the team radio channel, a crisis code name was employed. Jackhammer. An appropriate name, thought Brierly. Something that would break everything apart and turn it all to rubble.

The president has been kidnapped.

God almighty.

Every light in the building was on. People were shouting, running. Brierly knew that not all of them were aware of the
exact
nature of the calamity. The agents who didn’t know were giving fierce looks because they wanted top marks in what they’d been told was a high-profile surprise drill. The ones who suspected that this was something real were scared and, as they’d been taught, they fine-tuned their fear to bring them to a deadly level of alert preparedness. Brierly could spot the ones who knew, though. They had a different look in their eyes. They were scared—for their own careers as much as for the president—but more than that they were angry. It was their job to protect the president. Something had happened, someone had made them fail at that job. The cold fury in their eyes promised awful things to whoever was behind this. Brierly knew that it wasn’t bravado. He felt it, too. The rest of the staff—anyone who was not part of the security detail—was under armed guard. Interrogations were already underway. The entire White House had been crashed and locked down so hard that a fly couldn’t slip through without a body cavity search.

But the president was still missing.

No,
Brierly corrected himself.
Not “missing.” Taken.

His cell rang and Brierly glanced at the screen display. He slowed to a stop, wincing, steeling himself to take this call.

He said, “Yes, Mr. President?” Addressing the man who had been vice president less than two hours ago. William Collins. A man Brierly personally and professionally despised.

“Where do we stand?” demanded Collins.

“I just arrived on-site and—”

“I didn’t ask that,” Collins snapped. “I asked for a status report.”

Brierly was young for his directorship but he was a very experienced agent. He never let his personal feelings color his words or flavor his tone.

“At this time we have not located the POTUS,” he said crisply. “The first lady is being interviewed by one of my best men along with a staff psychologist. Ditto for the president’s body man and the team who were on duty outside the room.”

There was a heavy pause in which Brierly knew he was supposed to appreciate the full weight and scope of the acting president’s imperial disdain.

“Have you searched the building?”

No, asshole,
Brierly thought,
that never occurred to us. So glad you called.

“Yes, sir. Every room, every closet, under every desk.”

“And the transponder? Still no signal?”

“That is correct, sir.”

“Have you considered that the surveillance systems and computers may have been compromised?”

“Yes, sir. We have teams—”

“I’ve requested specialists from my Cyber Crimes Task Force,” Collins said briskly, emphasizing the word “my,” as if he was anything more than a nominal head of the investigation. “They’ll be there within the hour. You are to give them full access and total cooperation.”

Brierly frowned. “Sir, surely you appreciate the necessity of keeping this matter restricted to as few people as—”

“A great number of those
few
people are suspects.”

“I understand, sir, however we have protocols for this kind of an investigation and—”

“Protocols? For this kind of thing? Really? Tell, me, Brierly, when have you ever even heard of this kind of thing? This is outside of the scope of your experience,” said Collins, leaning on the word “experience,” making a point with a sledgehammer. “And surely even you have to realize that this is connected with the terror campaign being waged against our country. Get your head out of your ass. Expect my team within the hour.”

“Yes, sir,” said Brierly in as flat a monotone as possible. “Thank you, sir.”

“Brierly … this happened on your watch.”

“Thank you, Mr. President, I am fully aware of my responsibilities in this matter.”

And fuck you, you arrogant little shit.

“We are going to have to discuss your handling of things,” warned Collins.

“Yes, sir.”

“And one more thing,” said Collins. “I don’t want to hear about you running to Church or the DMS with this.”

“May I ask why not? Something like this could not have been accomplished without advanced technology and the DMS is—”

“The DMS is on my list, Brierly. Don’t think they’re not.”

“What exactly do you mean, Mr. President?”

“Surely it’s occurred to you, Brierly, that only a system as sophisticated as MindReader could have accomplished the intrusions and done the damage we’ve seen. Either Church is involved or he’s bungled his own security so badly that someone else has accessed MindReader and is using it to systematically attack some of this nation’s most highly classified projects.”

“Mr. President, are you accusing Mr. Church of—”

“I’m not accusing anyone of anything yet. When I do it will be spelled out on a federal warrant. In the meantime, you might want to decide where your loyalties lie.”

“Sir, I—”

The line went dead.

Brierly looked down at the cell phone. He took a moment to compose his face and then hurried down the hall to the president’s bedroom. Lyle Ames met him at the door.

“Talk to me,” said Brierly, and he could hear the edge of pleading in his own voice.

Ames, an old friend, touched his arm. “There’s nothing here, Linden. I mean nothing. No signs of a struggle, no forced entry. Video of the hallway verifies the report of the agents on the door. If the president was abducted by force there is no sign of it. Nothing.”

Brierly lowered his voice to a sharp, confidential tone. “That’s not acceptable, Lyle. I just had my ass handed to me by our new president. He’s sending some agents from his Cyber Crimes Task Force and he expects us to cooperate with them. If there’s anything to find I want us to find it, not them.”

Ames grunted. “The only thing we have is something two agents found on the lawn. They found it during the first sweep of the groups, so the timing fits, but we have no idea what it is or what it means.” He produced a high-res color print and handed it to Brierly. “It’s about ten feet across, so to get a clear picture I had to put a guy in a helicopter.”

Brierly frowned at the image. “This was on the lawn?”

“Pressed into it, yes.”

The pattern was odd but orderly; a strange ratcheted pattern, radiating out clockwise from a smaller circle at its center. On the top arc of the circle were three smaller circles in descending size.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s not the symbol of any terrorist organization I’ve ever heard of. We’re running it through the symbols and logos database.”

“Are you sure this was left by whoever abducted the president?” asked Brierly.

“Not sure of any damn thing,” confessed Ames. “It was on the lawn and the agents walking the grounds say that it wasn’t there before the alert.”

“I want to see the surveillance cameras for this part of the lawn.”

Ames cleared his throat. “Those cameras have a four-minute window where all they show is static. The pattern is not there before the static and
is
there afterward.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Collins is going to call that a cyber-attack and he’ll use it to take this whole thing away from us.”

“I know.”

“Besides—it’s bullshit,” snapped Brierly as he slapped the picture against Ames’s chest. “You can’t make something this big and complicated in four minutes. Come on, Lyle, I don’t need fucking fairy stories right now. Give me some actual goddamn evidence.”

Ames colored. “Linden, I’m giving you what we have and aside from this thing on the lawn we have nothing. We’re working everything. We have the first lady downstairs. I spoke with her already, but she said she slept through it and didn’t wake up at all until Gil and the door team entered the room.”

Brierly searched his face and took Ames by the elbow, pulling him out of earshot of the other agents. “And—?”

“And I believe her. We can ask her to take a polygraph, but I know what it will say.”

“Will she consent to a blood test?”

Ames nodded. “Already has. She insisted we do it, and she wants those results as badly as we do. We’re also running tests on the glass of water beside the president’s bed, his toothpaste, pills in all of the bottles in the medicine cabinet…”

“He doesn’t take a lot of pills.”

“I know, most of them are vitamin supplements, but we don’t know if he took anything tonight. Or if the first lady took anything. She says that she doesn’t even remember lying down.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s what she said. She and the president came into the residence, changed into pajamas, and that’s it. That’s all she remembers before the agents opened the door and woke her up.”

“How was she when she woke up?”

“Borderline hysterical, but that was a reaction to the events. She didn’t appear logy or dazed. None of the reactions you’d expect from a chemical sedative. Even so, there might have been something in her system, maybe slipped into something she ate or drank. We’ll look for contact substances, too—something that could have been placed on a surface they might have touched.”

Brierly nodded. “What about Gil Shannon?”

“Same thing. I have two men with him now—both top interrogators–and they’re working him pretty hard. I spoke with the agents who were at the POTUS’s door and I laid it on pretty thick, too. Promise of immunity if they had anything to do with this and could provide actionable information.”

Brierly grunted. “You get approval from the attorney general?”

“No, the AG’s in Florida. I lied. I figured, fuck it.”

“What’d you get?”

“I got some very angry, very outraged agents who I think will pass a polygraph. But … they also know that they’re done as far as the Service goes.”