The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller (35 page)

Another two agents guarded the room itself. Once again, Flynn had to go through the lockdown drill with them. Within the past hour, Bill had officially identified him as having a Category One clearance, which gave him the ability to legally bypass them. But legalities take time, and that he did not have. He dropped them both with blows to the temple that would keep them out for a couple of minutes, and entered the room.

Diana's face flushed deep. It was relief, he knew. Seeing her again made him feel the same. In this extreme situation anything could happen to anybody at any time. It was good to see her face.

“Where's the football?”

The president was glued to a phone, surrounded by aides. Diana pushed her way through the dense official mass. “It's next door with Whittier, but there's fixed base in here.”

“Where exactly? Which room?”

“The Briefing Room, I believe. But—”

Flynn crossed behind the president, getting angry glares from the secretary of state and the chief of staff.

The Briefing Room was empty.

He went back to Diana. “We need to put eyes on it and keep eyes on it.”

“But with the president here, how can it be activated?”

“Whoever has a valid biscuit and the DoD verifying code can simulate two-man compliance and initiate an attack.” The biscuit was a plastic card containing the president's personal verification code, which would be confirmed by the secretary of defense prior to being transmitted to the National Military Command Center with whatever war plan had been decided on.

They checked the adjacent video conferencing center, which contained only the technical personnel assigned to it.

“Whittier's going to be tagged,” Flynn said. He hurried around the corner to the Secret Service office. There were a dozen personnel there, watching the myriad of cameras that covered the structure and the grounds.

“Whittier,” Flynn said. “I need his location.”

“Whittier,” said one of the technicians. This was followed by silence.

“Where?”

“Sir, I—”

“You're not seeing him?”

“No, I am.” He turned, frowning. “He's in the Residence. In the First Lady's dressing room, sir.”

As they headed back to the Residence, he handed Diana one of the pistols. “You'll need this.”

“What's happening?”

Footsteps pounded behind them. Flynn turned to see a pale-faced Roland Boxleitner swing around the corner. “There you are! There are codes moving. Codes moving, Flynn!”

“And you don't know where they're coming from?”

His stare, woebegone, sparking with panic, was his eloquent answer.

“Go back in, tell the president to attempt verbal override.”

“That won't work!”

Flynn was on him in an instance. “It might slow this down by a couple of minutes! Now go!” To Diana he muttered, “That guy is not swift.”

“Flynn, please tell me what's happening?”

“Lorna's got ahold of the football. She's transmitting codes with it. Whittier is dead.”

“She's—”

“—transmitting a war plan. Exactly.”

“But how can she be stopped?”

“No idea. Let's go.”

“Where? Where is she?”

“Residence.” He said to the communications officer, “I want every man in the Residence looking for the First Lady. Every room, every closet, behind desks, under beds, in the attic. And give us buds. We need to be able to hear you guys.”

The officer handed two communicators over.

Flynn and Diana went to the Residence. It was now late afternoon, and the tourists were gone. The rooms were quiet, softly lit as always. Very faintly, the sound of Washington traffic could be heard drifting in from the outside, imparting a curious sense of normality.

They were climbing the private staircase when an agent launched himself from above. Dropping down, he fired on Flynn, but not fast enough to avoid being shot dead. He tumbled in a heap and rolled onto the narrow landing.

Flynn stepped over him. “We're close,” he said.

“I thought they were on our side!”

“Feel the skin. It's one of those damn biologicals.”

“I thought—never mind what I thought.”

When they reached the top of the stairs, Flynn emptied his pistol into the six of them that were waiting there.

“My dear God, how do you do that? I'll never come close to that level of proficiency.”

“I wish I knew. They're defending the eastern side, so we'll find her—”

“Too late, Flynn.” She stood in the door of her bedroom, almost lounging against the wall. “The war plan is in operation. The first flights are already launching.”

Maybe they were and maybe they weren't.

“The Situation Room has been taken out of the chain of command. Shithead is talking to himself.”

There was a rescind code. “When did you call the launch?”

She smiled. “It's too late for you to stop it.” The smile broadened. “Kill me, Flynn. You'd love to.”

He shoved her aside and entered her suite. On it, Ginny Bowers lay in a pool of blood, her severed throat a bloody grin.

Behind him Diana cried out, and another biorobot piled into him, attaching to his back with all its brutal, mechanical power. He levered himself forward at the waist, flung it off. It hurtled toward Lorna, but he killed it with a head shot before its body took her down. She groaned. “You bastard, I think you've broken my damn back.”

Diana hurried past him.

He wanted to kick Lorna's head in, but there was no time for anything except the work at hand, which was to locate the football.

He said into his mike, “Colonel Whittier is down. I need somebody up here to input a rescind order into the football's communications system.”

“It's in here,” Diana called.

It lay in the dressing room, the worn black satchel that contained war plans in folders, codes in plastic sleeves, and the most highly classified communications equipment in the Western World.

Bill Greene came in, flanked by Secret Service officers with drawn pistols. Secretary of Defense Cornyn was with him. Staff packed the hallway.

“Bill,” Flynn said, “she's activated a war plan. I don't know which one.”

“Missiles are away and Russia is preparing to retaliate,” Cornyn said. His voice wasn't afraid or angry, just tired. In a dull tone he said, “We've managed to transmit destruct sequences to four of them, but there are three more still rising and the rest of the war plan is about to execute.”

“Rescind codes?”

“Situation Room's nonoperational.”

Flynn heaved the fifty-pound satchel onto the foot of the bed.

“This is working,” he said.

At once, Greene and Cornyn input their rescind codes. A moment later, the command center returned a green light, signifying that the plan would not be executed further.

“Where are we?” Greene asked.

“We have three missiles still in play. The Russians have two in play.”

“Anything on ballistic trajectory yet?”

“Two minutes for us, three for them.”

“Can we destruct?”

“Deflect. We've just gotten open lines on them,” Cornyn said. He was listening to an earbud of his own. “Now that the war plan is rescinded, they're reachable again by telemetry.”

“Get Putin on,” the president said. He picked up the nearest phone. Such was the White House communications system that he was at once talking to the president of the Russian Federation. “Vladimir, we're dropping ours into the North Pacific.”

“We see that.”

“What's your status?”

There was a silence. After a moment, Cornyn bent double and retched. Flynn felt his own heart racing. Putin was at the other end of the line determining whether or not it was too late to abort his launch. Millions of American lives hung in the balance.

“Sir,” an aide said from the corridor. “We have determined that this is their east-first wave. New York, Boston, us, plus regional command and control and CENTCOM in Florida.”

“Sky Dragon?”

“Sky Dragon is expended at this time.”

“Sir, we need to get you back down to the PEOC right now.”

“Vladimir?”

He listened. His grip on the phone tightened. Then, very softly, he put it down.

“They have successfully aborted.”

Cornyn clutched his chest. Two aides rushed to his side and took him out of the room. Bill Greene sat on the foot of the blood-soaked bed. He bent his head and covered his face with his hands. The sound that came out was a woeful, sorrowing groan, relief mixed with something deeper, Flynn thought—the terror of a man who is truly alone.

“Flynn,” he said, “is this over?”

“Sir, it's over for now, but they will regroup.”

“How long?”

Flynn reviewed their options, as well as he thought he might know them. “If they want to take the planet from us, it will be some time before they can come up with another plan.”

As he spoke, he noted the stirring of murmurs his words brought to the room. Most of these people did not yet know about Aeon. They knew only that, for reasons that were not entirely clear, a world war had nearly started.

“What sort of a plan, Flynn?”

Flynn said nothing. This was not the place to discuss it, but Aeon had vast resources, and he thought it might be a virus, a plague of some sort. But how could he know? He could not know.

“Flynn?”

You do not remain silent when the President of the United States asks you a question, and certainly not when it is repeated. “Sir, we will get that under study at once. But I think we have bought some time. This is a very difficult, complex operation they're attempting. They won't be coming back at us tomorrow.”

He grunted. “Cornyn?”

“I'm sorry, sir,” the secretary said. “I thought I was having a cornonary.”

“You and I are going golfing. We can save our heart attacks for the course.” He glanced around. “Costigan—where's Costigan?”

The secretary of state edged into the jammed room. “Get on this right now,” the president told him. “We need to get every country in the world that possesses nuclear weapons to check them and determine if they've been altered. We need those warheads pulled.”

“There will be resistance to that.”

Bill Greene laughed a little. “Your job. You get it done.”

He stepped toward the door. As he was leaving, he stopped. Two agents had Lorna under guard. She was up against a wall, facing drawn guns.

“Get her out of the building,” he said. “I don't want to see her again.”

After they had hustled her away, Diana said, “Sir, she was acting under duress. That can be fixed.”

“Good. Fix it. Forde! Where's Forde?”

The Secret Service chief waved from the hall and came up to the president. “She is to be placed under house arrest. Incommunicado. Put her in one of the safe houses. Any attempt at escape, shoot her.”

“Sir?”

“You heard me.”

Flynn watched Greene pass down the hall, heard the thunder of footsteps on the stairway as he and all who followed him returned to the Situation Room.

He and Diana found themselves alone. “A goddamn Bevo wrangler,” Flynn said. He shook his head. It had been a hell of a thing to see that seeming idiot transform himself into a man of decision. But he had done it. Bill Greene was now and without question President William Greene.

“We've got a lot to do,” Diana said.

“Do we?”

“Well—” She stopped.

“Time for the panthers to return to their lair,” Flynn said. “Nothing more for us here.”

They left the White House then, walking out among the crowds on a clear, brisk autumn evening. Diana took Flynn's hand. She said, “You're amazing, Flynn. That entire thing was amazing.”

He looked back across the past ten days. “What I did is hard to understand. How it was accomplished.”

“You're sort of a superman.” She laughed a little. “Very impressive.”

He felt a flare of anger. Surely she knew more. “Diana, what am I?”

“Basically?”

“Truthfully. What am I?”

“A small-town cop I recruited because he was obsessed with missing people. A man who does not quit.”

“Perhaps I can help,” said a familiar voice.

Morris was behind them.

“Jesus!” Diana said, whirling around.

More carefully, Flynn turned.

Morris had the whisper of a smile on his face. “You have saved my business,” he said. “For that I am grateful.”

“Your information was good, so thank you.”

“Will you kill me now?”

“We're unarmed.”

He nodded. “I know.” He spread his arms. “As am I.”

“I know.”

“You're evaluating me, trying to see if you can take me physically.” His hand darted out, tapped Flynn's cheek, and moved back to his side so fast Flynn had felt only the brush of the dry, cool, artificial skin, and had not seen the hand. Morris's smile widened. “Goodbye, brother,” he said. He turned around and strolled off through the evening crowd.

Neither of them considered following him. They both knew it would be useless.

“He keeps calling me ‘brother.' I don't understand that. I know for certain that I'm fully human.”

“You are.”

“But why can't they kill me? Why do I always get away?”

“All I can say is, I'm glad you do.”

He took her arms and turned her toward him. “Do you know anything about me that you're not telling me, about what I am?”

“Batman? Are you Batman? Superman? An X-Man? Are such people real?”

“God, no. I'm a person.” But in the back of his mind was the persistent, uneasy thought that he was not that, or not only that, and that Morris and Diana both knew some secret about him. He had sorted through his past, his DNA, his life, but he could not find anywhere an explanation for his physical skills or his uncanny ability to outwit the minds of Aeon. Maybe the means to detect what was different about him was beyond human capabilities.