“Salvador got to you, didn’t he?”
“Salvador has nothing to do with this.”
“But you spoke to him.”
“Of course I spoke to him,” Zhao said. “But that’s not the point.”
“Of course it’s the point,” Al-Hassani said, now springing to his feet, his face flushed with anger. “You two are conspiring against me. I just had the man in my home. And now he is willing to turn his back on me without a second thought?”
“Mustafa, please, no one is conspiring against you,” Zhao insisted.
“Oh, really? Then why is he making you call me? Why doesn’t he have the courtesy to call me himself?”
“He’s on the phone with Doron,” Zhao said. “He’s trying to broker the deal you asked him to make.”
“I never asked him to make it,” Al-Hassani shot back, pacing the veranda now and discarding his pipe. “He’s cut a deal with you, hasn’t he?”
“What? What are you talking about, Mustafa?”
“Don’t lie to me, Zhao. He cut a deal with you, didn’t he? He’s trying to turn you against me.”
“That’s ridiculous, Mustafa. Please, my friend, take a deep breath and listen to what you’re saying.”
“You offered to send a quarter million troops to my backyard, didn’t you?” Al-Hassani charged.
“Peacekeepers,” Zhao said, “not combat troops.”
“What’s the difference?” Al-Hassani asked.
“Intent.”
Al-Hassani sniffed in disgust. “They’ll be armed, won’t they?”
“Of course.”
“They’ll be combat capable, won’t they?”
“They’re professional soldiers,” Zhao conceded. “Who else would I send, children?”
“Then how will I know they’re not a threat?”
“Because you have my word that they won’t be.”
“Your word?”
“Yes,” Zhao said. “And besides, Mustafa, they’ll be based in Kuwait, in the Emirates, not anywhere near Babylon or Old Baghdad.”
“That’s less than a day away by tank and armored car,” Al-Hassani said.
“So?”
“So when I least expect iT — when my back is turned — how do I know a quarter of a million heavily armed, combat-ready Chinese infantrymen won’t march up the Euphrates River valley right into Babylon?”
“Why in the world would I do that?” Zhao asked, his patience evidently wearing thin.
“Oil? Greed? Lust for power? Let me count the ways,” Al-Hassani said.
“No one is conspiring to take you out,” Zhao said curtly. “Unless you keep talking like this.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No.”
“Did Salvador tell you to say that?”
“Of course not. Look, Mustafa. I don’t have time for your little conspiracy theories. I have enough troubles of my own. I’ve asked Salvador to come back to Beijing in the hopes that his presence will keep the Americans from launching against us. Perhaps it will buy us some time to turn President Oaks’s attention elsewhere. We didn’t attack the Americans. Those weren’t our bombs.”
“Whose were they?” Al-Hassani demanded to know.
“I have no idea.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you want.”
“I hear you think the North Koreans did it,” Al-Hassani said, stirring the pot.
“I told you, I have no idea,” Zhao said. “But one thing I know for certain: The Americans are on edge. They’re angry. They’re ready for revenge. They want justice. They’re not thinking clearly, not yet. And if you keep provoking them with this whole Kurdish thing, who knows what could happen? Who knows whether they’ll listen to reason? They could start a war, Mustafa, a war that could decimate my country.”
58
Caulfield’s hands were trembling.
The conference room was completely silent. No one spoke. No one dared blink, much less move. All activity in the hallway outside the door had ceased. Caulfield could see the phalanx of agents and Marines, guns drawn, ready to storm in if he gave them an opening. But for now, two dead bodies had forced a standoff, and it was his move.
Beads of sweat were streaking down his face and neck, but he didn’t dare loosen his grip on the president’s neck. With his right hand, he pressed the 9 mm harder against the president’s temple and crouched down behind him to lower his profile, in case a Secret Service sniper he might not see took aim.
His eyes were blurring. He winced as the throbbing pain in the back of his head intensified. His body craved a fix he wasn’t going to get, and for the first time, thoughts of suicide gripped him. He told himself he didn’t want to die. But he couldn’t let there be a war. Not with North Korea. Not now. The thought of his older brother, Derek, stationed with the Eighth Army along the DMZ, being mowed down by the DPRK was more than he could bear. If there was something he could do to stop it, he had to, didn’t he? Derek was all he had left.
The FBI said his mother and four younger brothers were nowhere to be found. They had very likely been vaporized in the attack on New York. He hadn’t seen his father — a violent, raging alcoholic — in more than a decade. The last he’d heard, the man worked nights fixing subway tracks under the streets of Manhattan. In all likelihood, James Robert Caulfield was dead too. Perhaps that was for the better, but it meant James Robert “Bobby” Caulfield Jr. was all alone in the world.
He looked around the room. No one looked directly back at him. Even here, he was alone, he told himself. He saw fear in the eyes of the men watching him from the videoconference screens. But he also saw a bloodlust for revenge — against him, against Pyongyang, against the Chinese, and against the unseen enemies lurking in the shadows, enemies that had just obliterated four American cities.
He didn’t see sympathy. He didn’t see compassion. He knew any one of the agents outside this room would kill him in a heartbeat if he showed a moment’s weakness. Only in the eyes of Judge Summers did he see what appeared to be a flicker of recognition that there might be a shred of decency somewhere deep inside Bobby Caulfield.
Suddenly his attention turned to the flat-screen monitors and the minicameras built into them. It now dawned on him that everything he was doing was being seen and heard in the ops centers at Mount Weather, Site R, CINCPAC headquarters, Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, and the joint command war room a couple of stories underneath Seoul. The thought of his every action being watched by people he couldn’t control repulsed him. He raised his weapon and fired four shots. Each of the four plasma TVs on the far wall exploded, startling everyone and cutting off the live feeds. He was alone again with hostages he could see, hear, and kill.
Jack McKittrick huddled with his men.
He’d been commander of a Secret Service Counter Assault Team for less than eighteen months, but he’d been on the president’s protective detail for the previous three years. His older brother, Charlie, had been blinded in the line of duty six years earlier protecting President MacPherson in Denver. Now someone had finished the job. MacPherson was dead. His family was dead. Most of the members of his political party and administration were dead. And McKittrick wasn’t having any more of it. It was time to make someone pay, and Bobby Caulfield had just volunteered.
“We don’t have much time, gentlemen,” he began, tucked away in an office down the hall from the conference room so they could talk and plan in privacy. “Caulfield’s already killed Agent Coelho and General Briggs. Does anyone have any doubt he’d be willing to kill the president?”