She clawed at her Glock. “You motherfucker! You lying bastard!” she shouted. “You betrayed us!”
“I was never with you in the first place,” Tillman said.
She continued to claw at her Glock. Because she was crunched up against the stair railing, however, she couldn’t quite pull her gun from its holster.
“Don’t do it,” Tillman said, racking another round of buckshot into the 870. “Don’t.”
Her wide, crazed eyes stared straight into Tillman’s as she finally freed the Glock. She was smiling now, a broad fierce feral grin. She knew what was coming. But in some way she must have welcomed it—this, the culmination of everything her sad life had been aiming toward.
“Don’t,” Tillman repeated.
She pushed herself slowly to her feet, laughed at him, and raised the Glock.
He fired, racked, fired, racked, fired again.
< Qp>
What was left of Lorene Verhoven fell slowly to the ground. Her shirt caught on the newel post at the bottom of the stair railing and tore free. She fell and hung there from the newel post, shirtless, her back bare and exposed. There were scars everywhere. Cuts, burns, thick ridges of pink skin—a topographical map of a stolen childhood.
“Come on,” Tillman said to Klotz. “We need to get your girls out of here.”
Klotz stood rooted to the floor until Tillman shoved him with the butt of his gun. Then he teetered forward, grabbed his daughters, and ran for the door.
Gideon heard the shots in his earphones and leaped from the seat of the car. He handcuffed Millwood to the steering wheel and sprinted across the front lawn. By the time he got to the door, Tillman, Klotz, and the two girls were coming out.
“Where’s Verhoven?” Gideon asked.
“Dead,” said Tillman. “Lorene, too.”
“You okay? Klotz? The girls?”
“We’re fine, but we need to get to the Capitol.”
“After we call this in. We’ve got a witness. Klotz can verify everything we say.” The doctor was eyeing him silently, the two girls clutching his trousers.
“We can’t wait for the bureaucrats to wrap everything up. By the time they’re finished taking our statements, the president, vice president, and most of the government will be dead.”
“We can at least give them the information we have.”
“You’re still thinking like a negotiator, Gideon. That’ll take hours. And then what? You think they’ll believe us? You think Dahlgren will believe us? You think President Wade will believe us?” He spat out Wade’s name as if it were a poisoned cherry pit.
Gideon knew his brother was right. Even if they had the time, they would be working against Dahlgren’s natural antipathy and suspicion of their efforts. He wouldn’t listen, and he would do everything in his power to stop them. They didn’t have all the details of the attack, so there was only one thing for them to do.
Gideon turned to Klotz. “You need to give us time to get inside. Will you do that?”
Klotz pursed his lips, then nodded.
“Promise me, Doctor.”
“I promise.”
“The cops will be here before long. Tell them it was a home invasion and a private security guard fought them off. Tell them he went downtown to file a report.”
Klotz agreed. “Please,” he asked. “If you see my wife, tell her we’re okay.”
“I will.”
Tillman shook his hand, then he and Gideon walked down to the car. Millwood was sitting quietly inside.
“Oh, this is interesting,” said Tillman.
“Long story,” said Gi;I Q; said Gideon. He uncuffed the officer. “How do you feel about a little ride on the Metro?”
49
PRIEST RIVER, IDAHO
It was nearly five-fifteen when Nancy Clement saw the farmhouse in the distance. The bulldozer had been chugging steadily along the winding country road for two hours and she had not seen a house or a car the entire time, and still had no cell phone signal. The dozer’s tank was nearly empty.
But now she had hope that whoever lived in the farmhouse might help her get through to somebody in DC. The Caterpillar was going so slow, it almost seemed to be going backward.
“Hello!” she shouted. “Hello!”
But nobody answered. She realized she was still a long way away.
She wound around a curve and the house was lost in the trees. Then it appeared again, then it was lost again, then it appeared again.
“Hello!” she shouted again.
She saw movement now, a man out in the yard, doing something. She chugged closer and closer. Chopping wood. The guy was chopping wood.
As he heard the engine of the bulldozer, the man set down his axe and walked toward her in a leisurely fashion.
When she’d almost reached him, she pressed the decelerator pedal, then switched off the dozer’s engine so she could be heard.
“Taking the dozer out for a spin?” he said.
“Do you have a phone?”
“Lines are down.”
“What about Internet?” she said.
The man looked at her like she had asked him if he was a space alien.
“Internet?” she said. “Have you got Internet access?”
The man continued to look at her with a puzzled expression. She took in the axe, the tiny house with its peeling paint and sagging porch, the battered pickup truck, the cockeyed chicken coop, and she felt a wave of despair. Internet, hell, she’d be lucky if this guy even knew what a computer was.
“Internet?” she repeated feebly.
“Of course I’ve got Internet,” the man said, tossing his axe on a pile of split logs. “Who doesn’t have Internet?”
It turned out he was not a redneck farmer but an IT guy from Boise who had bought the farm as a vacation place and then moved there as a temporary cost-saving measure after losing his job the previous year. His name was Hank Adams. He was a big fan of The X-Files and other conspiracy-themed TV shows and books and movies. He didn’t have cable, but he had a big satellite dish that brought in all his favorite channels and the Internet. When she explained the nature of the fix she was in, he eventually came around and started to grow excited.
Soon she was sitting in front of a brand-new iMac with a m82222222222 T‡assive screen logging into the man’s Skype account. She typed in the number for the burner cell phone that Gideon had given her.
“Gideon?” she said, when he answered.
“I was wondering what the hell happened to you. Are you okay?”
“It’s going to be a gas attack,” she said breathlessly. “Hydrogen cyanide, I think. But I haven’t figured out the target.”
“It’s the State of the Union address,” Gideon said. “We’re on our way to the Capitol right now. Tillman and me.”
It took Nancy a moment to process this before she could respond. “A guy by the name of Dale Wilmot is behind this. He built a factory in Idaho to synthesize the stuff from some kind of root vegetable. It volatilizes at seventy degrees. They can smuggle the stuff into the Capitol in liquid form then spray it or spill it and it would vaporize.”
“Assuming the ambient air was above seventy.”
“Right.”
“It’s twenty-five degrees in Washington, DC, today.”
Nancy felt a stab of irritation at herself. How had she missed a thing like that? There was some piece of the pie that she was missing.
“They must have figured out some way to atomize it,” she said. “We need to call the Secret Service. We’ll meet them at the Rayburn building.”
“No. Dahlgren told them I’m nuts and you’re a rogue agent under suspension who’s fantasizing about some phantom attack on American soil. They’ll never listen to me, or you. We’re on our own. Here’s what we know. Verhoven and Lorene were holding hostage the family of a Secret Service agent named Shanelle Klotz. They told her she had to open a door or her family would be killed. She must be with them now. If we can find out where she’s posted at the State of the Union address, we’ll have a chance to stop them.”