“I’ll stay in touch,” Moore replied, grabbing his jacket and briefcase. Cotler pointed to colonels and navy captains like a squad leader. “You, you, you. Go with the SecDef.” Moore and his troop of uniformed and civilian aides headed for the elevator to brave the dangers above.
“Oh-God! Oh-God! Oh-God!” Clarissa hiccuped with three unsuccessful gulps of air. She shook her head so hard that her hair lashed at her eyes. Her father dug his fingernails into her wrists. Clarissa pulled away from the son of a bitch, then slapped at his shoulders and face. Fucking murderer! Murderer! Murderer! she thought.
“Would everyone listen up!” came a shout. A bark. A command from Air Force General Latham. The graying, standing officer lowered the telephone from his ear. “The vice president’s alternate national command post was shot down by three long-range fighter-interceptors!”
“Over Kansas?” shouted Secretary Moore.
“Impossible!” General Cotler challenged.
“It happened,” Latham responded. “They made a low-level, hypersonic ingress.”
Cotler didn’t deal any longer with the air force chief of staff. “Find out,” he ordered an army colonel, “in the next five minutes, whether there is a 1,000-mile trail of physical damage on the ground in the wake of those ‘hypersonic fighter-interceptors.’ And get search and rescue aircraft and an investigative team in there now.”
“I’ve got pilots on CAP over the crash site,” Latham announced. “There are no survivors.”
Art Dodd pointed at a dark plasma display. “Put pictures up there. I want to see it. Right now.”
“I’m working on it,” the air force general replied.
Everything was moving so fast. Consequences hurtled by unnoticed at first. It took people time to catch up.
Clarissa was the quickest of them all. “You’re the president,” she said out loud to her father. The old Speaker contemplated his lap, humbled, Clarissa thought, by the office that lay at his feet. Or he’s just old, she amended. He would need all the help he could get.
“We should swear Mr. Leffler in,” all heard from the opposite end of the room. It was Hamilton Asher. Hamilton Asher. Hamilton Fucking Asher! Clarissa raged. He was a dead man. She could get back at him. Avenge Bill’s death. She could use her father’s power to destroy the monster. The killer of innocent people.
Color test bars and then a picture filled the screen behind Art Dodd. A blackened smear with licks of flame here and there blotted out orderly rows of wheat. The flat field was adorned with twisted, unidentifiable scraps of metal and with lesser debris of nonmetallic origin.
The swearing in was organized quickly. Surprisingly quickly, Clarissa thought as she gnawed on two nails, looking around to see if anyone else seemed suspicious by the rapidity with which the transfer of power was arranged. It would have been better to have built some disorganization into the process. The chief justice appeared on a screen. The words they used, Clarissa thought, all came from the constitution, but this succession, for the first time in American history, was extra-constitutional.
She put the thought from her mind. There was too much work to do. Her feeble father had to build a new administration during a desperate war. As her father raised his hand and slurred his solemn oath of office, Clarissa’s planning raced ahead. Trust, she thought. Trust. We’ve got to get somebody we can trust. Of all of Bill’s senior advisors, Clarissa decided, Richard Fielding was probably the most trustworthy.
“Mr. President?” General Latham intoned the instant the ceremony ended. Directly beside him stood Hamilton Asher. “You have now assumed command of the armed forces of the United States of America. The Chinese are undoubtedly behind these assassinations,” the air force chief of staff began, “or they’re gonna learn about them very soon. Either way, they might just see a vulnerability. A moment of opportunity.”
“To strike us?” Cotler asked. “With nuclear arms? We have absolutely no indication that…”
“This situation is highly unstable!” Latham argued both to Cotler and to Clarissa’s father. “President Leffler hasn’t had his transition briefing. I’d like to lay out a few options. Give him his nuclear command and control briefing. Transfer the codes.”
Latham! Clarissa knew instantly. And Asher. They’d come to collect on her father’s lone “campaign promise.” The sole precondition to her father’s succession to Bill’s office, and, she realized for the first time, to her father’s continued survival. If he refused, they would query the next man in line. Perhaps, they already had.
Cotler nodded reluctantly for Latham to proceed with the briefing, but Clarissa wondered whether Latham would have stopped even if General Cotler had refused. Three or four sentences into Latham’s nearly whispered lecture to Clarissa’s father, however, Cotler barged in and shouted in anger.
“You’re giving him specific first strike options!” Cotler raged. “What is this, Martin?”
“If they attack us without attrition of their forces, Adam,” Latham replied, apparently from the heart, “we’re dead. As a country. It’s over!”
“But there is no attack under way!” Cotler objected. “For Christ’s sake, General Latham, our defenses will give us plenty of time to…!”
“Mr. President?” Latham asked suddenly. “What are your orders?”
“What?” was shouted from both Cotler and Admiral Thornton, Chief of Naval Operations, who were on their feet.
“We attack,” Clarissa’s father croaked, “as planned.”
“As who planned?” Art Dodd demanded.
“He meant as General Latham advised!” Clarissa cried out, rising to lean out over the table and defend her otherwise defenseless father. Hamilton Asher, a far better armed protector, stood at her father’s other side.
“General Latham…!” began Cotler before turning to the other end of the table and seeing that his air force counterpart was on the phone.
“Two-niner-echo-gold,” he was finishing into the mouth-piece. A cadre of air force officers stood at the back arid sides of his seat. “Hello?” Latham said into the handset. “Does anybody read me? Hello? Hello! Hello!”
The image of the vice president’s wreckage on the screens froze like a video recording.
For a moment, Clarissa thought that maybe the Chinese truly had launched a sneak attack.
The double doors burst open, and Clarissa jumped and then gasped. Bill Baker and Richard Fielding entered on the crest of a wave of Secret Service agents, whose weapons were drawn and raised. “You’re alive,” Clarissa whispered to Bill, who looked her hard in the eyes. The agents fanned out in both directions and circled the table, swarming everywhere and yet focused on discrete targets. The first to be handcuffed — roughly and quickly — was air force General Latham. Some of his uniformed aides were singled out and arrested. Others were asked to step aside.
The swarm appeared behind Clarissa, who’d sunk into her chair beside her father. She felt the agents keenly at her back. Her skin tingled as if waiting for their sting. Asher grunted loudly as his arms were yanked around to the rear. Handcuffs descended upon her father’s unresisting wrists.
“Dr. Leffler,” some faceless reaper politely called out from behind. She stood and faced the agent, maintaining her composure. Maybe this was something else entirely.
Both her wrists were gently seized. The cuffs fit them tight together. Clarissa’s jaw hung wide in shock. They led Asher past stern-faced generals and cabinet secretaries. Tom Leffler followed — head bowed — in abject shame. Agents escorted Clarissa by the elbow down the gauntlet of silent stares. Men and women. Soldiers and civilians. Aides she’d never before met. All glared at her with a look of intense and personal loathing. Hated. Her usually rapid facility for comprehension totally failed her at that moment. She couldn’t understand why they hated her.