“Just get us out of here,” Amanda begged in whispers. “Take us with you back to America!”
After the NSC meeting broke up and the room cleared, Bill had the technician replay the end of the video. “Freeze it,” he ordered. The uniformed airman hit a button on his console, then rolled a dial back until the frame was filled with the image he knew the president wanted to see: a picture of his daughter.
No comment had been made when the scene had first been shown, although whispers had circled the table when the president’s daughter had appeared on the screen. Bill studied the picture, frozen on four wall screens of Stephie standing beside the open mass grave and waving. She had to have known that Bill might see the video. She was waving at her father.
She was filthy and had a bandage covering the entire right side of her neck. Her combat boots were dust-colored. Cargo pockets bulged from baggy camouflage trousers. Although she was slender, she looked stocky under the flak jacket. Equipment hung off her webbing: three canteens, dozens of ammo pouches, pineapple-shaped grenades, stubby, bullet-shaped 40 mm grenades, a knife, a flashlight, and small kits of various sorts with plastic clasps.
Her helmet bore scars from near misses. Bill felt his skin crawl at the harrowing stories those marks told.
Stephie stood there with a half smile — one corner of her lips turned up — and waved her open palm from side to side. The sight struck Bill with almost physical effect. It was the same girl he had seen on the sun-baked front lawn of her beachfront home in Mobile, Alabama, fourteen years before. She had begged him to stay for lunch. Pleaded that she had so much to show him. Rushed across her bedroom and randomly retrieved drawings and dolls and hairbrushes in a desperate attempt to trick him into remaining awhile longer. But Rachel had paced the hall outside and stuck her glaring face into the room more and more frequently. She had agreed to give Bill only half an hour, and she was tapping her watch with her jaw set in anger as he exceeded his allotted time.
When Stephie had said good-bye from her lawn, she had tried to smile, but the effort had obviously been forced. The same girl now stood beside piles of rotting bodies and was similarly unable to muster any joy from her life.
When Frank Adams appeared in the door tapping his watch, the experience that Bill relived seemed complete. He studied his daughter one last time, then waggled his fingers at her image in a halfhearted wave. He glanced across the darkened conference room at the technician, who quickly lowered his gaze to his glowing console. Bill rose slowly and headed for the elevator. He fought the tidal wave of depression that threatened to swamp the embodiment of America’s storm-tossed ship of state.
Clarissa and Vice President Sobo chatted stiffly in the corridor as they awaited the arrival of President Baker. The uncomfortable conversation between the president’s mistress and constitutional successor ended promptly on seeing him down the corridor, even though Bill was intercepted at some distance by his military aide.
“Mr. President,” the navy lieutenant commander whispered, “we’ve succeeded in establishing intermittent contact with a Marine colonel in Hawaii. He commands remnants of forces from all four services — about twelve hundred men and women — and he’s in contact by radio with some of the other units. He’s asking for orders, sir.” The military aide didn’t say, but it was implicit, that the colonel was asking for permission to surrender.
“I’d like to speak to him,” Bill responded.
“Well, sir, he’s on short-wave radio. The atmospherics are screwy — a weak signal comes and goes — but we expect we’ll be able to raise him again in a matter of minutes.”
Bill nodded, and he and the aide approached the two waiting women. Clarissa flashed Bill a smile, but he couldn’t manage to reciprocate. He was unable to muster any feeling other than sadness.
Elizabeth Sobo said, “The Secret Service won’t let us both go on the same helicopter. They won’t even let us both go to Andrews at the same time. My plane is waiting in Baltimore.”
When Bill glanced at the South Lawn through two glass-paned doors, two Marines in dress uniforms crisply opened them. “You take Marine One,” Bill said. “I’m going to order our remaining troops in Hawaii to surrender. I’ll meet you in Omaha.”
Sobo smiled at Clarissa. Frank Adams, Bill’s chief of staff, had advised against taking Clarissa on the trip even though the exercise on which they were embarking had been kept totally secret for political reasons. The full-dress rehearsal would test the command and control systems at America’s alternate national command center in Omaha, and leaking word of it might damage American morale. Sobo’s eyes now took in the ornate White House hallway: crown moldings, ancient portraits, niches filled with statuary, lush Oriental runners. “Something tells me,” she said wistfully, “that our accommodations in Omaha will be more Spartan.”
“And as I recall,” Bill replied, “the Spartans all died to a man at Thermopylae. Maybe that’s a bad choice of metaphors.”
Sobo pondered Bill’s remark with a grim expression on her face, then finally and simply said, “Maybe.” She turned and headed through the open doors. The Marine guards closed them behind her as the helicopter’s engines began to whine.
Bill, Clarissa, and Bill’s military aide stood alone in the corridor. After a moment, the lieutenant commander said, “I’ll, uh, go check on the second helicopter.”
“As soon as you raise Hawaii, come get me,” Bill directed, and the man turned, nodded, and left.
The instant they were alone, Clarissa said, “Bill, I got a target letter. I’m the target of a Justice Department investigation under the National Secrecy Act.” She waited, but Bill did nothing more than arch his brow. “You knew about this?” she asked accusingly.
“No,” he replied. “I didn’t…” He couldn’t think of the words to speak that were both truthful and that didn’t violate the pledge of confidence he’d made to Richard Fielding. But Clarissa was far too insightful not to notice his dissembling, and she looked instantly stricken. She heaved a deep breath and turned away in shock. “Clarissa, I…” he began again, but faltered. She shook her head slowly.
Bill reached out to rest his hand on Clarissa’s shoulder. “We’ll get you a first-rate lawyer.”
“I already have a lawyer!” she snapped as she pulled free. “My father got me one!”
He wanted so to comfort her. To be outraged and vengeful and fiercely protective of his lover. “This is clearly a purely political ploy,” Bill reassured her. “And I promise that the White House will fight the stunt tooth and nail.”
From her angry glare, he concluded, his pledge of support was obviously lacking in fervor. The sound of Marine One’s engines rose to a whine even through the closed doors, momentarily drowning out their conversation as the helicopter labored skyward. But the stunned, hurt gaze that Clarissa fixed on Bill spoke volumes in the silence.
A thundering blast shattered glass and felled the two Marines at the door. In a rush of random observations, Bill saw glass glittering from the folds of his suit jacket as he wrapped his arms around Clarissa. He saw crimson blood on the neck and shaved head of a hatless Marine who struggled to rise to his knees beside the door. And he heard the crash of Marine One onto the South Lawn, followed moments later by its still spinning rotors, which plowed into the grass.
Strong hands ripped Clarissa and Bill apart and hustled them in opposite directions down the corridor. Four, five, ultimately eight Secret Service agents surrounded Bill, all of them laying their hands upon him. Pushing him at nearly a run with a force that he was powerless to resist. Holding bunches of his jacket’s fabric in grips firm enough to have supported him even if Bill had gone totally limp.