Carver hated hitching rides on military transports. The conditions were rarely comfortable, but he could hardly afford to use his scant budget to buy airline tickets when perfectly good military planes were crisscrossing the country 24/7.
Nico did not wait well. He fidgeted and sighed, wishing for something — anything — to read or do. He had been allowed to take just one personal effect from the Federal Pen- a photo of moon-faced Madge Howland.
“Pen pal?” O’Keefe asked after seeing him obsess over Madge’s photo.
“Fiance,” Nico corrected, shoving the photo back into his jeans pocket.
O’Keefe eyed Nico’s tattoos — the block letters E-V-A, on each forearm. “Eva,” she read aloud. “That’s her name?”
Carver, who had fully researched Nico Gold’s past before recruiting him, answered for him: “Eva was his mother’s name.”
Nico shook his head. “You’re half-right, snoop. Eva’s the name of the woman who put me into the world. It’s also the name of the woman who took me out of it. ”
O’Keefe squinted in puzzlement. “What? Now I’m confused.”
“He means Eva Hudson,” Carver explained.
“As in the Secretary of the Treasury?”
“Bingo. She was Assistant Director at the IMF when Nico went on his little Robin Hood kick.”
“I can speak for myself,” Nico said. “The IMF and the World Bank are nothing more than self-serving bureaucracies. I was simply taking what belonged to the world and redistributing it to people that really needed it. There’s a full explanation in my autobiography.”
“Which is lousy, by the way,” Carver said.
Nico grinned for the first time all day. “You actually bought my book!”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I borrowed it from the library.”
O’Keefe checked her watch. It was coming up on a quarter past eleven. “We might as well tell you where we’re headed now. We’re going to Fort Campbell, Kentucky. There’s a joint op effort between the feds and Army Intelligence.”
“Army Intelligence? That’s an oxymoron.”
Agent Carver picked up his attache and pulled out a folder full of coded transcriptions stamped CLASSIFIED. He handed them to Nico. “You might as well get started.”
Nico pushed his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose, looked over the transcriptions for all of two seconds before pushing them back at Agent Carver. “These are beyond comprehension. I need to hear the original audio files.”
“Our people put a lot of time into those.”
“If your people were all that great, you wouldn’t have hauled my ass out of jail.”
He had a point. Carver had been utterly confounded with the G-linguists who were supposed to be such effective code breakers. The NSA was the nation’s single largest employer of mathematicians and had some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Twelve cryptologists had already failed to produce any results. Carver subsequently had them all replaced with contractors. Three weeks later he regarded them as a bunch of overpaid, greedy academics with no real world experience.
Agent Carver’s and O’Keefe’s cell phones buzzed at the same time.
A paratrooper sitting across from them growled as the two startled federal agents whipped out their phones. “Hey! Cell phones off during flight!”
Carver ignored him. He had been told by his Air Force buddies that the concept of cell phones interfering with flight navigation was a myth that had been perpetuated by commercial airline pilots. Quiet passengers made for more enjoyable travel, and considerably happier flight attendants.
His face darkened as he read the first text message: ATTEMPT ON CAMEO INCONCLUSIVE. Carver had, unfortunately, seen this type of message many times before. “Attempt” was fed-speak for an assassination attempt. “Cameo” was the codename for the Vice President. “Inconclusive” meant that there were casualties, but there was a chance of survival. Had the Vice President been dead, the message would have read “Conclusive.”
The other messages followed in rapid succession: ATTEMPT ON H MAJ LEADER CONCLUSIVE; ATTEMPT ON SENATE MAJ LEADER CONCLUSIVE; ATTEMPT ON SECDEF INCONCLUSIVE; ATTEMPT ON SECTREAS NONSTARTER.
O’Keefe’s eyes welled up. She turned to Carver. “We’re too late.”
He smiled. “I love your optimism.”
“Optimism?” O’Keefe said in an angry whisper. “How can you joke?”
“I wasn’t joking,” Carver said. “Only an optimist would assume the worst is already over. But that would be the best-case scenario.”
“What are you saying?”
“This might be just the beginning.”
The Pentagon
11:14 a.m.
Marines deployed retractable SAM batteries along the five edges of the Pentagon’s massive 28.7 acre rooftop. Within the five floors and six million square feet of office space below them, some 23,000 military and civilian employees were ordered to stay clear of all window-facing offices. The building had been hastily constructed in the 1940s as a temporary military headquarters, and as 9/11 had proved, it was hardly impenetrable. The Pentagon had been built on the cheap during one of the most trying economic times in American history, right down to the several thousand pounds of horsehair used as insulation. In recent years its windows had been upgraded with Kevlar overlays to provide some measure of protection against a sniper or exterior blast. The SAM batteries had been added to defend against suicide pilots.
Deep beneath the Pentagon’s ground floor, General Wainewright’s staff gathered in the National Military Command Center, or NMCC. This was the subterranean vault from which the Joint Chiefs directed military operations during DEFCON 3 situations. Should the crisis go to DEFCON 2, plans called for strategic command to be evacuated to Raven Rock.
The officers gawked at several gigantic monitors, where the drama unfolded on live television. FOX was running a montage of the late Congressman Bailey. CNN depicted a 2008 still image of Holy Grace Baptist Church, then cut to live aerial footage showing the smoldering city block where the church and two adjacent buildings had stood only an hour earlier. General Farrell, the Vice-Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, turned up the volume. “You’re looking at what once was Speaker of the House Bill Bailey’s home church,” the news anchor said, “where it is reported that the congressman was killed while attending services today.”
“They don’t know the half of it yet,” General Farrell snorted.
General Wainewright hurried into the NMCC with his waifish assistant, Corporal Hammond, trailing behind him. The blast doors closed behind them and the officers sprang out of their chairs. Wainewright peered over his reading glasses at the group. “The TV goes off,” he said. “Status!”
Farrell began a sober tally of the morning’s events. His voice was permanently hoarse from four decades of chain smoking and barking out orders. “We have several concurrent, seemingly coordinated assassination attempts,” he began. “The Vice President is in critical condition: Unverified rocket attack on his car in Wyoming. Speaker of the House Bailey is believed dead: Car bombing in Monroe. Senator Thomas is believed dead: Blast at his vacation residence in Kennebunkport.”
The brass volleyed a dozen questions all at once. “When did the attacks begin?” someone shouted.
“This morning,” Farrell responded. “Between ten and eleven, and the situation is ongoing.”
“What do you mean coordinated?” came General Shufford’s voice over the speaker phone. Shufford was one of four Joint Chiefs, representing the Air Force, and had called in from a base in Europe.
Before Farrell could respond, the blast doors swooshed opened. The meeting’s latest arrival wore running shoes, black spandex leggings and a snug gray athletic shirt with GWU emblazoned across the chest. Her long raven hair was pulled back into a pony tail. She carried only a Blackberry.