Margaret Howland drove her truck into the Greyhound lot. Her headlights panned slowly across the dozens of hungry, unshaven faces. She rolled her window down. “Anybody seen a guy named Nico?”
“Hey lady,” a veteran in a fungus-tainted Army uniform yelled. “I’ve got a bus ticket with your name on it. L.A.’s beautiful this time of year.”
“God bless you,” Madge called back diplomatically. The truck’s headlights finally found Nico’s clear-framed eyeglasses and thin lips and slight chin. He stepped out from the curb wearing ill-fitting khakis, a gray t-shirt and blue sneakers that he had found at Goodwill that afternoon. He opened the truck’s passenger door and took in the sight of her. She wore the same size-fourteen floral print blouse she had worn during her last visit to the prison. Her hair was up in a bun. And as usual, she had not tweezed her eyebrows and her nails were unpainted. She was just the way Nico liked them — plain, round and unpretentious.
“I can’t believe you came.”
“It’ll cost ya,” Madge said with a wink. “Get in here.”
Nico climbed into the truck. He kissed her tentatively at first. Then again, and with more confidence. She smelled like tea tree oil shampoo.
They drove wordlessly through town toward the I-81 South. Madge did not ask Nico how he happened to be out of prison some fifteen years ahead of schedule. The Lord worked in mysterious ways.
Madge was a mid-level programmer for a local Methodist Children’s Hospital. Two years earlier, she had been moved by a story written in Technology Weekly about Nico’s exploits called “Rise and Fall of an Activist Hacker.” The next week, she had written him a letter that began, “Dear Mister Gold, I read about the unfortunate turn of events in your life, and would like you to know that I for one am praying for your eternal soul.”
Although Nico was an atheist, he did not mind Madge’s attempts to convert him to Christianity, which had never waned in the sixty-one letters and fourteen visits to the Federal Penitentiary that followed their first contact. He found her relentless devotion to faith fascinating, even comforting. He was attracted to her earnestness. And while he knew that Madge was far from the coding genius that he was, the common language of programming gave them something to talk about.
They entered the I-81 South toward Burlington. “Are you hungry?” Madge said.
“No,” Nico replied, although in truth he was famished. The last thing he needed was to get recognized in some roadside diner.
Twenty miles down the road, they pulled into a truck stop. Nico waited in the pickup while Madge went inside, purchased four microwavable burritos, nuked them, and brought them out to the truck with a pair of cokes. They sat eating them in the parking lot until, having forgotten to grab napkins, Madge licked one of her chubby fingers. Nico grabbed her hand and licked her other fingers for her. One thing led to another in the expanse of the king cab’s spacious back seat.
“I didn’t plan that,” Madge said as she buttoned up her shirt, “and I’ll have to pray on it. But Jesus my savior knows that my heart’s been with you for a long time. It’s only the liberal justice system that’s kept us apart.”
A few more miles down I-81, they passed a Ulysses convoy. “Isn’t it terrible what’s been going on?” she said.
“Awful,” Nico said. He did not elaborate. He knew that if he told Madge what had really happened — that the President was dead, and that there was no such terrorist cell in Yemen responsible for all the carnage — that she would not believe him. That’s tomorrow’s conversation, he thought. Enjoy tonight.
Eisenhower Building
7:35 p.m.
Speers emerged from the tunnels through the narrow portal in the Eisenhower Building’s basement stairwell. The massive blast-proof door slammed behind him, and he froze. He held his breath and listened for boots, voices or gunfire. The Old Executive Building was an extension of the White House itself. It flanked the West Wing and had been renamed the Eisenhower Building decades ago, although most people still used the old name. The building had been completed in 1888 and was originally the State, War and Navy Building. Speers kept a cubicle in the West Wing for times when it was strategically important to be near the President. But on most days, he preferred to work here, where there were fewer interruptions.
Having heard nothing but the frantic booming of his own heart, Speers decided it was safe to proceed. He pulled his security badge from his pocket and swiped it on the elevator panel. The doors swung open. The elevator arrived at the third floor. Speers held the doors open. He craned his neck into the corridor to see if anyone was there.
By the look of the office, it was clear that the staff had been evacuated in a hurry. Doors were flung open. Lights were left on. Personal items — gym clothes, unused movie tickets, grocery lists — were out in plain sight. Piles of shredded paper and partially eaten breakfasts were everywhere.
Speers was famished. He could not resist a half-eaten Danish sitting on a colleague’s desk. He shoved the rubbery pastry into his mouth as he made his way toward his own office.
It was a relief to see that the office had not been ransacked. He booted up his computer and unlocked his lower desk drawer, which was full of grape lollipops. He unwrapped one and popped it into his mouth. His eyes rolled back into his head as the sugar began flowing through his body.
“Curfew in twenty minutes,” a voice boomed. “You have twenty minutes to get indoors. This is a zero tolerance curfew.” Speers peered out the blinds and looked down on 17Street. The voice was coming from a speaker mounted atop a Ulysses patrol vehicle.
Speers turned his attention back to his computer as his mail came online. He spotted the message he had been looking for:
FROM: Corporal Hammond, Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff TO: Julian SpeersFW: RE: CONFIDENTIAL
There were two attachments. Speers clicked on the first, a document containing a series of mechanical diagrams that were annotated in Farsi. The engineering schematics were beyond him, but he switched on a Farsi-to-English translator in his browser and soon realized that he was looking at a proposal for a state-of-the-art, Iranian-built desalination plant that had been prepared for General Wainewright. Further into the document, he came upon a map of the California coast. Xs near Mendocino, Eureka and Cambria seemed to mark future desalination plant locations.
The second attachment triggered a video on a private Web server. It took Speers several seconds to recognize Angie Jackson holding a copy of yesterday’s newspaper. She had the vacant look in her eyes of someone who had resigned herself to certain death. The video’s sound was scratchy as she put the newspaper down and began reading from a prepared script. Speers boosted the volume on his desktop speakers.
“Yesterday,” she began, “I was rescued from Chesapeake Bay. It was clear that these men had no reason to harm me.”
Suddenly, the overhead lights flickered out, followed by the computer and printer. Speers went to the window, hoping it was some type of blackout. It wasn’t. The streetlights in the surrounding buildings were all on.
A banging noise sounded from one of the lower floors. Speers grabbed the few pages that had come out of the printer, crammed them into a folder and escaped down the hallway just as red laser targeting beams cut through the darkness.
Escape routes were few and far between. Getting downstairs to the tunnels would be tricky. The building had several staircases, but they were probably crawling with Ulysses. Elevators were also out of the question.