“Who are you?” the President exclaimed. “How did you get in here?” He finally recognized who they were. “You’re McLanahan’s Tin Men! He sent you to kill me?”
“Never mind them, Joe!” Barbeau cried. “What was all that about? You made a deal with Zevitin to have McLanahan assassinated by Russian agents?”
“It’s starting to look like a damn good idea, Stacy, don’t you think?” Gardner asked. “This is exactly what I was afraid of — McLanahan is going to assassinate all his enemies and take over the government!”
“So to plan a strategy to deal with the crisis you bring a bimbo to Camp David, screw around with her awhile, then make a deal with the president of Russia to have an American general assassinated?”
Gardner whirled around. “Help! Help me!” he screamed. “I’m in the suite and there are armed men in here! Get in here! Help!”
One of the armored figures strode over to Gardner, put a hand behind his neck, and squeezed. Gardner’s vision exploded into a cloud of stars from the sudden intense pain. All of his strength immediately left his body, and he collapsed to his knees. “They’re all out for now, Mr. President,” the armored figure said. “No one can hear you.”
“Get away from me!” Gardner sobbed. “Don’t kill me!”
“I should kill you myself, you piece of shit!” Barbeau shouted. “I wanted McLanahan out of the way, maybe embarrass or disgrace him if he didn’t cooperate, but I wasn’t going to kill him, you stupid idiot! And I certainly wasn’t going to make a deal with the Russians to do it!”
“It’s McLanahan’s fault,” Gardner said. “He’s crazy. I had to do it.”
The figure grasping Gardner’s neck released him. Gardner collapsed to the floor, and the armored figure stood over him. “Listen to me carefully, Mr. President,” the figure said in a weird computerized voice. “We’ve got you on tape admitting to conspiring with the Russians to shoot down American bombers and the Black Stallion spaceplane, and conspiring with the president of Russia to have Russian agents enter the country to assassinate an American general.”
“You can’t kill me!” Gardner cried. “I am the President of the United States!”
The figure slammed an armored fist right beside the President’s head, then two inches down through the resawn maple floor and concrete foundation in the bedroom suite. Gardner screamed again and tried to scurry away, but the figure grasped him by the throat, putting his helmeted face right up to the President’s. “I can kill you easily, Mr. President,” the figure said. “We stopped the Navy SEALs, we stopped the Secret Service, and we stopped the Russian air force — we can certainly stop you. But we’re not going to kill you.”
“What do you want then?”
“Amnesty,” the figure said. “Full and complete freedom from prosecution or investigation for everyone involved in actions against the United States or its allies from Dreamland, Battle Mountain, Batman, Tehran, and Constanţa. Full retirements and honorable discharges for everyone who doesn’t want to serve under you as their commander-in-chief.”
“What else?”
“That’s all,” the other figure said. “But to ensure that you’ll do as we say, the Tin Men and CID units will disappear. If you cross us, or if anything happens to any of us, we’ll come back and finish the job.”
“You can’t stop us,” the first Tin Man said. “We’ll find you no matter where you try to hide. You won’t be able to track or detect us, because we can manipulate your sensors, computer networks, and communications any way we choose. We’ll monitor all your conversations, your e-mails, your movements. If you betray us, we’ll find you, and you’ll simply disappear. Do you understand, Mr. President?” He looked at the two women in the room. “That goes for you two as well. We don’t exist — but we’ll be watching you. All of you.”
EPILOGUE
He that falls by himself never cries.
The young boy cast a fishing line into Lake Mojave from his spot at the tip of a rocky point beside the long, wide boat-launching ramp. Lake Mojave was not really a lake, just a wide spot of the Colorado River south of Las Vegas. It was a popular winter venue for seasonal residents, but they could begin to feel the onset of summer heat even now in early spring, and you could sense the stirring in the place that people were itching to leave. Not far behind the boy was his father, in shorts, sunglasses, nylon running sandals, and Tommy Bahama embroidered shirt, typing on a laptop computer in the shade of a covered picnic area. Behind him in the RV park, the “snowbirds” were packing up their campground and preparing to take their trailers, campers, and RVs to gentler climes. Soon only the most die-hard desert-lovers would stay to brave southern Nevada’s brutally hot summer.
Amidst the bustle of the campground the man heard the sound of a heavier-than-normal car. Without turning or appearing to notice, he escaped out of his current program and called up another. With a push of a key, a remote wireless network camera on a telephone pole activated and began automatically tracking the newcomer. The camera zeroed in on the vehicle’s license plate, and in a few seconds it had captured the letters and numbers and identified the vehicle’s owner. At the same instant, a wireless RFID sensor co-located with the camera read a coded identification beacon broadcast from the vehicle, confirming its identity.
The vehicle, a dark H3 Hummer with tinted windows all the way around except for the windshield, parked in the white gravel parking lot between the marina restaurant and the launching ramp, and three men alighted. All wore jeans, sunglasses, and boots. One man in a safari-style tan vest stayed by the vehicle and started scanning the area. The second man wore an untucked white business shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up, while the third also wore an open safari-style tan vest.
The man at the picnic table received a tiny beepbeepbeep in his Bluetooth wireless headset, telling him that a tiny millimeter-wave sensor set up in the park had detected that one of the men was carrying a large metallic object — and it wasn’t a tackle box, either. The second man in the vest stopped about a dozen paces from the picnic area beside the ramp to the boat-launching ramp next to a garbage can and began scanning the area like the first. The third man walked up to the man at the picnic table. “Hot enough out here for you?” he asked.
“This is nothing,” the man at the picnic table said. He set his laptop down, got to his feet, turned to the newcomer, and removed his sunglasses. “They say it’ll get above a hundred by May and stay above a hundred and ten for all of June, July, and August.”
“Swell,” the newcomer said. “Cuts down on visitors, eh?” He looked past the man and to the boy fishing beside the boat ramp. “Cripes, can’t believe how tall Bradley’s getting.”
“He’ll be taller than the old man any day now.”
“No doubt.” The newcomer extended a hand. “How the hell are you, Patrick?”
“Just fine, Mr. President,” Patrick McLanahan said. “You?”
“Fine. Bored. No, bored out of my skull,” former President of the United States Kevin Martindale replied. He looked around. “Kind of a bleak place you got here, Muck. It’s not San Diego. It’s not even Vegas.”
“The desert grows on you, especially if you come here in late winter and experience the gradual change in the temperature,” Patrick said.