“Understood,” Rodgers said. “I’ll call Bob and put him on this. Are you on your cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“Keep me apprised when you can,” Rodgers said.
“All right,” Hood replied. “Mike—”
“Paul, we’re going to take care of this,” Rodgers assured him. “You know there’s usually some kind of cooling-down period immediately after a takeover. Demands stated, attempts to negotiate. We won’t waste any of that time. You and Sharon just have to try and stay calm.”
Hood thanked him and hung up. Rodgers turned up the volume on the TV, listening as he rose slowly. The newscaster had no idea who had driven the van or why they’d attacked the United Nations. There had been no official announcement, and no communication from the five people who’d apparently gone into the Security Council chambers.
Rodgers shut off the television. While the general headed to his bedroom to dress, he punched in Bob Herbert’s mobile phone number. Op-Center’s intelligence chief was at dinner with Andrea Fortelni, a deputy assistant secretary of state. Herbert hadn’t dated much in the years since his wife was killed in Beirut, but he was a chronic intel collector. Foreign governments, his own government, it didn’t matter. As in the Japanese movie Rashomon—which was the only thing besides sushi and The Seven Samurai that Rodgers enjoyed from Japan — there was rarely any truth in government affairs. Just different perspectives. And professional that Herbert was, he liked having as many perspectives as possible.
Herbert was also a man who was devoted to his friends and coworkers. When Rodgers called to tell him what had happened, Herbert said he’d be at Op-Center within the half hour. Rodgers told him to have Matt Stoll come in as well. They might need to get into UN computers, and Matt was a peerless hacker. Meanwhile, Rodgers said that he’d call Striker and put them on yellow alert, in case they were needed. Along with the rest of Op-Center, the elite, twenty-one-person rapid-deployment force was based at the FBI Academy in Quantico. They could get to the United Nations in well under an hour if necessary.
Rodgers hoped the precautions would not be necessary. Unfortunately, terrorists who started out with murder had nothing to lose by killing again. Besides, for nearly half a century, terrorism had proven impervious to conciliatory, United Nations-style diplomacy.
Hope, he thought bitterly. What was it some play-wright or scholar had once written? That hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn’t permanent.
Rodgers finished dressing, then hurried into the fading light and climbed into his car. His own concerns were forgotten as he headed south along the George Washington Memorial Parkway to Op-Center.
To help rescue a girl from renegades.
ELEVEN
Forty years ago, at the peak of the Cold War, the nondescript, two-story building in the northeast corner of Andrews Air Force Base was a ready room. It was the staging area for elite flight crews known as the Ravens. In the event of a nuclear attack, it would have been the job of the Ravens to evacuate key government and military officials from Washington, D.C., and relocate them in an underground facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
But the ivory-colored building was not a monument to another era. There were gardens in the dirt patches where soldiers used to drill, and the seventy-eight people who worked here were not all in uniform.
They were handpicked tacticians, generals, diplomats, intellience analysts, computer specialists, psychologists, reconnaissance experts, environmentalists, attorneys, and press liaisons who worked for the National Crisis Management Center.
After a two-year tooling-up period overseen by interim director Bob Herbert, the former ready room became a high-tech Operations Center designed to interface with and assist the White House, the National Reconnaissance Office, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Interpol, and numerous foreign intelligence agencies in the management of domestic and international crises. However, after single-handedly defusing the crises in North Korea and Russia, Op-Center proved itself uniquely qualified to monitor, initiate, or manage operations worldwide.
All of that had happened during Paul Hood’s watch.
General Mike Rodgers stopped his Jeep at the security gate. An Air Force guard stepped from the booth. Though Rodgers was not in uniform, the young sergeant saluted and raised the iron bar. Rodgers drove through.
Although it was Paul Hood who had run the show, Rodgers had been a hands-on participant in every decision and in several of the military actions. He was eager to handle the crisis at hand, especially if they could work this in the way he knew best: independently and covertly.
Rodgers parked and jogged as quickly as his tight bandages would allow. He passed through the keypad entry on the ground floor of Op-Center. After greeting the armed guards seated behind the bulletproof Lexan, Rodgers hurried through the first-floor administrative level. The real activity of Op-Center took place in the secure, below-ground facility.
Emerging in the heart of Op-Center, known as the bullpen, Rodgers moved quickly through the checkerboard of cubicles to the executive wing. The offices were arrayed in a semicircle on the north side of the facility. He bypassed his own office and went directly to the conference room, which attorney Lowell Coffey III had dubbed “the Tank.”
The walls, floor, door, and ceiling of the Tank were all covered with sound-absorbing strips of mottled gray and black Acoustix; behind the strips were several layers of cork, a foot of concrete, and more Acoustix. In the midst of the concrete, on all six sides of the room, was a pair of wire grids that generated vacillating audio waves. Electronically, nothing could enter or leave the room. In order to receive calls from his cell phone, Rodgers had to stop and program the phone to forward calls to his office and then to here.
Bob Herbert was already there, along with Coffey, Ann Farris, Liz Gordon, and Matt Stoll. All had been off duty but came in so that the weekend night crew could continue to attend to regular Op-Center business. The concern everyone felt was palpable.
“Thanks for coming,” Rodgers said as he swung into the room. He shut the door behind him and took his seat at the head of the oblong mahogany table. There were computer stations at either end of the table and telephones at each of the twelve chairs.
“Mike, you spoke with Paul?” Ann asked.
“Yes.”
“How is he?” she asked.
“Paul and Sharon are both worried,” Rodgers said curtly.
The general kept his conversations with Ann as short as possible with as little eye contact as possible. He didn’t care for the press, and he didn’t like spinning it. His idea of press relations was to tell the truth or to say nothing. But above all, he didn’t approve of Ann’s fascination with Paul Hood. It was partly a moral issue — Hood was married — and partly a practical one. They all had to work together. Sexual chemistry was unavoidable, but “Dr.” Farris never took off her lab coat when she was around Hood.
If Ann noticed, she didn’t react.
“I told Paul we’d let him know when we have something,” Rodgers said. “But I don’t want to call unless it’s absolutely necessary. If Paul doesn’t get evacuated, he may try to get closer to the situation. I don’t want the phone beeping while he’s got his ear to a closed door.”
“Besides which,” Stoll said, “that line’s not exactly secure.”