He popped the door and headed up the short flight of stairs to the big stone archway.
Mark nodded to himself. "I guarantee it," he grumbled, still not positive why he was even here. Although he had an inkling.
Plastering on a professional face, the young analyst hurried from the car and trotted up the stairs to the Executive Wing of the White House.
MARK HOWARD COULD only assume that this strange turn of events had something to do with the mysterious, unexplained background check. It had all been very thorough, very detailed. More meticulous even than when he had joined the CIA fresh out of college.
Howard assumed it was somehow related to "Black Boris," a deep-cover mole alleged to have been squirreled away at Langley for years. Mark had always suspected that Boris was a myth-the Loch Ness Monster of the spy game.
Since the background check came not long after the well-publicized incidents of Chinese spying at Los Alamos, Mark assumed this was just some new attempt to flush out someone who probably didn't even exist. Until, that is, he learned that he alone was being investigated.
He found out the truth after dropping a casual comment to a fellow analyst at lunch in the cafeteria. Afterward, a few more discreet inquiries confirmed the fact that no one else was being scrutinized like Mark Howard.
The knowledge that he was being singled out for some reason made for a few tense weeks.
Then one day, as abruptly as the investigation had started, it stopped.
Most people would have let the matter drop. Indeed, Mark would have. Gladly. If not for the "feeling."
That was what he had learned to call his special gift. The feeling. It was a strange sense, an intuition he'd had since childhood. Back then, when a ball was lost in the woods, Mark would know precisely where it was, even if he hadn't been playing the game. The other kids would come and find him and bang, there it was.
It worked with animals, too. He'd found lost dogs, cats, even a rabbit that had gotten out of Mr. Grautskeeb's hutch. The saddest day of his childhood back in Iowa was that time when he was six when he'd found Ronnie Marin's missing collie in the weeds out behind the tool shed. She'd been there for two days. No one had bothered to look for her there. No one but little Mark Howard.
As he grew older, he realized that this ability of his could be applied in other ways. At the CIA, it allowed him to draw together meager, disparate facts and assemble them into a whole with remarkable accuracy.
While Mark didn't consider the feeling a psychic thing, he had to admit his brain worked differently than other people's. It was more an ability to intuit on a level greater than the average man on the street. Which was probably why he found himself holding the rewritable CD on that day not long after the unexplained background check ended.
Mark didn't know why he'd fished the silver disc from the back of his drawer. Sitting in his drab little cubicle in the bowels of CIA headquarters in Virginia, he studied the disc. Fluorescent light reflected off its gleaming surface.
He'd made the disc more than six months before. On a day that would prove to be one of the strangest of his young career, a man who identified himself as General Smith had called looking for an analyst.
Mark had been given the urgent task of locating a ship at sea. A geosynchronous spy satellite over the Atlantic was turned over to him for the task. After Mark had located the ship, General Smith had briefly commandeered Howard's computer to confirm his findings. It should have been impossible, but the lemon-voiced man on the phone was able to access Mark's computer with ease.
When he was through, Smith had thanked Howard for his assistance and had receded into cyberspace, never to be heard from again. All Mark had to show for that weird afternoon was a single CDROM of satellite images. And the feeling.
Instinct had compelled him to dig deeper.
Rather than let the matter drop, Mark kept track of the general's ship through surreptitious means. Howard was stunned when, mere hours after it arrived in the Mideast, a previously unknown type of nuclear weapon was detonated in Israel. Chaos had descended on the entire region for several frightening days.
When the situation finally stabilized a week later, Mark learned that the men suspected of deploying the device had been found dead in an oasis in Jordan. The cause of death was listed as "unknown."
Mark didn't know why, but after reading that short report, something clicked. It grew worse a few months later.
The Mideast had largely recovered when a new crisis developed, this time in East Africa. The defense minister of that country had hatched a crazed scheme to turn his country into the crime capital of the world. But although everything seemed to be in place for him to succeed, his plot had somehow miraculously imploded.
It was then Mark knew for certain he was looking at another piece of a larger puzzle. Sifting through the East Africa data, he found one report overlooked by everyone else at the CIA. It mentioned a young white and an elderly Asian who were somehow involved with the native Luzu tribe at the time of the crisis. And in the moment he read that report, it all became clear.
General Smith-who probably wasn't a general at all-was the leader of some secret force. The white and the Asian were his operatives. Mark didn't know for certain how he knew this to be so. He just knew it was true.
Later, when he went back to look at the computer report, he found that all references to the two men on the ground in East Africa had been expunged. Someone had covered their tracks. And that someone was computer literate and could access the CIA's files.
Smith.
The ramifications were huge. When he found the files deleted, Mark had immediately retrieved the CD-ROM from his desk. Deleting its contents, he used a borrowed cigarette lighter to melt the disc into unusability. Once it was warped out of shape, he snapped it into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet.
Woodenly, he returned to his desk.
For Mark, this was the most exciting, frightening moment of realization he'd ever experienced.
The events in the Mideast and Africa had been big. They had each in their own way threatened to destabilize the world as America perceived it. And yet they had not.
There was something big lurking beyond the known fringes of American government. Alone in his cubicle that amazing day, Mark understood with blinding clarity that the clearance it was given pointed like a neon arrow to only one place.
THE OVAL OFFICE WAS bigger than Mark expected. In the rooms beyond came sounds of packing. Through the door that opened on the office of the President's personal secretary, boxes were stacked high.
A person unseen could be heard gently sobbing. Mark assumed it was someone who didn't want to relinquish the reins of government at the end of the week.
The men in the Oval sat on the two long sofas near the fireplace. In addition to the CIA, there were agents from the FBI, NSC and the Justice Department present. Mark sat quietly off to one side of the senior government officials.
The President came shuffling in ten minutes late. America's departing chief executive looked as if he'd slept in his clothes. He wore a heavy wool bathrobe, open wide. The belt dangled, lopsided, and dragged on the floor behind him. His green sweatpants were stained, and his ample belly threatened the seams of his ratty Global Movieland T-shirt. His unlaced sneakers scuffed morosely on the carpet as he made his way to his desk.
On one of his last days in office, the leader of the free world had given barely any attention to his omnipresent makeup. A few thick smears of orangetinted rouge had been glopped haphazardly on both cheeks. The tiny broken veins in his big nose faded into the wide rosacea blotches that marred his otherwise pasty face.