When the president’s assassin realized he could die in the next few moments, he turned reptilian, cold-blooded, as he took and released several deep, sharp breaths and then plunged his head back and under the raging water. Rather than fight the current, he relaxed, let the flood have its way with him, smashing him against a boulder and then flinging him into deeper water just as the flashlight beams cut across the surface of the creek eighteen inches above him. He was soon past the soldiers on the parkway, but he remembered the ones on the bridge and stayed submerged.
Forty seconds. Fifty seconds. Sixty.
His lungs were close to bursting, but he did not lift his head until those lights had passed over him, and he was looking up through the heavily silted water at the dark underside of the bridge. Cruz surfaced, took four deep breaths, and ducked back down beneath the water.
The creek was straighter there, and he went with the flow out from under the bridge and down a long dark stretch away from prying lights. Feeling the current slow as the creek widened and deepened, he surfaced and breathed deep again.
It was remarkable just how warm he was. The suit was lined with material that reflected and trapped his body heat. The water was probably forty-five degrees, judging from the way it felt on his chin and lower cheeks, but the rest of his body might as well have been in Florida.
Twenty minutes later, he floated beneath the off-ramps from K Street and the Whitehurst Freeway. Over the thrum of rain, Cruz could hear tanks clanking up on the overpasses, and he could smell their burning diesel.
The current slowed even more as he approached the Swedish embassy, which was up on the western bank of the creek and lit up like a fortress. He swam to the opposite side of the waterway and stayed tight to its east bank until he was well clear of the place.
Beneath the Virginia Avenue bridge, he stopped and crouched in the shallows.
The lights were on ahead of him at the Thompson Boat Center. He could see Humvees and soldiers in the parking lot and imagined that others would be guarding the docks on the Potomac side.
Cruz peered down the east bank of the creek and decided he’d hang tight to it, maybe even crawl up into the brush if it looked like a better—
“Hey, what?” a man’s drunken voice said from Cruz’s left, high up the bank below the bottom of the bridge. “Frick’s that, Mikey?”
“Huh?”
“Down there, bro!” he said, and a flashlight went on.
Before Cruz could move, the beam found him. He took two strides and dived toward midstream, hearing shouts behind him.
He swam deep, let the current take him for a count of twenty, then cut left, trying to make it back to the vegetation overhanging the eastern shore. He reached it, grabbed onto roots, and lifted his head for air.
The two drunken bums under the bridge were still yelling.
“Hey! Hey, soldier man! There’s a frickin’ frogman in the creek! Frickin’ frogman in the water, dude!”
Soldiers were running toward the creek, guns up, shining their lights. They were all to Cruz’s right, and looking back toward the bridge and the men shouting. He didn’t notice the two coming from the dock side of the boathouse until their lights had found him. The assassin wasn’t sixty yards from the confluence of Rock Creek and the Potomac when the soldiers started shouting at him to freeze and put his hands up.
Cruz dived again and swam deep and blindly downstream, wishing for a surge of storm water to speed him into the Potomac.
Even submerged like that, a good six feet under, he heard the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic-weapon fire and the shrill whine of the bullets cutting through the water all around him.
Part Four
A Nationwide Manhunt
Chapter 74
A door banged open that Saturday morning.
I startled awake, dazed and unsure where I was, and Ali rushed to my bedside and broke down crying.
“Dad,” he blubbered. “We’re all gonna die!”
I sat up, bleary-eyed, still in my clothes, and remembered I’d gotten home past three a.m. and collapsed into bed beside Bree.
I looked over at my wife, who was just stirring, and then back at my son, who was weeping with a pitiful expression on his face.
“We’re all gonna die, Dad!”
“Stop. What are you talking about?” I said, fighting a yawn.
“It’s what they’re saying on the news,” he insisted. “Larkin, he did something against Russia, China, and, like, North Korea. They think it’s war and, like, going nuclear.”
“What?” Bree said, shooting up.
I was already out of bed. I snatched up Ali and carried him downstairs into the kitchen to find Nana Mama in her robe and Jannie in her University of Oregon sweats, both staring at the big screen in the outer room where some talking head was babbling about the entire world being on the verge of war.
My grandmother looked at me, grayer than pale, and said, “It’s like the Cuban missile crisis all over again, Alex.”
Bree hustled into the room. “Explain what happened.”
Jannie said, “Larkin attacked Moscow and Beijing.”
“No,” I said, horrified. “Missiles?”
“No,” Ali said. “Cyberattacks, Dad.”
Nana Mama said, “Larkin ordered CIA hackers to shut down electrical power for ten minutes in those cities and whatever the name of the capital of North Korea is.”
“Pyongyang,” Ali said.
“We can do that?” Bree asked. “Shut down all power?”
“We’ve already done it,” Jannie said.
Up on the screen, the feed cut to President Larkin aboard Air Force One.
He stared into the camera with deep resolve and said, “To authorities in Russia, China, and North Korea, my message is simple. If you continue to hack us, we will be forced to counterattack on a larger scale than what you’ve already seen. If you send missiles, we will respond with quick and devastating force. Your move.”
The screen went blank for a moment and then returned to a flustered morning-news anchor used to delivering fluff. She couldn’t speak at first, and then she broke down. “What’s the point? The nukes could be coming, and I’m sitting in Washington while the president’s off in a jet somewhere trying to start World War Three!”
“See!” Ali said, and he started crying again. “We have to get out of here, Dad!”
“We can’t,” I said. “They’ve still got the city cut off, trying to catch President Hobbs’s assassin.”
Jannie started to cry. “No, Dad, they think he’s already dead.”
“What?” Bree said, shaking her head in confusion.
We’d both been asleep less than five hours, and the world felt like it had changed completely in that time.
Nana Mama was watching the poor news anchor who was being led off camera; her co-anchor looked like he wanted to follow her. My grandmother muted the TV.
She said, “He was in Rock Creek in a wet suit. Some homeless guys living under the Virginia bridge spotted him trying to swim to the Potomac. Multiple soldiers guarding the Thompson Boat Center opened fire on him with machine guns. They feel sure he’s dead. They’re dredging the... there.”
She unmuted the TV. The feed had shifted to a camera on Virginia Avenue aimed at the Thompson Boat Center. Beyond it, police and Coast Guard boats were plying the Potomac, looking for a body.
“Who cares?” Ali said, and he hugged me fiercely. “The Russians are going to nuke us, aren’t they? Or the Chinese?”
Feeling how terrified he was, I kissed him and hugged him back. “No one wants a war like that. Not even our enemies.”
“Then why did the president shut their lights off?”
“Because they were attacking us in the wake of the assassinations. They were trying to see if we were weakened. President Larkin was showing them we aren’t.”