“You’ll need to appeal to their wallets as well,” Hussey said. “Making them feel safe is one thing, giving them incentive to spend will pull people off their couches and out of their homes.”
“Larry…” Roberts said. She apparently knew where Hussey was headed and wasn’t comfortable with it.
He waved her off. “It’s a good idea, Claire.” Then continued. “Suspend sales and meal taxes for a week. Maybe two. Some people won’t be able to resist. And when nothing bad happens to them, the rest will follow.”
“That would require a lot of state cooperation,” Duncan said.
“Mm-hmm,” Hussey said. “We’d likely have to reimburse their losses. But it could prevent a financial meltdown.”
“Sir,” Roberts said, trying to interject.
But Duncan liked the idea. “Get it done.”
Roberts sighed. It was her turn to deflate. “Why don’t you tell him whose idea that was, Larry.”
Hussey’s face went pale.
The door to the conference room opened. Duncan’s secretary entered and fought her way through the packed space. Duncan knew by the serious look on her face that she had an important message to deliver, but he needed an answer from Hussey, too. “Spill it, Larry.”
“I thought you would have known,” Hussey said. “It was on the news.”
“I’ve been a little distracted,” Duncan said. The secretary was almost there.
“The idea was Marrs’s.”
Fuck. Marrs was going to eat this up. Not only had he already committed to the idea in front of all his advisors, it was also a good idea. He couldn’t back out on it just because it came from Marrs first.
His secretary whispered in his ear. He flinched, having forgotten she was incoming. “Dominick Boucher called. Wants you to make contact asap.”
The nation’s economic woes took an instantaneous backseat. “Make contact. Those were his words exactly?”
The secretary nodded.
It was a key phrase they had established. It meant that Boucher needed to have a chat with Deep Blue. And that meant it was mission related, and, he looked at his watch, it was far too soon for the teams to have reported in. And that meant something was wrong.
Duncan stood.
A sea of voices rose up with him.
Documents had to be signed. Approval given. The nation managed. And Marrs’s plan had to be put in motion. None of it could happen without his John Hancock.
He stood rooted for a moment, torn between his conflicting duties. Manager and warrior fought a battle for his attention. His pulse quickened. He could feel it in his neck. The voices of his advisors were like needles in his eardrums. He had to take action. Every cell in his body cried out for it.
But that wasn’t what he signed up for.
He held out a hand, silencing group. “One at a time. Quickly.”
As the first form was handed to him by Larry Hussey, the form that would set Marrs’s plan in motion, Duncan turned to the secretary and said, “Call Boucher. Tell him I’m digging a trench and will call him when I’m done.”
“Digging a trench” wasn’t code for anything, but he knew Boucher would understand. No one liked digging trenches, but they could save your life when the mortars started flying. And if the crisis wasn’t ended soon, the skies would be clouded with rounds.
* * *
DUNCAN ENTERED THE empty situation room, hidden in a basement of the White House, and sat down at the head of the empty executive table. Using a small remote control, he dimmed the room’s lights and sat in darkness. After rubbing his eyes, he leaned forward on his hands, rubbing his temples. It had taken him forty-five minutes to sign all the required paperwork.
In that time, the news networks had already caught wind of Marrs’s seeming ability to dictate presidential policy. And the press along with Marrs had brewed a firestorm. Marrs called the decision to use his suggested tax pause a smoke screen, an attempt to distract people from his failings. The man could turn anything, even his own ideas, into an attack.
The loudest pundits called him a traitor. A warmonger whose policies on terror endangered the nation. Comparisons to Hitler and Stalin were casually hurled by men seeking higher ratings. Marrs led a rally in Washington, D.C., shouting for justice and shaking his fist.
Duncan wanted nothing more than for Marrs to come to his office and try shaking that fist face-to-face. But instead he had to remain measured and calm. “Defuse the powder keg,” his advisors said. Settle. Appease.
It was all bullshit.
The man was brewing fear, contaminating the people with it and making sure Duncan’s assurances of safety were ignored. He would probably derail his own tax pause idea, too, but would not be held accountable for it.
But every time the American public’s focus turned away, Marrs brought them back with wild allegations or bolder calls to action. The most recent one being impeachment. He’d heard the same call to action a year previous when the nation faced a killer pandemic thanks to a weaponized strain of the Brugada syndrome used in an assassination attempt on his life. He had taken drastic measures—quarantining the White House staff and hundreds of U.S. citizens against their will. The rumbles died down when a cure had been provided, but the whispers never faded. With new ammunition, the guns of impeachment fired again.
He didn’t fear impeachment. It was a ridiculous notion championed by the minority. But they were loud and persistent. They kept the national attention focused on him, binding his actions. The fools were unknowingly crippling his efforts to find the people responsible for the attacks.
He hit a second button on the remote. A blue screen lowered from the ceiling, stopping behind him. Once lowered, a bright light backlit the screen, making it glow and casting him in a silhouette that disguised his identity. He switched on the laptop in front of him and established a secure video feed with Dominick Boucher, who had been overseeing the team’s latest batch of rescue missions. He stood in Delta’s tactical HQ and was surrounded by an array of stations with men and women watching satellite feeds, monitoring endless flows of information from news, police, and military sources around the world. It was the intelligence heart of every Delta operation. One that he normally commanded.
Boucher’s white mustache twitched when he faced the screen. It was a telltale sign that things were not well. “Dom, what’s the score?”
There was no “What took you so long?” No annoyance in Boucher’s eyes. The man knew the score: Deep Blue was the president of the United States and he sometimes had shit to do. Instead, he simply cut to the chase. “Bad guys four. Us, zip. We’ve been played. The authorities in Taiwan, Russia, Colombia, and Argentina knew we were coming.”
Duncan’s mind spun, trying to figure out who knew enough to reveal their hand. The list was short.
“I don’t think we have a snitch,” Boucher said, as though able to read Duncan’s thoughts. “We tracked down calls to several other countries that resulted in troop mobilization. All were on our list to hit next. Whoever did this only knew we would be looking, but not where we were going first. They were shooting scattershot, hoping to hit us.”
“Which they did.”
Boucher’s mustache twitched again.
“How bad is it?”
“Bishop’s team was captured, but escaped without being identified as U.S. military.”
Duncan felt some of his tension slip away.
Boucher quickly added, “But not before wounding seven Argentine National Gendarmerie soldiers.”
His tension returned with a vengeance, squeezing the small of his back.
“Queen and her team escaped after instigating a gunfight between the Colombian military and a bunch of drug runners. Both sides received casualties, but there were no reports of our team’s involvement.”