Find Eddie but pay attention to everything.
I saw Eddie! He lay sideways, in a blood-soaked bed, feet over the edge, mouth gaping, brain matter splattered across the pillow!
No, it was not Eddie. It was a different Japanese man. I fell against the wall in horror and relief.
The pause had situated me beside several black-and-white photos on the wall. I stood blinking at them in astonishment. The pictures curling inside heat-shattered glass were the last thing I’d think to see here. They were World War Two shots! German officers sightseeing at the pyramids, with two men wearing white suits. One of them looked fifty, a European; the other was swarthier. Egyptian? Next, shots of Jews with yellow stars on their clothing, on a line, in a concentration camp. Then Adolf Hitler sitting in a chair talking earnestly with a robed cleric wearing the kind of round white turban that I recognized from Iraq. Shiite.
Hitler was leaning forward, palms open, face reasonable, if such a word could be used in his case. He was making an important point to a valued guest.
What the hell? What’s the connection to this place?
When I reached the end of the ward I looked back to see fire consuming the room. A door here was closed. My leg was dragging. I pushed through the door with my heart in my mouth to see a middle-aged man in medical whites whirling toward me, holding a can of gasoline. I was in an examination room. A few beds, and human forms on them. An exam table with shackles on it. The doctor struck me as Levantine; olive skin, fleshy face and body, large nose, and furious black eyes that looked larger through thick black eyeglasses, half slid down his nose. He’d been splashing gasoline on walls. He’d given up the chance to flee in order to complete the destruction. He screamed at me as fire consumed an open file cabinet, and a laptop melted and bubbled on a table. I needed this man alive. I yelled for him to put down the can. He started to throw it at me, and a burst of gunfire spun him sideways and made him dance back and smack into the wall and slide down.
Izabel Santo stood in the doorway, her AK smoking. She was panting, and the rage on her face was firelit, red. The gasoline can had sailed past me to smash into the wall and splash fuel, and now fire whooshed up on three sides.
“Joe? Is that you?”
I knew that voice. I couldn’t believe it. Eddie was gaping at me in astonishment from one of the beds at the back of the room. He was handcuffed there, and had been hidden behind the doctor. I counted three men in all here, survivors, alive. One man burst into tears. The other screamed for help. They all looked sick and terrified.
It was hard to breathe. Eddie had lost weight and his face was pale. His croaked voice, his actual voice, filled me with so much emotion that for an instant there was no pain or fire or dead doctor. Eddie smiled with a kind of pain-wracked disbelief, as if he doubted what he saw, or suffered hallucinations.
“Where did you come from, Uno?”
“The key! Where’s the key to the handcuffs, Eddie?”
Izabel moved up, gaping. “That’s him? Your friend?”
“We have to tell Ray what went on here,” Eddie said, as fire bloomed and beakers shattered and windows blew out and Izabel moved toward the other survivors to try to release them.
“Screw the key, One. Shoot the cuffs off,” Eddie advised. He’d always been a fast thinker, Eddie.
TWELVE
White House Deputy Assistant National Security Advisor Kyle Utley’s job sometimes was to sit in for his boss at meetings, take notes, and report back. He was in the White House’s Roosevelt Room doing just that, eyeing the Rough Rider painting over the fireplace when his cell phone vibrated for the fourth time in ten minutes. The return number was his wife’s. This meant the news would be bad.
“The seventy-two-hour deadline has passed, without attacks by terrorists. This false alarm was handled professionally. You all deserve congratulations,” Homeland Security’s Deputy Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis told the gathering of second- and third-tier reps from security agencies. Now that the initial alert had been downgraded, lesser officials dealt with the aftermath. Their bosses had gone on to other things.
“Our quiet response to the threat showed superb synergy. We avoided panic and kept the public safe.”
Kyle raised an index finger to mean he was breaking, moved into the carpeted hallway, and punched in his wife’s number. Angie was a lawyer for a big lobbying firm downtown, on K Street. She picked up during the first ring.
“I just got a disturbing phone call, Kyle.”
Angela Utley was not a complainer, and if she was upset, there was good reason, Kyle knew. He was a protective husband, furious with anyone who would bother his wife. His first thought was that the incident related to the pissed-off plumber who had argued with Angie over a bill last week. “Who called, honey?”
“Well, that’s just it! He never said his name! My secretary came in and handed me her cellular. The guy on the other end said you knew him from the New Post Pub.”
Kyle felt the good mood from the meeting disappear and a hard ball of tension replace it. He fell into the hallway armchair, across from an oil painting borrowed from the Smithsonian, depicting Japanese planes attacking Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. American ships were in flames in the water. Smoke roiled. Sailors were burning alive.
Trying to keep his voice level, Kyle asked, “What did the caller say, Angie?”
“He told me to write everything down so I wouldn’t forget it. He said that the deadline has passed, the first attack has started, and it’s your fault. He said you still have a chance to limit more damage and you know how. Your fault? What did he mean?”
“I don’t know.”
Kyle felt sweat break out in his armpits. The attack has started? There was nothing in the news about any attack. No bombings. No planes down. No mobilization he’d heard of, anywhere, that could have masked a government response to an attack, here or overseas.
No, absolutely nothing coming in.
Angie’s voice grew tighter. “The man said he hoped that you and I have the right medicines. He knew we have no children, and hoped that our parents would be all right. He said the usual pills should work, whatever that means. Kyle? Medicines? How did he know we don’t have kids?”
Kyle thought fast. “He probably read that Post’s Style section piece, Angie. D.C. couples on the way up? Last month?”
Yes, the caller was a nut, Kyle told himself. The caller, as the Deputy Under Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis had suggested a few minutes ago, was delusional. Maybe the caller merely imagined that there had been an attack. Yeah, that’s it.
But if that was it, how come, Kyle thought with dread, I have a gut feeling that bad news is about to come? He tried to pin down the source of his premonition. It was the look on the stranger’s face outside the New Post Pub. The man had seemed rational. And the approach now, reaching him through his wife’s secretary, skirting possible monitoring, was diabolically shrewd.
“Kyle, who was that man?” Angie asked.
“I don’t know. Was that his whole message?”
“No. He said that groups all over the United States are in place to begin more attacks.”
Kyle felt dizzy.
“He said that the only way to prevent that is to give them what they want. He said to tell you to remember Tol-e-Khomri. What is Tol-e-Khomri?”