Any Means Necessary: A Luke Stone Thriller (Book 1) (27 page)

“Oh no,” Becca said.

Now the men were coming back, walking with Gunner. They flanked him, each one holding one of his wrists.

There was a man on top of her. He had a bad shave and coffee breath.

“Did you see that?” he said. “Did you see it? You did that, not us. If you had come quietly, that never would have happened.”

There was nothing left to do. Becca spit in the man’s face.

11:27 p.m.

Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center - Bluemont, Virginia

Chuck Berg drifted in and out of consciousness for hours, until another explosion woke him. The sound was deep, like faraway thunder. It made an impression in the air, like a wave on the ocean. He seemed to swim underwater for a long while, then he rose to the surface.

He broke through and opened his eyes. Thirty-seven years old, Chuck had been in the Secret Service for almost twelve years. He had spent two of those riding a desk, and nine of them as part of an advance security team. Six months ago, he had been awarded the plum assignment of a lifetime, working as one of the Vice President’s personal bodyguards. It didn’t feel so plum right now.

Chuck pieced together what he could remember. They had exited the elevator and were moving down a narrow corridor to the TV studio. They were a couple minutes late, and were walking fast. He was behind the Vice President. Two men, Smith and Erickson, were in the lead.

Suddenly the steel door in front of them blew inward. Erickson died instantly. Smith turned to come back up the corridor. His face was lit with the firelight as the flames burst through the shattered doorway. He saw a shadow stagger through the bright orange and yellow of the flames. It was Smith, lit up like a torch. He screamed for only a second, then went silent and keeled over. Berg pictured Smith inhaling fire. His throat ruptured, the scream had died almost before it began.

Chuck tackled the Vice President and held her down.

A shockwave moved through the hallway. The entire facility seemed to tremble. Something hit Berg in the head. He remembered thinking:
Okay, I’m dead. Okay.

But he wasn’t dead. He was still here, in the same corridor, in pitch-darkness, on top of the Vice President. The pain in his head was bad. He ran a hand along his scalp and found a wide slice tacky with dried blood. He pushed into it. A cracked skull should make the pain worse the more he probed. It didn’t happen.

He was alive, and he seemed to be operational. And that meant he had a job to do.

“Mrs. Hopkins?” he said. She was tiny, so small compared to him that lying on top of her was strange.

“Ma’am, are you with me?”

“Call me Susan,” came her surprisingly resilient voice. “I hate all that ma’am shit.”

“Are you hurt?”

“I’m in pain,” she said. “But I don’t know how bad it is.”

“Can you move your arms and legs?”

She squirmed beneath him. “Yes. But my right arm hurts a lot.” Her voice was shaking. “The skin on my face hurts. I think I was burned.”

Chuck nodded. “Okay.” He did the math. She could move her extremities, so no important nerves had been severed. They had been down here a long time. Internal injuries or severe burns probably would have killed her by now. So her injuries, while painful, were probably not immediately life threatening.

“Ma’am, in a moment, we’re going to see if you can stand, but not yet. I’m going to crawl away just for a minute, then I’ll be right back. I don’t want you to move at all. I want you to stay exactly where you are in exactly the position you are in. It’s very dark and I need you right where you are. Do you understand? Please say yes or no.”

“Yes,” she said in a little girl voice. “I understand.”

He left her behind, moving like a snake along the floor. He had noted an emergency kit stored behind glass directly across from the elevator doors. If that part of the hall was intact, he would be in business. He moved slowly, touching everything in front of him, looking for sharp edges and possible drop-offs. There was a lot of debris. He also felt along the wall. After a time, his hand touched the indent in the wall which told him he had reached the elevator.

Chuck worked his way to a kneeling position. Three feet above the ground, the air became fetid and smoky. He ducked back to the floor.

“Mrs. Hopkins?” he called out. “Are you still there?”

“I’m here, all right.”

“Continue to stay on the floor, please. Do not stand up for any reason, okay?”

“Okay.”

Chuck took a deep breath then stood up. His knees popped. His hands moved along the wall until they found the glass case. He had no idea how to open it, so he punched it as hard as he could. It was breakaway glass, and it shattered instantly.

The case was deep. His hands roamed inside of it, feeling familiar shapes. There were ventilator masks in here. He would need those. There was a gun—unnecessary, given the circumstances. He found a flashlight secured to the wall with a strap. He undid the snap, brought the flashlight out, and turned it on. It worked.

Oh my God. Light.

Quickly now he found water and a stack of meals-ready-to-eat. A first aid kit. A hatchet and a universal tool. He dropped to the floor just before his breath ran out.

He leaned against the wall. They were alive, and they had supplies. They were moving forward, and it was time to start thinking ahead. The facility had been attacked. It was a hardened facility, so it should withstand any missile or bomb attack from above. That suggested the attack had come from down here. And that, in turn, suggested that Chuck needed to find a way to the surface.

But…

He had to be careful. Nearly a decade ago, when he had first gone in the field, they had paired him an older agent, a man named Walt Brenna, who was months from retirement. Walt had a funny way about him. The other agents said he was a curmudgeon. They told Chuck not to listen to him. But he and Walt spent a lot of time together. Some days, there was nothing to do but listen to him.

Walt was obsessed with a concept he called “White on White.”

“They’ll tell you that this job is watching out for Islamic terrorists or Russian assassins or what have you,” Walt would say. “But it really isn’t. You think those guys are going to get anywhere near the President of the United States? Think again. The entire point of what we do is to neutralize a White on White attack.”

Chuck Berg took Walt’s ramblings with a giant grain of salt. But they stuck with him over the years, and he sometimes thought about them. To Walt Brenna, a White on White attack was one where the government attacked itself. The Kennedy assassinations were examples of this. So was the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Walt Brenna on Reagan:

“The Vice President, first in the line of succession, is the former CIA Director. The father of the man who tries to kill the President is the head of World Vision, a CIA front group. The Vice President’s family are friends with the would-be assassin’s family. The Vice President’s brother and the assassin’s brother are scheduled to have lunch together while the murder is taking place. Very little of this makes the newspapers. None of it is ever investigated. Why? Because the assassin is crazy and that’s all we need to know? No. Because White on White is an accepted part of the game. Their job is to do it, and our job is to stop it. Offense and defense, that’s all.”

As the years passed, Chuck learned that Walt wasn’t the only one in the Service who thought this way. No one talked openly about it, but he had heard whisperings. How could you identify a White on White? What would it look like if one was coming?

Chuck nodded to himself.
This
is what it would look like. A bomb had gone off inside a secure facility, hours after an attack on the White House. The explosions at the White House also came from inside the building, or most of them did. Outsiders couldn’t plant bombs in either place, and definitely not in both places. The only ones who could have done this were the military, the intelligence community, or the Secret Service itself.

With the benefit of the flashlight, he crouched low and duck-walked quickly back to the Vice President. She hadn’t moved at all.

“Ma’am? You can sit up now, if you can manage it. I have food, water, and a first aid kit. We’re going to need to wear these masks when we move out, and I’ll show you how. It will seem cumbersome and confining at first, but I promise you’ll get used to it.”

She moved slowly to a sitting position. She winced at the pain in her arm. Some of the skin on her face had peeled away. To Berg, the burns looked superficial, although she might get some scarring or discoloration. If that was the worst thing that happened to her, Chuck would call that lucky.

“Shouldn’t we try to call someone?” she said.

He shook his head. “No. We can’t call anyone. We don’t know who the enemy is. For the time being, we’re going to operate in secret.”

She seemed to think about that. “Okay.”

“Now, the way to the surface may be difficult,” Chuck said. “We might have to climb, and it may be frightening, and painful. So I’m going to ask you to do something for me. I’m going to ask you to reach down deep inside, and be as tough as you can. Find that tough person inside you. I know she’s in there. Can you find her?”

The woman looked at him, and suddenly her eyes were hard. “Buddy, I was in the fashion industry, surrounded by predators, when I was a young girl. I was living in New York and Paris and Milan, by myself, at sixteen years old. I am as tough as they come.”

Chuck nodded. That was exactly what he wanted to hear.

11:57 p.m.

The United States Naval Academy - Annapolis, Maryland

It was a strange place to meet.

Luke was dressed entirely in black. He wore black gloves. There was a black hood stuffed in his pocket.

The dark football field of the Navy Marine Corps Memorial Stadium spread out in front of him. The vast empty stands towered above him. GO NAVY was painted in massive letters across the upper tier of seats. In the night, the words looked white, but he knew that in the daytime they were yellow against a dark blue background.

He hung back, lingering in the shadows of the end zone concourse ramp. He watched the darkened broadcast booth at the top of the stadium, looking for the slightest movement. If he were a sniper, that was where he would be.

A man walked across the field toward him. Gradually, the man became clearer. He was tall, heavyset, walking as though he was carrying more weight than he once had. He wore a long overcoat. He came closer still, and now Luke could make out the dark suit under the man’s coat, and the soft, almost doughy features of the man’s face.

He entered the darkness of the concourse ramp.

Luke moved, only slightly. “Mr. Secretary?”

The man started, just a touch. It was clear he hadn’t seen Luke there. His eye was drawn immediately to the black matte Glock in Luke’s hand. Luke holstered it for the moment, to put the man at ease.

“Yes,” the man said. “I’m Dave Delliger.”

“I’m Luke Stone.”

“I know who you are. I was on a call with the President today. You’re the man who saved his life.”

“Temporarily,” Luke said.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry things happened this way.”

Delliger nodded. “I am, too.”

“I hate to ask you this, sir, but is there any chance you were followed here?”

Delliger nodded again. “There’s every chance. I attended the new President’s swearing in two hours ago at Site R. I took a Navy helicopter here. Site R is a hundred miles away, in the mountains. In the dark, with my failing night vision, it would have taken me until tomorrow morning to get here.”

Luke faded back against the wall. That was the wrong answer. Certainly not the one he was hoping for.

“Don’t worry,” Delliger said. “There’s nothing out of the ordinary. They have no reason to suspect me. This is my alma mater, and I taught here for many years. I still keep an office and a bedroom on campus. The Navy lets me do it because they’re so proud of me. I am what you might call a fixture here. I told the people at Site R that if we’re all going to die, I would prefer to do it here than in a hole in the ground.”

“I was under the impression,” Luke said, “that you once roomed with President Hayes at Yale.”

“Law school,” Delliger said. “I did, and we really were best pals, like everyone says. But that was later, after I performed my military service.” He raised his arms and gestured at their surroundings. “This is my true home.”

“President Hayes was murdered,” Luke said.

“I know he was. It was a coup d’état. I was there when Bill Ryan took the oath of office. Everyone was quite pleased with themselves, believe me. Now we’re going to have a war with Iran. Ryan’s going to make the declaration tonight, if he hasn’t already made it. Why wait for the
Today Show
to come on? And since most of the Congress is dead, there’s no sense asking them to declare it. Makes me wonder how the Russians are going to feel about all this.”

“We can stop it,” Luke said.

“What, the war?”

“The coup.”

“Mr. Stone, as far we know, time only moves forward. You can’t stop something that has already happened.”

Luke was silent.

“The President and the Vice President are dead,” Delliger said. “The next two in line are Bill Ryan and Ed Graves, both hawks, both alive. After that, the entire line of succession is gone. They were all at Mount Weather. If you were going to stop this, assuming such a thing were possible, and topple Bill Ryan, who would you replace him with? At this point, who is the legitimate heir to the throne?”

“I don’t know,” Luke admitted.

All day, he had been so focused on stopping it from happening that it hadn’t yet occurred to him the whole thing was already over. He was only now beginning to grasp the sheer scale of the operation. Don had told Luke he was window dressing, but that was wrong. He wasn’t window dressing. He was a bug on the windshield.