Black Skies (23 page)

T
he day of the gala had arrived. Morgan, dressed in a well-tailored tuxedo, took Lily’s arm in his. He had considered telling Jenny the nature of the night’s mission, on the off-chance that he and Lily were caught in the background of a photograph of a famous couple and ended up in the society pages. It seemed, however, implausible enough that he shrugged it off. With a little luck, Jenny would be none the wiser.

Lily was wearing a corseted red gown and shoes to match—something she called Manolo Blahniks, as if he were supposed to know what those were. They came out of their limousine at Battery Park, where an illuminated red carpet led to the docks. There, a small fleet of luxury speedboats was ferrying guests to and from the island.

They gave their names at the pier. Bloch, likely through the shadowy, well-connected Smith, had gotten them on the guest list alongside scores of high-ranking politicians, A-list celebrities, and assorted people who were wealthier than God. A security guard ran a metal detector wand over them. As expected, it missed the nearly invisible earbuds that were inserted into each of their left ears.

The speedboat took them and a handful of other guests toward the island, where the Statue of Liberty was fully lit in all her glory. Four searchlights lit the sky above her, the light shining bright then fading into the fog.

The speedboat reached the pier on Liberty Island, which was decked out with the same kind of pomp and circumstance they had found at Battery Park.

Morgan didn’t recognize the pop singer onstage, but he had a feeling that Alex might if she were there. The crowd was fancy, but not as homogenous as it was in Monte Carlo. People dressed with the same sober elegance as those in the European casino mingled with less-formal guests—movie stars and artists in open collars, with disheveled hair, and Silicon Valley billionaires with the relaxed casualness of people who had no family name to uphold and too much money to need to maintain a respectable image.

“Do you see him anywhere?” asked Morgan.

“No, but I think I see David Bowie.”

“Lily, focus,” he said. “We’re here for Weinberg.”

“All right, ” she said, pouting. “Has anybody ever told you you’re no fun at all?”

Scanning the crowd, Morgan couldn’t spot Weinberg, but he did pick out one familiar face.

“Excuse me,” he said to Lily, and walked toward a woman in her early middle age, with short brown hair and a respectable demeanor, wearing a black shawl over a sober dress of the same color. She was talking to an older man, bearing an expert look of feigned attention and interest.

“Senator,” he said, interrupting her conversation.

Lana McKay turned to him, and then her eyes grew large and she covered her mouth in surprise. “Oh, my goodness.” She turned to the man she had been talking to. “If you’d excuse me, Roger. I need to exchange a few words with this gentleman. His appearance here is—somewhat shocking, to say the least.” She turned back to Morgan. “My apologies, Mr. Morgan. I never thought that I would see you again. I have to say, the experience is not entirely unlike seeing a ghost.”

“I do prefer to stay out of sight,” he said. “Although sometimes I do get to come to events like these. Are you enjoying yourself, Senator?”

“Not really, no,” she said with a confidential smile. “But political exigencies bring me here. They’re an unfortunate part of Washington culture that every freshman senator with a head full of ideas comes to accept and rue.”

“Really?” he asked. “I kind of hoped that you’d be above that.”

“Yes,” she said. “Me too. You judge me, Mr. Morgan, and I can understand that. You’re a man of action. Your approach to getting things done is direct. No bullshit, if you’ll pardon my language. Just do what needs to be done. But to try that in Washington is to beat your head against a brick wall. You hit up against a system of one hundred people with one hundred different agendas. Good intentions and good ideas mean nothing by themselves.”

“Instead, you play the game and you lose yourself,” he said.

“Well, you do get to the point rather fast, don’t you?” She sighed. “There’s a lot I would rather do. I lot a really need to do. I don’t have to tell you that the outcome of our current crisis with the Secretary can have deep ramifications to our safety and integrity as a nation. In particular, what we decide to do about it. This could could plunge the nation into permanent war and push us closer to a police state.”

“You wouldn’t know it from looking around this crowd,” said Morgan, gesturing at the revelers around them, the colorful flashing lights of the stage where the pop star was lip-synching a tune, the servers carrying trays of champagne and tiny canapés.

“You really wouldn’t, would you?” she said. “The world could be coming down around them, and they might not even notice as long as there’s a waiter handy to top off their dry martinis.”

“Meanwhile, we’re at the same party, lamenting the state of the world,” said Morgan.

“What does that say about us?”

Morgan laughed.

“I have to admit that your presence here is ominous, Mr. Morgan” said McKay, lowering her voice. “I hope it doesn’t mean that someone intends to blow up the Statue of Liberty or anything like that.”

“No, nothing like that,” he said. “Not as far as I know, anyway.”

Morgan noticed a presence through his peripheral vision, and saw that his date had caught up to him. “My word, those Wall Street types can be rather crass,” she said, looking back in the direction she had come from. She turned to face McKay. “Good evening, Senator. Lily Randall.
Enchanté.
It’s an honor, really. I’m a
huge
fan of your early work.”

“There seems to be a lot of that going around,” said McKay. “Mr. Morgan, it has truly been a pleasure seeing you again., but duty calls.” McKay walked off into the crowd to make conversation with the jet set.

When Morgan saw the intruders out of the corner of his eye, it was already too late. The sound of gunfire tore through the revelry. Bodyguards and security personnel were dropping all along the perimeter of the party area. Figures in black were emerging from the edges of the party and swarming into the center, firing semiautomatic weapons in short bursts.

Weinberg!
It had to be! What was his plan? To eliminate a rival? A political opponent?

It didn’t matter. Morgan just had to get to safety.

He scanned the crowd until he found McKay. “Senator! Get behind me!” He looked around for cover, but the party was out in the open. He wheeled around and came face-to-face with the answer, all three hundred feet of it. “Come on. We’re going into the statue.”

In the commotion, he spotted one of the gunmen, dangerously close, who in his black mask seemed to be looking directly at him. He spoke into a communicator that seemed to be on his sleeve, and walked in their direction. Were they after him? Had Weinberg identified him to them somehow? Was this all about him?

He looked at the terrified woman on his right. No, of course this was not about him. It was about
her.
The senator.

The man raised the semiautomatic, ready to shoot, when a flash of red appeared behind him. Lily Randall, who had somehow gotten behind him, swung a heavy silver platter at his unprotected head. The metal hit with a clang, and he fell forward with an
oof.
Lily crouched and relieved him of his PP-90 nine millimeter. Then she jogged over to Morgan and McKay.

“Let’s get out of here!” she said.

“To the statue,” said Morgan, leading McKay with them. Between them and the statue was an enormous tent that held an extensive bar and dance floor. They ran behind the bar and out the back of the tent, emerging not far from the entrance to the statue museum, which was ensconced between two points of the star-shaped base. This corner of the party was quiet, at least for the time being. They ran over to the museum doors. Morgan reached them first and pulled the handle. Locked, of course. He tried kicking it, but they were too heavy. He kicked again, putting the force of his entire body behind the blow. The door barely budged.

“Morgan!” Lily yelled. He looked behind him, as two gunmen had appeared in their line of sight, one who had followed them through the tent and another who had made his way around. “I’ve only got so many rounds to fend off both of them!” She shot off a burst toward the nearest one, and he ducked for cover behind a tub of ice.

Morgan kicked the door vigorously, but it did no good.

“Morgan!” Lily repeated.

“Behind us, Senator,” Morgan said, stepping forward to protect her. The two men were moving closer, and soon they would be close enough to overwhelm any covering fire Lily could provide. She let out another burst of bullets, which made them stop. Then another man emerged from behind the tent.

A single submachine gun had no hope of holding off three armed men. They were cornered, and all was lost.

The door behind them opened and someone yelled, “Get inside!”

Morgan ushered McKay in, then Lily. The man who had admitted them, a security guard, closed and locked the door behind them. “Step away!” he yelled. Morgan moved out of the line of sight of the door panes, and motioned for McKay to do the same.

Morgan surveyed the room they were in—he’d never visited the statue before. It was a large foyer, square and two stories high, with a balcony enclosing a spacious central area. The old torch, with its intricate verdigris copper frame, was mounted right in the middle of the chamber, tall enough to be partly obscured and only wholly visible from the balcony.

“What the hell is happening?” asked the guard. He looked like he was pushing seventy, pudgy and balding, but there was something sturdy in him, too. He was not a guy who let himself be pushed around. Clarke, his badge read.

“Shooters,” said Morgan. “A lot of them.”

“I have a gun,” Clarke said, pulling out a Ruger revolver. “They’re not coming in here.”

Morgan had to admire this guy’s guts. “You can’t do much with that,” he said. “There are too many them, and they’re armed like marines. This door won’t hold for long.”

Right on cue, there was a bang on the door as the gunmen tried to kick it in.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Morgan said.

“Where is there to go?” asked Lily. “We’re trapped.”

“Up,” said Morgan.

B
uck Chapman saw the commotion through the blinds of his office windows as everyone clustered around a TV that was mounted on the wall. His heart sank. Clustering around the TV, he knew, was particularly bad. Certain kinds of bad news were learned of through more discreet channels, and later passed on to the news media. It took a disaster of a certain magnitude for TV news to scoop the CIA.

He ran outside and struggled to see through the crowd and hear past the cacophony of talking and crying. He made out the Statue of Liberty and heard the newscaster mention gunfire.

“What’s going on?” he shouted over the din.

“The governor’s gala is being held hostage by armed men,” said Gillespie, who had a more direct view of the TV, without looking away.

“Governor’s gala... Jesus, Weinberg was supposed to attend!” he said to her. “That can’t be coincidence, can it?”

Heads shifted and he got a clear view of the picture on the screen. Bodies in tuxedoes and gowns lay strewn on the ground at Liberty Island, and people were being herded into the open center by figures in black. Flashes of gunfire were rendered as faint pops in the helicopter video.

“Is there something we need to be doing?” she asked.

He searched his mind. Surely they needed to be doing something. Right?

But he came up empty. He could only watch the TV in horror and desperation.

A
lex Morgan sat at a café in a lobby across from the Hampton building, watching the comings and goings of the parking garage, pretending to read a book on the history of the Secret Service.

She’d been feeling restless at home, sick of reading and exercising and everything else. She took off on her motorcycle, driving up and down the highway for nearly an hour until she took the ramp into the city and made her way there. She’d driven past it many times in that week, and sat down for a stakeout twice before. It had never yielded anything, but she still stayed, trying to catch a glimpse of something, notice a pattern, identify a person.

If she were asked
why
she was doing this, she might not know. She had a vague fantasy that she would find out something interesting, something only a skilled spy could have caught, and her father would be impressed by her daring and resourcefulness. At the same time, after his scolding the other day, she wanted to defy him, to do anything that would make him mad. If she were confronted with these fantasies, she would deny them, embarrassed. But there they were nonetheless.

She continued to eye the street, not paying much attention—it was late at night and she didn’t really expect any movement—until she did actually see something. A white van drove to the gate of the parking garage. Two men got out and crouched down at the gate opening mechanism. Within less than twenty seconds, the gate had been raised.

Strange,
thought Alex. She tossed a couple of bills on the table, put the book back in her messenger bag, got up and walked off toward the Hampton building garage. She slinked in, squeezing past the closing gate like she had that first time, and ran down the ramp to the area of the parking garage where she had seen her father walk through the mysterious door.

She stopped at the corner, where she stood flat against the wall and peeked around the edge. The van had parked near the door, and two men were bending over at a panel on the wall, while two more stood near the vehicle. They had black masks concealing their faces, and were wearing dark colors.

Seconds later, the door opened. The two men went inside, while the other two opened the back doors to the van. The rear of the vehicle was turned away from Alex, but as they walked a few feet away from it Alex saw that they had taken out something the size of a carry-on bag and were hauling it between the two of them.

Alex took out her phone and called her father. By some miracle, she caught a signal, underground. The phone rang several times; no answer.

Come on, Dad, pick up!
She tried again, and failed in the same way.

She looked at the van. Something was happening. Something important, something bad, and she could not stop it. She considered rushing the men, but she had no weapons except for a small pocketknife.

She bit her lip. This battle was lost, but perhaps there was something that she
could
do.

Alex turned around and ran full tilt toward the exit.