Code Word: Paternity, A Presidential Thriller (7 page)

“Well, that’s just great!” said Easterly.
“Two of our validators are presidents who are widely believed to be liars—Clinton about Monica and
Bush about WMD.”

“But,” replied Hendricks, “we also have
the Chinese government.”

“That’s what he meant!” said Anne
Battista. “The Chinese foreign minister, when he said we’d know soon who did
it.”

Listening to Battista, Martin realized that
her outburst would show Griffith that he was not
the only one outside of Paternity until today, but Griffith’s red cheeks and balled fists,
resting on the table, told their story.

“Does
anyone
here think the Chinese would be willing to back us
on
Paternity?” asked the vice
president, his right hand flicking
imperiously to include everyone.

Battista looked at Griffith coolly and said, “A lot would depend
on who Paternity points to.”
 

The president stepped in. “You’re right,
Anne, and when we know that, the Chinese connection will be an aspect to
pursue. But right now let me throw out a hypothetical: let’s say I decide that
we
must
have independent confirmation
of Paternity. I then authorize sharing of portions of our database.”

Martin turned to Hendricks, pausing for a
beat, and everyone knew he was reminding him who was president.

He continued: “So how does that work? Who
do we share with? How do we share credibly?”

“Well, I’d say for sure the IAEA,”
replied Battista, referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency. “And the
permanent members of the UN Security Council. We’re going to need their support
to do anything at the UN, and probably each member still has expertise in
analyzing fallout.”

“Who are the
strongest skeptics going to be?” asked Martin.

In unison, Griffith and Easterly
said, “the press!”

“OK, and how can
we handle their skepticism?”

“Well, we really should turn Sam Yu loose
on that angle,” Griffith
replied, “but here’s a top-of-the-head thought: How about if we bring Bob
Woodward inside
Paternity? He has a
record of
reporting from behind the scenes without either pulling punches or revealing
the most sensitive information.”

Well
I’ll be damned!
thought
Martin.
Bruce wants to be sure he comes
out of this on the side of the angels. That’s no surprise, but I expected he’d
be more subtle. Well, if Woodward starts revealing inside information, I’ll
know where to look first.

Easterly responded to the VP: “Hell,
others are so jealous of him that they’ll go out of their way to debunk
whatever he writes! And he’s a
Washington
Post
guy. The
Times
would hate us
if we did that. I bet Sam won’t go for it.”

“Just a
thought,” said Griffith.
“Like I said, Sam’s the expert.”

“You know,” said Battista, “somehow we’ve
got to get away from Colin Powell briefing nonexistent WMD to the UN. We’re
going to see that footage played over and over.”

“Mr. President,” said Griffith, “the turn this discussion has taken
shows the danger of trying too hard to be understood, to get everybody to agree
with us. As it has here, the issue shifts from the terrorists to the
credibility of the United
States. I’m all for lining up support, but
after we’ve considered the evidence here in this administration, we’re going to
have to do what we in Pennsylvania
call takin’ care of business. That’s our responsibility to Americans!”

“Mr. Vice President,” said Battista, “we
have a responsibility to the world as well as to Americans. That goes with
being the only superpower!”

Martin thought,
Yes, Bruce is going to be a problem! For many reasons I don’t want to
cut him out of this, but I need to find some way to insulate the process from
his aggressiveness.

The president closed his briefing book
and slid his pen into his shirt pocket, those actions as dismissive as closing
a door. “Bruce, when the time comes to take care of business, we will. And
we’ve taken care of a lot of it here. We’ve had a discussion that points to
some things we need to think through to make the most effective use of
Paternity. John, I need your good staff work, soon.”

Martin rose and left the room. As he
walked, he made a decision: he and Ella would go to Las Vegas, soon.

Chapter
12

Rick and Ella made love that night, not
passionately, but deeply, two people tenderly seeking to give and receive
solace, knowing their lives had been changed forever, in a yet unfathomable
way.

Rick had dropped quickly off to sleep,
but now he was awake. It felt really good to be above ground again, at Camp David. He rolled and saw Ella, motionless in her bed
a few feet away, heard her breathing slowly and deeply. Good—she wasn’t awake.
His mind was racing and he knew that sleep would not return.

The
buck stops on my desk. Okay. Presidents get the issues that are basically
insoluble. If they weren’t, somebody else would have solved them. Most
presidents muddle through, sustained by strong belief in
something
, be it a political philosophy or a religion or both, and avoid the
shame of a failed presidency because chance or fortune or a higher
power—whatever you choose to call it—breaks about even over the course of a
term. Bad decisions tend to be balanced by good. It’s a fifty-fifty world.

I’ve made tough calls, risky calls
before, like running against Glenna Rogers. When you take on your party’s
sitting president, failure isn’t an option if you want to
stay in
politics! I made that call and other tough
ones during the campaign, and now I’m president. This is different, but . . .
I can do it
.

At five a.m. he
quietly put on robe and slippers, stepping softly to the cabin’s porch, feeling
in a pocket for cigarettes and matches. As he moved, the Secret Service moved,
too, murmuring into their microphones.

The president lit up and inhaled deeply.
The cigarette’s glow was the only light source on the shadowed porch, although
the compound was lit. Birds were starting their morning chorus in the nearby
trees, and the air felt pleasant.

Rick’s mind returned to the cabinet
meeting. His gut said they couldn’t continue to govern from a bomb shelter.
Yes, it would be chaos if a nuke in Washington
got him, Bruce, the cabinet, and Congress. But the country couldn’t shelter in
a bunker and continue to exist as the United States of America. Americans
had to get back to their workplaces and resume buying and selling and borrowing
and lending.

If
the people have to get back to
their
cities their government should lead by
getting back to
its
city, Washington. Bruce and I
must stay apart so that one bomb can’t get us both, but beyond that, this
government has to go back to work in the capital. This morning I‘ll tell Bart
to make the arrangements. We’ll sleep tonight in the White House!

Paternity!
Sweet Jesus, what am I going to do with
that
information?
Aaron and Scott got the drift that I didn’t want them to rush through the
analysis, and that should delay the official determination another twenty-four,
maybe forty-eight hours. But it’s coming at me like a freight train, and it
can’t and shouldn’t be kept secret.

 
Suddenly it
hit him: Suppose North Korea had not
only made the bomb; suppose North
Korea had also made the attack?

***

Low lights came up. Kim sat in his chair,
alone in his theater.

 
He’d spent hours watching scenes of the
devastation and President Martin’s speech and news conference. He’d heard the
president say, “we will find out how they got the bomb they used” and that America would
deal with both those who carried out the attack and those who enabled it.

The devastation pleased him, and Martin’s
threat felt hollow.

As he had before taking the Arab’s money,
Kim assessed Martin’s options. If the Americans attempted invasion—unlikely
with the memory of Iraq
so fresh—his fine army would bleed them far worse than al-Qaeda had. One frozen
winter would be enough to send them crawling away, but it wouldn’t even take
that! If he simply threatened to use his missiles on Seoul
and Tokyo, South
Korea and Japan
would force them to withdraw.

If they blockaded or imposed sanctions,
he would get around them as Saddam ha
d done. This was
another way
his creative genius would enable his triumph. He would flood
the world with videos of his people’s suffering, and America would have to back down.

Since Kim attached no value to lives
other than his own, the issue for him was
him
.
And the only way the Americans could actually harm
him
was with a nuclear strike.

In his mind’s eye, Kim saw again the
destruction his small bomb had created. He imagined how Pyongyang,
his
city, filled with statues and monuments to him and his father,
would look after a much larger American nuke had done its work.

The Americans
would
find out the bomb was one of his. Kim felt an unfamiliar
emotion: fear.

 
But then he saw, as if reading a screenplay,
that he and his dear people would be protected from American reprisal by
American doubters. American blogs showed that large numbers of them would
always disbelieve their government. Kim thought for a minute of the film that
Michael Moore would make and smiled; it would be even better than
Fahrenheit 9/11
!

 
Martin would order a nuclear attack only if he
possessed undeniable proof of the bomb’s origin—and only then if he could also
stomach killing thousands of Kim’s people, enraging the Chinese and South
Koreans, and creating even more chaos among Americans. No. Everything in the
man’s life history shouted that he wouldn’t. Kim knew there was no such thing
as undeniable proof.

When the second bomb exploded, it would
bring the Americans to their knees. It would also strip them of their allies.
No nation would risk helping them for fear of drawing the Arabs’ rage on
themselves.

Kim decided to watch
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
—he had always liked Jack
Nicholson’s work.

***

“A penny for your thoughts,” said Ella
softly from right behind him. She molded herself to Rick’s back, reaching her
arms around his waist and leaning her forehead into the nape of his neck,
hugging him gently. With a guilty start he flicked away the cigarette then
squeezed both her hands in his; he slowly unwrapped her arms and turned to face
her.

 
“I
was just thinking about getting us and the country back to work,” he said. “The
longer we hunker down, the worse it gets. Locking down our cities makes things
go to hell for the economy much faster than anything we might gain against the
bombers by doing it. What do you think it will take to get people back to their
lives?”

“Setting an example and leveling with
them,” she said, and then: “Rick, what are the odds of more bombs?”

“I don’t know, but if I ask myself, how
many bombs these people—whoever they are—could have, logic says not many.
Whether they bought them, stole them, or built them, there are so many
constraints . . . limited bomb-making capacity, limited cash, and, I’ve got to
believe, few sources, few nations that would be willing, or are so lax, that
they would part with, or lose control of, more than a handful of nukes.”

“So, worst case,
we’re looking at . . .”

“I don’t know.
Maybe two or three more bombs.”

“Two or three
more cities is what that means.”

“Yeah.”

“Can the country
take that?”

“Depends a lot on which cities. If they
were New York, Washington, and LA . . .”

“So, we don’t
try to defend everywhere. We defend the most critical cities.”

“Try selling
that to Congress and the press and the bloggers!”

Ella looked at him sharply. “Well, Rick,
you may have to do just exactly that! Remember what you said about running an
open, straight-talking administration?”

“Yeah. But I had in mind explaining the
sacrifices necessary to make Social Security solvent, not trying to sell the
idea that, depending on where you live, you may be expendable.”

“Well, remember how England stood
up under the blitz. They didn’t try to defend every city as if it were London. Churchill sold
that. Get the speech writers working on it!”

 
“Sir, it’s six o’clock.”

Rick and Ella knew that voice. It
belonged to the president’s valet, and with it their day began.

Chapter
13

Creech Air Force
Base, near Las Vegas

Steve Nguyen w
as
far gone toward
death by radiation by the time Rick and Ella arrived at
his stretcher. He had experienced several bouts of spontaneous bleeding,
evidence of which was on his clothing, ears, nose, and the corners of his
mouth. From somewhere in the morphine-induced haze that guarded him from most
of the pain of his disintegrating body, Nguyen sensed a presence. He forced
open his encrusted eyelids.

Rick was nearly overwhelmed by the
smells: feces, infection, urine, vomit. As Rick and Ella paused beside Nguyen,
he recognized them. “Mr. President!” Looking toward the hoarse, garbled,
gurgling voice, they saw a man with red blotches and oozing patches on his skin
and ulcerated, infected lip sores. He had pulled himself up on one elbow.

“They killed my family, my wife, my two
little girls . . .” A rasping breath. “They killed me, too.” Nguyen suddenly
reached across his body and upwards, the motion tearing an IV needle out of his
forearm, and grabbed the president’s leg. As others reached for the man, Rick
shook his head. He felt the strength in Nguyen’s grip. “Find them. Punish them
for what they did here. Promise me. Promise me!”

The president squatted beside the
stretcher, his throat constricted, eyes prickling
. Why? Why? Nothing this country has done, no American policy, however
misguided, justifies killing these people. I do not grant you the right to kill
us! I will
not
accept this!

For the first time since the bombing—in
fact, the first in a very long time—Rick Martin felt emotion that he did not
shunt to that separate place he’d constructed early in his life, when he
resolved never to expose his feelings, never to risk allowing another to savage
his unprotected emotional flesh.

“What’s your
name?” said the president, biting his lip.

“Steve . . .
Nguyen.”

“What are the
names of your family?”

“Cindy my wife .
. . Rachel who was three and . . . Carol . . . five.”

“I promise you,
Steve Nguyen. I promise!”

Nguyen winced, stiffened, and pulled
himself upward, his muscles straining. Bleeding lips working, he shouted,
“Don’t let us down, Mr. President!” He let go of Rick’s leg and slumped back
down on the stretcher, hemorrhaging again in scarlet streams, his
radiation-ravaged blood now without the platelets needed to clot.

Rick knelt, frozen, gazing at the dying
man and smelling his suppurating sores.

Don’t
let us down . . . he holds me responsible for the outcome of all this. For
bringing some sort of justice and closure and, yes, benefit out of this horror.
He believes that’s the president’s job,
my
job. Well, I do,
too, Steve!

Rick squeezed the dying man’s hand,
looked into Ella’s eyes, and rose. They continued their journey through the
dreadful landscape. When the first troops had arrived, Steve Nguyen and other
survivors inhabited a scene like those recorded by American Civil War
photographer Matthew Brady: the ground was carpeted with the wounded and dead.
Survivors took precedence; the dead were left where they had dropped. Soldiers
walked among them, giving water, rigging what shelter they could, injecting
morphine from their battle dressing packs. These were paratroopers; they
traveled light and slept rough and had few tents to offer. Very few survivors
had shelter from the merciless sun.

By the day of the president’s unannounced
arrival, the soldiers and a steady stream of volunteers had filled every
building and hangar at Creech with the injured. Their numbers, while
overwhelming to those caring for them, were far, far fewer than the numbers of
survivors remaining without shelter around the no-go perimeter. Even the
fortunate ones at Creech were in grim circumstances. Most lay or sat on the
tile or concrete floors in the squalor of festering wounds, overflowing waste,
and head-to-toe crowding.

As word of the Martins’ presence rippled
through the base, a crowd gathered. Sam Yu, face like stone, moved alongside
Rick as he paused at another stretcher. “Mr. President, you should speak to the
survivors and the soldiers. I’ll pull something together.” Rick nodded and
moved toward the next victim, his concentration broken only for a moment.

About forty-five minutes later, Rick and
Ella climbed up onto the bed of a truck. Rick held a bullhorn and looked out
over hundreds of people, the number growing as those able to walk streamed from
all directions.

Wilson
, leading the presidential protective
detail, climbed up and took position about five steps—or one step and a dive—to
the president’s left. He was angry and jumpy; his eyes scanned ceaselessly for
an expression or a movement revealing a shooter.

He felt like a plastic ball in a bingo
caller’s hopper.
One of these days, count
on it, somebody’s going to shoot at a president again.
When that happens,
the agent whose ball had dropped from the hopper was either going to take the
bullet or spend the rest of his life questioning his reaction in the instant
that contained his entire reason for being. Wilson’s stomach churned.

As he stood a few feet away, danger never
entered the president’s mind.
What should
I tell them? What
can
I tell them?
To give himself a few more moments to consider Sam’s hastily written words, he
said, “Let’s begin with a silent prayer for those who’ve been killed and those
who are struggling to survive.”

The president broke the silence: “The
first thought I think we all have is what a monstrous tragedy this is. All the
lives destroyed. All of us—federal, state, and local governments—will help. And
I’m sure you join me now in thanking all the medics and soldiers and volunteers
for their unceasing work to comfort and heal.”

During the applause that followed, Martin
looked around
, seeing
many people were without
shelter. “We will improve conditions here as rapidly as humanly possible! I
especially want you to know that hundreds of thousands of your fellow Americans
are volunteering themselves, their tents and campers and vans, their homes, all
of their individual talents, to help you.

 
“Ella and I are here because we want to be
with you, to see and hear and try to understand and absorb the enormity of what
you’ve suffered. What we have experienced today will be with us always and will
drive us as we tackle all that’s required to protect America, to rebuild, to bring the
murderers to justice, and to reduce the dangers to mankind from nuclear
weapons. The memory of your courage, your kindness, your skill, and above all
your fierce urgency will drive us and sustain us when we tire.

 
“Right now we want to be with as many of you
as possible in the few minutes before we must return to Washington.”

Rick hopped down, took Ella’s hand, and
waded into the crowd. Wilson and other agents formed a scrum in a doomed
attempt to keep space between the presidential couple and the surging crowd.

The Martins were engulfed in humanity.
Voices from all directions. People reaching out to shake Rick’s hand, to touch
his shoulder, some sobbing, others grimly silent.
Every one of them needs something from me
, Rick thought,
but I have nothing left.

“Mr. President!”

“Thank you for
coming, Mr. President!”

“Mr. President,
why . . . why?”

Suddenly he found himself pressed close
to a thin woman whose face was framed by tangled shoulder-length grey hair.
“President Martin!” she said in a voice that he heard with singular clarity
amidst the hubbub. “My daughter was killed in Iraq. My husband and our
grandchildren were killed here. Don’t let this be an excuse for more killing!
Don’t give in to the ones who tell you to bomb, or invade. War isn’t the answer
to this. Find another way.
There’s got to
be another way!”

The woman’s eyes lanced Rick, impaling
him with their intensity. “Yes,” he said, “yes, I’ll find another way!” Wilson shouldered between
them, alarmed by the woman’s passion and her position, pushing up against his
president. She disappeared from Rick’s view but not from his mind.