The Book of Truths (27 page)

Tradition mattered, even in apparently trivial ways.

Despite the turmoil raging and the lack of communication, Preston was his usual calm self because they didn’t fob off forty-five pounds of worldwide destruction on people who panicked
easily. He’d already had a Top Secret clearance from his work in the army. Then he had to get a Yankee White clearance in order to even be near the president, but that wasn’t that hard because it required an SSBI—Single Scope Background Investigation—same as his TS had.

But then had come the psych screenings. Don’t want a loon or potential loon carrying the football.

Don’t want someone who runs around the aisles of
Air Force One
screaming,
“We’re all going to die,”
when they encounter heavy turbulence. Or like that guy in
Aliens
who kept whining. Preston would have put a bullet in that fellow right from the start.

In essence, as the not very good joke went, they were looking for the human equivalent of yellow dog, a Lab that could sleep at the president’s feet with its tail in the fire and show no sign of concern.

Nope, nothing much bothered Truman Preston.

But the sight and sound of the First Family raging at each other made him a bit uncomfortable. The First Daughter, Debbie, had just stormed away from her parents, dragging a Secret Service agent by the tie into her bedroom, door slamming shut behind them. If he didn’t know better, he’d swear they were having loud, angry sex, with her parents still right next door accusing each other of all sorts of things—the stuff people really only said to each other in that last argument before divorce, when darkest feelings and truths were uttered that one could never come back from.

Except a lot of people in the House were confronting each other, just like the First Couple.

And people were running about. That was the most disturbing thing. No one ran in the White House. Not even children, although he’d heard that Kennedy’s kids had, but look how that
turned out for all of them. It only took a few weeks here before everyone took on the slow, purposeful stride of power the White House exuded and they became part of the conveyor belt.

Yet he’d just seen a junior press secretary being chased by a pair of Secret Service agents as she tried to wedge open a window and climb out. They’d grabbed her, kicking and screaming, back to the others on the first floor.

So people running in the White House was not something Preston had planned for today and he, more than anyone else in the building, thought of life as a plan. A slow, deliberate relay in which he carried the baton for a while and then passed it off at the end of his shift and then got it back. Routine. Normal.

One thing he was certain of: It wasn’t going to hell in a hand-basket on his watch.

He heard the president scream at the First Lady that she was a castrating bitch. A vase came flying out of the open door to their room and Preston ducked as it shattered on the wall near him.

That, too, was not normal. Preston had been around the president and his wife for four years and the harshest thing he’d ever heard the old man say was, “Gosh darn, double toothpicks!” Preston had no clue where it came from, but it meant POTUS was upset. But now they sounded like two sailors on shore leave. And that vase had been around since Dolley Madison (he remembered every detail of his in-briefing to the building, another trait necessary to his job), so there was something up with that. The First Lady had a fit if it was even turned in the wrong direction, and now she had just smashed it.

Reluctantly but realistically, Preston got up and moved farther away, out of the thrown porcelain line of fire. (There was a lot in that room.) He wasn’t sure where was safe right now in
the White House, but any place was better than where he had been. He felt a physical wrenching in his gut, a loneliness, as he moved away from the man whom he never left while carrying the football.

The football seemed heavier than usual and the room seemed to close in on him, but no one had prepared him for this. He took a seat farther down the hallway and fidgeted.

“Major Preston.”

A lesser man might have startled at the quiet voice just behind him, as if she’d snuck up on him. He recognized her and knew she always moved quietly. She had so little presence few ever noticed her, but she carried that big book, and because he carried the big briefcase, he’d felt a kinship from afar.

“Yes, ma’am?” There was also the fact that during that in-brief, he’d been told that she was the only person he was never, ever to interrupt when the president was with her.

“But what if—”
he’d started to ask, and he’d been cut off at the knees.

“NEVER!”

So who the hell was she?

“Sit back down,” the Keep said as she settled into the chair next to his, placing the leather-bound book flat on her lap. “But please, make no attempt to touch me. Or anyone else for that matter. You haven’t had physical contact since you came into the House for your tour of duty, have you?”

“No, ma’am. The Secret Service already asked.” People never got close to him, even in normal times, he suddenly realized. As if he were a leper. “Why?” he added.

“Should you have passed your security check, Major?” the Keep asked.

Preston blinked. “Of course. Well, I mean, I did. So yes.”

“And the psych evals?”

“Yes.”

“What about ethics?” the Keep asked.

Preston realized he was now holding the football to his chest.

The Keep gave a sad smile. “It gets heavy when you’re no longer carrying it for someone else, doesn’t it, Major?”

Preston realized his palms were a bit sweaty and he tried to remember the last time they’d been like that outside of the gym. He was one of those who only sweat after extreme exertion. He really didn’t understand the intent of her question. What was comforting, though, was that despite the chaos in the White House, she seemed calm enough.

“What’s going on?” Preston asked.

“I have a message from Smedley Butler.”

“Who is that?”

“And you’re a marine.” The Keep seemed disappointed. “You’ve heard of Chesty Puller, right?”

He nodded, a warm feeling washing over him at the name of the famous marine general.

“John Basilone?”

Preston’s chest swelled. “Won the Medal of Honor and still went back into combat. KIA at Iwo Jima. A hell of a marine.”

The Keep nodded. “But Smedley Butler won
two
Medals of Honor as a marine, yet you’ve never heard of him. Interesting, don’t you think?”

Another piece of something shattered and the First Lady was cussing up a storm. Something about a lack of testicles on the president’s part. He supposed it was a follow-up to his comment about castration.

The Keep tapped a finger on her book. “
War Is a Racket
.”

“Excuse me?” Preston said.

“Smedley served in the marine corps for thirty-four years, got out in 1930. Then he wrote a book with that title:
War Is a Racket
. Old Smedley said he could give Al Capone some hints on how to conduct business since the gangster only ran three districts in Chicago and Smedley was part of rackets on three continents in his long and storied career. But you’ve never read the book, have you?”

“No.”

“Never heard of him.”

“No.”

“If you want to know who someone is,” the Keep said, “one of the easiest ways is to study what they read. What they study. What their hobbies are. Background checks are one thing. One can’t be absolutely right about everyone, but for your job, we do have to be right. So the best way is to know what people read in their downtime. E-books help a lot with that. No longer have to do those tedious inventories of who checks out
Catcher in the Rye
from the library or what you used your credit card for at Barnes and Noble. What people do when no one is watching is when you get to know who they really are. But someone is always watching, Major. Someone is always watching those people who hold something like that”—she indicated the case once more—“in their hands. And when you least expect it. Makes sense, doesn’t it.”

The last was not a question.

“Is there a point to this?” Preston asked.

“Just passing time, out of the way, like you,” the Keep said. “If we stay still and quiet, maybe everyone will ignore us.”

And that’s when the case buzzed in his hands.

“And you have the only outside line left here in the White House,” the Keep said.

Preston ignored her. He reached inside his shirt, pulled out the key on his ID tags, and inserted it in the lock on the case. One of the locks. The other had a code that changed with every shift. He was the only one who knew the code. He dialed it in.

“Smedley was the
only
marine ever to win two Medals of Honor,” the Keep said as Preston worked, “and the Marine Brevet Medal. Of course they don’t give that one out anymore. Yet after he retired, he, like Eisenhower a generation later, warned of the military-industrial complex and complained he’d just been a gunman for all the businessmen who got the government to send marines into places like Honduras, the Philippines, China, Mexico… a list so long, even he had trouble remembering all the countries he’d had boots on the ground in.”

Preston flipped the latch on the briefcase and pulled out the satellite phone, turning away from the woman. He listened to the brief instructions, then turned the phone off, stuck it back in the case, removed the pistol that was always in the case, and latched the case shut.

“You’re sweating,” the Keep noted.

Preston stood, the briefcase very heavy in his one hand, the pistol in the other. “Why are you giving me this history lesson?”

The Keep stood. “We’ve found that confronting someone, especially a soldier like you, usually reinforces their initial attack impulse and rarely, if ever, causes them to change their mind. I’m trying to get you to change your mind about what you’re about to do by telling you about one of the greatest marines there ever was who changed his mind.”

“You’ve said your piece.” He gestured with the pistol. “Now I have to do my duty.”

“To who?” the Keep asked, but he was already moving.

And that was how Major Preston abandoned his post at the order of the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, meanwhile, was leaving nothing to chance. While he waited for Preston to heed his call, he was typing on a keyboard hooked in the secure military Internet. The only problem was his fingers were almost too wide to hit only one key at a time. Other than that, he was just rocking along as the letters appeared on the laptop screen.

>>PINNACLE URGENT

There was a pause, a couple of seconds too long in Riggs’s judgment, then a reply.

<

Riggs nodded. Finally, finally, finally, it was time. “Payback is a medevac,” he muttered as he began typing.

“Excuse me, sir?” the closest officer asked.

“Shut the fuck up,” Riggs muttered as he focused on his typing, never one of his stronger suits, even when his fingers were single-key-sized.

>>PINNACLE INITIATION BY ORDER RIGGS VCJCS

This time he slammed a fist onto the conference tabletop as it took at least five seconds for a response.

<

“No shit, dumb fuck,” Riggs muttered. He reached into his coat pocket where the flask used to reside and pulled out the acetate card that had been passed from general to general, starting with General Curtis LeMay in 1951. How it was passed, and whom it was passed to, was an intricate study of trust, paranoia,
and patriotism with a bit of socio-pathology thrown in that could provide enough fodder for hundreds of PhD dissertations.

Except not a single word of any of this was in any report.

The only document regarding Pinnacle that ever existed was this authorization card.

It had never been sent out with the laundry.

Riggs knew he needed to be very careful. He’d only get one shot at this. No second chances allowed. He extended his right pinkie, small enough that it could tap a single key. He held his breath and typed:

>>ELCANNIP

So, okay, they had never been very imaginative from 1951 and forward through Ortsac. But the cursor remained blinking for ten long seconds and the response Riggs yearned for came:

<