The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller (20 page)

“Here's another surprise. He carried a paper file into the White House before he was offed. That file contained classified information about the most sensitive organization in the government. He was killed for it and for what he knew.”

“And how in the world does a cop from grungy little Menard, Texas, know this?”

“It's my unit, Bill. I'm not working in Menard anymore.”

“Get the hell over here.” He hung up.

“He's on the hook,” Flynn said.

“Now what do we do?”

“Bury him in bad news.”

“He's not going to like that.”

“Presidents spend their lives buried in bad news. It's what the job is about.”

They reached the sidewalk, and Diana hailed a cab.

At the White House, they were directed by the guard at the gate to scram. “Closed until tomorrow nine
A.M.
,” the officer said, his voice bored.

“We're here to see the president.”

“Oh? And you have an appointment?” Mirth in the voice now.

“We do,” Diana said.

His eyebrows went up and a crooked smile broke out on his face. He was a study in amused skepticism. “May I send your names in?” he asked with exaggerated politeness.

“Flynn Carroll and Diana Glass.”

He picked up his phone. Flynn noticed that two other officers were coming down the drive. They weren't hurrying. Their holsters were snapped shut. Kooks arrived claiming appointments with the president on a regular basis.

The officer hung up the phone. The smile was gone. He input a code into the gate's security system. As the cab rolled forward, two plainclothes Secret Service agents appeared in the portico. They stood, legs spread.

Flynn wondered if these two would recognize him. He wondered, but he didn't care.

“Sir,” one of them said, “we'll need the pistol.”

“Of course.” He took the Glock out of his side pocket and handed it over.

He could see by the agent's face that he had noticed that it had been fired recently. As his partner opened the door, four more agents met them in the front hall. This was an unplanned and unexpected meeting, meaning they were operating at a high security level.

They were led to the family elevator, and two of the hulking agents crammed themselves in with them.

Bill Greene was in the West Sitting Hall, lounging on a couch in front of the big arched window that had long ago held Tiffany glass. A sheer curtain was drawn across it, so no paparazzo could get a snap of the President of the United States in Jockey shorts and big, fluffy slippers smoking a cigar.

He gestured toward a silver humidor on the gleaming coffee table in front of him. “Cigar? They're H. Upmanns.”

Flynn started to take one, but Diana pulled his hand back. “Nope.”

Bill's eyes twinkled. He was married to a female powerhouse; he knew the signs.

The West Sitting Hall is a large space, and the Greenes hadn't managed to lay it out for intimate conversation. The result was that the president sat on a crushed velvet couch at one end of the room, and Diana and Flynn on its twin thirty feet away. Lorna's interests did not extend to interior decoration.

At that moment, as if cued by Flynn's passing thoughts, she came striding in, her heels clicking with the clipped precision of a hyperactive metronome. She hadn't yet said a word, but her snapping gait might as well have been a curse.

She stood in front of them, all five feet of her. She was wearing silk that flowed around her nakedness like a cloud. Flynn wondered if her girlfriend was waiting back in their lair, longing for her return.

“You better not bring that criminal friend of yours into the White House is all I can say, Flynn.”

“Excuse me?”

She sat down beside him, enveloping him in, of all things, crème de menthe breath. “That creep MacAdoo Terrell who knocked Cissy up when she was seventeen.”

“I did not know that.”

“'Course you did. You two are thick as thieves. You'd be a crook, too, if you had any guts.”

“I knew they had a relationship. I didn't know about any pregnancy.”

“A-damn-bortion. Could've cost us the White House.” She looked past him to Diana, obviously wondering who she was. She put a hand on Flynn's knee. “Why are you here, Errol, dear?”

“I let them in,” Bill called from his distant couch.

Flynn turned to Lorna. “I thought you guys were dead set against abortion.”

“That crap's for the zombies, Flynn, wake up. God's been dead for years.”

Flynn kept his thoughts about that to himself. He believed that there was good out there somewhere; he had to.

Lorna went over to the other couch and sat down beside Bill. The socializing, hard-edged as it was, was over. From her position of power and safety beside the President of the United States, she looked across at Flynn and Diana. “So, why are you here? You don't barge into the White House at this hour for fun.”

The president walked over to the fireplace. Standing in front of it with his elbow on the mantelpiece, he seemed so completely presidential that even God might have become convinced that he could do the job.

“We're a specialized unit that works in the area of terror suppression,” Diana said, “and we believe that you are under threat. The murder worries us. It's why we're here.”

“The kid killed himself. As I believe I've already said. So that fish don't swim.”

Flynn said, “He was beheaded by an Iranian agent because he'd discovered a secret that doesn't want to be revealed. I know what that secret is and you don't, but you need to.”

“Go on.”

“Have you ever heard of Aeon?”

“No.”

“There are aliens here.”

“There are. And I've criminalized illegal immigration.”

“Not that kind.”

There was a brief silence. Lorna choked out a scornful laugh.

“From another world, then?”

Neither Flynn nor Diana responded. He needed to come to this on his own.

“What are you two tripping on?” Lorna asked.

“This planet—or place; we're not sure exactly what it is—is in possession of powerful technology. They can control minds, among other things. And they do not like us.”

“The United States?”

“Mankind. They want us gone.”

Greene sunk into himself. Then his eyes bulged with belligerent anger. “A god-for-damned alien invasion, and it happens on my watch. Shit!”

Lorna's smile faded. A confused frown replaced it. “How long has this been going on?”

“More than one alien species has come here,” Diana said. “But right now Aeon is the only situation we have to deal with.”

“These are the things with big eyes? From the movies?”

“That was another species. Very mysterious. As far as we know, they left when Aeon came.”

“Except that their faces are on every kid's lunchbox in the country.”

“Communicating with them was a challenge we couldn't meet. In any case, what Aeon mostly fields are biological robots, complex mixtures of living tissue, electronics, and machinery.” She glanced toward Flynn. “He's an expert at destroying them.”

“We should catch one and learn how it works,” Lorna said.

“That hasn't been possible,” Flynn responded, remembering the disastrous early attempts at it.

“So where do we come in?” the president asked. “What do you want me to do?”

“They're in the process of concluding an alliance with Iran, and we assess the situation as being extremely dangerous. Once this alliance is in place, Iran will be the most powerful nation on the planet.”

Flynn then saw something that made every muscle in his body grow tense, as if some sort of physical assault were about to take place. Greene had pulled a large black briefcase made of soft leather out from behind the couch. The football should have been in the care of a military officer. And in the White House, where there was communications equipment both in the Situation Room and in the President's Emergency Operations Center beneath the East Wing, it shouldn't have been in use at all.

“Know what this is?” Greene asked.

“Yes.”

He opened the football and laid it on his lap. “I punch in a code and a flight of Minuteman missiles turns somebody into a nuclear cinder. Russia. China. Iran. You name it, they've all got codes.”

“There's no code for Aeon.”

“Then I need one.”

“Aeon is in outer space,” Lorna said.

“So? We have astronauts, don't we?” He opened the football.

“Bill—” Flynn heard the worry in Lorna's voice.

“Take a look at this thing, Flynn.”

“Bill, close it. Everything in there is classified.”

“Flynn's a big genius, he wants to see it.”

“Put it away!” Lorna was now shaking, but not with fear. She was furious. She'd have liked to tear his heart out; you could see it. She'd hated him for years. Despised him, this faithless husband who swung all sorts of ways, but never with her. At the same time, though, here she was in the White House, honored as First Lady. Flynn didn't envy her that conflict, eating her heart as certainly as cancer eats the gut or the brain.

Greene snapped the football closed. “You're talking to the most powerful man in the world about hostile alien entities, Flynn.” He put it back down beside the couch and advanced on Flynn. “Next time, you bring crap like this to a shrink, not to the White House. ‘Aeon.'” He shook his head. “Sweet Jesus.”

“Don't be a damn fool,” Lorna blurted.

“I'm going to need proof. Serious proof. An alien invasion!” He shook his head again in disgust and disbelief. “And how much money do you people spend? Who's paying you?”

“Sir, our budget is not large,” Diana said.

“It better not be.” He lifted his thumb toward the door. “
Vamanos!
I'm sleepy.”

Flynn and Diana left, not speaking, not in this captured place.

If the White House didn't already belong to Aeon, they sure as hell would have no trouble gaining control over it.

The last thing Flynn wanted to do was assassinate the poor dumb guy. But if the fate of nation and species was in the balance, he would not hesitate. At least the vice president, Harlon Durward, the former senator from Kentucky, was no fool. Mean as a snake and somewhere to the right of Hitler, but no fool.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE SENSE
of urgency that had settled in when Flynn saw Bill Greene with the football, then heard his nonsensical reaction to the news of Aeon, now rendered him silent as he and Diana returned to the Georgetown house. Diana also said nothing, certainly not in a taxicab. They'd been careful to cross the street and hail it well away from the White House.

But when he saw her house, its elegant façade glowing in the streetlights, a surge of exhaustion swept through him. It was a black wave, the storm returning in all its crushing rage, sucking him downward.

“Flynn?”

“Sorry!” Incredibly, even as they were getting out of the cab, he had fallen asleep. He'd slept a little on the carrier, and he'd even less on the plane, not after he'd woken up and found Morris in his face. All of it was imperiled sleep, where the body lies still but the mind remains on watch.

But the house wasn't safe, either, obviously.

“Shit…”

“Come on, you're passing out.”

The interior smelled like his lovely old home in Menard, the family homeplace for four generations—of beeswax coming off the furniture, of the indefinable perfume of a place where a woman lives, of the flowers that stood on the mahogany side table in the sitting room. As had his mother, Diana lived elegantly. Her taste was discreet. Nothing too flashy; no statements. He loved the way she kept this house: the beauty of the rooms, the sense of permanence and peace.

“I need to shake this.”

“In the past four days you've been tortured, gone through a storm at sea without so much as an inner tube, flown ten thousand miles, been shot at, and discovered not only that the end of the world is at hand, but that the President of the United States is even more of an idiot than you thought. So you're tired. Bone-tired. And you're not going to shake it.”

“I have to! We just got stiffed by the president. He wants proof. We've got to get it to him.”

She took his elbow and directed him toward the stairs.

“We can't stay here, it's too dangerous.”

“Flynn, it's dangerous everywhere, and here at least we have one of the most sophisticated security systems on the planet.”

“A toy.”

“You have to sleep. You have no choice. You can't afford not to. You're losing your edge.”

“We have to get over to the office, we have to pull the whole team in, and we have to do a massive search of every single bit of UFO lore and alien lore that has been recorded anywhere in the past year.”

“And?”

“We're looking to prepare for some pattern, some clue, that might tell us what the hell they're doing.”

“Flynn, you're asking us to sift through a gigantic dumpster for a single gold button that might not even look like a gold button. Mission impossible.”

“Then I have to kill Greene. I have to go back there tonight and kill him.”

“Kill the president in the White House? That's an ambitious plan, I'll say that for it. But what does it get us? Next stop, the vice president. Then after that, who? The president pro-tem of the Senate? Then on down the line how far, Flynn?”

“The veep's not a fool.”

“Flynn, tell you what. I'll get the work going if you get some sleep. I'll also provide the president the proof he needs.”

“How will you do that?”

“That's my business, but I have the resources we need.”

“What? Not a body. You know those damn things come back to life.” He thought of Morris. “They're machines, so they can be fixed.”