The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller (7 page)

“OK.” Now he had something useful. “The Iranians possess a weapon from Aeon and they're interested in our unit. And in the White House.” Dots were connecting. He broke off the chase. This was a sideshow, nothing more. Aeon had created this garish mystery as a distraction. “I'm heading for the White House,” he said.

“You're breaking off the pursuit?”

“Doesn't matter.”

“I don't get it, but OK. Be careful.”

“If I can.”

 

CHAPTER SIX

THE WHITE
House is divided into three sections: the West Wing, the East Wing, and the familiar old mansion that stands between them, the Residence. It is the Residence that tourists enter, passing through elegant rooms on the ground floor while the presidential family's life unfolds upstairs. It's not a home, really, the White House, but more an intimate version of Versailles, where a relentlessly public person carries out a rigidly constrained existence under ceaselessly watching eyes.

The domestic staff and the Secret Service personnel assigned to it know essentially everything that happens in it, including the private areas. Even so, the tradition of discretion is rarely broken. For example, most presidents have entertained a continual succession of women—interns, secretaries, social acquaintances—who have brought momentary comfort to what is, invariably, a fraught existence. The presidency of the United States is not quite powerful enough to succeed, but too important to fail. They enter young and confident and leave it old and useful. When they leave, they all take a secret with them: All that power is an illusion. The presidency is about compromise, frustration, and broken promises. It is also about fear, constant and ever-increasing, escalated each morning by the first terror trip of the day: the intelligence briefing.

Flynn was not naive. He'd seen presidents come and go. Bill Clinton, the amateur with a taste for bimbos; George W. Bush, with his strange and very private vulnerabilities and needs; Barack Obama, who like Ronald Reagan, had a wife too domineering to allow him to get into female trouble.

And now Bill Greene. Back in Texas, Lorna had hired Manny the Torch to burn down the Governor's Mansion after she'd found him in bed with his secretary of state, Will Shifley. It was whispered that rent boys slipped into press conferences and stayed the night.

How in the world had he ended up as a governor, and now in the White House? What can the American people have been thinking, to believe for even a moment that he could run the country, he who could not even begin to run his own life? But the American people were ever ready to be led, and the money behind him—money that knew his secrets—had led them very well.

Flynn knew all of these things and more, and reflected on them as he drew up to the private entrance. The uniforms let him through, but not without glares of pure steel. He was an invader. He didn't belong here, not in this most exclusive few acres in the world, the White House, where slept the most important human being on the planet and her husband, the president.

The elevators in the White House are small and not new, and they don't give the impression that they'll necessarily get you where you're going. More than that, as far as Flynn was concerned, they were liable to be turned off by vindictive Secret Service agents. He could easily be left in one all night, so he took the back stairs to the second floor. He was met there by an agent and a butler.

“I need to see them,” he said.

The agent looked at the butler. Then they both turned their eyes to Flynn. “The doors are closed,” the butler said. “We can't enter unless called, not at night.”

“You two do your thing,” he said. “I have to have eyes on them, all three of them. I'm going to expect free use of the building for the rest of the night. I don't want to be followed, watched, spoken to, or disturbed in any way whatsoever. Is that clear?”

The agent's face was basalt. He looked like he belonged on Easter Island. The butler said, “Of course, sir, that's our understanding.”

In recent years, the president and First Lady had slept together in the master bedroom. That was not the case now. Lorna had the master. Bill was in the living room, which had been converted into a bedroom with a narrow single bed and a bookcase containing the thrillers that he loved. There was a big-screen TV and a PlayStation. He'd spend hours plugging away at tactical military games, then settle into a thriller of the kind he could count on: not too much gore, not too many complications, and the outcome never in doubt. Lorna was a student of history. She spent her time with Machiavelli and Churchill, studying power and past conflict to find present insight.

Flynn crossed the center hall in a few steps, then silently indicated to the Secret Service agent outside that he was going in the president's door.

The agent jumped up from his chair and blocked it.

“Don't do this. Let's just cooperate for a few minutes. It's not hard.”

“You can't enter that room.”

“And if we find him dead in there in the morning, what then?”

“We can protect our people.”

Flynn said nothing. He didn't need to. The agent stepped aside.

Inside, the insulated windows meant that the only sound was the air-conditioning, a faint hiss. The room was larger than one would expect, with a high ceiling and walls painted blue. There was a desk, spotless, and six TVs built into a large wall unit. The president was a serious sports fan. Officially, he was a golfer. He wanted to appear presidential at all times, and golf was a powerful tradition. But in the case of Bill Greene his handicap was, well, a handicap.

A second sound joined that of the air conditioner: the president's steady breathing. He lay on his side, so buried in blankets that only his face was visible.

Flynn approached the bed. He looked down at Bill, now a grizzled man of fifty-five. He'd been elected, basically, on the strength of two factors: the glasses he'd started wearing, which made him look presidential, and the fact that he had the best grin. Looking back across history, most presidents since FDR had been elected because they had better grins. Roosevelt's jaunty cigarette-holder smile was hard to beat. Truman had grinned like an undertaker, but his opponent, Thomas Dewey, had the terrifying rictus of a corpse.

Dubya had grinned like a Weimeraner having a gas attack, but when Gore smiled, you thought “card shark.” Kennedy had outshone Nixon as heaven outshines the Black Hole of Calcutta. Even so, Nixon's grimace, deadly as it was, had made Hubert Humphrey look like an even shiftier used car salesman. Obama's smile was devastating, a commercial for teeth. McCain smiled like a shark, Romney like a priest. Thus Obama's two terms. Ronald Reagan, same deal.

Right now, Greene's postcard smile was locked away behind the frank truth of his dry, sunken face. He snored like a rhino. But he was very definitely alive and the room was otherwise empty, so Flynn left him and did the harder part, which was to enter the main bedroom and make sure that Lorna was still undead.

In college, she'd been a Delta Gamma Epsilon. Their house had been accessible after hours, but you had to be damn careful of the housemother, a perpetually infuriated Junior Leaguer who was far from junior, and who'd years back renounced her vows and laicized from the Sisters of the Holy Sepulcher. Laicized maybe, but Ietta Swiney had remained a Sepulcher at heart. Still, unlike their housemother, though, some of the girls welcomed company in their rooms. Others didn't. Lorna was one of the others. Worse, she slept so lightly that she always seemed to some degree awake. She'd apparently been on the prowl for a rich boy she could control, and had hit on Bill when she'd seen the difficulty he had outthinking Bevo, the university football team's mascot, who was known to be unusually dim even for a steer. Bill's first success in politics was to get elected Bevo Wrangler by the honorary organization that maintained the creature. But Bevo had wrangled him. Seeing this, Lorna had decided that she could not only push Bill into politics, but also control him. And he had the finances to make that work.

Flynn tried the door between the rooms. It was locked from Lorna's side. She sure as hell wasn't interested in any midnight calls from Bill, as if that would ever happen. They probably linked up only rarely, every few years perhaps, when they both happened to be full of booze and memories at the same time.

Flynn examined the lock. It was an ordinary pin/tumbler mechanism, all brass. He took out his pick kit and dipped a snake rake into the slit. He bounced the pins, but not by simply putting pressure on the rake and hoping for the best. He had a practiced touch, and the pins were soon all on the shear line.

As he drew the door open, he heard the beginnings of a slight creak. He froze, listening for stirring from either room. Bill continued to rumble, but there came from Lorna's room the sounds of two people, and neither of them was asleep. There were faint, pleasured sighs, all female.

Like Eleanor Roosevelt in her time, Lorna Greene kept girls. Flynn didn't judge one way or the other, but he did open the door far enough to get a look at her, so that he could do the visual check he felt was necessary.

For a dizzying moment, he thought Cissy was in bed with her, but then he saw that the fan of blond hair belonged to Ginny Bowers, Lorna's young secretary.

He drew the door closed, relocked it with the rake, then slipped out into the softly lit corridor, closing the president's door behind him.

His Secret Service buddy was right there, right in his face. “Seven minutes,” he said. “I was about to hit the alarm.”

“I didn't realize that you were planning to resign.”

“I'm not.”

“If you'd tripped that alarm, you would have.”

He glared at Flynn. Flynn didn't glare back. He just looked at the guy and waited until he'd looked away and dropped his shoulders.

“I'm gonna be in the Closet Hall for most of the night. I'll be patrolling at random. You're not to address me again, and sure as hell not to interfere, not if you want to keep working here and avoid criminal charges.”

The man's lips turned up with contempt. “Criminal charges?”

“This is a national security matter. It's way above your clearance level. If you impede me or fail to obey my orders, you're going to be looking not only at getting your ass torched, you'll be facing a treason charge.”

The smile went away. So did the agent.

Flynn crossed into the Closet Hall and tried Cissy's bedroom door. Also locked, which was good. Because this door opened into a common area, it had a better lock on it, electronic. Using his Slagel pick, he was through it in under a minute. The room was lit by two night-lights, one near the bed and another glowing from the bathroom.

Cissy's canopied bed from their Texas ranch stood against the wall opposite the windows. In fact, now that he looked around, he saw that the room was an exact duplicate of the one from the ranch, right down to the Kit-Cat clock on the wall with its swinging tail and phosphorescent cat eyes.

She lay very still, on her back. Her breathing was shallow. She wasn't asleep and she was armed. The weapon was under the covers, in her right hand.

“Cissy, release the gun.”

“Flynn!”

“Hey there.” He stepped over to the bed.

A smile lit her face. She sat up and patted the covers. He dropped down into the grace of her perfume. When his old buddy Mac had romanced her, she'd been underage. She wasn't underage now.

“How's Di?” she asked.

“Good.”

“Oh, God, Flynn, what happened?”

“We're working on it.”

“Flynn, I need to know or I'm going to go insane here.”

“There's a lot of legal issues.”

“I signed the form!”

“That's a confidentiality agreement, not a clearance document. You've never been cleared.”

“Flynn, we're going to be killed, aren't we? Or worse—like Abby.”

The words hung between them. She knew that Flynn's wife Abby had disappeared, and that it had had to do with the aliens, but very little more. She did not know of his relentless search for her, or the fact that he'd originally been recruited into the detail by Diana because of his tireless determination to find her.

“Abby was kidnapped,” he said evenly.

“By them!”

“Who?”

“Come
on,
I'm not stupid! The aliens, and now they're here, they're in the White House and they killed Al Doxy.” She shuddered, her voice dropping to a whisper. “Beheaded him.”

“We don't know who was responsible. Not exactly.”

She threw herself on Flynn. A bitter rack of sobs engulfed her. He held her shaking body. Soon he felt himself stirring. He wished it down. But wishes don't always come true, and this one definitely did not. His arousal made her feel more in control, and she leaned against his chest. The smell of her hair—fresh, sweet straw—filled his nostrils.

“Flynn, I don't want to die.”

“I'm here to protect you, and I'm going to do that.”

She leaned away from his chest so that she could look up at him. “For how long? One night? Two?”

“As long as it takes.”

Her eyes were darting indicators of panic.

“Are they in here now? Right now?”

He wanted to be truthful, but if he told her the truth, which was that he didn't know, she was only going to get into a worse state.

“Why not go back to Austin? It's a city, so it's fairly safe. Stay in a big condo, lower floor. There's no public reason for you to remain here. Or your mother, for that matter.”

“Mom's President of the United States. She can't take off and leave the alky in charge.”

“Is your dad hitting the bottle again?” Bill was known to binge.

“He's been quoting Ecclesiastes and smoking cigars.”

“Not good.” That was his first phase, when he had about half a pint of bourbon in him. If he kept going, in a couple more days he'd be so drunk he couldn't move, collapsed on a floor somewhere and wallowing in his vomit. Years ago, when that had happened in the old Faust Hotel in Menard, Flynn had been the one to clean him off with a garden hose, pour him into the bed of a pickup, and drive him back to the Governor's Mansion. (Lorna's revenge fire had taken place later.)