White: A Novel (33 page)

The fact that they were talking aloud in Venable’s presence was lost on no one.

“Elizabeth, are you still here?” the president suddenly said. He stood up from the organ and walked over to them as if he’d just awoken from a pleasant nap.

“This is symptomatic,” Hernandez said. He looked at Venable as if he were just another interesting case on morning rounds. “The mind can become lucid for minutes at a time, before lapsing back into dementia.”

“Doctor Hernandez,” the president said, surprised. “What brings you here?”

“Give him the injection,” Beechum said.

“Injection?” Venable asked. Then his eyes glazed over again and his shoulders slumped. He stood there and disappeared back into his terribly confused mind.

**

SIRAD WOKE UP
on a tabletop, covered with a topcoat she had found behind a copier. Hammer Time snored obnoxiously on the floor beside her. Ravi had taken the couch.

“How could you sleep through that?” I Can’t Dunk asked, presumably referring to the stuttering wave theorist.

“You smell him?” she asked, pushing the coat off her and scrunching up her nose. “It’s like week-old garbage.”

“It’s his breath,” I Can’t Dunk said. Sirad lowered herself off the table and walked over to him. He was playing Pac-Man on a PDA.

“Ugh.” Sirad shivered. “How can you work with that?”

“No choice. He’s brilliant. We need him.”

Sirad shook her head, expressing her dismay, clearing the cobwebs, and remembering what lay ahead all in one jagged motion.

“I have to go back into the city and talk to Mitchell,” she said. “Are you clear on what has to be done while I’m gone?”

The clock on the wall told her that she’d wasted entirely too much time.

“I’ve already started,” I Can’t Dunk said. “Just waiting for Ravi before I get too far ahead.”

Good,
Sirad thought. Steganographic alchemy would be the least of her concerns at this point. Ravi and his posse of quivering cerebrums knew just enough to take care of the detective work. Only she had all the information necessary, now, to put the whole thing together.

Borders Atlantic is full of secrets, and they’re all mine,
she remembered Mitchell telling her. The ruthless, arrogant CEO had spun her in circles, manipulating her role as a CIA nonofficial cover officer to an advantage she poorly understood all these months later.

Well, who has the secrets now?
Sirad asked herself. She gathered her briefcase and hard-copy printouts of the digital signatures Ravi had shown her.

You may have the strongbox, Mitchell,
she thought,
but I’ve got the keys.

Now all Sirad had to do was decide which way to twist the tumblers.

**

JEREMY SAT AT
a picnic table in the moonlight with the colonel on one side and an albino with a bandage over his eye on the other. Heidi stood behind him, tending his injured ear.

“I told you I’m not the farmer’s daughter,” she said, ignoring her father’s disapproving scowl.

“We don’t have time for this, Heidi,” the colonel said.

“I never would have gotten you down there if I’d know they were gonna hurt you,” she apologized to Jeremy. “The colonel said he wanted to ask you a few questions is all. I just thought it would be better if I took you down there instead of his men.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jeremy said. He winced as she used an eyedropper to administer some hydrogen peroxide.

“That’s enough, Heidi,” the colonel said impatiently. “You’ve got plenty to do seeing to tomorrow’s classes. We’ve got two dozen other students, remember?”

“Yeah, but they’re not nearly as cute as this one,” she said, gathering up her first aid supplies. “That ear is gonna be a problem if you don’t give it time to heal.”

The colonel abided the way she ran her fingers through Jeremy’s hair, then waited until she had gone.

“Are you sure you understand what we might ask of you?” Ellis asked. The interrogation had already satisfied most of his concerns about Jeremy’s provenance, but the Phineas Priesthood was a small group that found its bedrock in the Christian Identity church. Like any movement, it held its share of secrets and pacts; offering them up to strangers always carried risk.

“I’m sure,” Jeremy said. Heidi had packed his ear with cotton. That and the fizz of hydrogen peroxide bubbles left a bright ringing in his head.

“Death is all you need to understand,” the colonel told him, just a little too melodramatically. He stared straight into Jeremy’s eyes as if his Montagnard sorcerer had taught him a thing or two after all.

“Mine or theirs?” Jeremy smiled. It wasn’t humor so much as conviction.

“Both. I think you know that.”

“I do.”

“That’s why you came, isn’t it?”

Jeremy shook his head. It wasn’t really a lie.

“How did you know?” the albino asked. “How did you know you’d find us here?”

They were the first words he had spoken since the interrogation downstairs in the bunker.

“I didn’t,” Jeremy responded. “Not for sure; not until you took me down to the bunker.”

Jeremy turned to his right and stared at Caleb. Ellis’s son wore shuffleboard goggles—those giant sunglasses old people wear in Florida—and a wide-brimmed Panama hat. His skin looked lambskin pale, almost transparent.

“Caleb oversees Cell Six, our operations unit.”

Ellis hadn’t formally introduced his son, but Jeremy knew him well. Less than a week earlier he’d watched this man disappear into an Indonesian jungle.

“If we decide to accept you, you’ll answer to me,” Caleb said. His words sounded like a primer for some response.

“I answer to the one true and righteous God,” Jeremy said. “I’ll help you if you want, but you got to know where I stand.”

Ellis nodded as if the answer impressed him. “Do you remember seeing this?” he asked.

Jeremy picked up a yellowed piece of newspaper someone had clipped from the
Washington Post.

WHY IS THIS MAN IN THE WHITE HOUSE?
it read. Someone had highlighted a quotation Jeremy well remembered—a statement about then president George W. Bush.
Why is this man in the White House? The majority of America did not vote for him. He’s in the White House because God put him there for a time such as this.

The name beneath it was General William “Jerry” Boykin, U.S. Army Special Forces.

“Are you saying Boykin is a Phineas priest?” Jeremy asked. He tried to sound more optimistic than incredulous.

“I wish,” Ellis responded. “But no. My only point is that there are strong, well-minded patriots at all levels of government. You don’t have to tattoo the back of your eyelid to support our cause.”

The colonel took the clipping back and glanced over it admiringly.

“You’ve read the scripture,” Caleb said. “You know what has to be done.”

Jeremy nodded once. “I know the voice of the stranger; the gutter god. Muhammad of Islam. I know he has to be stopped.”

“This country’s leaders have left us in ruin,” Caleb continued. “Homosexuals marrying. One race lying down with another. Mothers murdering their own unborn babies. Priests sodomizing the most innocent among their flocks. . . .” His voice trailed off into disgust so foul he could not lend it words.

“And two men against the world trying to stop it?”

A new voice rose behind them. It was a female voice, one Jeremy was not used to hearing in a situation like this. The hair on the back of his neck stood straight on end.

“I was just about to brief a new priest on how we might use him in our mission,” Ellis said.

“Good,” the woman responded, throwing a leg over the picnic table bench. She sat directly across from the man she had lain beside in the Jayawijaya Highlands. “Because according to the news, we seem to be running out of soldiers faster than we’re running out of time.”

“This is Sarah,” Ellis said.

Jeremy saw no recognition in her eyes and tried to show none himself.

“Didn’t expect a woman,” he said.

“Neither do they,” GI Jane answered. “Neither do they.”

“CLEAR!” THE ECHO
team leader heard one of his men call out from the back room. Behind them lay five dead terrorists amid a path of shattered glass, splintered wood, and empty shell casings.

“All clear,” Damon repeated into his microphone. He walked from one room to another, visually checking to make sure none of the casualties wore American flags on their shoulders.

“Copy, Echo One,” Mason responded through the dry chatter of the encrypted Motorola radio. “What’s your down count?”

“Five bad guys dead, three captured,” Damon responded. Smoke from the flashbang diversion grenades, “slap charge” door breaches, and submachine-gun fire burned in his lungs. “All HRT personnel accounted for. No injuries.”

“What do we got?” Chuck Price, the Hotel team leader asked. He found Damon in a small office at the back of the building. A lone computer sat atop a cheap folding table.

“We got what we came for, I guess,” was all he said.

Damon held a finger aside his nose and blew a gritty black string onto the floor. The Ensign-Bickford grenades provided excellent distraction, but the residue felt like beach sand between his teeth.

“All this for a fucking hard drive?” The Hotel leader shrugged. “Whatever happened to the days of search warrants?”

MITCHELL HAD JUST
helicoptered in from his Longpath estate when Sirad found him in the War Room.

“May I come in?” she asked, knocking on the open double doors. It was late, but who slept anymore?

“Please,” Mitchell answered. He stood between the red-oak conference table and his display cases. “I was just admiring my newest acquisitions.”

He pointed toward the dueling pistols, mounted on velvet with their muzzles addressing each other, almost the way Alexander Hamilton had last seen them two hundred years earlier.

“So, what did you decide?” she asked, crossing to the windows. The lights of New York sparkled in the darkness.

“Decide about what?” he asked.

“About the Aaron Burr lucky shot controversy. I understood that you wanted to obtain these pistols so you could test the trigger yourself.”

“Ah, yes. The triggers!” He looked relieved, almost playful. Sirad hadn’t seen this mood before.

Mitchell opened a broad glass door and removed the pistol on the right.

“This is the one.” He held it at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor and rested his left fist on his hip. “Hamilton lost his son to a .54 caliber ball from it in 1801, then lost his own life to a poor grasp of its idiosyncrasies three years later. Tricky thing, flintlocks.”

Sirad watched as her boss adjusted his dueling stance and squared his shoulders perpendicular to where she stood.

“The controversy goes like this: in preparing his son for a duel of family honor in 1801, Hamilton opined that a gentleman always fired the first shot wide. If that failed to calm ruffled feathers, well, then the next volley would sound for keeps.”

Mitchell stared at Sirad and pointed the pistol at her feet.

“You can imagine the pit in the young man’s stomach as he stood across the river in New Jersey that fateful morning trying to decide whether he should follow his father’s etiquette or do what instinct told him. He was a decent shot, by most accounts. He could have made the first ball count.”

Sirad tried to look bored. She had come with her own information about presidential guile and predation.

“A light fog had rolled out over the Hudson as the seconds prepared the weapons. Philip must have felt the beads of perspiration rolling down the sides of his chest, sticking to his ruffled shirt and waistcoat.”

Mitchell pulled back the hammer, filling the room with a two-stage, sharp metallic clank.

He loves this,
Sirad thought to herself.
He loves the power of holding other lives in his hands.
This was the same expression he had worn that night six months earlier when the seventeenth-floor thugs had tied her down on a table and poured seltzer water down her throat. She remembered him standing over her as they asked her questions she couldn’t answer, transfixed with her suffering and his authority to control it.

“They took their places, then ‘Present!’ his own second called out—Philip had won the toss. Then, by all accounts, both men raised and fired. Philip pointed wide at his father’s urging; his opponent took dead aim, either unaware of noblesse oblige or all too aware of his desire to survive. Philip took a ball in the gut, severing his spine. It took a day and a half for him to die—more than enough time to ponder his father’s advice, you’d think.”

Sirad watched as Mitchell raised the pistol above and to the right of her shoulder. They stood about twenty feet apart, standard dueling distance.

“And this is the handicap Hamilton took to battle three years later,” Mitchell continued. “Images of his dying son. A sense of code—the code that placed honor above all else. A torment of anger, duty, remorse, obligation.”

“I came to tell you that we’ve identified the people trying to get into Quantis,” Sirad said. This pantomime reminded her a little too keenly of Mitchell’s taste for marking other people’s weakness.

“And so, once again, the Hamilton family won advantage of second,” he said. “‘Present arms!’ a man called out.”

Mitchell swung the pistol directly at Sirad. She stared down the black hole it presented, a finger taut on the trigger, the hammer sprung back.

“Gun hands rose steadily,” he said, as if reciting from a personal recollection. “Sun gleamed on gunmetal. Birds fell silent. The smells of pine and fresh-cut grass and black powder still unlit filled the air.”

He looked sternly past the front bead sight, directly into Sirad’s eyes.

“Shots rang out!”

CLACK . . .
the hammer dropped as he pulled the muzzle away at the last moment.

“One man fell, mortally wounded. Hamilton.”

Sirad thought he said the word a little too knowingly.

“A day and a half it took him to die, just like his son. A day and a half to reflect through the keen lens of agony on the value of honor.”