White: A Novel (39 page)

SATCH WAS A
big man and strong, but the weight in his hands felt far more burdensome than anything he’d ever lifted.

“I hate this kinda stuff,” he huffed. The black plastic road case bore no markings, but he felt all too familiar with its contents.

“You know what they used to say,” his partner reassured him. “You ain’t gotta like it, you just gotta do it.”

“I ain’t no SEAL no more,” he argued. “And I never cared much for all those stupid sayings when I was in the teams, neither.”

The other man stood half a foot and fifty pounds lighter than Satch, but he had trained hard for this mission. Nobody big or small was going to show him up.

“Yeah, well just don’t drop that. I got all the fingers and toes I need, without growing extras.”

Satch grunted half a laugh and followed his partner out of a modest row house toward a double-parked van.

“Good thing you already got four kids,” Satch said. “I hear this stuff can make your balls pucker up like raisins.”

“Then I guess the colonel picked the right man for this gig, didn’t he? ’Cause the world ain’t ready for offspring from the likes of you.”

Both of them chuckled, lightening a troublesome moment. They walked down a long flight of stairs. Satch reached the van first. He held the box against the rear bumper with his thigh and unlocked the rear door.

“You hear a helicopter?” he asked. The other man looked up but couldn’t see anything above the rooflines along the narrow city street.

“It’s Washington DC,” the partner said. “There’s choppers everywhere.”

“Right,” Satch agreed. He hefted his box into the white Chevy Astro van and pushed the doors closed. “Can’t be too careful.”

“I’ll drive, then,” his partner said. “’Cause the most dangerous thing in this city right now ain’t seven-point-five pounds of cesium—it’s you behind the wheel.”

“PLEASE, NOT THE
children,” Caroline begged. She could take the pain of physical abuse, but nothing could ever hurt like the fear she had seen in their once innocent eyes.

“Bring ’em in,” one of the captors ordered. He was one of the men who had come through the window. And the pirate. The albino. Whiter than any man she’d ever seen, grotesquely scarred around the eye patch. Bloody from the broken glass.

“Mommy!” Christopher sobbed when he saw her lying there on the vacant cellar floor. The concrete had rubbed her skin raw where they had dragged her across it. Cruel welts and bruises covered her face and breasts.

“It’s OK, baby,” she said in the most soothing voice she could muster. The handcuffs ached around her wrists and ankles, but what hurt most was not being able to hold her kids.

Pull yourself together!
she screamed at herself. So far, the injuries were superficial and would heal.
Stay strong for the kids.

“What do you want from us?” she called out. They had asked so few questions. The beatings came for no apparent reason.

“We want you to keep these brats quiet,” the captor said. He wore a flannel shirt and brown canvas Carhartt pants—the kind carpenters wore, and farmers.

“
Waahhhh,
” Patrick cried. A second captor dragged the little boy in by his pajama collar.

“Especially this one. Little bastard hasn’t shut up from the time we woke him up.”

The carpenter pushed the child toward his mother, but there was no need for coaxing. Patrick ran to his mom and fell upon her. Christopher, who had stood inside the door almost transfixed with fear, slowly followed his brother and knelt down, still trembling wildly.

“It’s OK, sweetheart,” Caroline reassured him. She tried to wipe the blood off her face with the back of her hand so her appearance wouldn’t scare them. Her nose was probably broken; one blow had cut her above the left eye.

Goddamn the FBI.
Caroline seethed beneath the surface. She fought futilely at the restraints and swore to herself that the children would not see her cry. It was bad enough that they had taken her husband. Now they had allowed these animals to take her family, too.

100 INDEPENDENCE AVENUE.

How perfectly ironic,
Jeremy decided as he shifted up through the sixteen-gear transmission, slowly gaining speed with his load of fertilizer and number-two heating oil. His destination was the big, walled-off construction project obvious to anyone passing the Capitol’s East Lawn. It had been under way for more than a year already: a secret project that hadn’t stayed secret long. Sky-high cranes, excavators, and hard hats were just too hard to hide.

The
Washington Post
uncovered the $40 million congressional bunker first, but there had been little controversy outside the Beltway. In times like these, who could blame the nation’s legislature for building a place to hide?

Twelve minutes,
Jeremy reminded himself. It was just thirteen blocks from the body shop where he’d picked up the truck to the Capitol. Ellis’s instructions had been concise and specific.

Enter through the security checkpoint at the East Gate,
he had said.
They are running a thousand-yard pour tonight, meaning every concrete truck in the city has dropped off at least one load.

How could the Bureau have overlooked it?
Jeremy wondered, downshifting already for a stoplight. They knew terrorists sought symbolic targets and that there was no bigger target than that great domed People’s House up there on the Hill.

Detonator, conduit, charge.

Jeremy let out the clutch and pulled into traffic, reminding himself of the simple, inalterable construction of any improvised explosive device. In this case, Ellis’s men had rigged some kind of remote trigger. The detonator would fire a conduit—probably shock tube—which would deliver a lightning-fast spark to more than five tons of ANFO. Anyone who had seen Timothy McVeigh’s handiwork in Oklahoma City would know what that could do.

Got to find some way to break the detonator-charge interface,
Jeremy thought. And he had to do it in a way that would make a failure look plausible.

Honk!

Someone cut Jeremy off, causing him to lurch sideways, almost striking a bicycle courier.

“Watch where you’re going!” Jeremy yelled back, understanding for the first time that people behind the wheels of big trucks had a very difficult job.

The man in the car flipped him the finger and raced off, leaving Jeremy’s face flushed with anger.

Sonofabitch!
he thought. If this idiot only knew what lay in the back of his truck.
If they only knew that the safety of my family and a city full of innocent citizens could be jeopardized because they were late for a hair appointment.

Then he began to smile. He had an idea.

Jeremy stomped on the gas and shifted up. They’d be following him, of course; Ellis or one of his Phineas priests. He couldn’t see any obvious tail in his rearview mirror, but they’d be smart enough to stay out of sight.

“So much for expectation,” Jeremy said, believing he still might have a chance. His plan wasn’t exactly genius, but the best plans seldom were.

SIRAD DIDN’T NEED
to understand the Nguyen cornerstone or stochastic wave generation theory or Camus algorithms. All she needed to understand was that Ravi had found a way through White House Communications Agency firewalls without showing himself.

News of that came just after ten o’clock. Hammer Time had actually taken a shower, and I Can’t Dunk had brewed a new pot of coffee.

“My God,” Sirad remarked as her computer screen flickered twice, then filled with prose in standard English. “This looks like a Web page.”

“It is,” Ravi bragged. “The WHCA’s Sippernet interface with DISN’s DSNET3.”

“Ravi.”

“Sorry. The Defense Information Systems Network has four packet-switching networks to handle military communications in-house and with other agencies. DSNET3—referred to as the ‘Y’ side—is the most secure: Top Secret/ SCI. It uses packet-switching nodes that work off international standard Disnet-three protocols.”

“And this provides secure communications between the Pentagon and the WHCA?” she asked.

“It allows what they believe to be secure information transfer from POTUS on down. Eyes-only access to the Y side.”

“Brilliant, isn’t he?” Ravi asked.

“What?” Sirad asked. “Who?”

“God.”

“G-g-god?” Hammer Time jumped in. “What’s God got to d-d-do with this?”

“Complexity. We just play at codes,” Ravi said. “God dangles clues out in front of us, but when it comes right down to it, we can’t even come up with decent questions.”

“Come on, man,” I Can’t Dunk said. “How come you gotta get all misty every time we break into something?”

“God is the only great intelligence,” Ravi responded. His words sounded reverent, prayerful. “The poet mechanic.”

“Can we save the hallelujahs for a minute, fellas?” Sirad asked. “’Cause I’ve got a question.”

She leaned into the computer screen and pointed to a line of text.

“If these intrusions really originated with WHCA, what’s that?”

Hammer Time leaned in over her shoulder, trying to see where she was pointing. He felt more confident now that he smelled of Ivory soap and Head and Shoulders.

“‘CAPSTONE3,’” he read aloud. “A d-d-dog-ear, maybe? A remote-access entry c-c-code.”

“For what?” Sirad asked. She moved the mouse and double-clicked on something that looked particularly troubling.

“Let’s say you wanted to read your own e-mails from somebody else’s computer without knowing about it,” Ravi explained. “Normally, you would sign in under your own name. But that leaves a trail. The better way would be to break in, clone your host’s access protocols, and dog-ear your place so you could quickly move in and out. Hard to do, but it’s a safer way to play hide-and-seek.”

“A g-g-good way to fart and p-p-point your finger,” Hammer Time stuttered.

“But this intruder thinks he’s completely transparent,” I Can’t Dunk said. “Why would he need to cover himself with another layer of camouflage?”

“Because the downside in getting caught is too much to risk on a single backstop,” Ravi suggested. “Because he is so high up, he can’t take a chance that we will discover him.”

“Who’s that high up?” I Can’t Dunk asked. “The president?”

Sirad said nothing, but her silence confirmed what they all had suspected.

“You can’t be serious,” I Can’t Dunk argued. “Venable isn’t smart enough to pull this off by himself. He’d need help from the NSA or DISA, and even then, he’d be vulnerable to time signature.”

“Unless POTUS is just the dog-ear for CAPSTONE3,” Sirad thought out loud. “What if someone knew the president was out of the loop? What if they used his signature, knowing he was too busy to pay attention?”

“Son of a bitch.” Ravi nodded. “They wanted us to discover this all along.”

“What are our limitations to on-site discovery?” Sirad asked, suddenly infused with energy. She scrolled up and down the screen, looking for something only she would recognize.

“There are none,” I Can’t Dunk assured her. “If it’s in the WHCA or DISN system, we can access it.”

“Incoming, outgoing communications?” Sirad asked.

“Yes. We have access to everything they do, say, and know.”

“Domestic and international?”

“Yes.”

“Civilian and military?”

“Yes, of course,” Ravi answered. “We have free rein of every communication and conduit. What is it you want?”

“I want to access the fail-safe codes,” she blurted out.

All three men stared at her.

“You m-m-mean the f-f-fucking football?”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Sirad demanded. She reached for her coat and checked to make sure she had her keys. “Can you get them for me?”

“You bet we can,” Ravi told her.

He leaned back and crossed his arms. All of a sudden, he understood, too.

THE PRESIDENT HAD
showered and shaved, and now donned a traditional uniform of white shirt, red tie, and blue two-button suit by the time his cabinet arrived. They met in the Cabinet Room as usual, despite concern from the Secret Service, which had tried to keep him in PEOC.

“Good evening,” he said, striding into the crowded space ahead of Andrea Chase and his press secretary. “I want to deal with the issue of my absence these last twenty-four hours.”

No one else said a word. Some looked up at him, some stared into their briefing packages.

“I imagine there have been rumors, but I don’t have time to deal with them right now. Whatever you have heard, I’m back in the Oval Office and well focused on the fact that we may not yet have seen the worst of this crisis.”

Chase found a seat at the table. The press secretary stood along the east wall. Venable stood, as usual, behind his chair.

“Why don’t we start with an investigative update,” the president continued. He nodded to his attorney general then reached down for his glass of ice water.

“Should I, uh . . . shouldn’t I wait for the vice president?” the empty suit asked.

“At the suggestion of FEMA, I have sent her to the Mountain,” Venable said. His voice sounded firm and strong. “I would conference her in, but she’s in a Marine Corps helicopter as we speak. Go ahead with your briefing.”

The attorney general shuffled through briefing papers the FBI and DHS had prepared for him. Law enforcement had never been his thing, really. He was a jurist, an academic devoted to the letter of the law more than its application. Cops struck him as little more than a poorly educated, blue-collar cleanup crew assigned to the gutters of society. They were an occupational hazard.

“Where should I, uh . . . where should I start, sir?” he asked.

“Start with what I need to know,” Venable answered. He had regretted this appointment since their first meeting, but it was too late to do anything now. “Have we learned anything more about the Saudis?”

The attorney general thumbed through his briefing package until he found a folder earmarked Saudi Arabia.

“Yes . . . ah, FBI investigation continues. Director Alred assures me that . . . the Saudis—yes—the Saudis . . .”