Zero Day (48 page)

P
ULLER SAID
, “You’re a hero, Bobby. You saved a town, probably an entire state.”

He was seated across from his brother at USDB.

Robert Puller appeared to be trying hard to hide his pleasure at this statement. It was the first time at USDB that Puller had ever seen his brother wear an expression approaching pride.

“Did they deliver the commendation to you?”

Robert nodded. “A first for USDB. Not sure they knew what to do.”

“I bet.”

“I’m sorry about your friend, Sam Cole.”

“And I’m sorry they didn’t see fit to commute your sentence.”

“Did you really expect them to? The military does not second-guess itself. That would be tantamount to admitting a mistake, and the military doesn’t do that either.”

Puller reached across and shook his brother’s hand, ignoring the glare from the MP on duty. “You saved my ass.”

“That’s what big brothers are for.”

For most of the flight home Puller stared out the window. When the plane soared over West Virginia the pilot came on the PA. He told them where they were and added that he was from Bluefield, which he declared was the prettiest place in the country. Puller began to read the in-flight magazine and tuned out the man’s words.

He picked up his repaired Malibu at the airport and drove to his apartment. AWOL greeted him, and he spent a few minutes giving
the cat some attention. He looked out at the tiny courtyard visible from his kitchen window. This made him think, for some reason, about Sam Cole’s picture-perfect backyard with its fountain where they had sat together and talked. He touched his cheek where she had kissed him. He wondered if he had been wrong to turn down Sam Cole’s not-so-subtle invitation into her bed. But then he finally concluded that it had been the right thing to do at the time, for both of them. Although he had always thought there would be other times with the woman.

But what were the odds, really? That he would have lived. And she would have died. That chunk of concrete could have just as easily hit him. Or a tree. Or a deer. But it had chosen to hit Sam Cole and end her life.

A person could explain it away by saying it just wasn’t his time yet. Puller had done it himself after dodging death on the battlefield. Other guys had died. He hadn’t. But for him that wasn’t explanation enough. Not this time. He wasn’t sure why it was different in this instance, but he just knew that it was.

He put AWOL aside and reported to CID at Quantico. He wrote up his reports and talked to the people he needed to talk to. He was told that a promotion was forthcoming that would enable him to jump two spaces in the military hierarchy instead of merely one, an unheard-of opportunity.

He turned it down on the spot.

His SAC spent a long time trying to talk him out of it.

“Other guys would kill for this.”

“Then let the other guys have it.”

“I don’t get you, Puller, I really don’t.”

“I know, sir. Sometimes I don’t get myself.”

He had cleaned up his desk, returned a few emails, met with some superiors so they could be “in the loop,” and then he decided he was done with the Army for a while. He had leave saved up. He wanted to take it. There wasn’t an officer in the ranks who would have denied the request. People who had helped avoid nuclear holocaust on home soil could pretty much do what they wanted.

Within reason.

This was the U.S. military after all.

He went home, packed up some things and his cat, loaded the Malibu, and set out. He had no map, no plan, no destination. He was just a CID special agent on the loose with his trusty comrade, AWOL. The cat rode in the backseat like he was being chauffeured. Puller was glad to play the role.

They left at midnight because Puller preferred roaming in the dark. He found a road heading west and took it. By dawn he had covered over three hundred miles without stopping to even take a leak. When he did stop to stretch and relieve himself, gas up, buy the biggest coffee they had, and let AWOL out, he found he was well into West Virginia. Not Drake, another part. He wasn’t going back to Drake. There was nothing there for him, if there ever had been.

He didn’t want to see the Bunker again, what was left of it.

He didn’t want to see the Trents and the Coles, what was left of them.

He would carry Sam Cole in his memories for as long as he had them. Of that he was sure. Being around her had made him a better cop. And a better person. He would miss her for the rest of his life. Of that he was also sure.

He would come back to the Army and return to his duties catching people who did bad things. For some reason, he felt that he would come back stronger than ever. It was a nice feeling. He believed he owed that one to Sam Cole too.

He opened the door and AWOL jumped back into the car. Puller settled himself in his seat, shifted the Malibu to drive, and said, “Ready to roll, AWOL?”

The cat meowed its approval.

Puller eased back onto the road and then gunned it.

He swept down the road, moving fast, flowing smoothly.

And then he was gone, like he had never even been there.

After all, it
was
true.

You couldn’t kill what you couldn’t see coming.

T
O
M
ICHELLE
, the ride continues.

To Mitch Hoffman, for helping me to continue to see the light.

To David Young, Jamie Raab, Emi Battaglia, Jennifer Romanello, Tom Maciag, Martha Otis, Chris Barba, Karen Torres, Anthony Goff, Lindsey Rose, Bob Castillo, Michele McGonigle, and all at Grand Central Publishing, who support me in every way.

To Aaron and Arleen Priest, Lucy Childs Baker, Lisa Erbach Vance, Nicole James, Frances Jalet-Miller, and John Richmond, for being with me step for step.

To Maja Thomas, the empress of ebooks.

To Anthony Forbes Watson, Jeremy Trevathan, Maria Rejt, Trisha Jackson, Katie James, Aimee Roche, Becky Ikin, Lee Dibble, Sophie Portas, Stuart Dwyer, Anna Bond, and Michelle Kirk at Pan Macmillan, for helping me hit my highest numbers ever in the UK.

To Ron McLarty and Orlagh Cassidy, for giving superb voice to my stories.

To Steven Maat at Bruna, for taking me to the # 1 spot in Holland.

To Bob Schule, for your eagle eye.

To Anshu Guleria, M.D., for sound medical advice.

To the charity auction winners, Matthew Reynolds, Bill Strauss, and Jean Trent, I hope you enjoyed your characters.

To the Fort Benning crew who were so generous with their time and expertise: Maj. Gen. Bob and Patti Brown, Command Sgt. Maj. Chris Hardy, Command Sgt. Maj. Steven McClaflin, Lt. Col. Selby Rollinson (Ret.), Susan Berry, Col. Sean McCaffrey, Col. Terry
McKenrick, Col. Greg Camp (Ret.), Lt. Col. Jay Bartholomees, Lt. Col. Kyle Feger, Lt. Col. Mike Junot, Lt. Col. David Koonce, Lt. Col. Todd Zollinger, Maj. Joe Ruzicka, Capt. Matthew Dusablon, Chief Warrant Officer 4 Larry Turso, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Jose Aponte, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Shawn Burke, Special Agent Joseph Leary, Special Agent Jason Waters, Special Agent Jason Huggins, Sgt. 1
^ST
Class Steve Lynn, Staff Sgt. Shawn Goodwill, Nora Bennett, Terri Panco, and Courtland Pegan.

To Tom Colson, for your CID expertise.

To Bill Chadwell, for taking me through the intricacies of the Pentagon.

To Col. Marguerite Garrison (Ret.), for doing the same.

To Michael Furey, for your valuable help.

To Christine Craig, for walking me through USACIL.

To Bill Colwell and Rear Adm. John Faigle, USCG (Ret.), for introducing me to the wonderful Army and Navy Club.

To Maj. Gen. Karl Horst, for a great dinner and conversation.

To Dave and Karen Halverson, for the use of your last name.

To Timothy Imholt, you know why.

To Kristen and Natasha, because I’d be lost without you.

A special welcome to Erin Race as she joins the Columbus Rose team.

A wish for a great retirement to Lynette and Art, and heartfelt thanks for a job well done.

And last but far from least, to Roland Ottewell for another great editing job.

David Baldacci is one of the world’s favorite storytellers. His books are published in over 45 languages and in more than 80 countries, with over 110 million copies in print. David Baldacci is also the cofounder, along with his wife, of the Wish You Well Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting literacy efforts across America. Still a resident of his native Virginia, he invites you to visit him at www.DavidBaldacci.com and his foundation at www.WishYouWellFoundation.org, and to look into its program to spread books across America at www.FeedingBodyandMind.com.

John Puller must rely on all his training, all his experience, all his skills to hunt down the most formidable and brilliant prey he has ever tracked: his own brother.

A preview follows

The prison looked more like the campus of a community college than a place where men were kept in cells for ten years or more for offenses committed while wearing the uniform of their country. There were no guard towers, but there were two staggered twelve-foot-tall security fences, armed patrols, and enough surveillance cameras to keep an electronic eye on virtually every millimeter of the place. Situated at the northern end of Fort Leavenworth, the United States Disciplinary Barracks sat next to the Missouri River on nearly forty rolling, forested Kansas acres, a mound of brick and razor wire cradled by a green hand. It was the only maximum-security military prison for males in the country.

America’s foremost military prison was called the USDB, or the DB for short. The Leavenworth federal penitentiary for civilians, one of three prisons on the grounds of Fort Leavenworth, was four miles to the south. Along with the Joint Regional Correctional Facility—also for military prisoners—there was a fourth privately operated prison in Leavenworth, which raised the total inmate population among the four prisons to about five thousand. The Leavenworth Tourism Bureau, apparently seeking to capitalize on any bit of notoriety to lure visitors to the area, had incorporated the prison angle into its promotional brochures with the phrase “Doin’ time in Leavenworth.”

Federal dollars rolled through this part of Kansas and jumped the border into Missouri like a flood of green paper locusts, boosting the local economy and filling the coffers of businesses that provided the soldiers with smoked ribs, cold beer, fast cars, cheap hookers, and pretty much everything in between.

Inside the DB were about four hundred and fifty male prisoners. Inmates were housed in a series of escape-proof pods, including a Special Housing Unit, or SHU. The majority of inmates were here for sex-based crimes. They were mostly young and their sentences long.

Approximately ten prisoners were kept in solitary confinement at any one time, while the remaining inmates were housed in the general population. There were no bars on the doors; they were just solid metal, with a slot at the bottom for food trays to be shoved through. This also allowed for shackles to be fitted like a new pair of iron shoes when a prisoner needed to be transported somewhere.

Unlike at some other state and federal penitentiaries around the country, discipline and respect were demanded here and given. There were no power struggles between the incarcerated and their watchers. There was the rule of military law, and the primary responses from those being held here were “Yes sir,” closely followed by “No sir.”

The DB had a death row on which currently sat a half dozen convicted murderers, including the Fort Hood killer. It also had an execution chamber. Whether any of the death row inmates would ever see the lethal injection needle would be something only the lawyers and judges could say, probably years and millions in legal fees from now.

* * *

Day had long since passed to night and the lights from a civilian Piper plane lifting off from the nearby Sherman Airfield were almost the only evidence of activity. It was quiet now, but a violent storm front that had been on the radar for a while was howling in from the north. Another system that had sprung up in Texas was barreling toward the Midwest like a brakeless freight train. It would soon meet its northern counterpart, with devastating results. The entire area was already hunkering down in anticipation.

When the two rampaging fronts met three hours later, the result was a storm of shattering proportions, with jagged lightning slicing sideways across the sky, rain bucketing down, and winds that seemed to have no limit to their strength or reach.

The power lines went first, snapped like string by tumbling trees. Then down came the phone lines. After that more trees toppled, blocking roads. The nearby Kansas City International Airport had been shut down ahead of time, all planes empty and the terminal full of travelers riding out the storm and quietly thanking God they were on the ground instead of up in that maelstrom.

Inside the DB the guards made their rounds, or sipped their coffees in the break room, or talked in low whispers, exchanging scuttlebutt of no importance just to get through their shifts. No one thought anything of the storm outside since they were safely inside a fortress of brick and steel. They were like an aircraft carrier confronted by gale-force winds and heavy seas. It might not be pleasant, but they would easily ride it out.

Even when the regular power failed as both transformers at a nearby substation blew up, plunging the prison into momentary darkness, no one was overly concerned. The massive backup generator automatically kicked on, and that machine was inside a bombproof installation with its own underground power source of natural gas that would never run out of juice. This secondary system came on so fast the short lapse did nothing more than cause jittery fluorescents and a few pops on surveillance cameras and computer monitors.

Guards finished their coffees and moved on to other gossip, while others slowly made their way down halls and around corners and in and out of pods, making sure all was well in the world of the DB.

What finally got everyone’s attention was the total quiet that came when the foolproof generator with the endless supply of energy in the bombproof installation made a noise like a giant with the whooping cough, and then simply died.

All the lights, cameras, and consoles instantly went out, although some of the surveillance cameras had battery backups and thus remained on. And then the quiet was replaced with urgent cries and the sounds of men running. Communication radios crackled and popped. Flashlights were snatched from holders on leather belts and powered up. But they provided only meager illumination.

And then the unthinkable happened: All the automatic cell doors unlocked. This was
not
supposed to happen. The system was built such that whenever the power failed, the doors automatically locked. Not so good for prisoners if the power failure was due to, say, a fire, but that’s the way it was, or the way it was supposed to be. However, now the guards were hearing the clicks of cell doors opening all over the prison, and hundreds of prisoners were emerging into the hallways.

There were no guns allowed in the DB. Thus the guards had only their authority, wits, training, ability to read prisoners’ moods, and heavy batons to keep order. And now those batons were gripped in hands that were becoming increasingly sweaty.

There were SOPs, or standard operating procedures, for such an eventuality, because the military had procedures for every eventuality. The Army typically had two backups for all critical items. At the DB the natural gas backup generator was considered a fail-safe. However, now it
had
failed. Now it fell to the guards to maintain complete order. They were the last line of defense. The first goal was to secure all prisoners. The secondary goal was to secure all prisoners. Anything else would be deemed an unacceptable failure by any military standard. Careers and along with them stars and bars would fall off like parched needles from a Christmas tree still up in late January.

Since there were far more prisoners than guards, securing all of them involved a few tactics, the most important of which required grouping them in the large open central areas, where they would be made to lie facedown. This seemed to be going well for about five minutes, but then something else happened that would make every guard dig deeper into the Army manuals and more than one sphincter—whether attached to guard or prisoner—tighten.

“We’ve got shots fired,” shouted a guard into his radio. “Shots fired, undetermined location, unknown source.”

This message was repeated down the line until it was ringing in every guard’s ears. Shots fired and nobody knew from where or by whom. And since none of the guards had guns, that meant one of the prisoners must. Maybe more than one.

Now things, already serious, morphed into something bordering chaotic.

And then the situation became a lot worse.

The sound of an explosion flooded the interior of pod number three, which contained the SHU. Now the borderline chaotic leapt right into utter meltdown. The only thing that could restore order was an overwhelming show of armed force. And there were few organizations in the world that could do overwhelming armed force better than the United States Army. Especially when that gunned-up force was right next door at Fort Leavenworth.

Minutes later, six green Army trucks swept through the powerless boundary gates of the DB, whose high-tech intrusion detection systems had been rendered inoperable. Military police in SWAT gear and carrying shields poured off the trucks, their automatic weapons and shotguns racked and ready. They charged straight into the facility, their fields of vision bright and clear owing to their latest-generation night-vision goggles that made the blackness inside the prison look as fresh and vibrant as anything on an Xbox.

Prisoners froze where they were. Then those who were still standing immediately lay facedown, their hands behind their backs and their limbs trembling in the face of superbly trained soldiers loaded for war.

Order was eventually achieved.

Army engineers were able to restore power and the lights came back on and doors could lock once more. In the meantime, the MPs from Fort Leavenworth turned the facility back over to the guards and left the way they had come. The prison commander, a full colonel, gratefully exhaled as the weight of the world, or at least a sudden wall appearing between him and his next promotion, was lifted.

Prisoners shuffled back into their cells.

A head count was done.

The list of prisoners accounted for was compared to the official list of inmates. Initially, the numbers tallied.

Initially.

But on further inspection that did not turn out to be the case.

There was one prisoner missing. Only one. But he was an important one. He had been sent here for life. Not because he had fragged an officer or otherwise killed one or many. Or because he had raped, slashed, burned, or bombed. He was not on death row. He was here because he was a traitor, having betrayed his country in the area of national security, which was a term that made everyone sit up and look over their shoulder.

And even more inexplicably, on the cot in the missing prisoner’s cell was someone else—an unidentified dead man lying facedown under the covers. This was the cause of the initial miscount of heads.

They searched every corner of the DB, including the air ducts and any other crevices they could think of. They raced outside into the now dying storm to search there, marching in methodical columns, leaving nothing unexamined.

But this plot of Kansas soil did not yield what they were looking for.

The inmate was gone. No one could explain how. No one could say how the dead man had come to be here. No one could make sense of any of this.

There was only one obvious fact.

Robert Puller, once a major in the United States Air Force and an expert in nuclear weaponry and cyber security, and also the son of one of the most famous fighting soldiers of them all, the now retired Army lieutenant general John Puller Sr., had escaped from the inescapable DB.

And he had left behind an unknown dead man in his place, which was even more inexplicable than how he had managed to break out.

Informed of this seeming impossibility turned stark reality, the prison’s commander lifted the secure phone in his office, and in doing so kissed his once promising career goodbye.