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45
Tory’s LX was stopped at several checkpoints. “Sir, tell your tankers to keep their barrels pointed backwards if you’re going toward the Capitol area,” an MP major told General Devereaux in a tone that suggested he said this for the hundredth time, “because we have sniper teams on the side streets. Anyone who points a gun the wrong way within a mile of the White House takes a rocket, no questions asked!”
They got as far as the Reflecting Pool, only on the strength of Devereaux’s fluttering pennants. There, they had to get out and walk the rest of the way through cordons of civilian and military police.
Tory saw a White House blacked out and glowering in patchy dawn light. A circle of tanks and trucks surrounded the outer sidewalk. Rifle and gas mask carrying members of various uniformed police and military services formed a human shield many bodies deep all around. A Marine Corps unit had hastily deployed several field pieces on the lawn, Tory assumed to protect against air attack. Sandbagged machine gun positions were all around. Helicopters circled overhead. In the clouds, jets circled slowly sounding like knives on grindstones.
Tory clambered out of the LX with Peggy, General Devereaux, and Senator Mattoon. If Mattoon felt any apprehension about meeting with a President with whom he’d differed publicly on so many issues, he did not show it. Tory felt embarrassed to be at the White House in her disheveled, dirty uniform, with an infantry officer’s too-large shirt
General Devereaux negotiated with a stern-faced Marine colonel who kept shaking his head. Devereaux waved his cigar. The colonel took Devereaux’s .38 Special and frisked him and Mattoon. Devereaux’s eyes were big as masher marbles when he handed over his precious relic. Tory was patted down by women Marines, her .45 taken. The weapons were tagged, to be stored for later return.
Secret Service agents led Mattoon, Devereaux, and Tory into the White House through a heavily guarded entrance, along carpeted corridors, to a large reception room gorgeously paneled in walnut. There, President Cliff Bradley and General Billy Norcross held court. The two leaders shook hands with well-wishers and thanked those who had come to stand or die. Tory sensed nervous levity amid a general impression that the coup was about over. Only Rocky Devereaux looked worried as he paced dourly and tried to figure out the poker hand he’d been dealt.
Tory shook hands with President Clifford Bradley and decided he wasn’t what the press and the talk shows had made him out to be. He was big, he had a strong grip, he had keen eyes, and a gentle smile. She felt self-conscious about her lumber jack appearance, but he patted her hand warmly and said: “I’m grateful and you will all be invited for a big thank you dinner when this blows over.”
Tory glowed. “Sounds great, Mr. President.”
President Bradley and Senator Mattoon warmly shook hands. Then they moved together toward a table of coffee and danish as though they’d always been friends. An aide followed them with a hand phone. “Mr. President, it’s the U.S. Ambassador in Berlin. He says it’s extremely urgent.”
“Ask him if it can wait until afternoon. We have a lot going on here.”
The aide spoke with the ambassador, then said: “He says you must speak with him privately. It’s extremely sensitive.”
“All right,” the President said with a sigh. “I’ll grab some coffee and danish here, and talk for a moment with Senator Mattoon, and then I’ll take it in my office.”
Many people swirled around in this victory galaxy, military, FBI, Secret Service, White House, Congressional leaders like Senator Wayne Nichols and Representative Norm Delano. General Billy Norcross, hailed for siding the military with President Bradley, stood with his aides. Tory heard talk of Norcross as President Bradley’s running mate in the next elections, which the Middle Class Party now looked sure to win.
Tory found herself a glass of cola and put some ice into it. It was the first cold drink all day, and she relished it. Next in her priorities, she approached a secretary and borrowed a com button. She was anxious to call David, but afraid the call might enable the commandos to find him. Perhaps if she asked General Devereaux?
She found Rocky Devereaux holding his cigar in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. He stood in the entrance to General Norcross’s office down the hall from the Oval Office. The office had a beautiful blond oak door with inlaid geometric figures. The door stood partly open and Rocky was regarding a large painting on the wall behind General Norcross’s desk. “Mighty nice,” he was saying, “mighty nice.” It was a painting like those one saw in the Louvre—Napoleon, on a rearing stallion, waving a scroll of laws in one hand and a sword in the other. All around his steed, humans and goddesses engaged in a scene part battle, part orgy, and part symposium.
Tory turned to the larger room again, sipping her cola and feeling exhausted. Overwhelmed. She wasn’t sure which more than the other. As her gaze roved, she noticed two naval officers chatting with two secret service agents over coffee and danish. The naval officers were in dress uniform, which surprised her. One was a boyish young blond with steel-rimmed glasses. The other was a kind of dour, ugly man of uncertain race who had the flattest, meanest, brownest eyes she’d ever seen; he seemed to frequently lick his lips with the point of his tongue. A repulsive man. Mud-Eyes. She averted her eyes.
Tory’s borrowed com button beeped. “Excuse me,” she told Devereaux.
“Sure,” Devereaux said, eyeballing a table full of food outside. He sidled out.
“Tory, it’s David!”
“David!” she squealed. “Hi! Oh God, I’m so glad to hear your voice!”
“You’re okay?”
“Yes. Are you okay?” She made slight jumping motions. “Is it really you?”
“Yup. You sound like an angel from heaven. I’m tired, hungry, and scared. Where are you?”
“I’m in the city net with Jet. We’re in CloudMaster, chasing down Operation Ivory Baton. The program is still generating strange new output. Where are you?”
“I’m inside the White House.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. We brought Stan Mattoon to the President.”
“Oh good. I think it’s about over for the 3045th. You know what, though.”
“I love you very much. What?”
“I love you very much too and would like to play some more monopoly. Meanwhile, Jet’s driving down this alley here, and there are suddenly N’s all over the place. You know, we thought this was something Montclair and his bunch were running. Now I’m not so sure.”
“What do you mean, David?” Her eyes again drifted through the throng, past chatting generals, admirals, and senators, to the two naval officers. Hadn’t David mentioned the men who’d kidnapped him? Men who looked like those two? A preppy blond and a mud-eyed lizard man?
The two men stood isolated and drank coffee, and even though they might conduct brief, smiling, shallow conversations here and there, exchanging congratulations, they remained observers who were not really part of the scene.
Something is wrong here.
In the same moment, Tory noticed President Bradley walking past toward the Oval Office. He carried coffee and a danish and looked so sad and weary, poor thing. Steel Rims and Mud-Eyes sipped coffee. They looked this way and that, and then exchanged flat glances with each other.
Oh no.
David said: “This guy Federov, an old Soviet, wrote a book on all the ways democracy will destroy itself. Algeria, ‘91; Russia, ‘17; Germany, ‘33; you name it. Someone wrote up a huge program, using a Harvard econometric program and a Navy weather program as some of the main processing engines....”
Heart pounding, heart pounding. Mouth dry.
“...Basically, the program runs a million factors through its sieves and filters and spits out scenarios for how close the U.S. is to any one of those outcomes. Right now, we’re getting a strong reading about something called N—but we have no idea what it means.” As he prattled on, Tory glanced at the throng around the coffee table while listening to David.
Steel-Rims and Mud-Eyes, the two phony Navy captains, suddenly walked by right in front of her.
God, no.
They didn’t see her standing in the open office door as they walked past in the direction the President had gone, toward the Oval Office.
They are following him.
David’s beloved voice faded into elevator music as her mind raced, as her thoughts trying to overcome a pounding sense of shock. Something was, like, really really wrong here.
To kill him.
What else could it be? Suddenly the details didn’t matter. In an eyeblink, she realized that Devereaux had been right. This conspiracy had unguessed dimensions. The events at the Atlantic Hotel and Convention Center had been a sideshow. The main event was about to take place.
Must reach the President before they do.
“Love you, I’ll call you back.” She dropped the com button and started running.
She grabbed General Devereaux, making him spill his coffee. “Go round up Secret Service guys, tell them the President’s in danger.”
She ran out into the corridor.
Everyone was so intent on guarding the outside that almost nobody at the moment was thinking about guarding the innermost inside.
In the hallway, as she glanced toward the celebratory crowd, she caught a brief glimpse of General Billy Norcross. He didn’t see her. In fact, he was so aglow that he didn’t seem to see anything at that moment. It was just a glimpse of him, like a fawn in a car’s headlights, and she had no time to look another second, but he drifted toward his office with a look of ecstasy. The glow of empire was in his eyes. He looked far beyond America, far beyond humble and homespun democracy.
She bolted toward the right, down a long empty corridor.
A man in a suit stepped out of an office and she grabbed his lapels. He looked alarmed and grappled for her wrists. “Secret Service?” she asked, noting a badge on his belt.
He nodded, started to grab her.
She shook his hands away. “Two men are on their way to kill the President. Follow me.”
They ran down the hall together. “You said two of them?”
Tory nodded, and he drew his gun as he spoke into his collar button: “Echo Breaker, Echo Breaker! One Seven Emblem, One Seven Emblem. We have two tigers headed for Location One! I repeat, two tigers. Probably armed! Wearing Navy uniforms. Echo Max, Echo Max!” As they jogged side by side, he continued speaking with other agents.
Tory and the agent rounded a corner and slowed to a halt. The closed door of the Oval Office was straight ahead. On the ground sprawled two Secret Service agents in suits, a man and a woman. Blood puddled around them, and their dead eyes stared straight up. Their chests were so mangled with a flurry savage knife wounds that flesh and cloth mingled in a bloody stew. How had the killers gotten knives past the check points outside?
Tory and her companion threw themselves against the door. It was locked.
The agent shot the handle off and he and Tory crashed into the room together.
As Tory’s momentum propelled her staggering across the room, she glimpsed a horrific scene. The impostor Navy captains had the President on the floor between them. Steel-Rims tired to work a nylon garrotte with formed handles around Bradley’s neck. Bradley had one hand inside the garrote and was fighting for his life. Mud-Eyes pulled on Bradley’s obstructing hand, but Bradley was strong and was hanging in there, and Mud-Eyes raised a fist to punch Bradley unconscious. Steel-Rims changed tactics and pulled the garrotte to tow the President over his knee and break the President’s spine in a thorough execution.
As Tory recovered her balance, Mud-Eyes’s fist froze in mid-air as he turned and looked over his shoulder. Steel-Rims continued his frenzied assassination with gritted teeth and diamond-bright eyes. “Take them!” he shouted hoarsely.
Mud-Eyes moved like a lynx. He threw a thin dagger of composite materials that had, like the garrotte, escaped notice by metal detectors outside. Tory’s Secret Service companion staggered back as the object embedded itself in his chest, and he collapsed helplessly. His gun fell. Tory, charged with adrenalin, caught the .357 magnum revolver before it hit the ground.
She fell backwards over his body, awkwardly, but landed rolling.
Steel-Rims gave the President a karate chop across the neck. She heard a crackling noise, and the President’s head lolled to one side. His eyes slowly rolled upward and his mouth grew slack.
Mud-Eyes came at Tory. He had a composite knife in each hand and a deadly plan written in his eyes. She fumbled for a solid grip on the gun.
He and she were both moving very fast. Her brain, processing even faster, agonized at the minuscule differential between his running speed and her lifting speed.
She turned to face him, but could not raise the heavy gun fast enough.
Mud-Eyes hit her like a concrete mixer, knocked the wind out of her, but as she flew backwards, she squeezed her hand, felt the resistance against her trigger finger, and heard the explosion of the .357 magnum round, muffled by his body. She hit the hardwood floor and slid.
She rolled as she landed, and Mud-Eyes rolled with her, as if they were embracing. Only he was too weak for embrace now. Too weak—the knives slipped from his twitching fingers.
His eyes opened in shock as she involuntarily lay in this obscene embrace with him while he died in her arms. She lay on his chest, face to face, close enough to kiss. Repulsed, she watched blood fill his mouth, stirred by his flickering tongue. The blood bubbled up and drooled down one cheek making black puddles on the carpet. His reptilian eyes gave her a lingering starving look as though he longed to eat her.
She screamed and flailed away from him.
Steel-Rim had a satisfied grin as he pulled the limp President over his knee. He twitched the garrotte to get a new, tight fit around Bradley’s neck and finish him off. Steel-Rims’s face seethed with white-hot concentration as he gathered the strength of every muscle to give a tremendous yank that would break the President’s spine.
Tory advanced on him with the revolver in both hands. The gun bucked as it barked repeatedly, deafeningly. She walked closer and emptied the gun into Steel-Rims’s chest. Acrid gunsmoke drifted around her face, making her eyes tear, but she fired repeatedly in a dull, even rhythm. Each time, Steel-Rims’s body jerked..
Steel-Rims’s facial features slackened in a look of surprise, then regret. His arms faltered and he looked down at Bradley as though he loved him.
Then he looked up at Tory dreamily. She kept firing until nothing more happened. The clip was empty and the last shot, dead true between the eyes, shattered Steel-Rims’s head and spattered the carpet and the front of the President’s desk gray-burgundy.
Tory fell to her knees and embraced the dying President.
There was a terrible silence.
Then, all through the building, telephones began ringing.
ALLISON MIRANDA: Pandemonium has broken out in the White House. Because of the news blackout inside, we have been unable confirm or deny a rumor floating out that the President has either been killed or is seriously wounded. An Air Force air-evac helicopter that sits round the clock on the White House roof helipad for just such an emergency is now powering up its rotors. Our correspondent says he can see dozens of armed men streaming into the White House—Wait, we have this phone contact now—it’s with someone inside the White House—it’s with the office of General Billy Norcross—and here is General Billy Norcross, speaking to us live from the White House, and maybe he will help make some sense of this chaos and pandemonium.
BILLY NORCROSS: I’m in charge here.
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