Line of Succession: A Thriller (38 page)

The mercenary’s face grew surly. It was true. Agent Carver had gotten the better of him in Baltimore. He had been lucky to escape with his life. Still, he didn’t appreciate being called a pussy.

“
Chris,” Farrell chimed in, “I think what General Wainewright is trying to say is that he’d like you to handle this personally.”

“
Fine,” Abrams said. “But it’s going to cost you.”

*

Haley Ellis watched as the tall, sinewy bald man with pockmarked skin sat at a laptop computer linked into the network. The monitors around the room lit up with headshots of Eva Hudson, Agent Carver, Agent O’Keefe and Julian Speers. Abrams addressed the room. “These are the people we’re looking for,” he announced. “You can begin sharing these profiles with our Ulysses field operatives.”

Ellis watched helplessly as the message was dispatched to public and private units all over the city. The message below each read: WANTED FOR CONSPIRACY TO ASSASSINATE THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. LETHAL FORCE AUTHORIZED.

She jumped in her seat as a hand touched her shoulder. She looked up and locked eyes with General Farrell. “Miss Ellis,” he said as he towered over her. His breath smelled like eggs Benedict and coffee. “I’m afraid there have been some changes in the command structure. Perhaps no one notified you. The NIC is no longer welcome here.”

Force a smile, she told herself. “I’m aware of that, General. But I worked with Agent Carver at CIA, and I thought I could be of some help here today.” It was the truth. Before accepting the post at NIC, Ellis had made a career stop at CIA, where she and Carver had worked two cases together. She watched as Wainewright chewed on the answer. She had no intentions of helping the investigation, but it was essential that she buy some time. She had to figure out what the Joint Chiefs were up to and get word to the Director.

“
We already know a great deal about Agent Carver,” Farrell said.

It was time to improvise. “We’ve implemented new facial recognition software onto the network over at NIC,” she said, referring to the network of surveillance cameras in the Capitol. “The system is barely out of beta mode, but it’s already very effective. I think it could help us locate the targets.”

Farrell nodded slowly. “Very well. You can stay.”

U.S.S. Ronald Reagan

The Mediterranean

From his perch on the carrier’s massive bridge, Captain White watched the Israeli coast burn as bright as an Arizona sunrise. His staff watched live footage of an Egyptian trawler firing rocket-propelled grenades at a Ferry full of Israeli citizens. Egypt had not officially joined Iran, Syria, Hezbollah or HAMAS in declaring war on Israel, but it had also done nothing to stop wave after wave of private Egyptian vessels with armed citizens taking potshots at the exodus of Israeli refugees.

The U.S. was still sitting on the sidelines. White couldn’t believe it.

“
We’re tracking fifty-six boats leaving Tel Aviv,” the Ensign reported. “All full of civilians. All packed to the gills.”

“
I see ‘em,” Captain White said as he followed the real-time satellite feed.

The carnage was happening well within striking distance of White’s strike group, but he was powerless to do anything. All the treaties and alliances in the world seemed to have been tossed on the trash heap without explanation. If his orders stood, every one of those refugee boats would be sunk.

The U.S.S. Reagan’s official motto was Peace Through Strength. Yet Admiral Bennington had ordered the carrier strike group to move out to international waters. The best White could do was cite engine problems with one of the CSG’s destroyers, using this as an excuse to remain in the theatre. Bennington had not demanded a more detailed report, and Captain White took that to mean that his heart was not entirely into the order for defiance of the NATO pact either. White was going to maintain his position as long as he could and hope for a reversal.

Night had fallen, and Hezbollah had stepped up their rocket attacks to the north while the Syrian fighter-bombers continued their assault from the northeast. In Jerusalem, the Palestinians had met the Iranian armored divisions with open arms, and together they controlled both sides of the city, as upwards of twenty-thousand armed citizens and HAMAS soldiers alike walked behind six battalions of Iranian tanks.

The bridge phone rang. The Ensign picked up and passed the phone to Captain White. White listened wordlessly for less than two seconds. “I see,” he said finally. “Thank you.” He hung the phone back on its cradle and turned to the Ensign. His face was suddenly ashen.

“
That was the Admiral,” he said. “President Hatch has been killed.”

“
Killed? Killed how?”

He leaned against the bulkhead. The bad news out of the States never seemed to end. “I don’t know. They’re saying it was someone from Yemen.”

White sat down. He did not feel grief, exactly, nor sadness. Like most everyone in the military, he hadn’t voted for Hatch. But he felt shock.

“
Yemen?” the Ensign said incredulously. “Why couldn’t it be someone from Iran, or Palestine? At least then we could attack.”

Arlington Cemetery

6:20 a.m.

Rays of orange sunlight broke through a layer of wispy clouds. Several ragged figures slouched up the hillside, threading themselves like needles through the endless rows of majestic, identical headstones. Without binoculars, Speers could not be sure that Agent Carver and Eva were among them. Don’t move a muscle, he told himself. Not until you are sure.

He sat on the slope known as Section 26, just below Arlington House. It was here, in General Robert E. Lee’s former front yard, that the cemetery’s first Civil War veterans had been interred in the 1860s. Speers was careful not to sit directly on top of any of the graves. He positioned himself on the edge of one of the burial rows, behind a hedgerow that provided camouflage as well as a view of the city.

He counted nine helicopters combing the skies above the Capitol. They were concentrated in the airspace above the western district, Georgetown, Turkey Run Park and Rock Creek Park. Looking for Agent Carver, no doubt.

The Eternal Flame, where President Kennedy and his immediate family were buried, wasn’t far down the hill. President Hatch would soon be getting a memorial here somewhere, Speers thought, albeit a much smaller one. He tried to remember the names of all the Presidents that had died in office. Kennedy, Lincoln, Harding, Franklin Roosevelt, Garfield, Harrison and McKinley. And now President Hatch. Speers did the math. That meant about 18% of all Presidents never left the job alive. Wow. Being President was the most dangerous job in America.

The fugitives grew closer. He distinctly recognized Eva’s tall, composed gait, and Agent Carver’s athletic strides. Behind them, O’Keefe pulled and prodded Angie Jackson up the hill. Angie’s face was a frozen mask of pain and her eyes were half-shut and without focus, as if she was under hypnosis. But with O’Keefe’s steady guidance, Angie’s feet moved, albeit slowly. Speers’ insides filled with dread as he wondered what to say when she asked him where her son was.

Speers whistled and waved from behind the hedgerow. When they reached Section 26, O’Keefe gave the Chief a hug. “I’m glad you’re alive,” she told him.

“
It’s nice to see some friendly faces,” he admitted.

“
You lost weight,” Eva told him.

“
It’s the new three-day diet,” Speers replied. “You can eat anything you want, but you spend the entire time running from bad guys.”

The distant hum of helicopter rotors grew measurably louder. Speers hiked up the hill, leading them behind Arlington House and to what had once been General Robert E. Lee’s back door. He let them into the Hunting Hall, a high-pitched, rustic room adorned with taxidermied deer.

“
Is my son here?” Angie said.

Before Speers could respond, Carver glimpsed something terrifying from the south-facing window: Ulysses Bradleys pulling up Memorial Drive.

“
It’s a trap,” Carver said. A pair of attack helicopters came in so low that he could see the faces of the pilots.

“
Down here,” Speers called out. He began down a rickety set of stairs to a 19th century wine cellar. Save for a few low-wattage light bulbs, the white-walled cellar had been restored to its former glory. Oak barrels stacked along the far wall, perfuming the room with their scent. Speers lifted one of the barrels, revealing an ancient wooden trap door over the stone floor. He opened it.

“
What is this place?” Eva said.

“
Trust me.” Speers helped her down a wooden ladder that descended into a dark, cool dirt-floor chamber. She was followed by Carver and O’Keefe.

Angie trembled as Speers helped her descend the ladder. As he closed the trap door behind her, he heard broken glass and footsteps on the floorboards upstairs.

Carver whipped out his cell phone and used the screen’s backlight to illuminate the otherwise pitch-black chamber. Nudging past Eva, Speers shined his phone on a large security portal that looked just like the one he had first entered yesterday underneath Union Station.

He punched his code into the door and it pushed open. At the second entry point, he held his right eye up to the retina scanner. He had performed the routine so many times in the past several hours that it was practically second nature.

Unlike the tunnels linking Union Station with the Eisenhower Building, there was no emergency lighting. “Light ‘em up,” Carver said as he waved his phone to reveal the claustrophobic passageway. “Don’t worry – you can’t make any calls down here, which means Ulysses can’t track the signal.” They all pulled out their phones except Angie, who had lost hers in Chesapeake Bay three days earlier.

This stretch of tunnel was six and a half feet high, providing barely enough headroom for Carver and Speers, and just four-feet wide. The floor was a mixture of hard-packed clay and mud, and the roof and sides were lined by oven-baked bricks and mortar. Many of the bricks had crumbled away from the walls during the past 150 years, forced out by tree roots that, at some places, had grown completely across the width of the tunnel.

Speers stumbled in the half-light, then recovered and set a pace that he hoped his sore feet could handle. He and Carver walked up front, with Eva in the middle and O’Keefe prodding Angie Jackson along in the rear.

“
I’ve heard rumors about these tunnels,” Eva said as they trudged along in the near-darkness. “I thought they were a myth.”

“
Nixon actually believed the Russians were going to park a sub in the Potomac,” Speers explained. “He spent millions linking Lee’s tunnels to the ones under the city.”

“
Who else has the code?” Carver asked.

“
The question is, who that has the code is still alive?”

“
Correct.”

“
Besides me? Hector Rios. And General Wainewright.”

They heard the rats long before he spotted them. Thousands of tiny clawed feet swarming the tunnel walls, squeezing in and out of the cracks and breaches that had been created by tree roots and seismic tremors. Carver shined his cell phone light ahead and waited for the wave of vermin to pass.

They moved on, the blue glow of their cell phones lighting only four or five feet in front of them at any time. The tunnel floor gradually became an ankle-deep sludge that grew several inches deeper with each passing minute. But it was much wider now. Up to 10 feet wide in some places. Carver welcomed the elbow room. But not the water.

“
I don’t like the looks of this.”

“
It goes under the Potomac,” Speers explained.

“
The Holland Tunnel goes under the Hudson. But it doesn’t leak.”

“
You try getting budget to waterproof a tunnel that nobody ever uses.”

“
Get us out of here alive,” Eva chimed in, “and I’ll give you as much budget as you need.”

They kept moving, slowly and without much speaking, as the water levels continued to rise. Something swam against Carver’s leg. He decided not to say anything to the others.

He could not get his mind off the fact that General Wainewright had a code. If they were caught in a narrow section of the tunnels, they would be easily trapped, unable to flee or fight. Carver was not afraid of dying.

Carver believed in the afterlife. He was sure that his soul would be separated from his body and ascend to some blissful spirit world where Mormons and Athiests and Muslims and Jews would comingle with scant memory of what had divided them on Earth. But his greatest, most irrational fear lay in the mechanics of the soul’s journey. When exactly did the soul separate from the body? Could it move through solid rock, or did it need a clear path to ascend to some unseen parallel universe? He did not want to die here, in a tiny tunnel far below ground. He did not like the idea of his soul roaming these dark tunnels for all eternity, endlessly looking for a way out.

“
Where is my son?” Angie suddenly cried out. The voice loosened Carver from his own obsessions. He looked back. Angie was hyperventilating and her eyes darted around at frightening speed. This was someone who belonged under a psychologist’s care. O’Keefe had been at her side since they left Fort Campbell, and the wear and tear was starting to show in her face.