Line of Succession: A Thriller (43 page)

Carver didn’t have time to ask questions. He closed the pantry door and spoke in a quiet but stern voice, explaining that Ulysses had surrounded the White House in advance of a military takeover, and that within the hour, General Wainewright would be in the Oval Office. “The first thing we have to do,” Carver explained, “is convince Ulysses that they’re not going to get out of this without a fight.”

“
Let me get this straight,” Fordham said. “You want me to commit FBI agents to fight our own people?”

“
Not
people
,” Carver asserted. “A rogue
corporation
that’s acting against the interests of the United States.”

Director Fordham was silent for a few seconds. “Call it what it is. You’re talking about killing Ulysses employees,” he said. “That means killing Americans.”

Carver realized the magnitude of what he was asking. The FBI had managed to lose fewer than fifty agents in the line of duty during the Bureau’s entire history. It had done that, in part, by sticking to its core mission, and that mission didn’t typically involve urban combat. But the stakes were higher now than they had ever been. “Call it what you will,” Carver said. “But if you don’t help us, there won’t be a White House to defend. And that’s a promise.”

“
That sounds like a threat.”

“
It’s a vow. If the rightful President can’t occupy this house, then nobody will.”

The Director sighed heavily. “Look, I’m not sure how many agents are even on the premises right now. Maybe a hundred.”

“
It’s a start.”

“
Ulysses has heavy weapons. How are we supposed to deal with that?”

FBI Headquarters – otherwise known as the J. Edgar Hoover Building – was only a few blocks away. Carver had only been there once, in the mid-90s, to see a weapons demonstration the agency put on to attract recruits. The demonstrators had pulled guns from a large cache of confiscated criminal weaponry, including a large number of assault rifles that had been taken from gangs, terrorists, Mafia families and militias throughout the ages. He had even laid eyes on one of Al Capone’s Tommy Guns.

“
You still have that gonzo criminal weapons collection?” Carver asked.

“
It’s still there,” Fordham confirmed.

“
Open the entire collection up to any field agents that are willing to fight. Let them choose their weapon and all the ammo they can carry. Then get your people on the rooftops along 17th Avenue and start picking off these corporate knuckle-draggers.”

Carver hung up. Behind him, Agent Rios toggled through screen after screen of surveillance cameras. “Cavalry coming?” Rios said hopefully.

“
You’re not off the hook yet. Let’s move.”

“
Five minutes,” Rios said. Mary had said that LeBron Jackson was being held in the White House. The kid’s life was in jeopardy because of him. No way was he torching this place with an innocent inside. But he had nearly exhausted the six stories, 132 rooms, thirty-five bathrooms and eight staircases covered by surveillance.

Finally, Rios detected movement on the camera. “There,” he whispered. “Second floor. The residences.”

The camera zoomed in on two Ulysses soldiers sitting in chairs outside one of the bedrooms. They had pulled an antique side table between them and were playing a game of Hearts.

“
Bored-silly babysitters,” Carver quipped.

“
The kid’s gotta be in that room.”

Rios stood. Carver pushed him back down. “I’ll go,” Carver said.

“
There’s two of them.”

“
Let me worry about them. You know this place better than anyone. Figure out how to blow it up.”

Burlington, North Carolina

11:39 a.m.

As Madge snoozed in the bedroom, Nico watched MSNBC’s coverage of the events in Washington turn ugly. A camera crew had been booted off the top of the Treasury Building by hostile Ulysses troops. A reporter had fallen to his death.

Nico was no fan of Eva Hudson, but the idea of enduring Ulysses’ brand of military rule was unbearable.

He set to work on the Ulysses USA firewall.

Less than five minutes went by. Bingo. He received a pixel flare from a slave machine within Ulysses’ headquarters confirming that the hack was successful.

So he was in. Now what? It wasn’t like he had time to develop some killer malware that would wreak major havoc in their mobile combat systems. Nico knew nothing about the security giant’s internal operations. He needed someone to tell him how to throw a wrench into the machine.

“
Nico?” Madge’s disappointed voice floated up behind him.

Nico spun around in his chair and absorbed the reality of Madge in the morning. Tracks of dried drool caked the corners of her mouth. Hair pulled back into an unflattering bun. She wore the bed comforter as a makeshift robe.

“
How’d you sleep, sweetie?” Nico managed. He backed his chair up against the monitor in hopes of obscuring the screen. But Madge had already seen enough to know what he was up to. “Madge,” he began backpedaling, “Babe, I can explain this.”

Her disappointment morphed into palpable anger. “Nico, I told you to
wake
me if the old urges came back. This is
my
house! This is
God’s
house! I can’t
have
this in here!”

“
God?” Nico said. “Madge, you’re wrong. God would totally approve of what I’m doing. Can you please sit down? Please?”

She sat at the dining table. “I didn’t listen to the radio in the car yesterday,” she started. “I didn’t want to know why you were out. I wanted to believe.”

“
I’m legitimately out of jail,” Nico said, “and that’s the truth. I’m just not legitimately out of
custody
.” Madge sobbed. “Sweetie, just listen, please. I made a deal with two intelligence agents right after the bombing in Monroe.”

“
From what country?”

“
What country? Ours! The National Security Agency. The N-S-A!”

An excited gleam twinkled in Madge’s eyes. “Are you telling me you helped the government catch the terror cell in Yemen?”

It would have been easy to let Madge believe this. But, Nico decided, it was time for total honesty. “No, no, no. It’s not like what you’ve seen on the news. There is no connection with Yemen. That’s a big lie perpetrated by the Pentagon brass. I helped them find the terrorists, all right. Turns out, they’re right in our own government.” Nico stopped, waiting for Madge’s response. She didn’t blink. “I’m saying that Americans planned this. People in the Pentagon, Madge! After the President was assassinated…”

The rims of Madge’s eyes grew red. “What?”

“
Oh, right. Sorry. I forgot you didn’t know. They announced it while you were sleeping. President Hatch is dead. They killed him.”

Madge grabbed the remote control, pointed it at the little TV on the bookshelf and turned up the TV. A FOX News camera was trained on the Presidential motorcade, which was winding away from the White House. A ticker ran along the screen that said CHAOS IN WASHINGTON.

“
Madge,” Nico said, “Forget about the President for a sec. This isn’t what I wanted to tell you.”

“
Forget about it? The President is dead!” Madge ran to the bathroom, slammed the door and locked it. Nico heard the sound of running water, then uncontrollable sobbing. As much as Nico wanted to comfort her, there was no time. Nico turned back to Madge’s computer and resumed his exploration of the Ulysses network. There had to be something he could do, some wrench to throw in the machine.

The White House

11:43 a.m.

Agent Carver crept up the staircase to the Executive Residences. He slung the M4 Rios had taken from the weapons locker over his shoulder and held his SIG out in front of him. If given the chance, he would use his bare hands. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

He stopped at the next corner and held his breath, listening. He heard the dry slap of cards against a wooden table. “Gin!” someone said. It was a man’s voice, and he was just down the hall.

“
Screw you, cheater,” the other soldier said. “Shuffle ‘em, will ya? I want revenge. Gotta take a piss.”

Carver heard a chair slide backwards and footsteps on the floor runner. Carver backpedaled, ducking into a doorway that he soon realized was an open bathroom. He stepped behind the door just as the soldier entered. The soldier did not bother to shut the door behind him, nor did he bother to raise the toilet seat as he unzipped his cargo pants and sprayed his urine into the bowl, onto the seat and onto the floor.

A bronze bust of Jefferson Adams stood on a wooden nightstand beside him. It looked heavy, and the thought of using it to bash the kidnapping bastard’s skull in brought a smile to Carver’s face. But the soldier would inevitably clang head-first into the mirror or toilet bowl, which would alert his colleague. Carver was all alone. Stealth was key. Carver decided he would have to get his hands dirty. It was the only away.

Carver quietly holstered his pistol and took a towel from the hook behind the door. In one motion, he stepped out from behind the door and looped the towel tight around the soldier’s neck, squeezing hard enough so that he could neither breathe nor scream. The only sound was the stream of urine splashing the vanity, wall and flooring. The urine flowed long after the point that the man’s heart stopped. Bending to a near-squat, Carver settled the soldier’s dead weight noiselessly down onto the bathroom floor.

He left the bathroom and crept back to the corner. He held his hand over his mouth and began coughing. “Mike?” the other soldier called. “You okay in there?” Carver coughed again, more violently. “Mike?” the soldier repeated. Carver launched into a series of choking sounds, the likes of which he had not tried since he was in seventh grade, when he and his friends would pretend to have asthma attacks to get out of algebra class.

He heard the other soldier’s chair slide behind him, then footsteps. Carver kept up the charade until his target rounded the corner. Then he chopped him hard to the neck. Once he was on the ground, the soldier’s face froze in shock as he grappled at his shattered windpipe. Carver put one hand over the man’s mouth and used the fingers of his other hand to pinch off his nose, effectively shutting off his airways. The soldier blacked out thirty seconds later. In sixty seconds, he was dead.

Carver dragged the body into the bathroom, laid it next to the other Ulysses soldier, and shut the door. Then he proceeded down the hallway to the bedroom that the men were guarding. The door was slightly ajar. As Carver approached, he heard the bleeps and bloops of a video game. He nudged the door wider with his foot and saw LeBron Jackson in his native habitat – happily playing his first video game since his father had taken him and his mother on that fateful Chesapeake fishing trip.

*

Agent Rios knew very little about arson, and even less about making a bomb. But he knew that the White House had one of the most sophisticated smoke and chemical detection systems in the world. He wasn’t going to be able to simply walk into one of the kitchens and turn the gas on, wait a few minutes, and light a match. The sprinkler system would have the fire out in no time. He would have to be more creative.

He took the elevator to the White House bowling alley and walked through the back, down the stairs, to the boiler room. Early in his career, he had occasionally accompanied city officials here to read the gas meter, and he remembered the pipes snaking overhead to every part of the White House complex.

The room was pretty much as he remembered it, except that the old steel gas pipes had all been replaced with new copper. He sat on the floor looking up at them, hoping for some type of eureka. It did not come. He opened up the janitor’s closet and looked around. It was then that he spotted a can of WD-40. As a kid growing up in East L.A., one of his cousins had taken him out into the desert and showed him how to make a flamethrower using a lighter, some metal tubing and a can of WD-40, which was highly flammable. He remembered standing over a giant anthill, holding the flame in front of the aerosol can, and torching thousands of red ants. At the time, he had considered it the coolest thing he had ever seen.

He looked back up at the gas pipe.

The White House had twenty-nine fireplaces and three kitchens. It stood to reason that the gas pipe funneled natural gas to all those places, where it was bottled up and stored at one of many valve endpoints. If Rios could find a way to inject flame into the pipe from the boiler room, he saw no reason why the flame wouldn’t be carried through the gas pipe to all the fireplaces and each of the stoves in the White House, causing fires in many or all of those places. He doubted even the White House’s system had access to enough water pressure to put out 29 fires at once.