“Okay, I’m up,” he told the wooden door. Then he realized that his room didn’t have an attached bathroom, and he’d have to open the door. That he did.
“Good morning, Mr. President.” A young and rather earnest-looking agent handed him a bathrobe. Again, it was the job of an orderly, but the only Marine he saw in the corridor was wearing a pistol belt. Jack wondered if there had been another turf fight the night before between the Marine Corps and the Secret Service to see who had primacy of place in the protection of their new Commander-in-Chief. Then he realized with a start that the bathrobe was his own.
“We got some things for you last night,” the agent explained in a whisper. A second agent handed over Cathy’s rather tattered maroon housecoat. So, someone had broken into their home last night–must have, Jack realized,
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as he hadn’t handed over his keys to anyone; and defeated the burglar alarm he’d installed a few years earlier. He padded back to the bed and deposited the housecoat there before heading back out. Yet a third agent pointed him down the hall to an unoccupied bedroom. Four suits were hanging on a poster bed, along with four shirts, all newly pressed by the look of them, along with half a score of ties and everything else. It wasn’t so much pathos as desperation, Jack realized. The staff knew, or at least had an idea of what he was going through, and every single thing they could do to make things easier for him was being done with frantic perfection. Someone had even spit-shined his three pair of black shoes to Marine specifications. They’d never looked so good before, Ryan thought, heading for the bathroom–where, of course, he found all of his things, even his usual bar of Zest soap. Next to that was the skin-friendly stuff Cathy used. Nobody thought that being President was easy, but he was now surrounded by people who were grimly determined to eliminate every small worry he might have.
A warm shower helped loosen his muscles, and clouded the mirror with mist, which made things even better when he shaved. The usual morning mechanics were finished by 5:20, and Ryan made his way down the stairs. Outside, he saw through a window, a phalanx of camouflage-clad Marines stood guard on the quad, their breathing marked by little white puffs. Those inside braced to attention as he passed. Perhaps he and his family had gotten a few hours of sleep, but no one else had. That was something he needed to remember, Jack told himself as the smells drew him to the kitchen.
“Attention on deck!” The voice of the sergeant-major of the Marine Corps was muted in deference to the sleeping children upstairs, and for the first time since dinner the previous night, Ryan managed a smile.
“Settle down, Marines.” President Ryan headed toward the coffeepot, but a corporal beat him there. The correct proportions of cream and sugar were added to the mug–again, someone had done some homework–before she handed it across.
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“The staff is in the dining room, sir,” the sergeant-major told him.
“Thank you.” President Ryan headed that way.
They looked the worse for wear, making Jack feel briefly guilty for his shower-fresh face. Then he saw the pile of documents they’d prepared.
“Good morning, Mr. President,” Andrea Price said. People started to rise from their chairs. Ryan waved them back down and pointed to Murray.
“Dan,” the President began. “What do we know?”
“We found the body of the pilot about two hours ago. Good ID. His name was Sato, as expected. Very experienced airplane driver. We’re still looking for the co-pilot.” Murray paused. “The pilot’s body is being checked for drugs, but finding that would be a surprise. NTSB has the flight recorder–they got that around four, and it’s being checked out right now. We’ve recovered just over two hundred bodies–”
“President Durling?”
Price handled that one with a shake of the head. “Not yet. That part of the building–well, it’s a mess, and they decided to wait for daylight to do the hard stuff.”
“Survivors?”
“Just the three people who we know to have been inside that part of the building at the time of the crash.”
“Okay.” Ryan shook his head as well. That information was important, but irrelevant. “Anything important that we know?”
Murray consulted his notes. “The aircraft flew out of Vancouver International, B.C. They filed a false flight-plan for London Heathrow, headed east, departed Canadian airspace at 7:51 local time. All very routine stuff. We assume that he headed out a little while, reversed course, and headed southeast toward D.C. After that he bluffed his way through air-traffic control.”
“How?”
Murray nodded to someone Ryan didn’t know. “Mr. President, I’m Ed Hutchins, NTSB. It’s not hard. He claimed to be a KLM charter inbound to Orlando. Then he declared an emergency. When there’s an in-flight emergency, our people are trained to get the airplane on the
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ground ASAP. We were up against a guy who knew all the right buttons to push. There’s no way anyone could have prevented this,” he concluded defensively.
“Only one voice on the tapes,” Murray noted.
“Anyway,” Hutchins continued, “we have tapes of the radar tracks. He simulated an aircraft with control difficulties, asked for an emergency vector to Andrews, and got what he wanted. From Andrews to the Hill is barely a minute’s flying time.”
“One of our people got a Stinger off,” Price said, with somewhat forlorn pride.
Hutchins just shook his head. It was the gesture for this morning in Washington. “Against something that big, might as well have been a spitball.”
“Anything from Japan?”
“They’re in a national state of shock.” This came from Scott Adler, the senior career official in the State Department, and one of Ryan’s friends. “Right after you turned in, we got a call from the Prime Minister. It’s not as though he hasn’t had a bad week himself, though he sounds happy to be back in charge. He wants to come over to apologize personally to us. I told him we’d get back–”
“Tell him yes.”
“You sure, Jack?” Arnie van Damm asked.
“Does anybody think this was a deliberate act?” Ryan countered.
“We don’t know,” Price responded first.
“No explosives aboard the aircraft,” Dan Murray pointed out. “If there had been–”
“I wouldn’t be here.” Ryan finished his coffee. The corporal refilled it at once. “This is going to come down to one or two nuts, just like they all do.”
Hutchins nodded tentative agreement. “Explosives are fairly light. Even a few tons, given the carrying capacity of the 747-400, would not have compromised the mission at all, and the payoff would have been enormous. What we have here is a fairly straightforward crash. The residual damage was done by about half a load of jet fuel–upwards of eighty tons. That was plenty,” he concluded. Hutchins had been investigating airplane accidents for almost thirty years.
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“It’s much too early to draw conclusions,” Price warned.
“Scott?”
“If this was–hell,” Adler shook his head. “This was not an act by their government. They’re frantic over there. The newspapers are calling for the heads of the people who suborned the government in the first place, and Prime Minister Koga was nearly in tears over the phone. Put it this way, if somebody over there planned this, they’ll find out for us.”
“Their idea of due process isn’t quite as stringent as ours,” Murray added. “Andrea is right. It is too early to draw conclusions, but all of the indications so far point to a random act, not a planned one.” Murray paused for a moment. “For that matter, we know the other side developed nuclear weapons, remember?” Even the coffee turned cold with that remark.
THISONE HE found under a bush while moving a ladder from one part of the west face to another. The firefighter had been on duty for seven straight hours. He was numb by now. You can take only so much horror before the mind starts regarding the bodies and pieces as mere things. The remains of a child might have shaken him, or even a particularly pretty female, since this fireman was still young and single, but the body he’d accidentally stepped on wasn’t one of those. The torso was headless, and parts of both legs were missing, but it was clearly the body of a man, wearing the shredded remains of a white shirt, with epaulets at the shoulders. Three stripes on each of them, he saw. He wondered what that meant, too tired to do much in the way of thinking. The fireman turned and waved to his lieutenant, who in turn tapped the arm of a woman wearing a vinyl FBI windbreaker.
This agent walked over, sipping at a plastic cup and wishing she could light a cigarette–still too many lingering fumes for that, she grumbled.