“Nature abhors a vacuum?” John asked quietly.
“Sum’tim like that.” Chavez yawned. “Damned if we ain’t got one here and now.”
“NOT ACCOMPLISHING VERY much, am I?” Jack asked, in a voice both quiet and bleak. It was hitting him full force now. There was still a glow, though most of what rose into the sky now was steam rather than smoke. What went into the building was the most depressing sight. Body bags. Rubberized fabric with loop handles at the ends, and some sort of zipper in the middle. Lots of them, and some were coming out now, carried by pairs of firelighters, snaking down the wide steps around the fragments of broken masonry. It had just started, and would not end soon. He hadn’t actually seen a body during his few minutes up top. Somehow, seeing the first few bags was worse.
“No, sir,” Agent Price said, her face looking the same as his. “This isn’t good for you.”
“I know.” Ryan nodded and looked away.
I don’t know what to do, he told himself. Where s the manual, the training course for this job? Whom do I ask? Where do I go?
I don’t want this job! his mind screamed at itself. Ryan reproached himself for the venality of the thought, but he’d come to this newly dreadful place as some sort of leadership demonstration, parading himself before the TV cameras as though he knew what he was about–and that was a lie. Perhaps not a malicious one. Just stupid. Walk up to the fire chief and ask how it’s going, as though anyone
23
with eyes and a second-grade education couldn ‘t figure that one out!
“I’m open to ideas,” Ryan said at last.
Special Agent Andrea Price took a deep breath and fulfilled the fantasy of every special agent of the United States Secret Service all the way back to Pinkerton: “Mr. President, you really need to get your, er, stuff–she couldn’t go that far–“together. Some things you can do and some things you can’t. You have people working for you. For starters, sir, figure out who they are and let them do their jobs. Then, maybe, you can start doing yours.”
“Back to the House?”
“That’s where the phones are, Mr. President.”
“Who’s head of the Detail?”
“It was Andy Walker.” Price didn’t have to say where he was now. Ryan looked down at her and made his first presidential decision.
“You just got promoted.”
Price nodded. “Follow me, sir.” It pleased the agent to see that this President, like all the others, could learn to follow orders. Some of the time, anyway. They’d made it all of ten feet before Ryan slipped on a patch of ice and went down, to be picked back up by two agents. It only made him look all the more vulnerable. A still photographer captured the moment, giving Newsweek its cover photo for the following week.
“AS YOU SEE, President Ryan is now leaving the Hill in what looks like a military vehicle instead of a Secret Service car. What do you suppose he’s up to?” the anchor asked.
“In all fairness to the man,” John the commentator said, “it’s unlikely that he knows at the moment.”
That opinion rang across the globe a third of a second later, to the general agreement of all manner of persons, friends and enemies alike.
SOME THINGS HAVE to be done fast. He didn’t know if they were the right things–well, he did, and they
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weren’t–but at a certain level of importance the rules got a little muddled, didn’t they? The scion of a political family whose public service went back a couple of generations, he’d been in public life practically since leaving law school, which was another way of saying that he hadn’t held a real job in his entire life. Perhaps he had little practical experience in the economy except as its beneficiary-his family’s financial managers ran the various trusts and portfolios with sufficient skill that he almost never bothered meeting with them except at tax time. Perhaps he had never practiced law–though he’d had a hand in passing literally thousands of them. Perhaps he had never served his country in uniform–though he deemed himself an expert in national security. Perhaps a lot of things militated against doing anything. But he knew government, for that had been his profession for all of his active–not to say “working”–life, and at a time like this, the country needed someone who really knew government. The country needed healing, Ed Kealty thought, and he knew about that.
So, he lifted his phone and made a call. “Cliff, this is Ed …”
1
STARTING NOW
THE FBI’S EMERGENCY command center on the fifth floor of the Hoover building is an odd-shaped room, roughly triangular and surprisingly small, with room for only fifteen or so people to bump shoulders. Number sixteen to arrive, tieless and wearing casual clothes, was Deputy Assistant Director Daniel E. Murray. The senior watch officer was his old friend, Inspector Pat O’Day. A large-framed, rugged man who raised beef cattle as a hobby at his northern Virginia home–this “cowboy” had been born and educated in New Hampshire, but his boots were custom-made– O’Day had a phone to his ear, and the room was surprisingly quiet for a crisis room during a real crisis. A curt nod and raised hand acknowledged Murray’s entry. The senior agent waited for O’Day to conclude the call.
“What’s going on, Pat?”
“I was just on the phone with Andrews. They have tapes of the radar and stuff. I have agents from the Washington Field Office heading there to interview the tower people. National Transportation Safety Board will have people there, too, to assist. Initial word, looks like a Japan Airlines 747 kamikaze’d in. The Andrews people say the pilot declared an emergency as an unscheduled KLM flight and drove straight over their runways, hung a little left, and . . . well …” O’Day shrugged. “WFO has people on the Hill now to commence the investigation. I’m assuming this one goes on the books as a terrorist incident, and that gives us jurisdiction.”
“Where’s the ADIC?” Murray asked, meaning the Assistant Director in Charge of the Bureau’s Washington office, quartered at Buzzard’s Point on the Potomac River.
“St. Lucia with Angie, taking a vacation. Tough luck for Tony.” The inspector grunted. Tony Caruso had gotten away only three days earlier. “Tough day for a lot of people. The body count’s going to be huge, Dan, lots
26
worse’n Oklahoma. I’ve sent out a general alert for foren-sics experts. Mess like this, we’ll have to identify a lot of bodies from DNA. Oh, the TV guys are asking how it’s possible for the Air Force to let this happen.” A shake of the head accompanied the conclusion. O’Day needed somebody to dump on, and the TV commentators were the most attractive target of opportunity. There would be others in due course; both hoped the FBI would not be one of them.
“Anything else we know?”
Pat shook his head. “Nope. It’s going to take time, Dan.”
“Ryan?”
“Was on the Hill, should be on his way to the White House. They caught him on TV. He looks kinda rocky. Our brothers and sisters at USSS are having a really bad night, too. The guy I talked to ten minutes ago almost lost it. We might end up having a jurisdictional conflict over who runs the investigation.”
“Great.” Murray snorted. “We’ll let the AG sort that one–” But there wasn’t an Attorney General, and there wasn’t a Secretary of the Treasury for him to call.
Inspector O’Day didn’t have to run through it. A federal statute empowered the United States Secret Service as lead agency to investigate any attack on the President. But another federal statute gave FBI jurisdiction over terrorism. A local statute for murder also brought the Washington Metropolitan Police in, of course. Toss in the National Transportation Safety Board–until proven otherwise, it could merely be a horrible aircraft accident–and that was just the beginning. Every agency had authority and expertise. The Secret Service, smaller than the FBI, and with fewer resources, did have some superb investigators, and some of the finest technical experts around. NTSB knew more about airplane crashes than anyone in the world. But the Bureau had to be the lead agency for this investigation, didn’t it? Murray thought. Except that Director Shaw was dead, and without him to swing the clout club . . .
Jesus, Murray thought. He and Bill went back to the Academy together. They’d worked in the same squad as
27
rookie street agents in riverside Philadelphia, chasing bank robbers . . .
Pat read his face and nodded. “Yeah, Dan, takes time to catch up, doesn’t it? We’ve been gutted like a fish, man.” He handed over a sheet from a legal pad with a handwritten list of known dead.
A nuclear strike wouldn’t have hurt us this badly, Murray realized as he scanned the names. A developing crisis would have given ample strategic warning, and slowly, quietly, senior people would have left Washington for various places of safety, many of them would have survived– or so the planners went–and after the strike there would have been some sort of functioning government to pick up the pieces. But not now.