“I understand.” He paused. “If you find the flight crew, please don’t move them at all. Call us, and we’ll handle it. Okay?”
“How will we know?”
“White shirts, shoulder boards with stripes on them, and they’ll be Japanese, probably.”
It should have sounded crazy, but it didn’t. Magill knew that bodies often did survive airplane crashes in the most incredible outward condition, so intact that only a trained eye could see the signs of fatal injury on first inspection. It often unnerved the civilians who were usually the first to arrive at a scene. It was so strange that the human body seemed more robust than the life it contained. There was a mercy to it, for the survivors were spared the hellish ordeal of identifying a piece of burned, torn meat, but that mercy was balanced by the cruelty of recognizing someone that could not talk back. Magill shook his head and had one of his senior people relay the special order.
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The firefighters down below had enough of them already. The first special order, of course, had been to locate and remove the body of President Roger Durling. Everything was secondary to that, and a special ambulance was standing by for his body alone. Even the First Lady, Anne Durling, would have to wait a little for her husband, one last time. A contractor’s mobile crane was maneuvering into the far side of the building to lift out the stone cubes that covered the podium area like a battered pile of children’s hardwood blocks; in the harsh light it seemed that only the letters and numbers painted on their sides were lacking to make the illusion complete.
PEOPLE WERE STREAMING in to all the government departments, especially the senior officials. It was hardly the usual thing for the VIP parking slots to fill up at midnight, but this night they did, and the Department of State was no exception. Security personnel were called in as well, for an attack on one government agency was an attack on all, and even though the nature of the attack on the government devalued the advantage of calling in people armed with handguns, it didn’t really matter. When A happened, B resulted, because it was written down somewhere that B was what you did. The people with the handguns looked at one another and shook their heads, knowing that they’d be getting overtime pay, which put them one up on the big shots who’d storm in from their places in Chevy Chase and suburban Virginia, race upstairs, and then just chat with one another.
One such person found his parking place in the basement and used his key-card to activate the VIP elevator to the seventh floor. What made him different was that he had a real mission for the evening, albeit one he’d wondered about all the way in from his Great Falls home. It was what he thought of as a gut check, though that term hardly applied here. Yet what else could he do? He owed Ed Kealty everything, his place in Washington society, his career at State, so many other things. The country needed someone like Ed right now. So Ed had told him, making
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a strong case for the proposition, and what he himself was doing was … what? A small voice in the car had called it treason, but, no, that wasn’t so, because “treason” was the only crime defined in the Constitution, cited there as giving “aid and comfort” to the enemies of his country, and whatever Ed Kealty was doing, he wasn’t doing that, was he?
It came down to loyalty. He was Ed Realty’s man, as were many others. The relationship had started at Harvard, with beers and double dates and weekends at his family’s house on the water, the good times of a lively youth. He’d been the working-class guest of one of America’s great families–why? Because he’d caught Ed’s youthful eye. But why that? He didn’t know, had never asked, and probably would never find out. That was the way of friendship. It just happened, and only in America could a working-class kid who’d scratched into Harvard on a scholarship get befriended by the great son of a great family. He would have done well on his own, probably. No one but God had given him his native intelligence. No one but his parents had encouraged his development of that gift and taught him manners and . . . values. The thought caused his eyes to close as the elevator doors opened. Values. Well, loyalty was one of those values, wasn’t it? Without Ed’s patronage he would have topped out, maybe, as a DAS, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. The first word had long since been expunged from the title painted in gold letters on his office door. In a just world, he would have been in the running for the removal of the next word from the title as well, for wasn’t he as good with foreign policy as anyone else on the seventh floor? Yes, he surely was, and that would not have come to be without his having been Ed Realty’s man. Without the parties where he’d met the other mover-shakers, and talked his way to the top. And the money. He’d never taken a bribe of any sort, but his friend had advised him wisely (the advice having come from his own advisers, but that didn’t matter) on investments, allowing him to build up his own financial independence and, by the way, buy a five-thousand-square-foot home in Great Falls, and to
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put his own son into Harvard, not on a scholarship, for Clifton Rutledge III was the son of somebody now, not merely the issue of a worker’s loins. All the work he might have done entirely on his own would not have brought him to this place, and loyalty was owed, wasn’t it?
That made it a little easier for Clifton Rutledge II (actually his birth certificate said Clifton Rutledge, Junior, but “Jr.” wasn’t quite the suffix for a man of his station), Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.
The rest was mere timing. The seventh floor was always guarded, all the more so now. But the guards all knew him, and it was merely a matter of looking like he knew what he was doing. Hell, Rutledge told himself, he might just fail, and that could well be the best possible outcome– “Sorry, Ed, it wasn’t there….” He wondered if that was an unworthy thought as he stood there by his office door, listening for footsteps that would match in speed the beating of his heart. There would be two guards on the floor now, walking about separately. Security didn’t have to be all that tight at a place like this. Nobody got into State without a reason. Even in daytime, when visitors came in, they needed escorts to wherever they were going. At this time of night, things were tighter still. The number of elevators in service was reduced. Key-card access was needed to get all the way to the top floor, and a third guard was always at the elevator banks. So it was just timing. Rutledge checked his watch for several cycles of footsteps, and found that the intervals were regular to within ten seconds. Good. He just had to wait for the next one.
“Hi, Wally.”
“Good evening, sir,” the guard replied. “Bad night.”
“Do us a favor?”
“What’s that, sir?”
“Coffee. No secretaries to get the machines going. Could you skip down to the cafeteria and have one of their people bring an urn up here? Have them set it up in the conference room up the hall. We’ll be having a meeting in a few minutes.”
“Fair enough. Right away?”
“If you could, Wally.”
“Be back in five, Mr. Rutledge.” The guard strode off
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with purpose, turned right twenty yards away and disappeared from view.
Rutledge counted to ten and headed the other way. The double doors to the Secretary of State’s office were not locked. Rutledge walked right in through the first set, then through the second, turning on the lights as he did so. He had three minutes. Half of him hoped that the document would be locked away in Brett Hanson’s office vault. In that case he would surely fail, since only Brett, two of his assistants, and the chief of security had the combination, and that did have an anti-tamper alarm on it. But Brett had been a gentleman, and a careless one at that, always so trusting on the one hand and forgetful on the other, the sort who never locked his car or even his house, unless his wife made him. If it were in the open, it would be in one of two places. Rutledge pulled open the center drawer of the desk and found the usual array of pencils and cheap pens (he was always losing them) and paper clips. One minute gone, as Rutledge carefully shuffled through the desk. Nothing. It was almost a relief, until he examined the desktop, and then he nearly laughed. Right there on the blotter, tucked into the leather edging, a plain white envelope addressed to the Secretary of State, but without a stamp. Rutledge took it from its place, holding the envelope by the edges. Unsealed. He moved the flap and extracted the contents. A single sheet of paper, two typed paragraphs. It was at this point that Cliff Rut-ledge got a chill. The exercise had been theoretical to this point. He could just replace it, forget he’d been here, forget about the phone call, forget about everything. Two minutes.