Line of Succession: A Thriller Page 3

  He laid the loaded Smith & Wesson .38 revolver in his lap. A Koran rested in the glove compartment. It was important that his practice conditions simulate the real thing. Accordingly, the truck bed was full of oversized tires that weighed about seven hundred pounds collectively, or about the same as the combination of ammonium nitrate and explosive putty that he would replace them with.

  He clutched a small stopwatch close to his chest, took a deep breath, and then clicked it.

  Twenty-four seconds elapsed before he laid the stopwatch next to him and stepped on the gas. The super-duty rig wasn’t exactly race-worthy, especially since Ahmed had let some of the air out of the driver-side wheels. But the V-8 under the hood managed to get up to 45 mph by the time he was halfway down the quarter-mile drag strip.

  He drove toward a four-foot-high construction barricade at the opposite end of the strip. Next to it was a homemade ramp that he had fashioned out of concrete. At the last moment, he jerked the steering wheel sharply to the left with his left hand, while simultaneously working the parking brake. On cue, the truck began to “ski” – balance on the partially deflated driver-side wheels only – on the ramp just as his passenger-side wheels lifted high enough to clear the barricade. Releasing the parking brake, he tilted the steering wheel slightly to the right and was back on four wheels again.

  He skidded to a stop and drummed the wheel happily. It was the twelfth time in a row he’d managed to clear the barricade. He was ready.

  Ahmed’s smile faded as he spotted the police patrol car entering the gates with its roof lights swirling red and blue. He clutched his firearm in his lap, switching off the safety. He had to carry out his mission in less than five hours. Nothing could stop that.

  The officer was alone. He parked several feet away and got out, a barrel-chested man with a mustache as thick as a caterpillar and a sidearm so big and heavy that his pants hung dangerously low on his hips.

  “That’s some drivin’,” the officer said, looking up at Ahmed in the jacked-up rig. Ahmed smiled at the small-town officer, who could not see the gun in his lap. Ahmed knew he was lucky to be in a rural place where the police were inexperienced. In any big city, the officer would have kept his distance and demanded that he step out of the vehicle.

  “You some kind of stunt man?” the officer asked.

  “Yes,” Ahmed said, smiling as he looked down. It was half-true. He had arrived in a cargo container from Yemen via Hamburg three months earlier. His contact had met him at the Port of Long Beach and driven him to Burbank, where he was treated for dehydration, given a studio apartment, a fake California driver’s license and enrollment in a local stunt driving school. After the stunt driving program was over, he was immediately offered a job as an extra in an Arab exploitation film during which he would have had to drive a sports car down a staircase into a crowd of people. The irony of the situation amused him, but he had no time to indulge himself. He was already due in West Virginia to prepare for his mission.

  “We don’t get too many stunt drivers,” the officer said, looking at the ramps that Ahmed had set up for practice. “Well, that explains the props.”

  “Is there a problem, officer?”

  “You’re on private property. I’ll need to see driver’s license and registration.”

  “Yes sir.” Ahmed pretended to look in his wallet. He glanced at his watch. He reckoned that the act of subduing the officer, tying him up and transporting him home would take at least an extra two hours of his time, maybe more. It wasn’t worth it. He couldn’t risk the mission. There were others to consider. The timing was critical.

  He made his choice.

  “Here you are,” Ahmed said. He drew his .38 and fired a round into the officer’s chest. The officer fell to the ground. Ahmed fired two more shots into the officer’s ample gut to make sure he was dead.

  He got out of the truck and lifted the officer by the shoulders toward the rear of the patrol car. He popped the trunk and, with some difficulty, lifted the dead weight up high enough to roll him in. He started the car and drove it into a dense field of high grass and young poplar trees at the end of the strip until it was completely obscured by the greenery.

  He scratched his arms as he made his way out of the field. By the time he reached the truck, a rash had discolored his wrists, hands and forearms. He cursed the officer and climbed back into the truck. He had to get to a pharmacy. His mission would begin in less than five hours.

  The White House

  6:50 a.m.

  This wasn’t Blake Carver’s first meeting in the Oval Office, yet it seemed as if every drop of moisture in his mouth had evaporated. His stomach had quivered less during joint-op missions with Green Berets in Afghanistan. The awe-factor Carver felt had little to do with President Isaac S. Hatch, the unpopular Chief Executive who sat on the couch opposite him in a white monogrammed robe and slippers, or Julian Speers, who sat beside him. It was what the office represented. It was the great ones who had sat there before them. FDR. JFK. Elvis.

  The President thumbed through the 40-page brief that Speers had put the finishing touches on only minutes before. The paper in the President’s hands was still warm from the printer.

  Carver and Speers had come directly from Field House DC310, where O’Keefe still remained with Lieutenant Flynn. They wore yesterday’s suits and a piece of sugarless gum had substituted for a toothbrush. All Carver’s days seemed to be like this. It was the reason he kept his black hair clipped to a quarter-inch on the sides and an inch on top. It always looked the same no matter how long he had been up or what part of the world he had flown in from. Whenever his job allowed him to be in Washington, he went to this young barber on Adams Morgan who shaped it with a straight razor.

  Mary Chung, the President’s longtime personal assistant, entered with three cappuccinos on a tray. The President took a cup and continued to skim the document. Speers also helped himself. He took a moment to inhale the aroma of the ultra-potent brew that the White House barista had invented for the always-wired President. Carver politely declined.

  “You’ve gotta be the only person in Washington who’s never set foot in Starbucks,” Speers said. “And you’ve been awake, what, thirty hours?”

  “Never touch the stuff,” Carver said of caffeine. He had been raised Mormon in a predominantly LDS town in rural northern Arizona. He’d long since quit the LDS Church, but the religion’s edicts of clean living still agreed with him. The nature of Carver’s work kept him from living a saintly life, but he still treated his body like a temple. To this day, he’d never touched alcohol.

  “So what’s your vice?” Speers pressed him. “Ginseng? Sugar?”

  “Exercise,” Carver explained. “Blood to the brain.” He eyed Speers’ pot belly, accentuated by the wide floral tie that draped over it. “You should try it sometime.”

  Speers wiped cappuccino foam off his goatee. “You really expect me to believe that you’ve never had caffeine.”

  “Okay, once,” Carver admitted. “In ’06. I was in Columbia.”

  “Columbia?” Speers said. “I didn’t see that in your CIA file.”

  “By design, no doubt. Anyhow, my leg got caught in a rodent trap made of sharpened bamboo.”

  “Who kills a rat with bamboo?”

  “Wal-Mart hasn’t yet made it to the Columbian countryside, Chief. And this thing was really bad news. By the time I put on the tourniquet and could think about getting the hell out of there, I’d lost a lot of blood. I came across a coffee plantation and decided, for energy’s sake, to eat some beans straight from a tree.”

  “See? Caffeine saved your life.”

  “No. It almost killed me. I had the runs so bad I barely made it back to Bogotá.”

  The President finished scanning Speers’ report and set the document down beside him on the couch. “This is a heckuva brief,” he said, folding his reading glasses and shoving them into his robe pocket. “Not quite brief enough, though. Paraphrase for me.”

&
nbsp; Speers leaned forward. “We think there’s sufficient cause for a public investigation into DOD’s oversight of Ulysses USA.”

  “Public?” the President said. “No, no, no. First I need to know definitively whether Ulysses USA is up to any hanky panky.”

  “With all due respect, sir,” Speers said, “we started with that. We’re not saying that Ulysses isn’t the end buyer for the missing weaponry. We don’t know that for sure yet. But we’re saying that the trail seems to begin within the Pentagon. Or your own Cabinet, sir.”

  This wasn’t the answer that the President wanted to hear. He had created a monster in Ulysses USA, and he was looking for a way to kill it. Ulysses’ growth had coincided with a major downturn in U.S. military recruiting that had left America far short of the troops it needed to fulfill the President’s commitments at home and abroad. Having run on a platform of change – principally a change from the previous administration’s devotion to an open-ended assault on Islamic radicalism – he had, after two terror attacks on American soil, ended up entangling American forces in more foreign conflicts than ever.

  If the Pew Research polls were to be believed, President Hatch’s foreign quagmires had now made him the most unpopular President since Richard Nixon. With so little mandate, a military draft was not a feasible option. He didn’t have enough support in Congress, to say nothing of the military itself, which prided itself as an all-volunteer organization. Even suggesting it would have been political suicide. Facing a significantly downsized military, the Joint Chiefs had proposed outsourcing some of the fighting to Ulysses USA.

  President Hatch had been a businessman long before taking up politics, and the concept of outsourcing a governmental role to a more cost-effective private-sector company was, in principal, an appealing way to bolster the Virginia Democrat’s pro-business reputation. It was also hard to argue with the economics. Training a volunteer army with taxpayer money – and paying out VA benefits for as long as they lived – had simply gotten too expensive. It was pricey on the recruiting end, too. After the quagmires in Indonesia and Afpak, even the grunts in the infantry were demanding $15,000 signing bonuses.

  The President thumbed through the report again and leaned forward. “This is a helluva accusation. You have proof?”

  “I wouldn’t say proof per se,” Speers said, “but we think that a small group of officers is supervising it, and that someone high up in DOD is the puppet master.” He looked at Carver. “Tell him.”

  “Mister President,” Carver said, speaking softly. “It’s possible that Defense Secretary Jackson may be connected to this.”

  “Dex Jackson?” the President said. Now he understood the Chief’s reference to his own Cabinet. “You think it’s Dex getting rich off this?” It occurred to Speers that he had never heard the President refer to Secretary Jackson by his first name. These days, with the cabinet’s all-too-public sniping, it was easy to forget that he and the President had once been friends. Jackson was also the sole Republican in the President’s cabinet, a move that had bought him a little bipartisan support in Congress.

  “We’ve got a witness,” Speers said. “He said Secretary Jackson authorized a weapons delivery to someplace called Rapture Run.”

  “Rapture what?” the President said.

  “NSA has been monitoring what they believe may be terrorist-related cells in both Syria and the U.S. The codename Rapture Run has come up before. We just don’t have context.”

  The President shook his head and stood up. “If you’re still trying to decode context, why are you wasting my time?”

  Speers cut in. “Sir, we can’t rule out the possibility of a domestic terrorist attack using U.S. weaponry.”

  “Julian, you used that word again. Possibility. It’s all very loosey goosey.”

  “I’m requesting an executive order to raid Secretary Jackson’s office so that I can get you better data.”

  The President frowned. As much as he secretly longed to nail Dex Jackson to a cross, he didn’t have the political capital to do it right now. “Julian, I asked you to investigate a pattern of weapons smuggling that would help me weaken Ulysses. Now you’re accusing Dex of either arms dealing or arming terrorists. There’s a big difference. I can’t go into this willy nilly.”

  “Sir,” Speers pleaded, “I may not be able to hold off the reporter much longer.” In June, a New York Times reporter had called Speers asking for commentary on an in-progress story claiming that the DOD had given Ulysses preferential access to government contracts, access to classified intelligence and non-secured loans of government-owned weaponry, which they were in turn selling to America’s enemies. Speers had been able to use his strings at the Times to temporarily squash it. He had until after Labor Day. Then the story would run, with or without the White House’s approval.

  “Tell you what,” the President said. “I’d like to meet this witness of yours. If it feels right, I’ll give you what you want.”

  The door opened. Mary Chung popped her head in. “Mister President,” she said, “Secretary Hudson’s here for your meeting. Shall I have her wait?”

  “No. Go ahead and show her in.”

  The President turned to Carver. “I want you in the Security Council meeting today. Sit in the back and keep your mouth shut.”

  Heads turned as Treasury Secretary Eva Hudson entered wearing a grey power suit and designer flats. Practical shoes were important in a city like Washington. Parking was a pain in the ass, even if you had your own driver. It was better to walk.

  “Gentlemen,” she said as she flashed a flawless smile that looked even whiter against her new spray-on tan.

  “You’re looking awfully tan for a politico,” Speers quipped.

  “Thank you, Chief.” Eva picked at a coffee stain on Speers’ lapel as she passed. He could smell the molding putty she used to give her long brunette hair body and bounce. He wanted to touch it.

  Agent Carver wasn’t immune to Eva’s charms either. He turned at the office exit to check out Secretary Hudson’s Pilates-toned rear end. The move didn’t escape the President, who wagged his finger at Carver as he shut the door.

  Carver and Speers hustled through the West Wing. Speers struggled to keep up with Agent Carver’s pace. “Quick bite before the NSC meeting?” Speers offered. “Bet you’ve never had the Executive Omelet.”

  “I only eat egg whites.” They headed down the stairs. “Was it just me, or was Eva’s tan a little orange?”

  “No, it was bronze.”

  “You think she’s got any tan lines?”

  “Funny.”

  “I should ask the President.”

  Speers didn’t like the tone of the remark. “Don’t believe the rumors.”

  “Rumors are a threat to national security,” Carver said. “So if Eva Hudson, the hottest woman in politics, is intimately involved with the leader of the free world, I need to know about it.” Carver referred to the latest issue of Vanity Fair, in which Eva had taken the top honors in an article titled “World’s Sexiest Feds.”

  Whispers of an intimate relationship between Eva and the nation’s first widower President had plagued them for years. Carver knew that Hudson had started working for the president twelve years earlier, as his Assistant Chief of Staff, when he was Governor of Virginia. During the term, Hudson’s husband died in a tragic car wreck. A month later, then-Governor Hatch’s wife was struck with a rare, aggressive bone cancer that ended her life within weeks. That was when the whispers started. Staffers went on record that the two spent an inappropriate amount of alone time together soon after the tragedies. Eva was then suddenly promoted to State Congressional Liaison, and then the next year, Lieutenant Governor. She didn’t stay in the role long. The International Monetary Fund came knocking, and Eva, sick of the gossip and southern politics, jumped at the chance to join the IMF as Assistant Director. But two years later, after the election, she couldn’t refuse President Hatch when he asked her to join his cabinet.

  Sweat
ran down Speers’ forehead. “You okay?” Carver asked him.

  “Forget for a second what I said in there. What if the President’s right? What if it’s the wrong time to stir up trouble at the Defense Department?”

  “That’s crazy talk.”

  “You’ve seen his approval rating among the military.”

  “Please. Most of those guys voted GOP anyhow. And besides, the President’s a second-termer. Nothing to lose.”

  “Any head of state will tell you,” Speers warned Carver, “you don’t wanna piss off the guys with the guns.” Speers had long believed that if Thailand could have seventeen military coups in the past sixty years, and a superpower like Russia could have two in the past twenty years, it could happen anywhere. While most Americans worried about whether a few Arabs had weapons of mass destruction, it was the President’s enemies at home that kept Speers from sleeping at night.

  They came to the kitchen, where the President’s security detail chief, Special Agent Hector Rios, was eating a five-egg omelet. Rios had been in the Secret Service for twelve years and spent the past six with President Hatch’s team. Even before the six-foot-ten Rios stood to shake Carver’s hand, Carver recognized the former NFL linebacker.

  “Jacksonville Jaguars,” Carver said, grinning, revealing a full set of semi-straight, but perfectly white, teeth. “The first Latino middle linebacker to ever be drafted in the first round.”

  Rios grinned and extended his oversized paw for a handshake. “I’m impressed,” he said. “Intel guys are usually into the fringe sports. Mixed martial arts, roller derby. You know.”

  “I’ve been known to take in the odd roller derby match myself. So whatever happened to you? How’d you become a Fed?”