Line of Succession: A Thriller Page 4

  “Same answer to both questions. Osama.”

  “What? Osama bin Laden killed your football career?”

  “Different Osama. In my second year training camp, this defensive tackle named Osama Sinclair busted my left knee. He was just some poor guy from Miami trying to make the squad, but he ruined me. Couldn’t get his name out of my head. Osama. Osama. Osama. I was in the hospital having fantasies about what I was gonna do to this guy when I got out. Next day was 9/11. Osama Bin Laden was all over the news gloating about what he’d done to America. Maybe it was the pain pills, but I had a dream – super vivid, I mean – that I was going to devote my life to protecting America. Next day, I called up the Army and asked about joining. They were real skeptical about the knee injury. Then I called up a guy I went to high school with that joined the Secret Service. Hadn’t talked to him in years. Turned out to be a Jaguars fan. Said his kid had my trading card. And here I am.”

  *

  The President loosened the belt on his robe, revealing the 28-inch waistline that his Presidential opponent had famously suggested was “out of step with mainstream America.” The President moved in for a kiss, but Eva turned her head. She hated the awkwardness of Oval Office meetings. The President had assured her that he’d had all the customary microphones and cameras removed, but she knew the Secret Service often backfilled his feeble attempts at privacy.

  She checked her watch. “This better be good,” she said. “We’ve got a Security Council meeting in ten minutes and I still have to pack.” They had planned a secret getaway to Martha’s Vineyard, going so far as to have the President’s body double rent an estate on nearby Cape Cod to throw off the paparazzi.

  The President sat on the couch and motioned for Eva to sit opposite him. He put his palms together, as if to pray, and leaned forward, speaking as delicately as he could: “It’s about the weekend.”

  He had hardly said anything, but Eva could tell where he was going with this. It was the downside of being the President’s lover. “No need to explain,” she said coolly, although she’d been looking forward to the trip for two months. “It’s just business.”

  “The Iranian Ambassador’s asking for an urgent meeting at Camp David.”

  Eva’s brown eyes got wide. The President had made international headlines by extending an olive branch to Iran during his first term and opening up diplomatic relations for the first time since the 1970s. But the presence of an embassy in D.C. had done little to cool tensions. “I trust you’re going to run this by the Security Council,” she said.

  “I can’t. Half the council’s against me.”

  “Work with me, Isaac. I’m in the half that’s on your side.”

  “The Iranian hardliners are making threats again.”

  “So? Talk of wiping Israel off the map is an annual political rite for the clerics, nothing more.”

  “This isn’t business as usual. Sixteen MIGs broke Israeli airspace last week. Looked a heckuva lot like a dry run for an attack. CIA says Iran’s reserve armor brigades have been called up too. And there’s this.” He took a handheld computer from the desk and handed it to Eva. She looked at the satellite image depicting a number of official-looking state cars surrounding some sort of industrial complex. “That was taken near the Caspian Sea just a few days ago.”

  “Is that an Egyptian flag on that SUV?”

  “Sure is, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are bigwigs from Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Syria there too.”

  “What are they selling? Nukes?”

  “Water.”

  “Water?”

  “That complex in the photo is a desalination plant. It’s a long story. I can fill you in up at Camp David this weekend.”

  Camp David. The suggestion that she would join him there was stunning, even for the President, who in his second term had too often thrown caution to the wind. “Oh, the GOP would love that,” Eva quipped, giving the President room to play it off as a joke.

  His face was as serious as it had ever been. “Eva, we’re both widowers. We’re doing nothing wrong. Maybe we should just – “

  “Stop. We’ve been over this. MSNBC did that Web poll, remember? When they caught us going to dinner together?”

  “Hardly scientific.”

  Eva was insistent. “Nobody wants the Commander-in-Chief dating a cabinet member. The fact that we’re both widowers doesn’t change anything. It just looks bad.”

  “I’m your boss. I could order you to come to Camp David to discuss the Iranian trade embargo.”

  “And that would be sexual harassment.” Eva stood and picked up her Louis Vuitton attaché.

  “I’m not joking."

  “You’ve always been bold,” she said. “I’ve loved you for that. Don’t be reckless.”

  “You can always change your mind,” he said.

  “I won’t.”

  As Eva left, Mary Chung took the opportunity to poke her head in the door. She was holding a freshly pressed suit. “Excuse me, Mister President,” she said. “The Security Council is waiting.”

  White House Cabinet Room

  7:30 a.m.

  Defense Secretary Dexter P. Jackson arrived for the National Security Council meeting in uncharacteristically casual dress for himself on a Sunday morning, let alone Washington – chinos, boat shoes and an untucked white oxford shirt. Nearly the entire Congress and White House staff had already left town for the summer recess. Dex’s bags were packed and his wife was standing by to pick him up as soon as the NSC meeting was over. In less than three hours he would be trolling for marlin in Chesapeake Bay.

  Although his name was inscribed on a brass nameplate on his Cabinet chair, he could have found it blindfolded. Like everything in status-oriented Washington, the chairs around the long mahogany table that President Nixon had gifted to the White House were arranged in hierarchical order. The Defense Secretary’s chair was next to the President’s high-backed version. Chairs assigned to the Vice President and secretaries of State and Treasury were the next-closest, arranged in the order that the cabinet posts were first created beginning in the late 1700s. Likewise, the Homeland Security chair – vacant today, since President Hatch had recently fired the agency’s Director – was situated at the far end of the table.

  Dex stared out the French doors at the Rose Garden as the rest of the Council members filed in. There would be several additional vacant chairs today, since the Vice President was already on vacation, two of the four Joint Chiefs were abroad and the President’s National Security Advisor was at an off-site meeting.

  Speers sat in the back against the wall, chugging an energy drink. At the President’s request, Agent Carver sat beside him, leaving O’Keefe to baby-sit Lieutenant Flynn in Georgetown.

  This was Carver’s first NSC meeting. He turned to Speers. “Is there an agenda, Chief?”

  “There are two agendas,” Speers whispered. “The President’s and the Joint Chiefs’. The President’s objective is to get NSC meetings over with as fast as possible, since he’d rather bypass General Wainewright and the Joint Chiefs altogether and keep expanding his executive powers. The Joint Chiefs’ agenda – and Dex Jackson’s, for that matter – is to bring up as many explosive items as possible within an hour, so that they can publicly say they’ve attempted to work with the President and won’t take the blame for anything that goes wrong. It’ll also make for gripping reading after they retire and fish for seven-figure book deals.”

  Carver shook his head. “Our tax dollars at work.”

  Secretary of Defense Dexter Jackson checked his watch. As usual, the President and Eva were late. Dex leaned over the table, his caramel face widened in a grin. “A hundred bucks says that Eva comes in about sixty seconds before the POTUS again,” he said, using the acronym common in military circles for President of the United States.

  General Wainewright looked up from the emails his assistant printed out for him each morning. “Too easy.”

  “Okay. You
want odds? The President walks in right after Eva, and he’s still tucking his shirt in.”

  “You’re on,” Wainewright said. “And make it two hundred.”

  Wainewright, a four-star General and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pulled two hundred-dollar bills out of his wallet. The 58-year-old war horse was simultaneously muscular and overweight. He bench-pressed his weight every morning in his neighborhood gym. He also ate a piece of chocolate cake with brandy at bedtime every night. It all showed.

  “Is the AC on?” Wainewright said. He wiped the sweat from his brow. There was nothing wrong with the temperature in the air conditioned room. These were the dog days of summer, yet Wainewright insisted on wearing a dress uniform made heavier by the decorations pinned to it. In addition to the four silver stars on each of his shoulders, General Wainewright wore the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal, the Army Service Ribbon, an Air Assault Badge, the Combat Action Badge, the Distinguished Service Medal and the Legion of Merit.

  Eva entered and bid them all good morning. Just as Dex Jackson had predicted, President Hatch arrived some sixty seconds after Eva’s entrance, and he was indeed tucking his shirt in. Wainewright reached across the table and slid the two hundred dollars into Dex’s waiting hand.

  The cabinet secretaries stood out of courtesy until the President sat down. The Joint Chiefs no longer bothered.

  “Appreciate you all giving up your Sunday morning,” President Hatch began. “It’s August. Congress is already in recess and Number Two’s already on his way back home. Let’s make this a quickie. Dex, whadda ya got?”

  “NSA is monitoring several suspected terrorists cells. There’s an unusually large amount of chatter, but nothing we can move on.” Dex’s crow’s feet flexed with each utterance. “I recommend we go to Code Orange during the recess.”

  The President, who had made no secret of regarding Jackson as the politico who cried wolf, shrugged. “But you said yesterday you have no hard data. Nothing specific.”

  “I hear CIA has something. But frankly, without a Homeland Security chief to facilitate intel coordination between agencies, cooperation hasn’t been that great. I’m left to speculate.”

  “Fine. Put some Guard units at the ports. And be quiet about it.”

  Wainewright cut in. “What Guard units? I don’t know how many different ways I can say this, Mister President, but even my reserves are on their fifth tour overseas. Our only option is to ask Ulysses what it would cost to get some coverage there.”

  It was Eva’s turn to push her agenda. “I don’t know if you’ve looked at the defense budget lately, but I think we’re into Ulysses for about all we can afford. Frankly, I think the level at which we’re outsourcing our security is getting out of hand.”

  “All due respect,” Dex cut in, “Ulysses is hardly the problem. We’ve had two domestic bombings in the past year, and our Army is in three war zones. That’s not counting covert ops. I’d like to reiterate my proposal to begin strategic pullouts from several of our bases. We need help here at home.”

  The previous year, a young Islamic fundamentalist had exploded a Chevy Trailblazer on Santa Monica’s 3rd Street Promenade on a sunny Saturday afternoon, killing 170 people. The scene repeated itself in Seattle’s historic Fish Market, killing another 75. In both cases, the Allied Jihad – an extremist network borne out of the ashes of Al Qaeda – claimed responsibility. The Allied Jihad demanded that the U.S. close American bases in the Middle East, stop supporting Israel and “Zionist” organizations worldwide and cease military and intelligence operations in several predominantly Islamic countries.

  In response to the terror attacks, Dex had recommended pulling back U.S. troops – or at least pretending to – while covert Ulysses units systematically located terrorist leaders and eliminated them at various global hotspots. The basis for reasoning was his firm belief that terrorist organizations could not be defeated through conventional warfare.

  President Hatch had disagreed vehemently. He wanted to make a statement. Within eight hours of the second bombing, he ordered the Pentagon to immediately invade several Indonesian islands where Allied Jihad cells had taken control from the central government. Ten months later, American forces continued to fight a fierce insurgency that had spread to more islands. Indonesia was the new Iraq.

  Now General Wainewright took the opportunity to drive the issue home. “Dex is right,” he said. “We’re just threadbare here at home. The Allied Jihad’s whupping us in Afpack. They’re whupping us in Indonesia. We’ve got twice as many combat-ready forces in the vicinity of Israel and Lebanon than we do stateside. We should start by pulling out of all those areas.”

  “Hold it,” Eva clucked. They had been over and over this. Wainewright’s repeated insistence that Israel go it alone was enough to convince her that he was an anti-Semite. “Iran will be in Israel so fast,” she said, “it’ll make the holocaust look like a warm-up round.”

  General Wainewright glared at her. “Madam Treasury Secretary, I suggest you stick to counting nickels and dimes.”

  “If the Pentagon hadn’t misappropriated eight billion dollars last year,” Eva struck back, referencing an accounting nightmare reported by the Washington Post, “I might have a few dimes to count.”

  The President tapped his pen against his drinking glass. The room quieted. “I’ve trimmed the Council size before,” he cautioned, “and I’m prepared to go smaller until we find a group that works harmoniously together. None of you have tenure.”

  “Yes, Mister President,” Speers and Carver said in unison from the back of the room. Nobody else responded.

  “I expect everyone to bring cool heads after Labor Day. You are dismissed.”

  The Council wasted no time gathering their things.

  “Wait,” Eva asked in a voice loud enough for the entire room to hear her. “Was there anything to discuss on Iran?”

  The President shot her a glare that was both wicked and intimate. “No,” he said. “We’re done for the day.” Eva grabbed her attaché and left without another word.

  The scarcely perceptible moment didn’t escape Agent Carver, who elbowed Speers in the ribs.

  Carver’s cell phone buzzed as the room adjourned. It was O’Keefe. She began spewing something about Lieutenant Flynn. “Slow down,” Carver said, retreating to a corner of the room.

  “Flynn’s dead,” she said, only slightly slower.

  “Dead? How can he be dead?”

  “I went out to pick up breakfast, and when I came back…They came in through the upstairs window. I was only gone fifteen minutes, so they must’ve been watching the place.”

  Carver wasn’t entirely surprised. Ever since the home’s alarm system had gone unrepaired, Carver had been warning his superiors that something like this could happen. You couldn’t keep a field house a secret forever, and you certainly couldn’t keep one safe without minimum security measures.

  “He was garroted,” O’Keefe continued. “Looks like they used the sleeve of his own uniform. I’ll get the lab out here to confirm it.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Carver said. He had handled situations like this at CIA. It was better to cut a few corners and contain the damage. “If anyone finds Lieutenant Flynn, or finds out that we were holding him, this could blow up in our face and go all the way up the chain.”

  “I’m not sure what you want me to do.”

  Carver didn’t respond. He couldn’t risk anyone linking this to Julian Speers or the President. He was going to have to dump the body. But he didn’t want to get into that now. He had to make sure he got all the facts while O’Keefe’s mind was still fresh. “Just tell me everything you see.”

  As he listened to O’Keefe describe the crime scene in greater detail, the main question in Carver’s mind was who could possibly know that they were even holding Lieutenant Flynn. Only Speers knew about Flynn’s detainment, and Carver trusted him completely. It was evident from his meeting this morning that even the President d
idn’t know the details of the operation’s day-to-day activities. “I got a callback from my contact at MobiKomm,” O’Keefe added. “Are you sitting down? Flynn put in sixteen calls to Congressman Bailey in the past week. And they were more than just crank calls. The calls lasted nearly two minutes on average, so clearly there was some conversation taking place.”

  “Bailey? As in Speaker of the House Bailey?” Bailey was an unabashedly redneck five-term Republican Congressman from West Virginia.

  “One and the same.”

  Carver hung up, pulled Speers aside, and explained the situation. The Chief of Staff dashed out into the hallway, racing after the President. “Mister President,” Speers said as he caught up with him, “Wait. There’s been a development.”

  The President didn’t stop to look at Speers. “Not now, Chief.” Speers wasn’t about to take no for an answer. He ran alongside the President like a spaniel chasing a truck. “Sir, please. It’s urgent.”

  Exasperated, the President finally stopped and ducked into Mary Chung’s office. The 68-year-old grandmother of eight was eating a lox and bagel sandwich as she typed at blistering speed. “I need a moment,” the President said, which was a long-understood code that meant he was taking over the room and wanted her to leave. Mary rose and scrambled out of her own office to give him privacy. The President leveled his gaze at Speers. “So where’s the fire, Chief?”

  “The witness we told you about. He’s been murdered. Right under our nose.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the President said. “By who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Julian, I need evidence. Find another witness.”

  “Sir, the deceased had been talking to Congressman Bailey.”

  The President’s eyebrows shot up. “You can prove that?”

  “Not the way we’re going about this. It’ll never hold up in court. We need an executive order to legitimatize the investigation.”