Line of Succession: A Thriller Read online

  “Hold it. You’re not actually going to come right out and ask him about Lieutenant Flynn, are you?”

  “You know your problem, Carver? You’re a cynic. You assume everyone’s dirty. There may be a perfectly good reason that Lieutenant Flynn called the Speaker of the House.”

  Carver couldn’t believe his ears. “Oh, like what? Are they both members of the Capitol City Men’s Chorus?”

  “Think about it. The Lieutenant had obviously networked way above his pay grade. Doesn’t happen by accident. Maybe he was being blackmailed. Bailey’s the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Maybe the Lieutenant was reaching out for support.”

  “You’ve got a vivid imagination,” Carver said. “I guess that’s why you’re in the Executive Branch.”

  The rental car’s nav system cut in: “Exit in one quarter-mile.”

  “Listen,” Carver said. “The reason I called. The Lieutenant never existed, okay? You never saw him. We never talked to anyone about him. Got it?”

  Speers was quiet for a moment. “If you say so. You’ll tell me what happened at some point, right?”

  “No, Julian.”

  “I’m the Chief of Staff. Don’t forget that. I could order you to tell me.”

  “For your own sake, no. Now go have a nice chat with the Congressman.”

  Lee Federal Correctional Facility

  Lee, Virginia

  Carver passed through the metal detector and gathered his watch, phone, SIG, ammo, money clip and belt from a plastic bucket. This was his first time in a federal prison. A tall, portly guard stood behind him, grinning as he watched Carver struggle to slip back into his black oxfords.

  “Might help if you untied the shoelaces,” the guard cracked.

  “Shut it,” Carver said.

  Meagan O’Keefe came through next, pulling on her brown penny loafers. The humidity from last night’s rain had shortened her long strawberry-blond curls to tight, shoulder-length coils.

  “I raced the whole way here,” O’Keefe said, a little out of breath. She wiped her sweaty hands on her pantsuit. “Suicide job threw himself in front of the Blue Line.”

  The guard motioned for them to follow him down the hallway.

  “Death by subway,” Carver pondered. “Not a bad way to go. Quick. A sure thing.”

  O’Keefe scrunched up her face. “Messy. Gimmie pills any day.”

  “No. Too painful. Not decisive enough.”

  “Exactly my point. It’s that moment just as you decide to do it when you wish you hadn’t. Or at least that’s what they say.”

  Carver smiled. “I enjoy our banter.”

  The guard led them past several cells with bored-looking inmates in orange jumpsuits.

  “Who’s the convict?” O’Keefe said.

  “Nico Gold,” Carver said with dread. “Serving twenty years for grand larceny. He wrote a program that lifted small, nearly undetectable sums out of millions of foreign bank accounts.”

  “Sounds like a hacker. You said we needed a linguist.”

  “Hacking’s just a lucrative sideline. Languages are his passion. That program he wrote? It worked in twelve languages, including Russian, Hebrew, Hungarian and Arabic. He cracked the World Bank and the IMF.”

  “Maybe he can fix my credit score.”

  The guard opened a second set of gates and led them to a white door with a four-by-four inch opening. The guard filled it first with his puffy eyes, then with his mouth. “Visitors,” he said directly into it.

  He unlocked the door and turned to Carver. “Nico’s not dangerous. I’ll be down the hall. Just yell.”

  They entered the windowless room that was illuminated only by a skylight and closed the door behind them. Nico Gold sat at the plain plywood table in a short-sleeve orange jumpsuit. He was pale and lean with clear-framed eyeglasses, just as he’d appeared in his mug shot five years ago, but he had added tattoos to both forearms that said simply, “EVA.” He closed the book he was reading and placed it on the table before him.

  “Carver and O’Keefe,” Carver said by way of introduction. He had gotten used to saying CIA after his name. Now he was a man without an agency. “Federal agents.”

  O’Keefe eyed the title of Nico’s book. “Conversational Cornish?”

  “Cornish is a Celtic language,” Nico explained. His voice dripped with condescension.

  “It’s also a dead language.”

  “What else am I gonna do, pump iron?”

  Carver opened his briefcase and pulled out a folder marked CLASSIFIED. He threw it on the table in front of Nico. The prisoner opened it and began pouring over the scramble of letters and phonetic characters.

  Nico’s mouth twisted into a smirk. “Oh,” he said with cynical delight. “You’re coming to me with a problem?”

  “Coded transmissions,” Carver explained. “Our geeks got past the encryption phase, but the code is something else.”

  Nico looked for only a moment more, then rose from the table and walked to the door. He put his mouth to the tiny opening near the top of the door and yelled “Guard!”

  O’Keefe was flabbergasted. ”What’re you doing? This meeting isn’t over.”

  Nico turned to her. “You’re not the first spooks to come in here looking for help. If you’re serious, put an offer in writing and submit it through my attorney.”

  Carver reached into his briefcase once more, whipped out a pre-written negotiated deal. He handed it to Nico. “Official enough for you? It’s signed by a federal judge.”

  Nico scanned the document, shrugged. “What else ya got?”

  “Full disclosure,” Carver went on, “There’s no time for negotiations. We think we have a major terrorist threat on our hands.”

  Nico looked the agents over, sensing leverage. O’Keefe stood with her arms across her chest, biting her lip to the point of drawing blood. Nico smiled, clearly delighted. “Y’know, the Russians have a saying: Smart wolves don’t chase deer. They just wait by the river.”

  Carver had expected this, and he was ready with the carrot. ”Help us catch these guys and I’ll cut your sentence in half.”

  “Uh-uh. Come back to the river when you’re thirsty.”

  Carver heard footsteps and saw the guard’s eyes fill the door window once again. He turned to Nico. “You want high stakes? Fine. You break the code before anyone gets hurt and I’ll get you a Presidential pardon. Anything less and we double your sentence.”

  The guard spoke through the opening in the door. “Everything okay here?” he said.

  Nico turned to the door and smiled. “Ask the concierge to send down my things. I’ll be checking out today.”

  Carver and O’Keefe took some air outside the prison’s main office as Nico was processed for release into their custody. Carver took a pack of mint-flavored gum from his pocket and offered her a piece. “Sugarless,” he said.

  “Figures.” O’Keefe smiled and took a piece. She had long given up on coaxing the nutritionally pious Agent Carver to try so much as a donut. “Have you ever even had a cavity?”

  “Nope.”

  She stepped closer to him. Close enough so he could smell her peppermint shampoo. Carver felt a chill on his neck. It always happened when O’Keefe invaded his personal space.

  “So,” she said. “Losing any sleep over this?”

  It had been a long time since he had been with a woman. Even longer since he had been in a relationship. He had allowed his work to completely devour him. It was nearly impossible to get close to anyone with a normal life with his schedule. And unlike many of his colleagues, he had absolutely no taste for one night stands or hookers. O’Keefe was the first woman he had felt a connection to since coming back from Afpak, and it had taken a mountain of willpower to keep the relationship professional. He had gone down that slippery slope with her once, and barely escaped with the professional relationship intact.

  He stepped back slightly. “Losing sleep over what?”

  “The investigati
on. Someone died on our watch, and you did God knows what to clean it up. I’m wondering if that bothers you at all.”

  “No,” Carver said. “Not in the slightest. We don’t even know Lieutenant Flynn’s motivation for doing what he did, but at the very least, he assisted in the killing of a soldier under his direct command, and coordinated weapons that got into the wrong hands, putting hundreds more in danger.”

  She shook her head. “He was still a human being. Not a piece of garbage.”

  “Look,” Carver said with an edge that took her off guard. “If you feel you can’t perform up to your potential on this case because of your political beliefs…”

  She scowled. “Don’t give me that. You know my work ethic. I’m asking your personal opinion.”

  “My personal opinion doesn’t count.”

  “I’m asking as a friend.”

  “Tell me why it matters.”

  “Because I’ve got a right to know who I’m working with.”

  Carver grinned. “Good answer. Okay then. I think the President is generally well-meaning. But he’s also a narcissist with lousy taste in friends. Starting these wars was a bad idea, and outsourcing the fighting is even worse. If we get half a chance, I’ll gladly feed any of these Ulysses execs head-first into a wood chipper.”

  Monroe, West Virginia

  10:57 a.m.

  Faruq Ahmed sat parallel parked in his Ford F-450 on Main Street. Exactly one quarter-mile in the distance, at the end of the street, he could see the clock tower at Holy Grace Baptist Church. It was nearly show time.

  As had become his habit during practice runs at Gatlin Raceway, he sat clutching a stopwatch. The .38 rested on his lap. The Koran lay on the seat next to him. Ammonium nitrate filled the truck bed, which was covered with a leather snap-down bed cover. Last night he had completed the final step – removing the front driver airbags and replacing them with a concentration of C-4 that had been molded to fit the airbag cavities.

  He was proudest of this development. In the past, too many suicide vehicles had failed to detonate upon impact. For this reason, the latest Allied Jihad manual had instructed its jihadists to install a hot button on the steering wheel, which the driver would manually trigger a split-second before impact. Ahmed found this unacceptable. For one, it would leave too much to chance. God forbid he should crash on his way to the target, be knocked unconscious, captured and drugged for information. Also, he could be sure that if he could take the Ford into the church’s front doors, he would be assured complete destruction and maximum casualties. Pre-crash detonation would leave too many wounded. That had been the beauty of 9/11, Ahmed, thought. The New York City hospitals had waited hours for the wounded to arrive. But there were no wounded. Only dead.

  Ahmed had wired the front-impact crash sensors directly to the C-4, leaving nothing to chance. As a secondary precaution, he had doused the ammonium nitrate in gasoline.

  He watched each passing car closely. It was already 10:58. The service was to start at 11:00. Congressman Bailey had a reputation for being on time.

  Less than a minute later, the black sedan with Washington D.C. plates finally passed him. The windows were tinted too darkly to see inside, but he was sure this was the car. He clicked the stopwatch and started the truck engine, patiently watching as the seconds ticked by.

  Finally he put the truck into gear. “May Allah’s will be done,” he said.

  *

  Julian Speers’ rental car navigation system barked its final directive: “Drive straight ahead one half-mile.” He drove slowly. There was little that amused him more than reading signage in the deep South. Biblical dogma was infused with everything from commerce to politics. A church: JESUS WANTS OUT OF THE UNITED NATIONS. An appliance store: ALL DISHWASHERS 50% OFF! REVELATIONS 11:18 - NOW THE TIME HAS COME FOR THE DEAD TO BE JUDGED. GET YOUR KENMORE TODAY!

  He could see the Holy Grace Baptist clock tower in the distance. It was there, he was told, that Congressman Bailey would be attending the 11:00 a.m. service today. Speers’ plan was to slip in late, sit in the back, and approach Bailey afterwards.

  How to approach Bailey was another matter. Speers’ objective was to find out why the most powerful man in Congress would make time to speak directly with a simple army Lieutenant. The way he saw it, Bailey was unlikely to spill his guts. That was okay by Speers. All he wanted was an indicator. If Bailey denied talking to Lieutenant Flynn altogether, or pretended not to know who he was, then Bailey was likely in cahoots with him. If he admitted to knowing Bailey, then Speers would fact-check whatever he said.

  “One quarter-mile to destination,” the nav system said.

  Suddenly a Ford F-450 pulled out from the curb, nearly broadsiding him.

  “Asshole!” Speers shouted out the open car window, but the truck barreled ahead, running the red light and picking up speed as it went through the small-town intersection. “So much for Sunday drivers.”

  *

  Holy Grace sat at the end of the small but bustling retail district, forming the T at the end of Main Street. From its pulpit, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart himself had once stood denouncing rock and roll as the devil’s music. The deacon opened the sanctuary doors, releasing the organist’s sweeping call to worship as the last of the flock trickled in. He saw the heat fumes rising from the asphalt and felt the sweat trickle down his sideburns, into the collar of his white starched shirt.

  Congressman Bill Bailey’s black sedan pulled up to the space reserved for the church’s most generous donor. The deacon grinned, knowing how pleased the reverend would be to know that the congressman was in services today.

  “Hey Dale,” Congressman Bailey yelled when he stepped out of the car. “How’s your shoulder?”

  “It’s a-talkin’ to me, Mister Speaker,” the deacon shouted back. He had once called him Bill, decades ago, when Bailey was a mere junior congressman who still ran a machine shop in his spare time. Now he had risen to be Speaker of the House, just two steps from the Presidency. A man that powerful couldn’t just go by Bill.

  He helped the Speaker’s wife, Gladys Bailey, up the steps and handed her a program. “Any luck wettin’ a line?” he said as they stepped inside.

  “The bass are slow. The heat, I reckon. We might try crawdads.”

  They never heard the Ford F-450 coming.

  *

  Faruq Ahmed accelerated to 65 mph. In a move he had practiced time and again in the preceding weeks, he jerked the steering wheel to the right at the last possible moment and sent the truck skiing up the church’s wheelchair ramp, passenger-side wheels clearing the front steps. The truck went briefly airborne and sailed through the church’s double front doors.

  *

  Speers felt the church blast in his rental car from five blocks away. His windshield filled with white light and the car bounced on its shocks. A cloud-like expanse of black smoke billowed before him.

  He stepped out of the car. A piece of insulation hit him in the forehead. It felt more like a brick than a four-ounce piece of cauterized foam.

  “C’mere,” someone said. A liver-spotted hand gripped his bicep. Speers touched his own forehead and felt blood. The next thing he knew, he was standing in a storefront doorway next to an elderly man in a white suit. Chunks of smoking debris fell around them.

  “That’s my church,” the man said. “That’s my church.”

  Speers’ face fell even further. “That’s Holy Grace? Congressman Bailey’s…”

  “Yessir. The Speaker hisself. I saw his car pass by just a minute ago.”

  As Speers ran back toward the rental car, he held a newspaper over his head to shield himself from the ensuing particle rain. Once back inside, he switched on the windshield wipers to clear the ash from his view. He flipped a U-Turn and drove back down Main Street, honking as he drove through the fast-gathering crowd.

  Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina

  11:02 a.m.

  Major Cleveland Dobbs was halfway through his shift at CENTAF
, the nerve center for the Eastern U.S strategic air defense. The burly, mustachioed officer sat at his terminal at the top of the CENTAF command room, an amphitheatre-shaped room about the size of a movie theatre. It was here that Dobbs supervised eighteen air traffic controllers who in turn coordinated over a hundred coastal fighter patrols in a single shift. Since 9/11, fighter aircraft were constantly in proximity to every major U.S. airport. Keeping them clear of mid-air collisions in the increasingly crowded skies was a tough job. Dobbs spent most of his day actively monitoring the work of his rather green staff. At a cost of between thirty and fifty million dollars per aircraft, there was no room for error.

  His headset crackled as the Secret Service special agent aboard Marine One – the President’s personal helicopter – hailed him. “CENTAF, this is Dynasty requesting a flight plan.” For security reasons, it was protocol for the duty officer to manage Marine One and Air Force One personally. Marine One departure flight times were strictly classified; they happened unannounced, and flight plans were randomly generated by CENTAF on the fly. Helicopters, even the latest VH-71 Kestrels that Marine One flew, were simply too easy to shoot down to risk any security leaks.

  “Copy that, Dynasty,” Dobbs replied over his headset. “Verify destination.”

  “Red Zone,” the Secret Service agent said, giving the current destination codename for Camp David, the longtime Presidential retreat in Frederick County, Maryland. The flight between the White House and Camp David was a short one, and there were eight randomized flight paths varying between nineteen and twenty-six minutes in duration. The algorithm by which the CENTAF computers determined the route was a mystery, even to Major Dobbs. He had simply been trained to log into the Marine One application, list “Red Zone” as the destination, and click a button marked “GENERATE.” The computer would chew on it for less than one-tenth of a second and display the route to Dobbs.