That
needed checking out, for sure.
When he finally had the dry heaves under control he straightened up and, still somewhat shaky, walked over to the washbasins to clean himself up. The face that stared at him, bleary-eyed above the taps, looked years older than the face he'd shaved in the bathroom mirror at home that morning.
What have we done?
he wondered. The details were in the dictaphone; he'd zoned out during parts of Fleming's spiel, particularly when it had been getting positively otherworldly. He remembered bits—something about mediaeval antipersonnel mines, crazy stuff about prisoners with bombs strapped to their necks—but the big picture evaded him, like a slippery mass of jelly that refused to be nailed down, like an untangled ball of string. Steve took a deep breath.
I've got to get Fleming to call in,
he realized. A faint journalistic reflex raised its head:
It's the story of a lifetime.
Or the citizen's arrest of a lifetime.
Is a nuclear unabomber even possible?
J. Barrett Armstrong's office on the tenth floor was larger than Steve Schroeder's beige cubicle on the eighth. It had a corner of the building to itself, with a view of Faneuil Hall off to one side and a mahogany conference table the size of a Marine Corps helicopter carrier tucked away near the inner wall of the suite. It was the very image of a modern news magnate's poop deck, shipshape and shining with the gleaming elbow grease of a dozen minimum-wage cleaners; the captain's quarters of a vessel in the great fleet commanded by an Australian news magnate of some note. In the grand scheme of the mainstream media J. Barrett Armstrong wasn't so high up the totem pole, but in the grand scheme of the folks who signed Steve's paychecks he was right at the top, Thunderbird-in-chief.
Right now, J. Barrett Armstrong's office was crowded with managers and senior editors, all of whom were getting a piece of the proprietor's ear as he vented his frustration. "The fucking war's
over,"
he shouted, wadding up a printout from the machine in the corner and throwing it at the wall. "Who did Ali get the bomb from? There's the fricking story!" A bank of monitors on a stand showed the story unfolding in repeated silent flashbacks. "How did they smuggle them in? Go on, get digging!"
Nobody noticed Steve sneaking in until he tapped his boss, Riccardo Pirello, on the shoulder. Rick turned, distractedly: "What is it?"
"It's not Iraq," said Steve. He swallowed. "It's narcoterrorists, and the nukes were stolen from our own inventory."
The boss was belting out orders to his mates and boatswains: "Bhaskar, I want an in-depth on the Iranian nuclear program, inside spread, you've got six pages—"
Steve held up his dictaphone where Riccardo could see it. "Scoop, boss. Walked into my office an hour ago."
"A—what the fuck—" Riccardo grabbed his arm.
Nobody else had noticed; all eyes were focussed on the Man, who was throwing a pocket tantrum in the direction of enemies both Middle Eastern and imaginary. "Let's find a room," Steve suggested. "I've got my desk line patched through to my mobile. He's going to call back."
"Who—"
"My source." Steve's cheek twitched. "He told me this would happen. I thought he was crazy and kicked him out. He said he'd phone after it happened."
"Jesus." Riccardo stared at him for a moment. "Why
you?"
"Friend of a friend. She went missing six months ago, investigating this, apparently."
"Jesus. Okay, let's get a cube and see what you've got. Then if it checks out I'll try and figure out how we can break it to Skippy without getting ourselves shitcanned for making him look bad."
The atmosphere in the situation room under Raven Rock was a toxic miasma of fury, loss, and anticipation: a sweaty, testosterone-breathing swamp of the will to triumph made immanent. From the moment the PINNACLE NUCFLASH alert came in, WARBUCKS hunched over one end of the cramped conference table, growling out a torrent of unanswerable questions, demanding action on HEAD CRASH and CLEANSWEEP and other more arcane Family Trade projects, issuing instructions to his staff, orders for the Emergency Preparedness and Response Directorate and other sub-agencies within the sprawling DHS empire. "We're still trying to raise the EOB, sir," said one particularly hapless staffer.
"I don't want to hear that word
trying,"
snarled WARBUCKS. "I want
results.
Success or failure. Clear?"
The TV screens were clear enough. Andrew James couldn't help staring at the hypnotic rewind footage from time to time, the sunny morning view of downtown D.C., the flash and static-riddled flicker, the rolling, boiling cloud of chaotic darkness shot through with fire rising beyond the Capitol. The close-ups replaying every ten minutes of the Washington Monument blow-down, chunks of rock knocked clear out of the base of the spire as the Mach wave bounced off the waters of the reflecting pool, cherry trees catching fire in a thousand inglorious blazing points of light. Inarticulate anchormen and women, struggling with the enormity. Talking heads, eyes frozen in fear like deer in the headlights, struggling to pin the blame on Iraqi revenants, Iranian terrorists, everyone and anyone.
Northwoods,
he thought.
He made it work.
Nobody else in the national command structure had ever had the sheer brass balls to pull that particular trigger, to play power chords in the key of the Reichstag Fire on the instrument of state—
"Dr. James."
He tore his eyes away from the screen. "Sir?"
WARBUCKS grinned humorlessly. "I want to know the status of SCOTUS as of this morning. I very much fear we'll be needing their services later today and I want to know who's available."
James nodded. "I can find out. Do you want me to expedite the draft order on Family Trade just yet?"
"No, let's wait for confirmation. BOY WONDER will want to pull the trigger himself once we brief him, assuming he survived, and if not, I need to be sworn in first. Otherwise those bastards in Congress will—"
"Sir?" Jack Shapiro, off the NSA desk just outside the conference room, stuck his head round the door. "We've got eyeballs overhead right now, do you want it on screen?"
WARBUCKS nodded. "Wait one, Andrew," he told Dr. James. "Put it on any damn screen but Fox News, okay?"
Two minutes later the center screen turned blue. Static replaced the CNN news crawl for a moment; then a grainy, gray, roiling turbulence filled the monitor from edge to edge. A flickery head-up display scrawled barely readable numbers across the cloudscape. Shapiro grimaced, his face contorted by the telephone handset clamped between neck and shoulder. "That's looking down on the Ellipse," he confirmed. "The chopper's standing off at six thousand feet, two thousand feet south of ground zero—it's one of the VH-3s from HMX-1, it was on station at Andrews AFB when . . ." He trailed off. WARBUCKS was staring at the picture, face frozen.
"Where's the White House?" he demanded hoarsely.
"About"—Shapiro approached the screen, pointed with a shaking finger—"there." The splash of gray across more gray was almost unrecognizable. "Less than six hundred yards from ground zero, sir. There
might
be survivors—"
Dr. James quietly pushed his chair back from the table, turned away from the screens, and stood up. A DISA staffer took over the chair even before he cleared the doorway. The corridor outside was cramped and overfull with aides and officers busily waiting to see the Man. All of them showed signs of agitation: anger and fear and outrage vying for priority.