MCKENNA LEFT ME AGAIN, hinting at vague but urgent aspects of the case that required his attention, but frankly at that point I was happier with the four featureless walls as company. I’d been coming to terms with the end of my marriage for a while now. But Carolyn running around in the shadows, making sure her AmeriTel buddies got what they wanted? While my heart was still breaking over her? That felt like a whole new level of betrayal.
It had wounded me. But it had cost Karl Weimann—her friend—his life.
I turned on the local news in the hope of updates, muted the sound, and tried Carolyn’s number. I wanted to see what she had to say about Weimann’s death, and the role she’d played in it. But not surprisingly, all I got was her voicemail.
MCKENNA SHOWED HIS FACE AGAIN an hour later. I was still on my feet, looking out the window. My room had a great view. Of the parking lot. I’d just noticed how my car was sitting all alone at one side while the others were clustered together in the center. Like a nerd at a nightclub, I thought.
Another unwelcome reminder of life with Carolyn.
“How are you feeling?” McKenna was carrying an aluminum briefcase which, since there was no desk or table big enough to hold it, he set down on the bed.
“I just want to get out of here and put this fiasco behind me.”
“I thought you might feel that way. That’s why I brought this.” He indicated the briefcase. “Because aside from dealing with Peever and keeping the police off your back, there’s paperwork we need to take care of. My fault, I’m afraid. Some of the things I told you along the way, I shouldn’t have. We have to put the genie back in the bottle. Which, in twenty-first century America means there’s a form to sign. We could put it to bed right now, so you can get out of here a little quicker? Or, if you’d rather wait till you can run it by a lawyer, I’d understand.”
“Let me see?”
McKenna flipped open the case and produced a black leather conference folder with a Homeland Security logo stamped into the cover. Then he took out two pieces of paper and handed them to me. They were heavy gauge, thick, slightly off-white, watermarked with a government seal, and covered in fine print.
“I’ve tried to read government forms before. Is this one more understandable than most?”
“Hell, no.” McKenna grinned. “Do you think we want you to understand what you’re signing? Where would the open-ended liability be in that?”
“And suppose I do call my lawyer. He reads it, and asks for changes. What are the chances of the government agreeing to them?”
“Somewhere between zero and zero. But don’t worry. There’s a lot of bullshit in there, but it’s really pretty simple. It says that everything I’ve already told you, and anything I tell you in the future, is classified under the Patriot Act. Think of it as being like attorney/client privilege. You cannot reveal, imply, hint at—basically do much more than dream about—anything I’ve said or you’ve learned while you’re with me. If you do, two things will happen: Innocent people will die. And someone like me will crash through your door and take you to prison for the rest of your life. Clear enough?”
“I guess.”
“What do you think? Sign now? Or sign when your attorney gets here? Because realistically, those are your only two options.”
“I’ll sign now.”
McKenna passed me a pen and I scrawled my name in the space at the bottom of both pages.
“Good decision.” He took the form and pen back, dropped them into the briefcase, then scrambled the combination lock. “It means I can go ahead and offer you a choice other than sitting around in this miserable hutch for a couple of days. It has to do with your wife. And the memory stick she has. Because we could be looking at a very serious situation here, Marc. I know it seems surreal, all this chasing around after something so tiny. But the consequences of not retrieving it are huge. And now you’ve signed that piece of paper, I can tell you why. Remember I confirmed the virus had reached the White House?”
I nodded.
“OK. This is what it does. It seeks out the climate control system. But not of the aboveground White House. Not the part you see on TV. It homes in on the equipment in the bunker, beneath it.”
“There is a bunker? I thought it was urban legend.”
“No. It’s real. It gets used all the time, because protocol calls for the President and his staff to get evacuated down there whenever there’s an environmental alert. And if ever there was a system with a hair trigger, it’s the White House environmental system.”
“The virus gives false environmental alarms? No. That wouldn’t make sense. It suppresses the alarms, so the President doesn’t take shelter when he should?”
“No, and no. It waits, dormant and undetected, until the environmental alarm causes an evacuation on its own. It doesn’t matter if it’s a real alarm, or a false one. What matters is the President goes down to the bunker. Because what happens when the doors lock behind him is the clever part. First, the climate control system does the opposite of what it’s supposed to. It switches off the oxygen supply and the CO2 scrubbers, and vents whatever clean air’s left to the outside world. And while that’s happening, the management system sends a stream of false data to the local monitoring station—and the remote sites in Nebraska and Washington state—which makes the operators think everything’s peachy.”
“The President would suffocate?”
“He would. And so would all his staff. His family, too, if they were around when the alarm was triggered. A hundred-plus people, depending on when it happens. All killed by the system that’s designed to protect them.”
“Like sticking a Polaroid in front of a CCTV camera. No one would know anything was wrong. Until it was too late.”
“Exactly. And think of the damage it would do. The President, plus the cream of the political and administrative crop, all wiped out in one fell swoop. Not the worst terrorist attack in terms of numbers. But by impact? Off the charts. It would take the nation decades to recover.”
I’d met the President once. Years ago. When he was still a Senator. I hadn’t much liked him. I certainly hadn’t voted for him. Since then he’d been nothing more to me than a smiling face on the front of countless newspapers. But the thought of that same guy—whose hand I’d shaken, who’d looked me right in the eye—lying dead on the floor of his bunker? His body contorted, lips blue, tongue bulging out of his mouth? It struck me: Stalin was right. One death can be a tragedy. And despite the warmth of the room, I felt a patch of goose bumps spread between my shoulder blades.
“Who’s behind this?”
“Iran. Syria. Yemen. One of a dozen radical Islamic groups not tied to any specific state. America’s not short of enemies.”
“OK, wait. Back up. You stopped the massacre from happening. Why the panic over one missing memory stick?”
“We stopped the initial attack, yes. But we have to prevent future ones, as well. The virus is heuristic—it’s self-learning. It’s always adapting and evolving, which is why every known iteration has to be studied. And more than that, it’s a question of containment. As a piece of programming—the way it can conceal itself, replicate, target specific systems—it’s incredibly sophisticated. We can’t risk anyone else getting hold of it. Imagine it in Air Force One, or a nuclear power plant. Actually, don’t. Just help us get that copy back from your wife.”
“How? What do you want me to do?”
“Call her. Sweet-talk her. Convince her to give it back to us. You can’t share the reasons, but you can see how important it is she cooperates. And if she claims not to have it, there’s no one else who knows her well enough to tell if she’s lying.”