“With the chairman, sir, in Scotland, working on SAD.”
“So no one’s in charge.”
“Sir, the—”
“Get my car. Assemble the staff. We’re going to the PEOC.”
“Sir, we—”
Riggs fixed the man with a withering stare and he scurried to get the car.
Riggs hefted himself, with difficulty, out of his chair.
Time to face his destiny.
He opened his drawers and pulled out what he would need: his pistol, a copy of the Constitution, a Bible, and four Snickers bars.
Once Moms got them moving and they understood the threat was a pathogen, the Secret Service inside the White House reacted with precision and alacrity. The corridors leading to the East and West Wings were sealed. All doors leading in and out were also shut just after the two agents who’d dumped Brennan at the helipad returned. The president, along with the First Lady and First Daughter, had been hustled upstairs to the private residence, all shouting at each other.
It seemed the First Family had a lot of unresolved issues.
“What about tunnels?” Moms asked McBride, who seemed to be the one who knew who did what here.
“We’ve shut all the doors below,” McBride said. “I’ve got an agent on each one. The head of the Secret Service is outside and he’s got people in hazmat right up against the building on an interior line and then an exterior line working both ways. What the hell is going on?”
Moms took a deep breath. The building was secure for the time being, and McBride had issued a cover story for concealment about a no-notice security exercise. How long that cover story would last, she had no idea. There were a lot of people milling about, at a loss what to do now that the routine of preparing for Christmas at the White House had been interrupted.
And the president and his family had apparently gone insane.
They’d lined everyone up and made them dump cell phones and any other communication devices into a large barrel. All trunk lines in and out were shut off. Complete blackout.
“Get these people occupied doing something,” Moms said to McBride.
“Hold on,” McBride said. “What’s wrong with the president? I need to know what is going on.”
So Moms spent two minutes and twelve seconds telling him about Cherry Tree and that somehow it was loose here in the White House. The color drained from McBride’s face when she told him what Cherry Tree did: A politician’s worst nightmare had just been thrust in his face.
“You mean he can’t lie?” McBride asked when she was done.
“From what I understand, it’s worse than that,” Moms said. “Whoever is infected can’t stop telling the truth. And the problem is we don’t know how many people in here have been infected. You need to quarantine anyone who has had physical contact with the First Family. His daughter brought it in here, so start with her.”
McBride shook his head. “That’s not going to be easy.”
McBride turned to the crowd of Secret Service agents, stewards, staffers, media reps, chefs, maintenance personnel, and others who were now trapped inside and began to try to make sense of this insanity as they backtracked to the moment Debbie Templeton left her lunch with Brennan and entered the White House. Each person he thought she might have had physical contact with was hustled into the State Dining Room.
But Moms was focused elsewhere, also trying to stay physically distant from everyone. A woman was sitting in a chair near the staircase up to the residence. She’d been hovering near the president when Moms interrupted the already cut-off news conference. The woman seemed quite detached from all the turmoil tornadoing around her. From the appearance of the chair it was supposed to be one that was admired, not sat in. The fact this woman felt secure enough to do that said something on top of her lack of alarm.
She had a large leather-bound book on her lap. It reminded Moms of her mother’s photo albums. The ones with the little black corners holding everything together. As the chief of staff tried to put a lid on a pot inside the White House that was beginning to boil with Cherry Tree, Moms wondered how different it was now that pictures all seemed to be on hard drives or in the cloud, not tangible, not in a book like real memories. It made memories seem less real.
As Moms made her way around the crowd toward the woman, she considered the fact that people probably still made scrapbooks, even if they were electronic and could be wiped out with the flash of EMP from a nuke. (Nebraska wasn’t that far away in her own memory scrapbook.)
Her mother’s scrapbook had been full of pictures of her brothers, all younger, all of whom were now leading normal lives — doctor, salesman, actuary, and the youngest taking over the farm. Moms had never really considered that there were no pictures of her in that scrapbook. Did that mean she didn’t exist?
Moms could make out more as she got closer. The woman wore a nondescript business suit and had the tag on the chain around her neck that everyone else who belonged here had. The color indicated the highest security clearance.
The woman was too aware, yet detached at the same time. It took one to know one, and Moms had a good idea this woman came from the same dark world she did. Moms didn’t like people with their own agenda on her mission. This woman was up to something and it most likely wasn’t the same thing Moms was up to, so therefore she was a potential problem.
Moms stopped in front of her and the woman stood, book clutched to her chest. Exactly the way suicide bombers almost always took off their bomb-laden backpacks and clutched them to their chest before pulling the fuse. It was a level to which Freud had not dared go, clutching that which meant life and death closest to your core, your heart.
“What are you doing in the middle of my op?” Moms asked.
The woman smiled. “You must be Moms.”
It wasn’t the smile that relaxed Moms slightly; it was the way her eyes matched the smile. Nada always said, “watch the eyes.” Moms had been face-to-face with lots of dangerous people and those who wished her harm, and this woman was neither.
Not directly. But she was something and Moms needed to know what that was.
And she knew her Nightstalker name, which was a bit disconcerting.
The woman, Elle Keep, her nametag said, was still a problem, but probably not a dangerous one. A loose thread in a big building full of loose threads. Moms needed to cut this one or reel it in so she could move on to the next one. That plan unraveled with the woman’s next words:
“It’s my mission. Even better, and more professionally, we could call it our mission.”
Nada watched the eyes, but Moms had another way to evaluate. She looked down at the woman’s shoes. Shoes told you a lot about a person. These were expensive but functional. Which meant she knew how to fit in, but also how to be practical.
“What’s our mission, Elle?” Moms asked.
The woman shook her head. “Call me Keep.”
Frak me, Moms thought. “Keep?”
“More correctly, the Keep. I’m from the Cellar. I always wondered if I’d ever meet a Nightstalker. I wondered, but hoped not to because of the circumstances that would be inherent in such a meeting.” The Keep looked past Moms at the media people screaming about their rights to the chief of staff and two chefs on the marble floor wrestling because they had finally let loose on each other about whose dessert POTUS liked better. “But I certainly could not have imagined this.”
“We usually can’t imagine most of our missions,” Moms said as she processed Cellar. Mac had always bet the under, saying it was a myth. Sort of the way people in Black Ops always said, “I thought you guys were doing that!” and the other person said, “No, we thought you were doing it!” But everyone always hoped there was something like the Cellar, which really was supposed to be doing “it.” Because “it” needed to be done.