His move was so startling, the man in the lead teetered. Neeley swung around and gave him a gentle shove and he fell to the end of his rope.
Roland held on to his belay man, keeping both on the mountain. Roland looped their rope through a figure eight on the front of his harness, then cut their attachment to their own anchor point, in effect making himself their anchor.
As one man dangled over the abyss, the other stared wide-eyed at Roland. “Who the hell are you! What are you doing?”
Neeley climbed down and locked in on the mountain on the other side of him. “Hey!”
He turned his head toward her and she slapped his face with her gloved hand, drawing blood from the small needle in her hand.
The man blinked. “What did you do?”
“Cherry Tree, Mr. Nesbitt. You are Nesbitt, right?” She didn’t expect an answer yet as she knew it would take a minute or so for the serum to work. “And our friend on the end of the rope is your partner, Mr. Porter.”
“What the fuck?” Nesbitt sputtered. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m from the Cellar,” Neeley said. “And you’re going to tell me the truth.”
At the word Cellar, what little blood was left in Nesbitt’s face drained out. At the end of the rope, twenty feet below them, Porter was yelling something, twisting and turning in the wind, which blew his words away into the empty sky.
Neeley was watching his eyes. She saw his pupils dilate slightly and knew Cherry Tree had taken root.
“Did you compromise the mission?”
He blinked, shaking his head. “Mission?”
“The garbageman.”
“Oh. Fuck.” The next word was ripped from him. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“We claimed the interrogation. My group. We had to maintain integrity on our story. Get the credit.”
“Why?” Neeley asked in such a tone that Roland looked at her.
“Promotion.”
“Did your supervisor know?” Neeley asked.
“No.”
“Did he know?” Neeley pointed down.
Nesbitt followed her finger. “Yes.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
“Bye,” Roland said as Neeley was getting ready to ask her next question. He cut the rope and the two men dropped out of sight into the abyss.
“I wasn’t done!” Neeley yelled at him.
“Yes,” Roland said, as he took her in his arms. “You are.”
“Last day,” the Keep said. “What have you learned?”
President Templeton glumly nodded. “I don’t know if I’m relieved or just exhausted.”
“Both,” the Keep said.
They were seated, for the last time, in the same room on the top floor of the White House. Tomorrow there would be a new president. A new occupant of the position. A new person for the Keep to in-brief.
“Pretty amazing,” Templeton said.
“What is, sir?” The Keep had her book open, quill poised, but so far, she’d written nothing, which didn’t cheer the soon-to-be-ex-president very much.
“No one talked about it. What happened. Cherry Tree.”
The Keep lifted the quill and tapped it against her cheek. “Yes. I have to admit I was surprised and so was Hannah. But the Nightstalkers called that right by having everyone get infected. Not only were they able to burn it out at the same time, the psychological dynamics were most intriguing. So many people baring their souls to each other. So many secrets exposed. No one wants that. No one wants to talk about that. Everyone is pretending it never happened.”
The president laughed. “Nobody has looked anyone in the eye since then. I think everyone wants to get the hell out of here.”
The Keep said nothing and the president sighed.
“Tell me something,” he finally said. “The PEOC. Riggs had the code from the football. He had the targeting matrix. He launched. But he didn’t launch. You haven’t told me what happened. Why it didn’t go off like he wanted?”
“Ah…” The Keep shook her head. “Surely you don’t think it could be that simple. That a single man — or woman starting tomorrow — could simply open up a briefcase and begin Armageddon?”
She tapped the book. “It’s in here, but so few see it. Kennedy ran on the missile gap, then suddenly shifted gears. Reagan called the Soviets the evil empire, but then came within a single treaty of getting rid of nuclear weapons entirely. Nixon was crumbling, under impeachment, but he walked out of here without destroying anything when he so desperately wanted to. Do you know what changed them? That room.”
“It’s fake!” Templeton sat bolt upright. “The whole war room thing is a fake. Like a movie set.”
“No.” The Keep shook her head. “It’s real. The world could indeed be destroyed from that room. The Cellar or the Nightstalkers or any of us were never powerful enough to prevent that room being built for that possibility. What we could do was put in checks and balances. That’s something the Founding Fathers were all for. We just moved it into the nuclear age.
“Everyone adapts. As General LeMay and the others started Pinnacle to keep civilians like you from reducing the power they felt they needed, others worked to make sure that ultimate power, the power to destroy the world several times over, was not so negligently placed in one person’s hands.”
The Keep put down the quill. “Really. Think about it. How amazing is it that since Hiroshima and Nagasaki we haven’t used these weapons again? There have been studies on it, many studies, trust me, and the odds that we have never once used a nuclear weapon again are pretty astronomical. We’ve been in how many wars since the end of World War Two? The Berlin crisis, which we solved not with weapons but with food and coal. MacArthur wanted to use nukes when the Chinese crossed the Yalu. Nixon in Cambodia. Kennedy in Cuba. So many times we came so close, but it never happened.
“That was not chance, Mister President. Let me ask you something. May I, sir?”
Templeton seemed a bit surprised she was asking his permission. He nodded.
“What if you can only change when you truly, absolutely believe you have done the unthinkable? That you entered that code and pushed that button?” She tapped the book. “That’s the biggest secret in the Book of Truths. That’s the part you didn’t get to read when you came into office. That she won’t get to read when I brief her tomorrow night while she’s still heady from the inauguration, when I will, as you say, destroy her dreams and promises.”
“Who controls the nukes then? Or are they all a fake?”
“Oh, you know they’re real. You received the After Action Report on Pinnacle and the Nevada Test Site.”
Templeton snorted. “Hell yeah. Spent hours on the phone with the Russians and then the Chinese telling them we had an accident when they picked up the blast. But who controls them?”
The Keep tapped the book. “The Cellar, of course. The real launch codes are in here. And the only one who can authorize the release of that code is Hannah. Because this country needs people who don’t push buttons.
“The PEOC is why some presidents have changed so dramatically while in office. Because they did push it. Then they sat there for those two minutes, watching that screen, realizing what they had unleashed, the true impact of what had happened hitting them so hard that when that door opened and the Keep walked in, they fell to their knees in relief. They’d truly realized that nuclear warfare is lose-lose. A zero-sum game. They changed.