‘This way, please.’
The Secret Service agents led them through the building, which seemed to Ethan to be surprisingly busy with members of the President’s staff hurrying to and fro, weaving around Ethan and Lopez and casting curious glances at the two unfamiliar faces dressed in casual clothes. Ethan figured that at least Jarvis was wearing a suit, whereas he and Lopez looked as though they’d been dragged in from the street outside.
They were led down the hall to the Diplomatic Reception Room, used as the primary point of entry for the President and his family into the White House. Federal style furnishings were arranged in front of a spectacular panoramic landscape wall covering.
‘This way.’
‘Where are we going?’ Lopez asked.
‘The Deep Underground Command Center,’ Jarvis guessed as they were led to a stairwell that Ethan figured was adjacent to the West Wing.
Ethan knew that the White House had a labyrinth of tunnels beneath it, some leading to the Capitol, others to DC’s subway network with an entire station beneath the White House itself. But the DUCC was a more mysterious construction, built during recent years to allow the President and his team to relocate to a safe location in the event of a major crisis.
‘He’s already bunkered down?’ Ethan asked Jarvis.
‘The threat is both credible and direct,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘If Abrahem Nassir is on his way here we can’t be sure of when and where he will strike until we have further information. The President will stay here until the arrival of the President of the People’s Republic of China tomorrow.’
The Secret Service agents led them down a corridor at the bottom of the stairwell, the plush carpets and elaborate paintings of the White House a memory now. Bomb proof walls, harsh lighting and polished tile floors led to an armoured door, outside which stood two armed soldiers. Both men stood to one side as the Secret Service agents accessed the door and it hissed open.
They stood aside and gestured for Ethan, Lopez and Jarvis to enter.
Ethan walked into the bunker and was surprised to see a warmly lit room dominated by a long table, around the far end of which sat the President and several of his advisors. The President smiled and stood the moment he saw Ethan, walking around the long table and extending his hand.
‘Ethan Warner,’ he greeted him with a firm handshake. ‘We only ever seem to meet when I’m in jeopardy.’
‘Just can’t stay out of trouble, can you Mister President?’
Despite having met the President years before when he had still been a senator, Ethan found himself somewhat star — struck all the same. The man he had known seemed to have grown in stature, become more a statesman and leader than he had been all those years ago. The President turned to Lopez and shook her hand also before he gestured to the table.
‘Shall we?’
Jarvis stepped forward. ‘May we have the room, Mister President? You’ll understand, once we tell you what we’ve discovered.’
The President glanced at his advisors. ‘My team are here to both take records and advise, Mister Jarvis.’
‘They can listen to a recording, Mister President, although once you hear what we have to say I don’t think that you’ll be passing the message on.’
The advisors all looked at one another for a long moment and then the President nodded and asked them all to leave. Only a pair of Secret Service agents remained, standing either side of the bunker door as it was closed behind them. The rest of the Secret Service would assemble in the “Horsepower” command post, as it was known, in the basement of the West Wing. Ethan knew that the President’s Oval Office contained a trap door that led straight down to the bunker in which they stood and the command post, a vital rapid escape route in time of emergency.
The President sat down at the table, as did Ethan and Lopez.
‘So what it is that’s so important that you don’t want the directors of our country’s chief intelligence agencies present, Mister Jarvis?’
Jarvis sat down and folded his hands before him on the table as he replied.
‘Mister President, we believe that there is a coordinated effort on the part of radicalized terrorist outfits to take control of United States military personnel and use them as human avatars to infiltrate and destroy our country from within. The death of Major General Thompson and the soldiers under his command was the first test of a technology that will allow our enemies to perform such actions, to physically and mentally control a human being from afar and use them to cause harm to others.’
The President stared at Jarvis for a long moment and then glanced at Ethan.
‘This is almost harder to believe than what happened with Kelvin Patterson all those years ago.’
‘But no less real, Mister President,’ Ethan replied. ‘We already know that Major Thompson was implanted with a device that took control of the frontal lobes of his brain and allowed others to remotely control his actions, an act that led to the deaths of many of the general’s recruits at Fort Benning. The same thing likely happened to Commander Sandy Veiron aboard USS Carl Vinson. We now believe these attacks have been tests before a major strike on our country.’
The President thought for a moment.
‘I have a major ceremony to attend on the South Lawn tomorrow to welcome China into the Trans Pacific Partnership, and I can’t simply cancel that or go out there and tell the people of this country that the person standing next to them may be some kind of flesh — and — blood robot intent on killing anybody they can get their hands on. It will send the entire country into panic. It would be like revealing that half of my military staff are all Terminators or something.’
Ethan realized that to some degree the President was right. It was no longer the stuff of Hollywood myth that perfectly camouflaged enemies of the state could attack at will the citizens of any country using utterly emotionless machines. The difference was that the machines were not cyborgs but ordinary people acting without control of their bodies or minds.
‘There’s more,’ Jarvis said.
‘Go on.’
‘We have connected the perpetrators of this act of sabotage to two main groups: one is a terrorist outfit operating out of Basra, Iraq, and the other is a state — sanctioned unit of computer hackers and scientists based in China.’
The President nodded, almost smiled at the irony.
‘China,’ he echoed. ‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’
China’s recent military expansion and growing cyber — warfare capability were known to anybody with the ability to read the news. A recent breach of federal government computers at the Office of Personnel Management had compromised the records of four million employees, even as China was establishing military installations that threatened countries with US treaties in place such as the Philippines.
‘They’ve already hacked our Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Commerce,’ Jarvis pointed out, ‘and have an active and skilled force of cyber — warfare specialists constantly probing US cyber — security in an attempt to find vulnerabilities. This is simply their latest and most technologically advanced step in the game.’
‘How the hell did they acquire technology like this?’ the President asked. ‘Even we don’t have the capacity to hack into human minds.’
‘That’s not quite true,’ Lopez said, speaking for the first time.
‘What do you mean?’ the President asked.
‘The Identity Mine,’ Jarvis replied, ‘is a highly classified Black Budget program tasked with monitoring criminals through their own eyes, by seeing what they see and hearing what they hear. It was developed using technology that was stolen from us by Chinese operatives, who abducted four National Security Agency staff operating out of Hong Kong in 1997. We developed The Identity Mine from that same technology, but the Chinese went a lot further than we dared, going beyond merely monitoring criminals.’