He was no longer so cold. And he could hear.
“Mr. Bishop, do you have any pain?”
Bishop turned tear-blurred eyes toward the speaker. It was a young woman. She was wearing a look of grave concern. He wondered how she knew his name, until he saw her eyes looking at his chest and he remembered the name tag. He looked down. It hung incongruously from a piece of lapel on the remnants of the dinner jacket he still had on. An FBI-issue terry-cloth wrap had been thrown around his shoulders.
“Do you understand me?” the woman asked.
He nodded. “No pain,” he said.
“I’m going to leave you here,” she said. “You have a few cuts and burns but-”
“What happened?” he asked stupidly.
“An explosion,” she said. “If you’ll wait here, I’m going to take care of someone else.”
“I’ll wait,” he said. His eyes dropped to the floor. A dusty tile floor. There were planters nearby. He saw dark shops beyond. He had been through here earlier in the day, walking toward the ballroom with
…
“Oh, Christ!” he cried. He tried to stand, dropped as his legs refused to cooperate, and sat, looking around.
He didn’t remember the explosion, but he remembered the moments before it. He and Laura were sitting at their table, almost dead center in the big hall. They were talking pleasantly to people they didn’t know, a couple who seemed enchanted with Laura, and waiting for Julie to step to the podium. Then the world went red and he felt as if he were flying.
He woke, briefly.
Bishop’s thoughts drifted backward into waves of elapsed memories, of the times his daughter needed him. To be there. To show up. He summoned up the first words she’d been able to sound out for herself, during a short family trip to Florida when she was five, written on a bus window. E-mer-gen-cy. Emergency exit. He could still see her proud smile, her darling little legs cheerily kicking at opposite tempos, unable to reach the floor or the seat in front of her. Searching through the fog, he remembered the times he pretended to rise from the dead during her school’s haunted hayride nights. Despite the thick, gnarled makeup he wore, she could always tell when it was her father clawing at the side of the wagon. And despite the multitude of shrill, shrieking children, he could always single out his daughter’s excited squeal. He always made her the lucky victim, the most special rider of the night.
But he struggled to retain the thought of her face as it was then, as her present, more familiar features took hold of his delusional imagination.
Laura was glowing, her head turned slightly away from him, forward. Her light summer dress swaying proudly like a new flag, her hair flowing as if it were a tropical shore. He followed her as she slowly ran, silently along the slate pathway leading to their home, home toward her mother. Her mother. His wife. His late wife. She had been the embodiment of his future, of his daughter’s future. His departed companion was the eternal bond between them, the rope connecting the climber to the cliff. And when that was detached, Bishop had to become Laura’s security. His daughter’s guide, her unconditional friend, her devoted supporter. Her father.
Bishop saw himself stop short only paces away from them. His family. The only links to what he could call real life. Laura embraced her mother like they were seeing each other for the last time, like only children know how to hold, except it was Bishop who couldn’t stay there, who didn’t feel right, and then she looked at her father as if to say, “Thank you.”
He had been there for her. Whenever he could be, in whatever shape the world had left him in. With whatever love he had protected for her inside his heart. It was always there. And always would be. And no one was ever going to remove that from him.
And now…
He looked for his wristwatch, saw that the pressure he felt there was his bandaged forearm. He had neither a wristwatch nor a shirtsleeve. He let the arm drop, then raised his hand in order to cry into it. He wasn’t sure exactly why he was crying. But then a functioning part of his mind began putting it together. The medic had said there was an explosion of some kind. He had been knocked over and out, injured. His daughter…
“Dear God…”
He had an overpowering urge to see her, to hold her, but his body was trembling. Someone, one of the medics, saw him and came over to him, decided that he was not all right and that he needed to go to the hospital. He let himself be moved, lifted, wheeled for what seemed an interminable time. He was dropping, wheeled again. There were sights, shapes, sounds, but all he could see was his daughter’s destroyed body lying next to him, her pale flesh so still.
He was crying again, shaking, and then there was a pinch in his arm and it was over.
CHAPTER 13
WASHINGTON, D.C.
The Situation Room was rank. All the energetic air-conditioning did was turn it into chilled rankness.
Ryan Kealey knew the primary ingredients of the smelclass="underline" sweat and coffee. He could tell, almost to the half hour, how long the mix had been fermenting. He could also identify the kind of perspiration. It wasn’t the surface sweat of exertion, the kind you pushed away with a sleeve on the basketball court. It was the deep, hot, stagnant sweat of pressure laced with fear.
“I liked it better when the air had smoke in it,” Kealey said as Robert Andrews shook his hand.
“Sure used to hide that other stuff, didn’t it?” the CIA chief said knowingly behind a crooked grin.
“Killed those nasal passages dead,” Kealey answered, returning the smile.
Andrews extended a hand toward the seat that had been vacated by Jon Harper. It felt good to collapse into it. The president was not here, so Kealey had time to collect his thoughts.
The flight from the rooftop of the convention center to the parking lot of the George Washington University Hospital had taken a little over a half hour. The ride to the White House in a black Escalade had taken nearly twice as long due to police roadblocks and traffic. There had been more people leaving D.C. than usual, and it had nothing to do with the tail end of a busy commute. If anything, the traffic should have been lighter as the federal and local intelligence communities stayed at their desks, looking for clues about what had happened and what could happen next.
These are families leaving town, he’d thought as he noted the higher than usual percentage of minivans.
That was the curse of his profession. Noticing things. Both the conscious and subconscious mind were trained to record data. The vast amount of stored information-some of it unidentified because it was never tapped-was a phenomenon first studied after the September 11 attacks. Without naming names, mental health workers determined the percentage of New Yorkers who “knew something was wrong” by the wrong-way flight down the Hudson River of the first hijacked jet, American Airlines Flight 11. It was a staggering 59 percent. More than half the people who sought psychiatric counseling were subliminally aware of existing flight patterns by sight, but mostly by sound.
Kealey’s entire existence was like that. It was one reason he had to get out. The vessel was full.
But it was never drained, he thought as he noticed that more office lights were on than usual, that street vendors were hawking more American flags than before, that helicopters were hovering, instead of passing over the capital. In many of those, onboard computers were comparing license plates to U-Haul databases and profiling renters by name; onboard cameras were watching approaches to the Capitol, the White House, and other institutions and using facial recognition software to match pedestrians to FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security “wanted” lists; onboard infrared and ultraviolet eyes were scanning backpacks and laptops, underwear and shoes, baby strollers and shopping bags for explosives or radiological material. One of them, Kealey knew, would be monitoring all cell phone communications in the city, watching for dialed numbers. Terrorists who planted improvised explosive devices triggered them with phone-to-phone calls. These phones were “short-term units” bought with cash off the rack, the pay-as-you-go variety. IDing buyers at domestic electronics stores, running their names for potential terror affiliations, was not enough; many of these phones came from overseas. Thus, Homeland Security had developed software to keep a record of every call made in the United States to and from “long-term units.” Any call that was not on this list was instantly flagged. Between the time the first two digits of the receiving phone signaled an alert and the last two digits could be dialed, a computer on board the chopper activated Trask Industries’ new KillButton. This was a directed electromagnetic pulse that would immediately shut down the receiving cell phone and pinpoint the caller for police.