She realized the thump of the pile driver had stopped and spared a glance across the river. The workers were staring at the tower also, gesturing and talking among themselves. Scout felt a sense of fellowship and also relief that she wasn’t just imaging all of this.
Everything stayed exactly like it was for almost a minute; then, as if the metal tower digested a big ball of gold, the orb flowed out of the wire, back down the tower, and into the earth.
Scout leaned farther out of the window, in danger of toppling to the ground. She could see what the men on the river couldn’t. The golden pulse came out of the leg, into the ground, and along the black line she’d spotted earlier in the day.
Then it was in the water, a very slight golden mist, slowly spreading outward in all directions. It reminded Scout of a nature channel show where a python had imbibed a deer whole and it went down the gullet and the python slithered back into the water in order to digest the large meal.
The men on the barge had already dismissed it and were back at work, pounding away.
“It just ate a lot of power,” Scout whispered to herself, not knowing how she knew it, but she knew it.
And there was no doubt that wasn’t a good thing.
She pulled herself back in the window and grabbed her iPhone. She texted the same number.
And was rewarded with “NUMBER OUT OF SERVICE.”
“Come on, Nada,” Scout said.
Captain Griffin was on the roof of the White House, watching the sky with his binoculars. When he scanned south, the Washington Monument crossed his field of vision. As he did every time he saw it, he thought how odd it was that the monument was two tones. The obsessive part of him wanted to run over and paint it all one color, although the two tones came from different shadings of marble used in the construction, not different paint. And the two different types of marble came about because while initial construction of the monument began in 1848, it ground to a halt in 1854 because of the Know Nothing Party.
Really. The Know Nothing Party. Griffin liked that. He could think of a lot of politicians who could be charter members.
Then, of course, there was the Civil War, which put a damper on building as Washington became the most heavily fortified city in the world at the time. Lincoln did insist work continue on the Capitol Dome and managed to see the Statue of Freedom placed on top, although he did not live to see it totally completed in 1866.
And even after the Civil War, for the Washington Monument, there were more politics. So for twenty-three years, like a broken shaft, the one-quarter-completed monument graced Washington’s skyline, testament to a broken country.
It depressed Griffin to think that Abraham Lincoln never saw the completed monument. He often wondered how the various presidents felt when they gazed out from the White House. It was a hobby of Griffin’s to study the history of Washington, D.C., and the buildings and countryside around the White House. He was a big believer that one’s environment affected a person greatly.
They really should have matched the stone, Griffin thought as he completed his sector, then started over, jumping three-quarters right quadrant so that anyone observing him wouldn’t see a pattern, because there was no pattern.
Patterns were bad for effective security.
And thinking about security reminded him of the kerfuffle over the holidays when the White House had gone into lockdown and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff had lost his mind and committed suicide in the command bunker under the East Wing.
So they said.
Griffin had been on leave and was sorry he’d missed the excitement, but the Keep had handled things well and gotten him up to speed on what had really happened. The world was a much more dangerous place than the average person realized.
Or needed to know.
The Monument flashed by in his binoculars again as he circled back. When he redid his kitchen in Virginia, the contractor tried to pawn off two different granites on him. Said it looked cool. Not. The guy was just trying to unload stuff he’d bought for someone else after the other person reneged. Two tones in the same object just didn’t work.
He was so lost in thought he almost didn’t hear the phone.
Warren Zevon.
He kept the binoculars to his eyes with one hand as he pulled the phone out of his pocket and hit the accept key by feel. Then he glanced down, verified the message, and forwarded it, all automatically.
Then he lowered the binoculars and forwarded the message to the Keep. As it zoomed out of his phone to a tower, then back here to the White House, just one floor below him, where the Keep kept her office, he shook his head. There were those who believed the Loop was secure, a way those in the know could pass messages outside the system.
There was no outside the system. Not in a world where there were people like Hannah in the Cellar and the Keep in the White House and Ms. Jones at Area 51 and Mrs. Sanchez in the Pentagon comptroller and the other powerful denizens who ruled the dark world of covert ops. There was only what they allowed.
The world was a dangerous place and there were people who dealt with those dangers.
And for that, Captain Griffin was very grateful, unlike the many who decried every dollar spent by the government.
He knew the message was encrypted with a one-time program. He shook his head. They should have stuck to nonelectronic encryption. Use the same agreed upon page from Tale of Two Cities and a trigraph. Sometimes the old ways were the best.
Captain Griffin put the phone back in his pocket and scanned the grounds. There was a small patch of browning grass amid the sea of green. Some sprinkler head had to be off.
He made a mental note to tell maintenance about it at the end of his shift.
“He’s pulling off I-40,” the specialist who was sitting at the large display announced.
“Refueling?” someone asked.
Neeley walked over and stood behind the specialist, watching the image. The Nighthawk tracking the Prius was at a high enough altitude and far enough away that it couldn’t be heard and was just a distant black speck in the sky from the target vehicle.
The Prius drove past the cluster of gas stations at the exit. It continued along a secondary road, winding its way into the Tennessee countryside.
Neeley’s phone buzzed and she stepped outside to take the call. “Yes?”
“It’s a Sanction,” Hannah announced.
“He’s turned off the interstate,” Neeley said. “I’m not certain where the target is headed.”
“Most likely Knoxville,” Hannah said. “A message is being passed on the Loop via five cutouts. It originated in the Knoxville area.”
“The terminus?”
“We’re past cutout three now,” Hannah said. “Two to go to the terminus.”
“Shouldn’t we wait—”
“I want this shut down now. The Nightstalkers can deal with Rifts and Fireflies and all their other anomalies, but Burns, no matter where he’s been or what’s been done to him, is rogue. He was rogue before he got sucked through that Rift and he’s rogue now. I want this done before it escalates into who knows what. Not even Ms. Jones understands what’s going on.”
“Roger,” Neeley said as she twirled a finger on her free hand at the officer in charge. He sent a crew chief running toward the Nighthawk waiting nearby. Seeing him coming, the crew was already cranking up the engine. “Has anyone been able to at least determine what Burns’s real name was before he joined the Nightstalkers?”
“Ms. Jones did remember that,” Hannah replied. “Joseph Schmidt. Beyond that, not much. He came out of Delta Force and we’re running down all the former members of that team who have ‘disappeared.’ Unfortunately, there are quite a few and some have been disappeared so well, they never existed as far as we can tell. The Nightstalkers are very efficient about that.”