President Elect. Jack Mars

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СКАЧАТЬ Staples said. “Not what it is. I don’t know what it is, and that doesn’t really matter anyway. What it looks like is everything.”

      He gazed around the room, hard eyes taking everyone in, daring them to tell him otherwise.

      Young Tim Rutledge took up the challenge. “It looks to me like they murdered the investigator so they could pin it on Susan,” he said. “It looks to me like they stole the election through voter fraud and by tampering with the machinery. That’s what it looks like to me.”

      Luke finally decided to chime in with something. Now he realized what was wrong with this entire meeting, and since he did, he might as well point it out. Maybe it could help them.

      “It seems to me,” he said slowly, “that you need to take back the initiative.”

      Throughout the room, all eyes slowly turned to him.

      “Think of this as combat, a battle. They have you on the run. They have you in disarray. They do something, and you react. By the time you react, they’re already doing something else. They are on the attack, and you are in a disorganized retreat. You have to come up with some way to attack them, set them on their back foot, and retake the initiative.”

      “Like what?” Brent Staples said.

      Luke shrugged. “I don’t know. Isn’t that your job?”

      For several minutes, Kurt Kimball had been huddled in a corner with two of his aides. Something had clearly distracted him. Now he turned back to the room.

      “I like your idea, Stone. But it’s going to be hard to retake the initiative at this moment.”

      Stone raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Why’s that?”

      “We just learned that at least a hundred West Virginia state troopers, and Wheeling metropolitan police, are en route to Washington in a long convoy. They intend to come directly here to the White House, take Susan into custody, and bring her to the DC Metropolitan police headquarters themselves.”

      “They have no jurisdiction,” the White House counsel, Howard, said. “Have they lost their minds?”

      “It seems that everyone has lost their minds today,” Kurt said. “And they have a claim to jurisdiction, however slight.”

      “What is it?”

      “Both police forces, along with a dozen others from nearby states, are routinely deputized as auxiliary Washington, DC, cops to provide overflow security for the Presidential inauguration events every four years. They claim that renders them permanent deputies.”

      Howard shook his head. “It won’t hold up in court. It’s silly.”

      Kurt put his hands in the air, as if Howard had pulled a gun on him. “Whether it will hold up or not, they’re on their way here. Apparently, they think they’re going to walk in here, take Susan, and walk back out of here with her.”

      There was a long pause. No one in the room spoke. The silence spun out as each face looked from one to the other.

      “They’ll be here in thirty minutes,” Kurt said.

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      12:14 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time

      Outside the White House

      Washington DC

      “No one gets inside,” the tall man said into his walkie-talkie. “Are we clear? I want personnel centered at the gatehouse, but I also want eyes in the sky watching every possible point of entry. Shooters on the roof.”

      “Roger that,” a voice squawked from the handset.

      “Tell those shooters use of deadly force is green light. Repeat, green light on deadly force, but only if necessary.”

      “On whose authority?”

      “Mine,” the man said. “My authority.”

      “Copy,” the voice said.

      The tall man’s name was Charles “Chuck” Berg.

      He was forty years old, and had been in the Secret Service for nearly fifteen years. He had been the head of the President’s home security detail for more than two years. It had come about by accident, the result of a disaster. He had been on her personal security detail the evening of the Mount Weather attack, when she was the Vice President. He had almost certainly saved her life. Everyone else on the team had been killed.

      He had changed that night. He only saw it in retrospect. He had already been thirty-seven years old, in a job with a high level of responsibility, and married with two children – but in a sense, that was the night he became a man. He became who he was supposed to be. Before then? He was just a big kid with a job that let him carry a gun.

      Susan trusted him after that night. And he trusted her. More than that – he felt protective of her – and not just because it was his job to feel that way. He was younger than her by a decade, and yet he felt almost like he was her big brother.

      Survival – saving someone’s life – is an intimate thing.

      He knew there was nothing to these corruption charges, or this murder charge. And he’d be dipped if he was going to allow anyone in to take the President of the United States into custody – especially not a bunch of yahoos wielding a fake bench warrant from far outside any reasonable claim to jurisdiction.

      He had just done a perimeter check on foot. He was moving up the driveway, back toward the White House. Just ahead of him, a dozen heavily armed men in business suits moved briskly along the road. It was a sunny day, and cold. The shadows of the men on the ground showed sharp, high-powered rifles and shotguns poking from their sides.

      The guardhouse was just up ahead. It was protected by concrete barriers. There was both a STOP sign and a DO NOT ENTER sign on the fence. More men in suits stood by the entrance. The body language of the men was alert, tense. They had the overstuffed look of men wearing bullet-proof vests or armor under their clothes.

      Construction vehicles were setting down taller, thicker, and heavier barriers in front of the existing ones. They were just putting the finishing touches on the barriers now. The new barriers created a narrow chute, which was also a Byzantine maze of sharp right and left turns. It would force any vehicle to slow to a crawl. Wider vehicles, like trucks or Humvees, wouldn’t be able to pass through it at all.

      NOTICE, a sign read. RESTRICTED AREA. 100 % ID CHECK.

      There weren’t going to be any ID checks today. No one was going in or out.

      In the near distance, perhaps two hundred yards away, men in black uniforms moved into position on the roof of the White House. Those guys were the real deal, Berg knew. The shooters. Secret Service snipers, any one of whom could easily put a bullet through his heart from this distance.

      A Black Hawk helicopter took off from a helipad behind a copse of trees on the White House grounds. It headed east, then banked lazily to the north. Snipers lounged in the open bay doors.

      This was just the visible defense. There were more than a hundred men and women guarding the perimeter of the White House grounds, including military units. No inch of the fencing or the walls СКАЧАТЬ