House Divided. Джек Марс

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “Eh, forget it. Nobody’s going to miss Marsh Dennis. His ex-wives are probably all on the phone with their lawyers right now, directing them to make inquiries about the will.” She gestured at the phone. “That was Kurt Kimball.”

      Luke nodded. “Of course it was.”

      Suddenly, she slid out of bed. In the dim light, he watched her pad naked across the room. One last fleeting image of a different life passed through his mind – a life where it wasn’t time to get up yet.

      “I need you at this meeting,” she said. “As much as I hate to say it, the Special Response Team should be in on this one.”

      “Because of Jack Butterfield?” Luke said.

      Yes, Butterfield was close to the intelligence community in the sense that he liked to visit their offices, listen to their stories, and play with their toys. In exchange for being treated like one of the big boys, he pushed their budget requests through Congress. The hatchet in Hatchet Jack came from his passion for cutting after-school activities and social programs for poor people.

      Luke had been expecting a call, and then a visit, from Hatchet Jack one of these days. He didn’t look forward to playing footsie with Jack Butterfield, but it had to be done. The SRT was the President’s pet agency, but Congress made the budget decisions.

      Well, he supposed that particular visit wouldn’t be happening now. Luke smiled inwardly. He would never have wished any harm upon Congressman Butterfield, and especially not on the other passengers, but…

      He stood, went over to the bay window, and pulled back a corner of the heavy drapes. The forecast had called for snow, and it had been right. It came down heavy, blown by gusting winds. It looked like there were several inches on the ground already.

      “It’s snowing,” Luke said. Now he did smile. “To coin a phrase, the morning commute is gonna be a mess.”

      “That plane was brought down, Luke. Kurt thinks it was a targeted assassination. Worse, he thinks it might be the start of something bigger.”

      CHAPTER THREE

      5:17 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

      The Situation Room

      The White House, Washington, DC

      “I’ve already seen the photographs,” an intern said.

      “Gruesome. Corpses and body parts strewn across the hillsides. To think that Marshall Dennis is one of them. God. We studied him in an entrepreneurship class when I was at Wharton. He was amazing – a real force of nature. You wouldn’t think a guy like that would ever die. Like, he wouldn’t allow it, or something.”

      Luke was riding in an elevator packed with White House staffers and intelligence people. He glanced at the one who had spoken. The guy was very young, tall and fit, in a blue suit jacket and dress shirt with an open-throated collar, and a flop of blond hair nearly obscuring his face. He reminded Luke of New Wave rock bands from the 1980s.

      The kid hadn’t been speaking to anyone specific, just all the elevator riders in general. He had made an announcement of sorts: he had seen the pictures already. Briefly – very briefly – Luke wondered which wealthy campaign donor the kid was the son or nephew of.

      The elevator opened into the egg-shaped Situation Room. People who arrived there for the first time were often surprised at how small it was. When a crisis came, like now, for example, and the place started to get crowded, it could give a claustrophobic fits. It was hyper-modern and set up for maximum use of space, with large screens embedded in the walls every few feet, and a giant projection screen on the far wall at the end of the table. Tablet computers and slim microphones rose from slots out of the conference table in the center of the room – they could be dropped back into the table if the attendee wanted to use their own device.

      Every plush leather seat at the table was already taken. The seats along the walls were filling up with young aides and assistants, most of them chatting among themselves, tapping messages into tablets, or speaking into telephones.

      The young people were excited. Their futures were full of hope, and their eyes were bright with ambition. The fact that they had been awakened and summoned to an emergency meeting this early in the morning only underscored to them how important they were.

      Down in the center of the room, where the actual decision-making would happen, the faces were decades older and the eyes were less bright. Susan Hopkins sat at the closest end of the oblong table, in a high-backed chair with the Seal of the President on it. At the far end stood big, chrome-domed Kurt Kimball, Susan’s National Security Advisor. A sprawl of tired-looking men and women took up the seats between them.

      Susan and Luke always staggered their arrivals to emergency meetings like this. It was a tactic meant to obscure the fact that they had just awakened in bed together. One glance from Kurt told Luke all he needed to know: they weren’t fooling anyone – at least not anyone who mattered. Luke took a seat in the back row along the wall.

      He watched Susan, just slightly below him and to his left. She held a large white coffee mug in one hand. She looked good – slim and fit in a dark blue pantsuit, her hair just a little bit wild. Susan could make the most conservative outfit look sexy. She was talking seriously to her chief-of-staff, Kat Lopez.

      Stone looked Kat up and down. Long black hair, pretty face, dark almond eyes, and a tall, full-figured body hidden inside a blue business suit – she looked almost as good as Susan. Her eyes were tired, though, and were starting to show crow’s feet at the edges. Kat was not as young as she looked, and the demands of the job were putting some wear and tear on her.

      Suddenly Kurt clapped his big stone hands. He had played basketball in college. His hands were enormous. Kurt himself was big, but his hands looked like they were on the wrong body.

      “Order, everybody! Come to order, please.”

      The place quieted down. A couple of aides continued to talk along the wall. It was early morning, people were drinking coffee, revving up, starting their day. This was a place for talkers. Quiet, introverted young people didn’t usually end up working at the White House.

      Kurt clapped his hands again.

      CLAP. CLAP.

      CLAP.

      The last one sounded like an unabridged dictionary slamming onto a marble floor.

      The room went dead quiet.

      “Good morning, everyone,” Kurt said. “Thank you for arriving quickly. You all know who you are, so we’re going to skip the introductions.” He paused and looked at Susan. “Madam President?”

      “Mister National Security Advisor?” she said.

      “Are we ready?”

      Susan shook her head. “No. But that never stopped us before.”

      Kurt glanced at the young woman sitting just to his left. Luke recognized her as Kurt’s long-time aide. She still wore her hair in the Hopkins Bob that Susan had recently abandoned. “Amy, let’s start with Sharm El Sheikh.”

      On the large screen behind Kurt, and the smaller screens around the room, a photograph of an airport terminal appeared. The terminal’s roof was rounded and billowy, almost as though it were a tent. In the foreground of the photo СКАЧАТЬ