Line of Succession: A Thriller (16 page)

“
This code you’ve been trying to crack,” Nico repeated as patiently as he could, “it’s not a code. It’s a language, y’see?”

“
No. I don’t see.”

“
Muskogee. A Native American language. An
oral
language. The thing is, nobody speaks it anymore. The actual tribe died out decades ago.”

Carver’s face was suddenly full of malice. He stepped into Nico with both hands and lifted him by his shirt collar, throwing him back against a table. ”You knew what it was right off, didn’t you? Back in Virginia. You knew!”

“
How could I?” Nico said as he tried to fight Carver off. “You gave me those crappy transcripts, remember?”

O’Keefe pushed her index and middle finger into a pressure point just below Carver’s right shoulder blade. His left arm suddenly dropped to its side. O’Keefe easily pulled him off, smiling at the perfect execution of a move she’d learned in her weekly jujitsu class.

Carver smiled too, despite the lingering pain. O’Keefe had only been taking those classes for a few weeks.

“
You,” she chastised Carver, “behave!”

She turned to Nico. “Now explain. Slowly. You said it’s an oral language?”

“
Was.
The last survivor was coaxed into transcribing a phonetic version for archival purposes. No small feat. Muskogee is full of smacking sounds and tongue clicks and guttural sounds.”

“
Yet you claim that you can read it. Explain.”

“
Back then I was looking to develop a new programming language. Something spybots couldn’t recognize. I saw a writeup about Muskogee in a linguist’s community site. I ended up bribing a professor just to get a photocopy of it. Guess I wasn’t the only one in the world with that idea.”

Carver’s left arm was still tingling from O’Keefe’s pressure point move. He rubbed his forearm back and forth, coaxing the feeling back into it. “Just tell us how this relates to the codes.”

“
Look, it’s an old trick. Some coder adopts an obscure tribal language with a completely alien syntax. Like when the Americans used Navajo against the Japanese in World War Two. The Japanese went the rest of the war trying to figure out this impossible code, which was really a Native American language with a sentence structure unlike anything they’d ever seen. Same idea here. You were busy cracking a code, when all you had to do was learn Muskogee.”

*

Colonel Madsen took Eva to an office with wallpaper depicting bald eagles flying around snowcapped mountains. It contained a government-issue mahogany desk, a file cabinet and a computer docking station. Madsen nodded to a full-length couch against the wall with a set of blankets carefully folded at one end. “These are my old digs,” he said. “That couch will do for tonight, and we can get you a hotel off-base in the morning. “All I need tonight is an outside line,” she said.

Madsen nodded toward the desk phone. “There ‘tis. You need anything else, I’m down the hall. I’ll be bunking in my office tonight in case more hell breaks loose.”

Eva lifted the desk phone receiver and waited for the Colonel to exit. She dialed the Iranian Embassy in Washington. To her surprise, the Ambassador took her call despite the late hour.

“
Madam Secretary,” the Ambassador said, his British-accent indicative of his Cambridge University education. “I’m happy to hear you are alive and well. I was expressing my concern about your health to my colleagues.”

How touching. Eva didn’t buy it for a minute. “Mister Ambassador, I was calling to get your perspective on your meeting this morning with the President.”

The Ambassador was quiet for several moments. “Pardon?” he said. “Perhaps something is lost in translation…”

“
Camp David. This morning. You and the President were scheduled to meet.”

“
Madam Secretary, you have been misinformed. We have not yet had the honor of a Camp David invitation. To say such a thing is to rub salt in the wound.”

“
I meant no disrespect. I was just told that…”

“
You are incorrect. And if you will excuse me, we are following the developing military situation quite closely, and if I can say, with much approval.”

The Ambassador hung up. Eva’s head mushroomed with questions.

She closed her eyes and tried to quiet her mind. She imagined that her anxieties and unanswered queries were white noise, like static on an old terrestrial radio station. It was usually a matter of concentrating, very hard, and imagining herself turning off that radio. In these meditations, she sometimes had to turn the radio off a few times. Eventually she would think about nothing. After some time, she would cease thinking altogether.

Tonight was different. The white noise was unbearable. It had only been this loud once before, after leaving the governor’s mansion to take the IMF job a few years back. That time she was unable to quiet her mind for days at a time. She ended up needing medication to take the edge off.

She picked up the phone again and dialed her sister. The phone rang seven times. Finally her brother-in-law answered. He didn’t even ask if she was okay. He just started in with the questions.

“
Eva, what’s going on out there? Are there going to be more attacks? The news is saying maybe we should wrap the house in plastic in case of chemical attacks. Is there any truth to that at all?”

Eva should have known. Nobody wanted to hear about her fears. Not even family. They had their own bitter little world to worry about.

Rapture Run

11:19 p.m.

Chief Justice Stanford P. Dillinger entered Rapture Run in the same bewildering way that Speers had before him – driven blindfolded through West Virginia hill country, and then escorted into the retrofitted former coal mine on an underground subway. Unlike Speers, he had been permitted to bring a duffel bag with two changes of clothes, which he carried on a strap around his shoulder. Two Ulysses soldiers brought him past the enormous CENTCOM command room and to an isolated chamber. It was uncomfortably chilly. Nevertheless he sat alone at a plain folding table, soothing himself by stroking the enormous beard that hung like a gray fox’s tail from his chin.

General Wainewright entered the room twenty minutes later. He sat opposite the Chief Justice and folded his hands before him as if to pray.

“
Your Honor,” Wainewright said. He regarded Dillinger’s jeans, wing tips and button down shirt. The country’s leading constitutional authority looked incredibly small without his black robes. “Can we get you some tea or coffee? Maybe something to eat?”

“
Don’t gimmie this gimcrackery,” the 85-year-old Dillinger said. He looked like a doddering old man, but his mind was sharp. “The President should have made a statement by now, and the networks are spewing disinformation. Cut the crap and tell me how bad it is.”

Wainewright nodded. “All right then. A series of coordinated terrorist strikes have effectively beheaded our country’s senior leadership and disrupted the continuity of government.”

The Chief Justice absorbed this for less than two seconds, the scowl on his face unchanging. “That’s the most deliberately obtuse bullshit I’ve ever heard. Just tell me who’s dead and who’s alive.”

“
Suffice to say, we’ll need you to swear in the next President of the United States within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

Dillinger pounded a scrawny white fist on the table. “Are you dense? I’m asking you for names, General.”

Wainewright bristled, but managed to stay professional. “We’ve managed to maintain the National Command Authority, but due to the security situation, the planned model of Presidential succession just won’t meet the country’s needs.”

The Chief Justice shook his head. “I’m getting the impression that you brought me here to bless military control of the country.“

“
Rest assured, the next POTUS will be a
civilian
,” Wainewright assured him. “A sitting cabinet member. You have my word.”

“
More bullshit. The fact that you won’t name this mythical future leader is most disconcerting. Yes, most disconcerting indeed. Sounds like a black market auction, with the job going to the highest bidder.”

“
Presidential succession isn’t a constitutional matter,” Wainewright said, aping what he’d heard Speers say earlier.

“
If you’re going to flagrantly disrespect the laws this country has created, why are you wasting my time?”

Wainewright grinned. He thrived on this type of banter. Especially when he held all the cards. “You’re the high priest, sitting in your temple of truth and justice with your fellow disciples. People respect you. If we’ve got any hopes of keeping the country together, I need you to swear in the new President.”

Dillinger considered his options. The General was technically right. The Presidential Succession Act had come out of Congress, not the Constitution, and as of now, the Legislative Branch had no say over who took the throne. And if the situation was as bad as the General suggested, there could be riots, economic failure, anarchy. He had no intention of taking orders from the military, but on the other hand, if the High Court refused to participate in the process, they’d be permanently weakened. If anything, withdrawing the Court from the process might further fuel the country’s burgeoning police state.

“
A sitting cabinet member,” Dillinger repeated.

“
Yes your Honor.”

Dillinger knew that this was the very kind of back room deal that changed civilizations. He only hoped that this was the lesser of two evils. “I’d make you swear on a stack of Bibles, but everyone in Washington knows you’re an atheist.”

Wainewright laughed, took Dillinger’s hand and shook it. He had just cut the second most important deal of his career; The first had been persuading President Hatch to give him authority over Ulysses contracts.

*

Corporal Hammond led Dex Jackson down a low, dark corridor, lit with blue LED lamps, that reminded him of the nuclear submarine that he had served on after his graduation from Annapolis.

Hammond stopped and opened a small door to his right, which was much better lit.

“
I’m afraid these are your quarters, sir. It’s not much, but I’ll get you some clean clothes.”

Dex went inside, regarded the four walls, bunk, the small desk with a chair on either side, the video screen and the airplane-sized bathroom. He sat down on the bed and put his head in his hands. He was exhausted, but for the first time in his life, he feared sleep. Dex knew that when he closed his eyes, he would see his wife Angie flailing in the Atlantic.

“
Dex,” someone said. It was General Wainewright, standing in the doorway. “Got a sec?”

The room seemed much smaller as the General shut the door behind him and sat in the plastic desk chair. Dex had never been alone with the General, and he was awed by how much oxygen his presence seemed to require. The four stars on each shoulder of Wainewright’s uniform did not seem nearly enough.

“
I’m concerned about LeBron,” Wainewright said without preamble. “He’s blaming you for Angie’s death.”

Dex thought on this. “Well of course he is.”

“
That’s between you and your conscience. Bottom line, we can’t let him go on record saying you left Angie for dead.”

We can’t let him go on record. Dex thought about that statement for a few seconds. He didn’t understand who the General meant by “We” – the Joint Chiefs? The Pentagon? And Dex took offense at anyone but him trying to parent his child. Still, this was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs he was talking to. And for now, Wainewright seemed positively Czar-like. America didn’t know it, but Wainewright was running the country from a secret bunker that he didn’t even know the coordinates of, and he could do anything he wanted. This was no time to pick a battle.

“
Don’t worry,” Dex said. “I’ll talk to LeBron.”

“
Do yourself a favor,” Wainewright said. “Let him sleep it off. Then let the chaplain or the staff psychologist have a crack at him. You’ll have your hands full here with us.”

Wainewright slapped Dex on the back and stepped into the corridor, where he spotted the glowing cherry of General Farrell’s cigarette. He grabbed the smoke from Farrell’s mouth and stomped it into the floor. “Don’t be such a dinosaur,” he chastised him.

They walked down the four-foot wide corridor single file. As always, Wainewright walked in front. He had been one year Farrell’s senior at West Point, and had remained one step ahead of him his entire career. The nation’s second-most powerful military man was happy in his friend’s shadow. Farrell regarded himself as merely a great military mind, but thought Wainewright to be a true visionary, as evidenced in the way he had deftly outmaneuvered the President and DOD to feed Ulysses USA, his very own private army. Over the next week, they would have their chance to return America to its former greatness.

“
The Allies are demanding communication with the POTUS,” Farrell said. His voice was raspier than usual from shouting orders in the command room.