Line of Succession: A Thriller (25 page)

Speers pulled the phone out of his pocket, powered it up and found Eva Hudson’s mobile number in his contact list.

Fort Campbell

The Federal Reserve Chairman’s head looked enormous on Eva’s monitor. His 72-year-old chrome dome twittered ever so slightly as he jawed at length about the financial implications of the crisis. “I hope you can convince the President to act on this pronto,” the Chairman yelped over video chat. “His predecessor was granted certain emergency powers that he shouldn’t be shy about using.”

She didn’t have the stomach to tell the Chairman that she hadn’t spoken to the President since the church bombing in Monroe, and that she didn’t know a soul who had. “I’ll do my best, Mister Chairman.”

Colonel Madsen abruptly opened Eva’s office door. “Chief of Staff Julian Speers is on line one.”

Eva didn’t have to be told twice. “Mister Chairman, I apologize. Call you back.” She cut the video feed and picked up the phone. “Julian?”

“
Eva, it’s good to hear your voice.”

It was good to hear Julian’s voice too. But there was only one thing on Eva’s mind. “Is the President with you?” she said. “He hasn’t returned my calls.” Eva heard a familiar whirring in the background. “Chief? I hear rotors. Are you on Marine One?”

“
Eva,” Speers began with a foreboding tone, “This isn’t easy for me to say…” Speers choked up, unable to speak.

So it was true. Eva had suspected as much from the moment she saw the emergency tape. She felt the tears coming, but she couldn’t let herself go there. She resolved to hold herself together. There was no time for grieving. Not now. There was a leadership vacuum. She had to find out the details and act on them. “How did it happen?” Eva said.

Speers relayed the story that Major Dobbs had told him, and then offered his speculation that Marine One’s flight plan randomizer had been rigged ahead of time. It was the only theory that made sense. The signal dropped before Eva could respond.

She took out the bottle of Ativan. She took the other half of the pill she had ingested earlier and calmly swallowed it.

Eva sat for a moment, absorbing what she had heard. Not a surprise. But a blow nevertheless. The biggest blow.

She looked at the Ativan bottle. Taking it had been a mistake, she decided. She needed a clear head. The fog might numb the pain a little, but it wouldn’t fix anything.

Eva pulled the wastebasket close to her, leaned over it, and stuck her right index finger down her throat. Her gag reflex kicked in immediately. The anti-anxiety pill and what remained of last night’s dinner came out with force, filling the bottom two inches of the trash can.

She sat up, reached calmly for a Kleenex and wiped the corners of her mouth. Then she dropped the rest of the pills in the garbage. There would be no more crutches today.

Baltimore

Four short minutes after Carver had left the unarmed Sergeant Hundley as a sacrifice to the city’s vengeful looters, the Viper Squad convoy pulled within two blocks of the Hamilton Arms. A figure in jogging shorts and a blue hoodie emerged from a parked car and approached the lead Humvee. Carver rolled down his window.

“
Nobody’s been in or out since three a.m.,” the man said. He was CIA case officer Celon Wise. Carver had only last night picked Wise out of a CIA directory in hopes of finding someone local to stake out the Hamilton Arms. To Carver’s surprise, Wise was better than just local. He had a high school acquaintance that was a super in the building next door, so he had been able to set up an observation post without any problems.

Wise pulled the hood back, revealing the speckled charcoal complexion and left-veering nose that Carver recognized from his agency profile photo. “Tin foil’s on the back windows,” he went on. “I counted four people in the thermal goggles.”

“
Any weapons?”

“
The three men have assault rifles. But they’ve got a lady in there with ‘em. Pretty sure she’s not there by choice.”

Carver switched on his radio. “All units, we have a possible hostage situation. Use discretion.”

Sergeant Hundley’s second-in-command responded from the second Hummer. “Interrogative, Agent Carver: what is the definition of discretion?”

“
It means don’t shoot an unarmed woman,” Carver said. “And be careful with other residents that might be coming out of the building. Thanks to Sergeant Hundley, we missed our strike window. Curfew just ended.”

Celon Wise donned his hood and got back into his car. Viper Squad scrambled from the Humvees and proceeded toward the building. “Unit one, cover the building's rear entrance. Unit two secures the lobby. Nobody gets in or out. Unit three’s with me.”

Carver led his troops into a lobby that had last been redecorated in the 1980s. A few elderly residents sat reading in pleather chairs. Others were playing poker around a glass coffee table. Their eyes got big when Carver entered with his armed-to-the-teeth Special Forces unit. Two Green Berets split off immediately, securing the lobby at both ends.

“
Hey fella,” an old man said. His dyed black hair was swept back tightly against his head. Carver could smell the shoe polish from several feet away. “You're here for those jerks in 309, yeah? I called the cops days ago.”

Carver went to the table. “What’s going on in 309?”

“
Rough lookin’ C-U-Next-Tuesdays. Last week they were carrying these long gym bags, like they was going to play lacrosse or something. But I saw the outline of a gun stock pressed up against the fabric of the bag. They was carrying rifles, all right. And I know there ain’t no hunting season in August.”

“
We’ll check it out.” Carver addressed all the residents. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry about this, but you need to get some fresh air right now.”

“
Like hell,” the old man said. “Ulysses shot up a handful last night. Saw it on the Internet.”

“
Curfew’s over,” Carver said. “And trust me on this – you’ll be much safer outside than in here.”

The residents got up – some of them with great difficulty – and made their way to the front doors. Carver took two Green Berets with him up the stairwell and left four to cover the lobby.

*

Chris Abrams pulled his unmarked Humvee alongside the other two sitting down the street from the Hamilton Arms. The four men in Abrams’ crew were eager to get out. Two stood on lookout as the others began inspecting the other vehicles. “They’re from Fort Campbell,” one of them said. “You figure they’re here on patrol?”

“
Not a chance,” Abrams said. “These things didn’t drive themselves all the way from Kentucky. And the Army wouldn’t just airdrop any unit’s vehicles into Baltimore.”

The four men in Abrams’ crew had already added it up in their heads. “Twelve Green Berets,” one of them calculated, “versus five of us.”

“
Like those odds,” Abrams said as he opened a protein drink. After shooting down Marine One and personally assassinating the leader of the free world, Abrams equated himself with Iron Man and the rest of his crew as slightly lesser, but still lethal, superheroes. So far, their engagements on U.S. soil had been vastly easier than anything they had been asked to do in North Africa or Iraq. They were careful to always maintain the element of surprise. The constant intermingling of corporate defense contractors such as Ulysses and the traditional armed forces had nearly wiped out any suspicions that might have existed previously.

He parked the Hummer right behind the others, so that the vehicles looked to be part of the same convoy. The crew readied their weapons and approached the building on foot. Now it was time to divulge the details of the mission to his crew.

Abrams pulled three photographs of Angie Jackson from his pocket and handed them to the men.

“
She goes by Angie,” Abrams explained. “Make sure she’s dead. We’ll take the body with us.”

“
What if she’s in pieces?”

“
We’ll vacuum her up if we have to. Don’t leave a single scrap of DNA.”

*

In Apartment 309, Angie Jackson sat in the living room propped up against two floor pillows. Her ankles and wrists were duct-taped together and the television had been her only companion for hours. The pundits on TV, a pair of retired Generals who had once served under General Wainewright, paraded on-and off-screen like a couple of buffoons trained to recite from the same script. “
The foreign press wants you to believe these strikes in Yemen are somehow reckless or without justification. But let's recap what we know about Yemen. First off, it's long been a harbor for terrorists. Second, the government has been openly sympathetic to extremism.”

Elvir entered the room looking like he had just woken from a too-short nap. He had large puffy circles under his eyes. An M4 was strapped around his shoulder.

“
I gotta pee,” Angie told him.

“
When don’t you have to pee?”

He sighed and helped her to her feet.

“
I can’t feel my fingers and toes,” she complained.

He used a kitchen knife to cut the duct tape around her wrists and ankles and walked behind her to the bathroom. They passed the apartment’s lone bedroom, where two men slept on a floor mattress snuggling machine guns like teddy bears.

Angie went into the sparse, windowless bathroom and shut the door behind her. She stooped to look under the door to see if Elvir was waiting outside. As evidenced by his boots, he was. She turned the sink faucet on full and opened the medicine cabinet as quietly as she could. She wasn’t sure what she hoped to find – something sharp, maybe– but the cabinet was empty. Deflated, she sat on the commode and peed and, when she realized that she had to do much more than just urinate, noticed that the toilet paper roll was gone. In its place, a magazine with several pages ripped out rested sadly on the vanity. She dreaded the feel of the glossy pages against her bottom.

She mindlessly tapped her feet, a habit she had picked up as a child when her mother taught her how to make sure her feet didn’t fall asleep on the toilet. Then she felt it – something cool and round grazing the ball of her foot.

*

In apartment 209, the unit directly below 309 where Elvir Divac held Angie Jackson, Agent Carver stood on a living room table. He used a whisper-quiet drill with a two-foot masonry bit to bore a quarter-inch hole in the ceiling between the two apartments. He had not needed the masonry bit after all. The ceiling was impossibly thin and the insulation was non-existent.

209’s residents sat on a loveseat in the corner watching him work. Like many other elderly couples, they were too broke to move out of the crime-infested building. Carver had urged them to go downstairs, where they would presumably be out of the line of fire, but they had insisted on keeping an eye on their possessions.

Carver inserted a 20-inch fiber optic probe into the hole. Then he attached a small viewfinder to the end. By twisting the probe in a circular motion, he saw the entirety of 309’s living room. The apartments’ floor plans were identical. Carver saw the newscast on the TV in the living room and circled the probe around slowly. The room looked empty.

One of his men whistled twice from the bedroom. Carver dismounted the table, made his way down the hallway and regarded the Green Beret standing atop the old couple’s bed. He was looking into an identical viewfinder. “Two men,” the soldier whispered while keeping his eyes on the prize. “Both asleep. Both armed.” He twisted the optic another two inches. “Another in the hallway. Just outside the bathroom. Also armed.”

Carver went into the bathroom, where another solider stood on a crate. The soldier put his fingers to his lips. “Female in the bathroom,” the soldier twanged in a hushed Louisiana accent.

“
Is she armed?”

“
No sir. I’d say civilian.”

“
Hostage?”

“
Sir, I’d...” the soldier stopped. His face turned red. He turned away from the viewfinder.

“
What’s the problem?”

“
She's on the crapper, sir.”

Carver frowned. There was no time for chivalry, privacy concerns or squeamishness. He pushed the soldier aside, stood on the milk crate and peered into the fiber optic probe for a moment. Then he stepped down, astonished.

“
That woman,” he said, “is Angie Jackson.”

“
Who?”

“
Angie Jackson. As in Mrs. Dexter Jackson.”

“
The SECDEF’s wife? No sir. She’s dead. Saw it on the news.”

“
Believe nothing.” Carver twisted the optic and took another look. This time he found himself looking directly into Angie Jackson’s brown eyes. “Uh-oh. She’s onto us.”

*

Angie grabbed the optic probe and tugged on it. She managed to get about ten inches of it above the carpeted bathroom floor – just enough to realize that she was holding a tiny camera. She was being watched. Or videotaped. In the bathroom. She dropped the fiber optic and pulled up her pants.