Midnight Secrets (7 page)

Blake gave a deep sigh. Looked down at the carpet in contemplation. “In all confidence, John—”

“Yes?” London leaned forward.

“I’ve been given assurances that the party will swing behind me. Armstrong and Macy want a whack at it, and DeLuca wants another try, but the party feels that if a strong front-runner is established early on, it won’t be torn apart during the primaries. I was told that if I declare now, I can sail through New Hampshire and Iowa. Now that is a lot to take on. A lot depends as well on coming up with a viable and valuable veep candidate.”

London scrunched his face into a thoughtful frown. “That’s true. It’s a lot to have on your plate. Especially right now.”

His clue. Blake leaned forward, lowered his voice.

“Well, John, that’s the thing. Party analysts are clear that I have a really good shot at winning and taking with me a lot of politicians riding on my coattails. But—”

London leaned forward, too, face a little perplexed. “But?”

Blake sighed. He’d done some deepwater fishing and at least the fish fought back. London was like a farm fish, way too easy to reel in. He pulled a long, sad face.

“But—I find myself unable to get past the Massacre. Alex was my best friend. We’d been best friends since childhood. The Delvauxes were like family to me. And, to tell the truth, I’m still a little shell-shocked by that night. I should have died along with the others. It is a miracle I’m still alive. I’m having a lot of trouble processing the attack. I’m having stress flashbacks.”

Blake put a little tremolo in his voice.

London placed a sympathetic hand on his shoulder, no doubt mind spinning to know where Blake was going with this. “I’m so sorry, Blake. Anything I can do—anything at all. All you have to do is ask.”

Blake managed not to smile. London wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire.

He briefly touched London’s hand on his shoulder.

“You don’t know how much I appreciate this, John. And, as a matter of fact, there is something you can do for me. Something big.”

Surprise flared in London’s eyes. His expression of help had been purely rote. But he knew how the game was played and gave a faint smile, meant to be encouraging. “You name it, Hector, and it’s yours.”

Starting to reel in the fish...

Blake took in a deep breath, as if bracing himself for something portentous. He looked London straight in the eye and saw him repress a flinch.

“I haven’t spoken with anyone about this yet, John. I wanted to sound you out first. I’ve thought about this long and hard and prayed on it, too. You know better than anyone my sense of duty and love of this country, so the decision has been very painful. But the fact of the matter is, John...at this moment, I am unable to face a primary campaign. I lost too many people in the Massacre and I haven’t finished grieving. The loss has simply been too great.” He leaned over and clasped London’s knee. “So that is why I am asking you to make the sacrifice for me. With your permission, I’d like to go back to the party and throw my weight behind your candidacy.”

Hand on knee, Blake could feel the jolt of excitement run through London. He’d just been handed the keys to the kingdom and it was Christmas and a thousand birthdays all rolled into one. This election was special. The Massacre was fresh on everyone’s mind. The country was still traumatized and longed for a leader to rally round. The mantle of the Delvauxes was supposed to be Blake’s, but he was passing it on to London.

More a coronation than an election.

London was trying to repress his emotions, but the skin around his nostrils grew pale. A pulse beat in a vein along his throat. He laid a hand over his heart and Blake had no doubt that it was a genuine gesture, not a studied one. His heart was probably jackhammering.

London’s fondest dream, handed to him
on a plate
. Something he would never have been able to gain on his own, and it was going to be given to him.

“There’s more.” Blake gazed deep into London’s eyes. “I have some very powerful and wealthy people behind me, John beyond the party itself. You have no idea the resources that we will make available to you. If you don’t sleep with an underage punk rocker or get caught with cocaine up your nose or strangle a staffer, the job is yours. The
position
will be yours.” He bowed his head, keeping all irony at bay. “Mr. President.”

London huffed out an excited breath. “Oh my God. Believe me, Hector, when I say I will do my utmost to be worthy—”

Blake cut him off before he started sounding like a campaign ad. “However,” he said sternly. “There are a few promises you’ll have to make to me. To us. To the people who will be backing you.”

“Anything,” London promised fervently. And Blake had no doubt he was telling the truth. He’d do anything, anything at all. Good.

“The people behind me have incredible resources which they will place at your disposal. But they are going to want certain things. Certain favors. Nothing that could harm the country, of course. Just things that will ease their business dealings. You need to make a commitment to me that on the rare occasions I ask, you will follow my suggestions.”

“Absolutely. Anything you want.” London’s head was bobbing enthusiastically. He’d sell his firstborn to sex traffickers to be president. He thought he was agreeing to getting a few trade treaties passed or moving legislation that would cut business taxes. He had no idea.

Because phase two was not becoming president. Phase two was controlling the president. And Blake had just secured that.

Blake couldn’t move if he was kept under 24/7 surveillance by the Secret Service. But he certainly could as a private citizen with untold wealth. Because beyond phase two were phases three, four and five.

After which America as he knew it would be gone.

Excellent.

Chapter Four

Portland

Isabel Delvaux?

Well, fuck.

The Delvauxes were American aristocracy. Joe knew about them but not enough to know individual members. He knew that the family was political, with many members involved in environmentalism. Another couple of kids were involved in movies. The older generation was powerful. Alex Delvaux—Isabel’s
father
—had been talked about as the next president of the United States.

“Fuck me,” he said. “She’s rich and powerful.”

“No,” Felicity said. “Not anymore. Not the woman I saw. She’s been reduced to rubble.”

Felicity walked back into the kitchen to the big pan she’d set on the counter. Some amazing smells were coming from it. Joe lifted the aluminum and took a deep breath. “Wow. Big spaghetti.”

“Baked ziti, you barbarian,” Metal answered affectionately. “Are we going to get to eat this, too? I mean, after the boeuf bourguignon this seems almost too much.” He closed his eyes and took in the amazing aroma, too. “Ah, a woman who cooks.” Felicity shot an elbow to his ribs. “What? This is amazing stuff.”

“I cook,” Felicity protested.

Wisely, Metal kept his mouth shut. His fiancée was beautiful and super smart and scary good with IT. Her few stabs at cooking had practically landed them in the hospital. The only thing she cooked well was takeout.

“Isabel said to put this in the freezer, take it out an hour before you want to serve it and put it in the oven at 375 degrees for forty minutes and let it set for about a quarter of an hour before your guests arrive. I can’t believe you get to eat like this.”

“Hey.” Metal cocked his head. “I cook.”

She smiled smugly. “Not like this you don’t.” She turned to look at Joe. He probably still looked stunned.

Isabel, a Delvaux.

He’d been thinking that when she got better they could go out. Well, actually he’d been thinking more along the lines of when she got better they could have sex. A lot.

That seemed pretty foolish now. What would a Delvaux want with a beat-up former soldier?

“She’s rich and famous,” he said again. No use beating around the bush with Metal and Felicity. Metal knew him way too well and Felicity...well, she’d become one of the guys.

“No,” Felicity said crisply. “She’s not. I told you that. She’s a woman alone. Sit down.”

Joe raised his eyebrows.

“I’ve learned to just obey her,” Metal said. “Makes things easier.”

Joe sat down.

“So, Joe, what do you know about the Washington Massacre?” Felicity asked. “It happened while you were in the hospital between your third and fourth surgery so I imagine you read about it after the fact.”

“The Washington Massacre.” Joe lifted his eyes to the ceiling. “Okay. When it happened I was in ICU. I didn’t even hear about it until a couple of weeks after. Still, I think I know what everyone knows. Terrorist attack. Killed almost a thousand people. The electricity grid was attacked too so there was a three-day blackout. “

“Those people who were killed included Isabel’s entire family. Parents, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins. It was a close-knit extended family by all accounts, and they were wiped out.”

“Shit.” Joe turned to Metal. “Al Qaeda was responsible, right? It was another 9/11, on a slightly smaller scale.”

“Nobody really knows who was responsible.” Metal bounced a fist off his knee. “There were very few survivors. Isabel was one, though I never thought to make the connection. Word was she was in a coma for a while and as far as I know, was never interviewed afterward.”

“It was bad for us, wasn’t it?” he asked Metal.

“The worst.” Metal held up a hand and ticked off the points on his fingers. “First—this was an attack on a gathering of the president’s political party, meeting at the hotel closest to the White House. Practically on the White House’s doorstep. The attack occurred during an event celebrating the announcement of a presidential run by a scion one of America’s top political families. In effect, it took out the man who would probably have been president in a year and a half. The closest thing possible to a presidential assassination without being a presidential assassination. And it took out a good section of the nation’s political elite. There were a lot of undersecretaries and heads of agencies and political journalists. And then the blackout. That scared the shit out of everybody. Images of a dark Washington, DC in the moonlight spooked the entire country. Looked like what would happen after the zombie apocalypse.”

“You think they calculated that? The photo op?”

Metal shot him a shrewd glance. “Yeah. One photo especially was seen all over the world.”

The sounds of tapping and Felicity turned her monitor toward him. It was striking and one he’d never seen before. The iconic view of the Mall and the Washington Monument, in total darkness, a full moon rising behind the monument. The top third of the Monument was sheared off. In the background, shades of red as a section of the city was on fire.

Metal was right. “Looks like a snapshot of the apocalypse,” Joe said quietly.

“It nearly was.” Metal clenched his jaw. “The city went dark, all the cell phones in the area were jammed. The president was hustled into Marine Force One and taken to an undisclosed location. The VP was in the bunker. For about half an hour we were at DEFCON 2.”

DEFCON 2. DEFCON 1 was imminent nuclear attack. The last time the country had been at DEFCON 2 had been during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Even 9/11 had been DEFCON 3.

“And I slept through that.” Joe shook his head.

“You were blown up. You’d died a couple of times. You’re excused.”

“So...Al Qaeda, huh? They’ve regrouped?”

Metal shrugged. “That’s the story. Some obscure group based in Yemen no one has heard of claimed it. JIAP. Jihad in the Arabian Peninsula. Loosely connected to AQAP.”

“We bomb anyone?”

“Yeah. In Yemen. I think mostly we reduced boulders to rocks.”

Felicity cleared her voice delicately. “Not everyone believes it was JIAP. Or even AQAP. Some believe it was closer to home.”

Metal sighed and glanced at Joe. “She’s Russian. She sees conspiracies everywhere. It’s in her blood.”

They’d clearly had this discussion before because Felicity didn’t bat an eyelash. “Did you know that the next day over three trillion dollars disappeared from the American economy?”

“What? No.” Metal raised his eyebrows, a big reaction for him.

“Oh yes. Someone—and we have no idea who—made a killing in the market. Sold a ton of shares short. The darknet talks of nothing else.”

“Christ.” This was the first Joe had heard of it, too. He’d learned about the Massacre weeks after the fact, when the lights were back on in Washington and the funerals were over and it had been shoved off the talking head shows in favor of Russia invading Ukraine. “Is there a way to read up on that?”

Her fingers blurred again. “I’ll send you stuff, but I’ll send it encrypted and leave you the encryption code. Delete everything you read. I mean it, Joe. Get rid of this stuff from your laptop because some of this stuff is incendiary. There’s a whole meme on the CIA being behind the Massacre.”

“Fuck,” Metal breathed.

“Yeah.” Joe shook himself. “I just got shivers down my spine and I don’t scare easy.” He met Metal’s eyes. “Let’s hope it’s not true because otherwise...” His voice trailed off.

“Otherwise we’re fucked,” Metal said. “Big-time.”

“Okay.” Felicity stood. “Now that I’ve given you nightmares about your foremost intel gathering institution actively plotting murder and mayhem, I’ll leave. I’ve got some work to do at home.”

Metal rose with her and Joe walked them to the door.

Felicity turned to kiss him on the cheek. “Read that stuff I sent you on the Massacre. Isabel’s been through a lot. Be kind to her.”

“No need to worry, honey.” Metal put a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think there’s any way Joe would hurt her.” Metal met Joe’s eyes. Felicity had taken Isabel under her wing and anything that bothered Felicity bothered Metal.

Joe met his gaze steadily. Fuck no, he wasn’t going to hurt Isabel. He was going to protect her, just as the anonymous emailer asked.

It was dark when Metal and Felicity left and he closed up the house for the night. He wasn’t going out, he wasn’t going anywhere until he’d read every single word of the Massacre reports and the darknet conspiracy theories.

He carefully put the ziti—though it still looked like overgrown spaghetti to him—in the freezer and heated up the beef stew that was left. He mopped up the sauce with some bread Isabel had made that had olives and sunflower seeds in it and drank a beer.

Then he opened his laptop and started reading.

It was fascinating stuff. He looked at the attack from a specops point of view. If he was going to attack the country’s best and finest in a fancy hotel across the street from the White House, how would he go about it?

Well, more or less exactly as the terrorists had done, except they used some tech tricks that weren’t in his arsenal. 9/11 had been low-tech, the flyers counting on the fact that no one could even remotely imagine people would fly fuel-laden jets into office towers. But it hadn’t been a precision attack, based on special intel or weaponry. Basically it had taken box cutters and men willing to die and take thousands of other people with them.

This had the stink of a specops operation all over it. Starting from knowing where all the security cameras were and blanking them out before the massacre.

Whoever had planned it had the right event. After Alex Delvaux had declared his candidacy, he would have been surrounded by secret service agents. They weren’t the best of the best, in Joe’s book. They weren’t as hardened as SEALs but that was because they operated mainly in the USA and not in hellholes the way SEALs did. But they would have certainly supplied better security than had been on hand at the Burrard Hotel.

Which had been, essentially, zilch. It wasn’t stated specifically but Joe knew how to read after-action reports. There had been the hotel security, which was pitiful, and ten agents from a private company. Joe checked the company out and he’d never heard of it. He’d heard of more or less every single important security company in the US and most operating throughout the world. The fact that he hadn’t heard of the outfit meant that it was either a super elite one or rank amateurs. Joe opted for door number two.

There was no way to interview any of the security force—whether the hotel’s or the private company’s—because they’d all died in the attack. Not one man from the security detail survived.

Very few survived, in fact, so there weren’t many eyewitness accounts. Maybe forty people including a congressional aide so traumatized he’d had to be sedated and was still in a psychiatric hospital.

Reading carefully, Joe was able to piece together a bare-bones timeline. He started with the recordings. Several major news networks and an even bigger number of bloggers with cell phones were recording the proceedings.

7:20 pm. Big hullabaloo in the hotel ballroom, thousands of excited people. Canned music in the background. A buffet against the wall with waiters standing behind it, white-gloved hands clasped in front of them, staring off in the distance, as if the goings-on at the podium had nothing to do with them.

About thirty people on the podium, including Alex Delvaux. His wife was there and two young boys. Isabel was on the sidelines, smiling, talking to someone in the audience. The older brother was missing. Jack, his name was, Joe remembered reading. He didn’t recognize many of the others on the crowded podium. Then a woman stepped away and Joe recognized a face in the second row. Hector Something. Hector...Blake. He’d been around for as long as Joe remembered. Had even been a Secretary of Something. A Senator, too. Maybe twice.

He saw Isabel frown, look around, step off the podium with a cell phone to her ear.

The crowd was chanting, “Del-vaux, Del-vaux, Del-vaux!” Alex Delvaux stepped to the microphone, smiling, hands up, patting the air. Calming people down. It took him a quarter of an hour as they kept getting revved up, over and over again.

Finally, there was a little quiet. Delvaux bent his head down to the podium mike. There was a feedback whine and Delvaux stepped back quickly. The whine stopped and he stepped forward again. “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome! Thank you for joining us on this historic evening. We’re going to shake things up!”

The crowd went wild, jumping up and down, most of them holding up cell phones to capture the moment.

Delvaux held back a moment, grinning, letting the crowd have its moment.

Joe rarely paid attention to politics and politicians. He considered it all a rigged game, like pro wrestling, only less fun. He had to admit, though, there was real excitement in the air. He leaned forward to study Delvaux. Handsome but not too handsome. The lines in his face showed that he smiled more than he frowned. Charisma came off the man in waves.

So this was Isabel’s father.

“I know some of you are thinking of the excellent buffet tables behind you—” Raucous laughter. “But first there are some things we have to say, about us as a people and about our country. We feel—”