Red Dot: Contact. Will the gravest threat come from closer to home than we expect? (22 page)

After sipping from a cup of water that had been given to her, she assured everyone, “I’m OK. Kind of shaken up, but I’ve got work to do.” An agent standing beside her told her they had learned there was a problem at the Oval Office, and that the President could not be reached.

After thinking for a few seconds, she said to the agent, “There must be news camera crews in or near the building by now. Tell them I will make an address from the House floor in a half hour, at, let’s see, make it noon.”

“Ms. Vice President, we should get you to a secure location,” the agent said.

“And where would that be?” retorted Duggard, briefly annoyed. “We’ve got to give the American people some kind of reassurance, anything. Whatever details I can give them will be less frightening than what they are imagining. Contact my office and find out everything you can about the President’s situation and the extent of the plot. And get the Secretary of State on the line.

At that moment, Secretary of State Whiteton was entering General Peoples’ office at the Pentagon, leaving his two Secret Service agents outside the door at the General’s insistence.

Whiteton worried he might not be safe without the guards, though earlier both he and the President had agreed that Peoples was the type of man who would honor his oath of office. He had stopped for a moment outside the office door—a point at which he would usually efficiently and swiftly weigh
the pros and cons of going inside. Instead, his mind was uncharacteristically foggy. After a few seconds, he found himself walking into the room, as if he was watching someone else.

The General sat at his desk; he did not ask Whiteton to sit down, and the Secretary of State remained standing.

Peoples opened a drawer in his desk and, with his right hand, pulled out a 9mm handgun. He set it on the wood desk with a soft clunk, as if it were too heavy to lift, and looked at it for a moment.

“General Peoples, what are you doing?” an alarmed Whiteton blurted out. He fleetingly considered shouting for his Secret Service agents, but quickly dropped the idea when he thought that would lead to a bloody shootout, in which he would be the first casualty.

Ignoring Whiteton’s question, Peoples said in his small but firm voice, “Mr. Secretary, you are already aware that some members of the Armed Forces and government are executing a plan, called Tumbler, to force the President to implement a more aggressive policy against the extraterrestrials. If the President refuses…” Peoples’ voice faltered for a moment. “They will remove him from office.

“Here are the details of the plan as I know them.” The general stretched out his left hand and tapped a thin folder of papers on his desk. “Section three is particularly important.”

The Secretary of State stood frozen in fear and confusion. Was the General going to shoot him? It didn’t make sense to give him the plan first, if that was the case.

Peoples then reached out, picked up the gun, and said, “I knew about this treasonous plot and did nothing to stop it. I have disgraced myself; I have disgraced all the men and women who died fighting under my command; and I have disgraced my country. There is only one thing left to do.”

“General Peoples, no!” cried Whiteton as the General slowly raised the gun. “America faces a grave crisis. Your country, and the men and women serving under you, need you now, more than ever. I know this is terribly painful for you, but please be brave for your country once more. Please.”

Peoples had stopped lifting the handgun, and held it about shoulder high. He closed his eyes and looked to be on the verge of tears.

“Yes, I will serve,” he said, slowly putting the gun back down on the desk. “But I assure you that after this is over, I will accept my lawful punishment.”

At the Oval Office, Douthart tried to dial back his rage because he knew he would need to keep a clear head. He had surprised himself with his passion in defending the presidency. Maybe democracy and the Constitution meant even more to him than he thought. But as his anger cooled, a frightening realization arose: Claire would be coming to the Oval Office at noon—in just over a half hour—for their briefing.

Surely law enforcement will cordon off the area by then
, he thought. As if on cue, a siren began to sound in the distance, soon joined by a chorus of sirens as a fleet of police cars closed in on the White House.

Douthart instinctively felt that he couldn’t be seen to give in to the plotters’ demands or follow their instructions. When he thought it out, he saw that resistance would help maintain the dignity of the presidency, and would probe for weaknesses among the conspirators.

He dropped the torn-up executive order to the floor and began to walk out of the Oval Office. The officer who had accompanied Clark, a heavy-set major with a boyish-looking face, stepped in front of him.

“Stop where you are, sir,” he said.

“Major, you don’t give the orders here,” Douthart said in a firm voice. “You are in my office, and I am your duly elected commander-in-chief. Step out of my way.”

The major’s shoulders slumped. His jaw went slack and his lower lip trembled. He began to turn his shoulders, as if he might let the President go by.

“Oh be a man!” hissed another plotter, a square-jawed colonel who had just entered the Oval Office. “We’re here to protect America and return the government to the people.”

The President’s anger flared up again. “Return the government to the people? Who anointed you to decide what the people want?”

“Get him out of here!” commanded General Clark. “Put him in with the others.”

When the President refused the second aide’s order to move, the Colonel grabbed Douthart’s upper right arm and pulled him through the presidential secretary’s office and across the hall into the windowless Roosevelt Room. The room, often used for staff meetings and by large delegations preparing to meet the President in the Oval Office, contained almost two dozen people, who had been rounded up by the plotters.

Douthart stared in horror when he entered the room; Claire was seated on the other side of the table in the chair nearest the door. She must have arrived early for her appointment with the President, and gotten swept up with the other hostages.

The President looked away after a few seconds to avoid drawing attention to Claire. His mind raced as he tried frantically, and without success, to think of ways to protect her. Claire also looked away, but her stomach churned at the sight of the President being manhandled.

At the far end of long wooden table, in front of a fireplace topped with a painting of Teddy Roosevelt from his Roughrider days, sat four Secret Service agents and two police officers, all with mortified and angry looks on their faces and their hands on the table in front of them, as ordered by three armed conspirators standing near the door.

Claire and a half-dozen White House staffers sat in chairs along one wall, across from a portrait of Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR, who led America to victory over the Nazis and the Japanese Empire, now watched as a handful of American officials and military men and women held the President hostage and tried to overthrow the US government. The staff members were in shock; a few of them could not stop shaking or crying. Three plotters in the room with automatic rifles made the threat to the captives’ lives clear. The fact the staffers—and the President—were prisoners inside the White House was unimaginably distressing. It seemed the world had turned upside-down, and there was no limit to what disasters could happen.

After the rebel Colonel pushed the President to a seat at the table facing the staff members, Douthart looked around to get his bearings. To show that he was still the leader of the government, he said to his fellow captives, “Don’t worry, this will be over soon. We’ll all be out of before the end of the
workday. And I promise I’ll give everyone an EA (excused absence) so you won’t have to go back to work this afternoon.” Douthart’s reassurance and joke relieved some of the tension in the room.

“Just shut up,” one of the conspirators, a wiry captain, said loudly, pointing his M-4 rifle menacingly in the President’s direction.

I can’t show I’m afraid
, thought Douthart. He said, “These are just a few ignorant hotheads, even if some of them have fancy titles. The vast majority of the government and the military will very quickly crush them.”

The rebel who had threatened Douthart neared a boiling point from anger, fear, and frustration. The plotters had decided early on not to harm the President because it would erode their public support. But, determined to silence him, the guard aimed his rifle at the head of the nearest hostage—Claire—as other captives screamed or gasped. “I said shut up!”

Douthart leapt from his chair and cried out, “Don’t hurt her!”

The outburst stunned everyone—hostages and insurgents—into momentary silence.

Douthart slowly sat down, breathing hard. Claire thought,
don’t endanger yourself
, concentrating all her energy on the thought, as if to make sure it got to the President.

To calm the tension, Douthart raised both hands shoulder-high and made a gesture to signal everyone to be calm and quiet. The enraged gunman, breathing more heavily, stepped back to his place near the door. In a few seconds, he felt the need to explain himself.

“Thousands of patriotic and courageous Americans have taken this action to save our country from destruction, and to return our country to the people and Christian values that the Constitution called for. As long as you don’t resist, no one will be harmed. Our goals will succeed soon, and except for the President, you’ll all be released.”

Douthart kept silent to avoid adding to the risk for himself, Claire, and the other hostages, but he wondered how they’d decided they could dictate what the country’s religious beliefs should be.

He tried hard to focus his mind.
I’m the God-damned President
, he thought.
What can I do to get Claire and the others out safely, and help the country?
Soon he
wondered what was happening with the Vice President. What about General Peoples? And the ETs.

Holy crap. If they were just conning us about wanting peace, we’re sure making it easy for them to conquer us. And if they want peace, how can we cooperate with them?

Unknown to Douthart or the gunmen holding him hostage, the leaders of the coup were losing confidence. They had holed up in another interior office, next to the Roosevelt Room. From the start, the plot had problems. The plan had seemed so solid and sure to succeed when they drew it up. They had met in small groups of people, all of them virulently opposed to what they saw as deteriorating values and eroding freedoms. The approach of beings from another world seemed to make it even more urgent to protect fundamental values.

And now, they were convinced that the morally bankrupt government wouldn’t even protect America from destruction via the ETs. Some even thought the government worked with the space aliens to enslave the country. In their small groups, they enthusiastically reinforced their commitment to the coup and their hatred for the government, and convinced themselves the rest of the country would quickly follow them. They drew moral support from some like-minded and popular media commentators, politicians, and organizations that—while not explicitly calling for a revolt—subjected the government and the rest of the establishment to unrelenting and increasingly shrill criticism.

But the plotters, who themselves were part of the government or military, had not realized how daunting it would be to actually seize the President and Vice President and carry out the other parts of the complex coup. Some plotters simply abandoned the rebellion when the time came to begin. And doubts assailed many who carried out their roles. Even Fitzgerald, one of the coup’s leaders and a bombastic supporter, hesitated when he faced the reality of overthrowing the elected government.

And suddenly the coup suffered two staggering blows in quick succession. Leaders learned from plotters outside the White House and from TV news bulletins that Vice President Duggard would address the nation from Congress at noon, less than fifteen minutes away. Clearly the plan to
“neutralize” her had failed. Coup leaders didn’t know it, but several key players in the effort to capture Duggard had failed to act. Now the government had a popular figure to rally around.