Triggers (2 page)

“Yes, ma’am!” Kushnir was today’s custodian of the nuclear football—the briefcase with the launch procedures; he was wearing a Navy dress uniform. The Beast—the presidential limo—was five hundred feet away on Henry Bacon Drive, the closest it could get to the memorial.

The paramedics transferred Jerrison to a litter. Susan and Snow took up positions on either side and ran with the paramedics and Phalanx Alpha down the broad steps and over to the Beast. Kushnir was already in the front passenger seat, and the paramedics reclined the president’s rear seat until it was almost horizontal, then moved him onto it.

Dr. Snow opened the trunk, which contained a bank of the president’s blood type, and quickly set up a transfusion. The doctor and the two
paramedics took the rearward-facing seats, and Susan sat beside the president. Agent Darryl Hudkins—a tall African-American with a shaved head—took the remaining forward-facing chair.

Susan pulled her door shut and shouted to the driver, “Lima Tango, go, go, go!”

KADEEM
Adams knew he was in Washington—God damn it, he
knew
it. When they’d brought him here from Reagan, he’d seen the Washington Monument off in the distance giving him the finger, but…

But in every fiber of his being, he felt like he was in another place, another time. A cruel sun hung high overhead, and countless bits of burnt paper, ash, and debris swirled about him—a ticker-tape parade commemorating the destruction of the village.

Not again.

Sweet Jesus, why couldn’t it stop? Why couldn’t he
forget?

The heat. The smoke—not quite the smell of napalm in the morning, but bad enough. The relentless drone of insects. The horizon shimmering in the distance. The buildings torn open, walls collapsed to rubble, rude furniture smashed to kindling.

His right arm ached, and so did his left ankle; it could barely support his weight. He tried to swallow but his throat was dry and his nostrils were clogged with sand. His vision was suddenly obscured, so he wiped a hand in front of his eyes, and his palm came away wet and red.

More sounds: helicopters, an armored vehicle moving along the dirt road crunching wreckage beneath its tracks, and—

Yes, always, overtop of everything, unending.

Screams.

Babies crying.

Adults wailing.

People shouting—cursing—praying—in Arabic.

The cacophony of a ruined place, a ruined culture.

Kadeem took a deep breath, just like Professor Singh had taught him to. He closed his eyes for a second, then opened them and picked an object in the room here at Luther Terry Memorial Hospital, focusing his attention on it and nothing else. He selected a vase of flowers—clear glass, with fluted sides, like a Roman column that had been squeezed in the middle—

—by a fist—

And the flowers, two white carnations and three red roses—

—blood-red roses—

And…and…

Glass could cut.

And—

No. No. The flowers were…

Life. Death. On a grave.

No!

The flowers were…

Were…

Beautiful. Calming. Natural. Unspoiled.

Deep breaths. Trying to relax. Trying to be
here,
in this hospital room, not there. Trying, trying, trying…

He
was
here, in DC.
That
other place was the past. Done. Finished. Dead and buried.

Or at least dead.

Professor Singh entered the room. As always, the Sikh’s eyes went first to the vital-signs monitor, and he doubtless noted Kadeem’s elevated pulse, his increased respiration, and—Kadeem looked himself and saw that his blood pressure was 190 over 110.

“Another flashback,” Singh said, as much diagnosis as question.

Kadeem nodded. “The village again.”

“I am so sorry,” Singh said. “But, if we’re lucky—and we both deserve some of that—today’s the day we may be able to do something about this. I’ve just come from seeing Dr. Gaudio. Your final MRIs are fine. She says we can go ahead with the procedure.”

THE
same hospital, but another room: “Ready, Mr. Latimer?” asked one of the two orderlies who had just entered.

Josh Latimer was more than ready; he’d been waiting many months for this. “Absolutely.”

“What about you, Miss Hennessey?” the other orderly asked.

Josh lolled his head, looking over at the daughter he’d recently been reunited with after a thirty-year separation.

Dora seemed nervous, and he couldn’t blame her. He’d be better off after this operation, but—there was no denying it—she’d be worse off. Parents often made sacrifices for their children, but it was a rare child who was called upon to make a sacrifice as big as this for a parent. “Yes,” she said.

One orderly went to the head of each gurney. Josh’s was further from the door, but his orderly started pushing him first, and he passed close enough by his daughter to reach over and touch her arm. She smiled at him, and just then she reminded him of her mother: the same round head, the same astonishingly blue eyes, the same lopsided grin. Dora was thirty-five now, and her mother would have been sixty-one, the same age as Josh, if breast cancer hadn’t taken her.

They made an odd train, he knew, as they were pushed along: him as the locomotive, thin, with white hair and beard; her as the caboose, still a little on the hefty side despite dieting for months to get in shape for the operation, her long brown hair tucked into a blue cap to keep it out of the way. They happened to pass the door marked “Dialysis.” Josh had spent so much time in there he knew how many tiles were in the ceiling,
how many slats in the blinds, how many drawers in the various cabinets.

They continued down the corridor, and Josh was pushed feet-first into the operating room, followed by Dora. The orderlies joined forces to transfer him to one of the surgical tables and then her to the other. The second table wasn’t normally here; it was mounted on wheels. Overhead was a glassed-in observation gallery that covered two adjacent sides of the room, but its lights were off.

The surgeon was present, along with her team, all in their green surgical garb. Her eyes crinkled as she smiled. “Welcome, Josh. Hello, Dora. We’ll start by putting you both under. All right? Here we go…”

SECRETARY
of Defense Peter Muilenburg—a broad-shouldered sixty-year-old white man with silver hair and hazel eyes—stood looking at the giant illuminated world map stretching the length of the subterranean room at the Pentagon. Above the map, a large red digital timer counted down. It currently read 74:01:22. In just over three days, Operation Counterpunch would commence.

Muilenburg pointed at the big screen, where the string “CVN-76” was displayed in the middle of the Arabian Sea. “What’s the status of the
Reagan?”
he asked.

“She’s making up for lost time,” replied a female analyst, consulting a desktop monitor.

“We need the aircraft carriers in position within sixty hours,” Muilenburg said.

“It’ll be tight for the
Reagan
and even tighter for the
Stennis,”
the aide replied, “thanks to that hurricane. But they’ll make it.”

Muilenburg’s BlackBerry buzzed, and he pulled it out of his blue uniform pocket. “SecDef,” he said.

“Mr. Secretary,” said a woman’s voice. “This is Mrs. Astley.” The next words were always, “Please hold for President Jerrison,” followed by silence, so he lowered the handset a bit, and—

He quickly brought the phone back to his ear. “Repeat, please.”

“I said,” the president’s secretary replied, and Muilenburg realized that her voice was shaking, “Mr. Jerrison has been shot. They’re rushing him to LT right now.”

Muilenburg looked up at the bank of red digits, just in time to see it change from 74:00:00 to 73:59:59. “God save us,” he said.

THERE
were always two members of the Secret Service Countersniper Team on the roof of the White House; today one of them was Rory Proctor. The chill wind cut through him. He was holding his rifle in gloved hands and walking back and forth, scanning the grounds between here and the Ellipse, the fifty-two-acre public park south of the White House fence. The Washington Monument was visible, but even from this elevated position, Proctor couldn’t see the Lincoln Memorial, where all of the action had been taking place, although he was listening intently to the chatter in his earpiece.

Proctor was so used to scanning for things in the distance, he didn’t pay much attention to the rooftop, which had a stunted colonnade around its edges and a few potted shrubs. But a dove happened to catch his eye as it flew into view. It landed a few yards from him, by a squat metal enclosure at the base of one of the rectangular chimneys on the south side. There was some odd scuffing of the white roofing tiles in front of the enclosure. He took one more look at the grounds on the south side, saw nothing of interest, then walked over to look at the enclosure.

The padlock had been jimmied, and although it had been closed, it wasn’t locked. He swung the lid of the enclosure up, leaning it back against the white chimney, and—

Oh, shit.
Inside was a hexagonal contraption of squat metal about two feet in diameter and, judging by the depth of the enclosure, about a foot thick; it looked like someone had taken a slice through one of the lava pillars from the Devil’s Causeway. Proctor recognized the device from intelligence briefings. The attacks on Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia had been successful—meaning the bombs used there had been utterly destroyed when they exploded. But a planned attack on Los Angeles International Airport had been averted ten days ago when a terrorist from al-Sajada, the al-Qaeda splinter group that had risen to prominence after the death of Osama bin Laden, had been intercepted with a device just like this one in the trunk of his car.

Proctor spoke into his headset. “Proctor, Central. I’m on the White House roof—and I’ve found a bomb.”

THE
doors to the operating room burst open, and Dr. Mark Griffin, the CEO of Luther Terry Memorial Hospital, strode in, wearing a hastily donned green surgical smock, surgical hat, and face mask. “Sorry, Michelle,” he said to the startled surgeon. “You’ve got to clear out.”

Michelle sounded shocked. “I’m in the middle of a kidney transplant.”

“We’ve got a priority patient,” Griffin replied, “and no other operating room is available.”

“Are you
nuts?”
Michelle said. “Look at this woman—we’ve opened her up.”

“Can you stop?”

“Stop? We’ve just begun!”

“Good,” said Griffin. “Then you
can
stop.” He looked at the assembled team. “Clear out, everyone.”

“What about the patients? They’re intubated and we’ve put them both under, for God’s sake.”

“Sew her up, then move them out to the corridor,” Griffin replied.

“Mark, this is crazy. The donor flew in all the way from London for this, and—”

“Michelle, it’s the president. He’s been shot, and he’ll be here any minute.”

AS
soon as the bullet hit President Jerrison, Secret Service agents swarmed into the Lincoln Memorial. The interior was divided into three chambers by two rows of fifty-foot-tall columns. The large central chamber contained the giant statue of a seated Abe made of starkly white Georgia marble, mounted on a massive oblong pedestal. The small north chamber had Lincoln’s second inaugural address carved into its wall, while the small south one had a carving of the Gettysburg Address.

Agent Manny Cheung, the leader of Phalanx Beta, looked around. There were only a few places to hide: behind the columns, in the narrow space behind the statue’s pedestal, or somehow clambering up to perch on Lincoln’s back. Cheung held his revolver in both hands and nodded to Dirk Jenks, the thickset young agent on his left. They quickly determined that there was no one else in here, but—

But the elevator door was now
closed.
It was in the south chamber, in the wall adjacent to the Gettysburg Address, and had been locked off here at the top with the door open; Cheung knew that Jenks had checked it before the president had arrived. The elevator—used to provide handicapped access to the statue—went from here down to the small exhibit hall in the lower part of the memorial. Cheung barked into his sleeve. “He’s in the elevator heading down.”

There were security people guarding the entrance to the basement gallery anyway, but Cheung took off, running on the hard marble floor and down the wide outside steps. He passed between the two signs that flanked the entrance. The white one on his right said, “Warning: Firearms Prohibited,” and showed a silhouette of a pistol with a barred red circle over it. The brown one on his left said, “Quiet” and “Respect Please.”

Cheung hurried down the steps past the seating area that had been erected
for the presidential party, rounded a corner, and headed down again to the narrow entrance to the lower level. He had looked through the gallery just yesterday, as part of the preparations for the president’s speech. It had been his first time in it—like most Washington residents, he tended to visit the sites only when he had company from out of town, and there were so many things to see on the Mall, he’d never bothered with this little museum before.

The exhibit hall, opened in 1994 and occupying just 560 square feet, had been partially paid for by school kids collecting pennies. Since the back of the penny had depicted the Lincoln Memorial then, it had been called the “Pennies Make a Monumental Difference Campaign.” Cheung had read the Lincoln quotes carved into black marble slabs, including one that had startled him: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”

He tore past the exhibits, heading to the little elevator lobby in the back. Of course, by the time he got there, the elevator had completed its descent. Three other men—two uniformed DC cops and another Secret Service agent—were already there, with guns aimed at the elevator door. But there was no sign of anyone else, and the brass door was closed; whoever was inside must have a key for the elevator’s control panel, which would explain how he’d started it after it had been locked off on the upper level.