White: A Novel (36 page)

“That’s because you’re a bad shot,” Maddy said, walking back toward her little brother. She turned to notice the Isuzu pulling even with where they stood on the snow-covered lawn.

“Am not,” Christopher argued, still pouting, but angrily this time.

“OK, you got me,” Maddy conceded. She picked up the stick and handed it back to him. “But now it’s my turn to chase you. I get to use the fort.”

She noticed that the Trooper had stopped. Its window was coming down.

“Hey, who’s that?” she asked.

Christopher said nothing. All he could do was stare at the driver’s odd-looking face.

“Hey, is this the Walker house?” the man called out.

Christopher stepped toward the truck, the imaginary gun firmly clenched in his one good hand. His mom had told him not to talk to strangers, but having proper protection made everything seem a lot safer.

“Not Walker;
Waller,
” Christopher said. He raised the stick to eye level like his dad had showed him when Mom wasn’t looking.

“Are you a pirate?” Maddy asked. She had seen men like him in books and movies—a black patch over one eye, a grin that made her skin prickle.

“Hey, how come your skin’s so white?” Christopher asked. He kept walking closer to the truck, trying to get a better look.

“Is your daddy home?” the man asked.

“Don’t get too close,” Maddy said. “Mom said not to tell anybody nothing when dad’s out of town. Especially pirates.”

Neither of the children could see the 9mm automatic in the man’s lap, but they sensed danger in his face.

“I don’t like you,” Christopher announced. Maybe it was the patch over the man’s eye or the way his skin glowed whiter than the snow around them. Something struck the child as wrong. “You get away from here.”

Christopher pointed his stick at the car.

“Get away or I’ll shoot!”

The driver lifted his right hand and mimed a pistol of his own.

“Ay matey,” the man growled, summoning his best Blackbeard impression. “I wouldn’t want to fight a landlubber scalawag the likes of you!”

He pointed his index finger at the little boy, dropped his thumb, and smiled.

“But I’ll come back when you’re asleep, and then I’ll snatch you away to my secret lair. Arrrggg!”

He sneered an exaggerated look of menace, then stepped on the gas and raced away down the street.

“Let’s go,” Maddy said as she watched tears well up in her little brother’s eyes. She wanted to cry, too, but that was no way to act in a game of war.

XVII

Friday, 18 February

23:45 GMT

The Federal Mall, Washington DC

“
KIND OF A
cliché, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Meeting here in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial, fog rising off the melting snow. Full moon. Two spies whispering amid the hint of treason. Feels like what I thought it would be when I first joined up. I was so naive back then.”

Mr. Hoch wore a black North Face parka and a matching watch cap pulled down over his ears. GI Jane had dressed too lightly, anticipating a drive along the Rock Creek Parkway in some falsely registered car.

“Aren’t you cold?” Hoch asked. The woman wore sneakers, jeans, and a fisherman’s sweater that her grandfather had made for her in a retirement home knitting class.

“Have you heard from her?”

“Why is it that we always seem to talk at each other in two different conversations?” Hoch asked. He led her down a poorly shoveled walkway toward a copse of skeletal oak trees.

“Because no one in this business ever talks reality. I swear to God, I can’t even have a normal conversation anymore. It’s the lies, you know? Can’t keep anything straight after a while . . . who you work for, what you do, your favorite color, what, if anything, you still give a shit about.”

“She’s tracked the intrusion to the White House Communications Agency,” Hoch said. He reached his hands into the pockets of his jacket and hunched his shoulders, trying to close the collar around his neck.

The woman pondered what he said, walking just behind him. Her face pointed down, but her eyes searched incessantly among the surrounding sights.

“Does she know about Jafar al Tayar?”

“Of course not. She thinks she is backtracking intrusion software.”

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

GI Jane bent down and scooped up a handful of snow. She crafted it into a ball and tossed it up in the air a couple times, looking for a suitable target.

“What about Waller?” Hoch asked.

“He’s here. They threw him a bone—a trial task to see how he’d handle it.”

“And?”

“Haven’t heard anything from Ellis, yet,” GI Jane said. “Even omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent spooks of my inimitable bearing occasionally have to wait.”

Hoch cocked his head, not at her humor but at the inherent flaws in her theology.

“The CTC has come up with three working models,” Hoch said, referring to the CIA’s Langley-based Counterterrorism Center. He walked slowly through the dark, noting that the lights on the Capitol dome had been dimmed for security reasons. The entire downtown area—something he’d long considered a metaphor for America’s eternal optimism—had fallen into half blacks and shadow.

“I’m getting cold.”

“They’re all radiological. The Bureau estimates that Ellis still has at least three kilos of gamma emitters, which is enough to make several decent-sized RDDs.”

“It’s here,” she said, referring to the cesium and cobalt. “They’ll go for high-profile sites. The real intent has nothing to do with casualties. He wants symbolic effect.”

“Scenario one: he hits three or four different structures around the city. All soft targets. Places we wouldn’t expect like the Georgetown Mall, L’Enfant Plaza, National Cathedral—he hates Catholics—Mormon temple, places like that.”

GI Jane shook her head. She knew he was testing her. “Next?”

“Scenario two: he uses some conventional diversion—truck bomb, something like that—to focus attention away from harder targets. Once response crews move in, he launches a single, more devastating attack on the Capitol, the White House, or the Pentagon.”

“Delivery mechanism is going to be a problem,” the woman said. “We’ve locked down all level-one sites; he’ll never get close enough to use an RDD.”

“That’s what we’re briefing the White House,” Hoch agreed. “Besides, any first response to a soft target diversion would be local; security at the big targets is all federal. Sending police, fire, and EMS to a bomb scene would not divert security from sensitive areas. In fact, it would probably have the opposite effect.”

GI Jane threw her snowball at a shrub thirty feet away. “I hope you saved the best for last.”

Hoch stopped and turned to her.

“There are a few of us who don’t expect an explosion at all,” he said. “Three kilos of radioactive isotope sounds like a lot, but in reality, any exterior exposure in this weather would be foolish. Melting snow would quickly dilute the contaminate and rob Ellis of symbolic effect. He obviously wants to close down America’s seat of government. An RDD—even half a dozen of them—simply wouldn’t do that.”

“What’s the alternative?” she asked. GI Jane never claimed to be a mind reader.

“Closed system contamination,” Hoch answered.

“What? What kind of closed system could he . . .”

And then she understood. GI Jane, a woman who had always thought herself too smart and too tough to worry about the bogeyman, suddenly understood evil’s genius.

“How are you going to stop him?” she asked.

“I’m not,” Hoch answered. “And neither are you.”

**

FINDING A CONCRETE
truck had not been particularly difficult. Jeremy had simply driven around the city until he found one of its many new construction sites and followed a mixer back to its Arlington, Virginia, dispatch center. Once it got dark, he snuck onto the lot and popped the ignition. Most new cars had sophisticated anti theft devices, but the big Mack he selected could have been stolen by a grade-schooler.

A minimum-wage security guard logged the vehicle out but showed little interest in Jeremy’s bona fides. The nation’s capital had exploded in new construction, and concrete delivery had become an around-the-clock enterprise. Jeremy explained that it was a special last-minute order.

Maybe it would be best if they stopped me anyway,
Jeremy thought to himself as he tried to look experienced behind the wheel of the house-sized road hog.
At least I wouldn’t have to worry about helping Ellis kill innocent women and children in some horrific attack.

But they didn’t stop him. The guard noted Jeremy’s departure on a clipboard and waved him through the gate.

1721 Thirteenth Street Southeast,
Jeremy reminded himself, focusing on an address Ellis had given him back at the Homestead. He found the place in less than twenty minutes: a body shop, carved into the middle of a residential block—redbrick row houses across the street from what looked like a run-down school. The streets stood empty except for an odd pedestrian braving the cold air and a few people trying to dig their cars out of snowbanks.

Once Jeremy assured himself that he had found the correct address—Washington’s wagon-wheel quadrants made navigation a risky enterprise—he pushed in the clutch, slipped the transmission into neutral, and set the air brake. He was just about to climb down and try to find his contact when the garage door opened. A man in new-looking denim coveralls waved him in. The man looked impatient but sure.

“You clean yourself good?” the man asked when Jeremy had shut down the big, clanking diesel. The garage looked bigger on the inside. Despite the low doorway, which he just barely cleared, the body shop rambled left and right with lifts, toolboxes, and vehicles in various stages of repair.

“Nobody followed me,” he replied, climbing down from the cab. “Name’s Jeremy.” He reached out and shook the man’s hand.

“Malachi,” the man said. He stood about a foot shorter than Jeremy and moved as if he had worked at manual labor all his life. He could have been thirty or forty; the beard made it hard to tell.

Jeremy noticed two other men at the far end of the body shop, but Malachi didn’t acknowledge them. They looked busy lugging heavy bags from the back of a Ryder box truck onto a forklift pallet. He couldn’t see the writing on the bags, but there was no mistaking the smell: phosphate-based fertilizer, and lots of it.

“What do you want me to do now?” Jeremy asked, assuming none of these men had time for small talk. “They told me to deliver the truck. That’s all they told me.”

“And they told us to load it up,” Malachi said. “By our ownselves.”

“Should I wait?” Jeremy asked.

“Come back at eleven,” the Phineas priest called out over his shoulder. “Somebody will be here when you get back to brief you on what’s next.”

Jeremy looked at his watch. That was three hours from now.

“There a place to get a cup of coffee around here?” he asked, but Malachi had already joined the others with their lifting.

Perfect,
Jeremy groused to himself. He had three hours to sit and wait while Ellis and his men prepared for a devastating round of attacks.
Deep breath,
he told himself.
You’re not the only one working this operation.

The HRT sniper walked back out into the cold night hoping somebody else was making better progress.

SIRAD SMELLED HAMMER
TIME
even before she carded her way into the highly secure Mind Lab. He exuded a sharp, acrid odor that reminded her of Stilton cheese steeped in vinegar.

“For God’s sake, isn’t there a shower around here somewhere?” she asked.

“There’s a w-w-washroom at the other end of the b-b-building,” the wave theorist said, seemingly happy to see her. “But I wouldn’t w-w-worry about it. You smell f-f-foxy.”

She shivered at his compliment, then dropped her coat on a table near where Ravi worked at his terminal.

“Any news?” she asked.

“Some,” he replied. “What did Mitchell say?”

Sirad caught herself before speaking. She had spent so much time wondering about Mitchell’s intentions, she hadn’t even considered what to tell her three partners.

“He wants us to go after them,” she decided to say. “To go inside.”

“Go inside the WHCA?” I Can’t Dunk asked. “You must be kidding. It would be easier to explain the origins of the universe and provide three examples.”

“Jordan Mitchell? Kidding?” Ravi responded.

“I guess he has confidence in you,” Sirad told them.

“The WHCA holds the keys to the castle gates,” I Can’t Dunk pointed out. “They control all presidential communications, including launch-code encryption in the event of nuclear war. They have the most secure communications firewalls in the world.”

“No, Borders Atlantic has the most secure firewalls in the world,” Sirad corrected him. “And you have already demonstrated that you can identify White House tracking efforts. Why is it so hard to believe we can penetrate their defenses?”

“F-f-fucking A,” Hammer Time said.

“I guess that means yes?” Sirad asked. Her nose wrinkled reflexively at his body odor.

“He’s a wave theorist,” Ravi countered. “What does he know?”

I Can’t Dunk looked less optimistic.

“Getting in is one thing,” he said. “Doing it without showing ourselves . . . that’s another.”

“Well, look on the bright side”—Sirad smiled—“we’ve got about eight hours to do it. After that, most estimates say it won’t make a whole helluva lot of difference.”

“F-f-fucking A,” Hammer Time called out again. He seemed to come alive with the energy of a challenge. “I wanna r-r-rub up on some m-m-mathematics!”

“Tell you what, Hammer Time,” Sirad said. “We’ll get started on the math while you go rub up on a bar of soap. I don’t want to sound rude, but you’re starting to make my eyes water.”

“IS IT YOUR
arm, sweetie?” Caroline Waller asked. Bedtime had never been an issue for the little boy, particularly after a hard day playing outside, but tonight, he refused to go. “Is your arm bothering you?”