His hair was slicked back, and he had a gold chain with a cross hanging from his open collar.
“This man worked for the White Knight Linen Service Company,” Roach continued, “and went by the name of Vinneyvitelli. His real name is Abu Hasan. We are not sure if he is at large, but we are very interested in talking to anyone who has dealt with him in the last year.” Roach continued to talk, giving a number to call, but King wasn’t listening.
His eyes were open wide in disbelief. It couldn’t be. King stood, almost dropping his coffee cup. Tugging at the collar of his white bathrobe, he raced for the TV.
“Oh, my God, it’s him!”
NO ONE IN the bunker had slept for more than a half hour at a time, and some of the agents had not slept at all. The noise of steel assaulting steel grew louder as morning approached.
President Hayes remained confident that the FBI would come. He’d been through the briefings, he had listened to the experts state that the best time to attack was right before dawn. It was when people were most sluggish and hence easiest to surprise.
It started to brighten, this time of the year, around five thirty and the sun was up by a quarter past six. Each of the eleven felt a fevered anticipation as morning drew near, but as the hours passed by, there was collective letdown, followed by depression, as the nerve-racking sound of the door being breached gnawed at their ears. Each individual, including the president, asked himself or herself the same question over and over again. Can we hold out for another day?
Valerie Jones was coming back from the small bathroom, where she had finally, after two days, decided to remove the makeup from her face.
Considering the situation, she felt that any hang-ups about her wrinkles and the dark circles under her eyes were foolish.
Jones had spent all night thinking about the president’s rebuke the day before. She had worked far too hard to get where she was, and she wouldn’t allow anyone to pin the blame on her for admitting a terrorist into the Oval Office. In Jones’s mind the truth was never that simple.
There were always eight sides to every story.
There was no way she was going to roll over now and watch her career go up in flames. Jones had been concentrating on angles all night. Who could influence Hayes to help put the story in the proper light? Whom could she use to focus Hayes’s anger on? The first question was easy to answer. Jones knew enough senators and big donators. She could get them to whisper in the president’s ear or, if needed, lean on him. The way she would spin it would be to hold up Russ Piper and the DNC as sacrificial lambs. All Jones did was put him and his guest down in the appointment book. That menial task was hardly worth ending someone’s career over.
As far as getting her boss to focus his anger on something or someone else, Jones was working on that. She proceeded back to the couches and sat next to him. If she could get him thinking in another direction, she just might hold on to her job and her career.
President Hayes didn’t bother to look up when his chief of staff sat.
Jones studied him for a second and then asked, “Why wouldn’t they have come?”
Hayes shook his head.
“I don’t know. They must have a good reason.”
“Like what? Isn’t it our policy not to negotiate with terrorists?”
Hayes glanced over at her.
“We don’t always stick to policy”
“Well, who’s making the decisions?”
The president looked at her with his tired eyes.
“As I told you yesterday, if they’re following the Constitution, which I’m sure they are, the powers of the presidency will have been transferred to Vice President Baxter.”
Jones rolled her eyes.
“That isn’t good news.” The president did nothing at first and then nodded slowly in agreement.
“Why wouldn’t he send in the FBI?”
“I don’t know. Valerie.” Hayes sounded very impatient. The tension and lack of sleep were working on his nerves.
“Well, it makes no sense.” Jones moved forward cautiously.
“Everything you said about the FBI striking before sunrise made sense. I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have come.”
“There’s a lot we don’t know about. They could have plenty of good reasons why they’re waiting to attack.”
Jones was keenly aware of the problems between President Hayes and Vice President Baxter. She and the president had discussed them on many occasions. If she could get the president to focus his anger on Baxter, her minor role in this debacle would be forgotten.
In a voice just barely above a mumble, Jones planted the seed that she hoped would shift the president’s righteous thoughts in a different direction.
“Or Baxter likes being president.”
IRENE KENNEDY STOOD in her office and watched the sun rise over the trees of the Potomac River Valley. Any attempt to count her hours of sleep over the last week would be a wasted exercise. They were too few and too far between. She had more pressing things on her mind, and besides, thinking of sleep only caused her to worry more about Rapp.
Kennedy had been hoping to steal a couple of hours on the couch in her office after the two SEALS had made it into the White House and reported back on the bombs, but that never happened.
Things had fallen apart, and they had done so miserably.
At 2:23 A.M. Kennedy had been sitting in the control room at Langley when an irate Skip Mcmahon called. Mcmahon had been rousted from his cot in the Executive Office Building just minutes earlier by Rafique Aziz.
He had stumbled down the hall and into the FBI’s command post in his boxers and T-shirt. Once on the phone, Mcmahon was further confused by the wild accusations Aziz had Hung at him. Everything Aziz said came up empty with Mcmahon. Mcmahon tried in vain to deny the accusations, but Aziz only grew more irritated. As Aziz began to threaten to kill hostages, Mcmahon began to link the recent events with a phone call he had received from FBI Director Roach, the previous evening.
Roach had explained to Mcmahon that the CIA would be moving some sensitive surveillance equipment into position by the east fence of the White House. In less than a minute, one of Mcmahon’s agents had a set of blueprints rolled out on the table before him and was stabbing his finger at the location of a ventilation duct on the South Lawn. As things fell into place, Mcmahon assured Aziz that he would get to the bottom of the thing within five minutes. Mcmahon’s next phone call was to his colleague and good friend, Irene Kennedy.
That was when the control room at Langley started to piece together what had happened. Upon receiving Mcmahon’s call. General Campbell ordered Harris to send one of his men into the shaft to find out what was going on. Not long after that, the two SEALS were pulled out of the shaft by an electric winch. Nick Shultz had fulfilled the SEAL code of honor of never leaving a man behind in battle, dead or alive.
When the shooting started, Shultz was trailing just far enough behind to be safe from the shots, but within reach of the gear that Craft was pulling behind him by rope. Struggling, he pulled his swim buddy back through the narrow confines of the duct, inch by inch, praying his friend would be alive when they reached the other end. It was all for naught. Craft was dead.
Now, standing at the window of her seventh-floor office at Langley and watching the sun climb into the morning sky, Kennedy wished she could turn back the clock and do it all over again. Do it right, do it the way she had wanted to from the start. Kennedy had promised herself when she got into this business of ordering men into harm’s way that she would do everything possible not to become a detached bureaucrat. Seventeen men had died under her watch at Langley, the majority of them in one seriously botched operation. Craft would bring the total up to eighteen, and as with those before him, Kennedy would visit his grave.
