that he was running more on his stiff upper lip than he was off of any internal reserves of strength.
Well, if he could do it, Sarah could do it. She squared her shoulders and turned away from the sink.
She pulled the door open, stepped into the corridor, and immediately tripped over a heavy bundle of rags lying on the floor. She lost her footing and pitched forward, just managing to turn her face to the side as she half- stumbled, half-fell into the far corridor wall. Her shoulder banged painfully into sculpted plaster and she nearly fell down entirely. Still swaying and half-dazed, she looked over her shoulder at the bundle of rags.
But it wasn’t a bundle at all. It was a person … A young woman, lying on her side with her arms and legs sprawled limply in impossible directions, like a rag doll dropped on the floor and forgotten. She wasn’t moving. Was she breathing?
Sarah tried to bend over the woman, but the pain in her head ramped up so violently that she thought she was going to lose consciousness. Her blood roared in her ears, and her vision seemed to shift and waver. A hot flash swept over her like a gust of air from a blast furnace.
She slumped against the wall, panting and praying for the pain in her head to subside just a little. Through the nauseous fog of her pain, she could see the young woman’s face. The woman’s eyes were open, staring vacantly into the distance. Her lips were parted, and a trickle of blood-tinged saliva dropped from the corner of her slack mouth to a spreading pool on the floor. Another trickle ran from her right nostril and down her cheek.
Oh god! What was wrong with this woman? Was she … dead? Sarah opened her mouth to scream, but all that came out was a hoarse croak. She looked around for help. Someone.
Sarah began staggering toward the door of the closest office. She couldn’t remember whose office it was, but it didn’t really matter. She needed to call someone. Call for help.
The door couldn’t have been more than seven or eight meters away, but the distance appeared to stretch and then contract in a dizzying manner that seemed to be keeping rhythm with the pounding in Sarah’s head. Leaning against the wall, Sarah made for the door, step after trembling step, her knees becoming weaker with every movement. The door … the … door
… She stumbled and nearly went down. It was becoming difficult to breathe.
There was something in her throat. Some sort of hard knot. She tried to swallow and tasted something strange but distantly familiar. Her nose was running. She swiped at it blindly with one hand. Her fingers came away red. She was bleeding … Oh God … What was happening to her?
What was happening to
She reached the door, fought with the knob for a desperate second, and then stumbled through. “Help me …” Her voice sounded feeble in her ears, guttural and strangely distant. “Help … me …”
It took a few seconds for her eyes to focus on the contents of the room.
It was a charnel house. Bodies lay scattered about like so much wastepaper. Men. Women. In chairs; collapsed on the floor; slumped over desks. Sightless eyes staring into infinity, blood streaming from noses, ears, and mouths.
Sarah stood in the doorway, her lungs laboring for air, her mind refusing to take in the reality of what she was seeing. They couldn’t all be dead. They couldn’t …
Her legs gave way, and she collapsed to her knees. “Somebody … help…”
A man was lying face up on the carpet, his head a few centimeters from her left knee. An older man, his lower face a mask of blood and sputum.
In some dark recess of Sarah’s brain, the man’s face connected with a name. Hammer … smith.
And then Sarah did scream, the sound wrenching itself free from somewhere deep in her chest, clawing its way up her tortured and swollen throat like a wild beast rending flesh. She screamed until the last of the air was gone from her lungs.
CHAPTER 6
The president finished the article and dropped the newspaper on his desk with a sigh. What did the Sirajis think they stood to gain by making up stories like this? Did they think there was some political edge to be had? Was it just the need to see their names in the paper? Or were they just full of shit?
The door opened and Agent Allain LaBauve walked in. “Excuse me, Mr. President, we have a Condition Firestorm.” LaBauve’s voice was cool and professional. The two agents who had followed him into the room stood behind him without speaking.
President Chandler glanced up at LaBauve. The Secret Service agent’s poker face was firmly in place. His neutral expression gave no clue that he had just barged into the Oval Office without knocking, dragging a pair of agents in his wake. “Say again, Alan?”
LaBauve was the head of the President’s Personal Security Detail, his so-called body man, because he was never more than an arm’s length away when the president was in a non-secure location. The president called the big Cajun man Alan, LaBauve’s preferred version of his first name.
LaBauve had a talent for languages; he spoke French, German, and Russian — all with near-perfect accents. He had a master’s degree in criminal justice from the University of Virginia, and double bachelors in systems theory and political science. His speech was clipped, precise, and bore no trace of his dirt-poor southern Louisiana upbringing. And still he couldn’t escape nicknames like Swamp Thing and Gator. The last came from a persistent rumor that LaBauve — in his young and wild days — had once beaten an alligator to death with a half-empty jug of moonshine.
“Mr. President, we have a confirmed Condition Firestorm,” LaBauve said again. “We need to evacuate you immediately, sir.”
The president pushed back his chair and stood up. “Evacuate? What’s going on?”
LaBauve shook his head. “The British Embassy has been attacked, sir.”
A surge of ice water rushed through the president’s veins. His mind immediately started dreaming up worst- case scenarios. His brain was suddenly flooded with images of burned and mutilated bodies. He shook his head and blinked rapidly. “What? A bomb?”
“I don’t know, sir,” LaBauve said. “I don’t have any details.”
The president hesitated for a few seconds and then nodded. “All right. Where are we going? Down to the bunker?”
“Negative, Mr. President. We don’t yet know how the attack was carried out, or whether or not more attacks are imminent. Command Post’s assessment says you’ll be safer outside of the White House until we can be certain that the residence is not a target.” He walked toward the French doors to the West Wing colonnade and opened the nearest one.
The president followed him, with the two other Secret Service agents a half-step behind. His legs seemed heavy, his steps stiff, as if the news had somehow weighed him down. He forced himself to think. “If the White House was a target,” he said, “we would have been hit first.”
“CP concurs with your reasoning, Mr. President,” LaBauve said. “But we can’t rule out the possibility that somebody jumped the gun and attacked the embassy ahead of schedule. It’s still possible that the embassy is just one of a series of coordinated attacks.”
The president walked out onto the colonnade. LaBauve slid smoothly past him into the point position, and the other agents took up positions behind the president’s left and right shoulders, putting the president in the center of a tight triangular formation. LaBauve’s position in front of the president was a clear sign of how seriously the Secret Service was taking the threat. As a rule, the president walked in front, and the agents assigned to his protection walked to the side and slightly behind.
LaBauve raised his right wrist to his mouth and spoke quietly into the microphone concealed in the cuff of his black suit jacket. “Eagle is moving.”
