It was all that gray in a world that had once been black and white that had driven him to seek Allison’s counsel in the first place. Espionage was not a business for anyone who craved clarity.
“Stay down until I call you,” he said to Allison when the gunfire failed to draw reinforcements.
His pulse thudding in his ears, he ran across the walkway in a half crouch, stopping to check on the first man. He was completely motionless where he’d fallen, a fist-sized hole in his throat, blood pooling on the tile. Kealey whirled toward the second shooter, who was still alive and was struggling to get off his back by rolling onto his side. Seriously wounded, the front of his shirt soaked with blood, he had managed to hang on to his gun and was bringing it up into firing position.
Kealey took a lunging stride toward him, kicked the weapon from his grasp, and smashed his foot into the vicinity of his chest wound, at the same time driving him back against the side of the walkway. The gunman produced a low, froggy croak and went limp, sagging against the wall.
Moving swiftly to retrieve the shooter’s weapon, Kealey slung its strap over his arm, knelt over his motionless form, and pressed the muzzle of his Sig into the man’s temple. But he realized at once that additional force would not be necessary. The man was unconscious, a pinkish froth dripping from his wide-open mouth to his chin. If he’d coughed that up from his lungs-and Kealey had seen pulmonary bleeding often enough to recognize its signs-then it was a safe bet that he wouldn’t last much longer.
Kealey lowered the Sig, pulled aside the bandanna, and studied his face. It had no distinctive characteristics. A light-skinned, brown-haired Caucasian, he could have come from anywhere on the planet. A Bluetooth headset on his right ear did, however, catch Kealey’s attention. He removed the headset and, checking it for any obvious tracking signals, saw none and dropped it in his jacket pocket.
Searching him quickly, Kealey found a cheap prepaid cell phone in his trousers and pocketed it alongside the headset. Besides the weapon and a six-magazine ammunition pack over each shoulder, that was it, all he was carrying. The man had no wallet, no documents, no identification of any type.
Kealey slipped the 9mm packs over his shoulders and hurried back to the other shooter. He took the MP5K from his unresisting fingers, shucked the unfired round from its chamber, removed the partly spent magazine, and put it in a separate pocket from the headset and phone, tossing aside the gun. Then, curious, he pulled off the man’s mask, tugging a little to get the edge of the fabric out of the wound. It came free with a spray of blood that splattered Kealey’s shirt and jacket.
The dead man had black hair, olive skin, and a long, narrow face. His features might have been Middle Eastern, but they also could have been Spanish, Greek, Indian, southern Italian, or something else altogether. If the gunmen had the same ethnicity, or seemed to, it might be a clue to their origins and motives. As it was, Kealey could glean nothing from his appearance.
Tellingly, neither man carried hand or finger restraints of any kind. That proved his earlier assumption, when he saw the dead rent-a-cops: these guys were here to kill people, not take prisoners.
The Bluetooth receiver was identical to the other man’s. Kealey stashed the headset with the other one, then turned and gestured at Allison. Already on her feet, she ran and joined him in the entry to the walkway. Her face pale and distraught, she was holding her phone in her hand.
Kealey looked at her. ”What is it?”
“They have hostages,” she said. “He’s with them.”
“Does he know what they’re demanding?”
Allison stared at him, her lips working in mute silence, as if they could not quite fit around the words she wanted to speak.
Instead, she simply showed him the post.
We r on 3 flr. Many wounded in exhbt hall. Men w/guns killing ppl no reason, don’t know when I can post agn, they say will kill all of us i f-
CHAPTER 6
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Jon, I’m so sorry,” said President David Brenneman as he strode into the small breakout room off the Situation Room-officially, the Executive Conference Room-and shut the door. “I’m not sure if it’s any comfort to you at all, but I have some idea what you’re going through.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
“And we don’t know anything yet,” Brenneman added. “We’ve been there before.”
Sadly, that was true. And anguished as he felt, Harper knew that the president was sincere. But it was still ironic hearing the president of the United States speak those words under these circumstances.
The ECR was part of the five-thousand-square-foot White House Situation Room complex occupying half the basement level of the West Wing. Set up by President John F. Kennedy following his dismal strategic attempt to overthrow Castro’s Cuban government, the complex continued to function as a command center for the president and his council of advisors, and as of the 2007 revamp, it was operated by the National Security Council, whose nearly two dozen military and intelligence watch teams perpetually supervised and identified domestic and global emergencies. Each team varyingly consisted of several duty officers, an intel analyst, and a communication assistant, who compiled and submitted the Morning Book-which included the National Intelligence Daily, the State Department’s Morning Summary, and any intelligence or diplomatic reports-to the active national security advisor. The NSA also received the hand-delivered President’s Daily Brief from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and personally updated the president at the beginning of each day and at the end with a Sit Room Note, summarizing reports, graphs, maps, and photos from other agencies and how they were publicly received.
Harper and the president had been waiting for the meeting’s teleconference attendees to be brought online when Brenneman asked Harper to step inside, hitting a switch to opaque the window into the ECR so they could speak in absolute privacy. Now the men stood facing each other, bonded by grief. Two years earlier the second- term president had lost his niece, Lily Durant, to an insurgent group in Darfur. They had ruthlessly wiped out an entire refugee camp, but Lily, who had been doing volunteer relief work with UNICEF, had been their real target. Caught in a surprise raid on the camp, she was raped and murdered in their effort to mislead Brenneman into believing the Sudanese government was culpable.
The twist was that Harper had been among the core advisors to have met with Brenneman at Camp David not long after the early evidence came in, as had his own boss, the director of the CIA, Robert Andrews. Andrews, along with a fellow intelligence advisor and two top members of the cabinet, was even now waiting at a conference table in the ECR, on the other side of the electronically fogged glass panel. Back then, Andrews and Harper had both smelled something amiss in the raw data coming from Africa and had advised Brenneman to be patient. No one wanted to launch a misplaced retaliatory strike. Waiting appealed not only to the commander in chief ’s moderate inclinations but also to his grasp on common sense, which was uncommon in Washington. Their instincts had proven correct, though they could not have known then that the architect of the Darfur incident was one of the president’s handpicked confidants: the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Joel Stralen. He had been determined to set the nation on a course of war with Sudan, killing great numbers of people in the hope of disrupting a nexus of anti-American sentiment, a hatchery for the next generation of terrorists.
Success in that crisis had depended on Harper and Andrews probing beyond the obvious and being willing to gamble on a wild card named Ryan Kealey doing the job. Of course, that had been an overseas situation, a third- world battleground. It was not a major American city, with emotional resonance to the last attack on major American cities.
Now he stood looking at a changed Brenneman in the gloved silence of the room. A month shy of his fifty- eighth birthday, the president had thick gray hair, which had been almost completely brown before his niece’s death had leeched it of color, even as his once youthful face had become permanently lined and careworn, almost seeming to age a full decade overnight. Even the lyrical tone of his once sanguine voice, the narrative tool that had propelled him through college debates at Georgetown, long campaign trails to Congress, and had ultimately carried him through the crowds and into the White House, was stained by years of distress. Harper couldn’t help but notice the toll his friend had paid to pass through these gates, the hell that came with it. Nor would he wish to change places with the hard-lined leader. This time, he knew America had picked the right man for the job. And Harper was
