Torrent looked at Cole somewhat quizzically. “Very powerful sermon on Fox last night,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Cole. But he thought: It sounded to you like a sermon?
“We have some interesting new armaments that are being rushed out of prototype to meet these mechs,” said Torrent. “I know you’re a dirt-and-languages kind of soldier, but you have to love some of the new weaponry, Major Malich.”
“You got something that will trip a two-legged tank?” asked Rube.
“We’ve got a foam that dries in two seconds and then won’t let go. Basically, you glue them to the ground like gum.” Torrent grinned. “Some of these geniuses in weapons development must be thrilled to have a chance to use some of this far-out stuff.”
“As long as some of them didn’t moonlight by coming up with the Progressives’ weapons in the first place,” said Rube.
“And magnets,” said Torrent. “You lay them like mines, and anything big and metallic that passes within twenty feet is pulled toward it and can’t get free. And grenades that are all Shockwave, no flame. Hit one of those mechs with it, and everything comes loose inside. Lovely things.”
“I’m glad our troops will have something, said Rube. “Have they figured out what shot down those F-16s?”
“A hyperpowerful EMP.”
“That would suck up so much power the city’d black out,” said Rube.
“They think it might be laserized, so you get a lot more clout for the kilowatt. Whatever it is, it wipes out the electronics that keep those planes aloft.”
“So we’re going to do what, go back to propeller planes?” asked Rube.
Torrent paused for a moment. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. The jets hang back for air cover, and the little biplanes come on in, machine guns blazing. Like shooting down King Kong.”
“Looks like you’re having fun, Professor,” said Rube.
“War triggers human inventiveness at its most brilliant, because if you don’t win your wars, your civilization disappears.”
“It’s bad form to quote yourself,” said Rube, smiling.
“I said that before?”
“Don’t worry,” said Rube. “Quoting Averell Torrent makes everybody look smarter.”
Torrent clapped him on the shoulder and they moved down the corridor as Torrent disappeared inside the President’s office.
“So you know Torrent,” said Cole.
“Had three seminars from him in grad school.”
“Is he too dashing to be smart and too smart to be so dashing?” asked Cecily.
“He’s got more ego than a movie star,” said Rube, “but unlike most of my former professors, he has the brains to back it up. He never served in the military but he has his own version of history that works better than most others, and he has an eye for strategy. President Nielson isn’t wrong to seek his advice.”
“But he irritates you,” said Cole.
“He works at irritating me,” said Rube. “I don’t know what I did to get under his skin, but he rode me all the way through three seminars and gave me hell during my orals.”
“How did he irritate you just now?” asked Cole. “Besides calling you ‘soldier boy.’ ”
“He’s got a severe case of Winston-Churchill-itis. Churchill was the genius of global politics, so Torrent has to be, too. Churchill went ape over every wacko bit of military tech that came up, so Torrent has to pretend he’s a tech guy.”
“He isn’t?”
“No more than Churchill was. I don’t know why I think he’s faking his enthusiasm. Maybe because a former advisor to the NSA wouldn’t usually know that much about cutting-edge weaponry.” Rube stopped and took Cecily by the shoulders. “Cessy,” he said, “the stuff on my PDA will make your job easier. As soon as I get back, I’ll give it to you.”
“Give it to me now so I can get started,” said Cecily.
“Everything’s in Farsi,” said Rube.
“The names and addresses?” asked Cecily.
“They don’t mean anything without an explanation. I’ll be back by noon tomorrow. I’ll just pop in to the Pentagon, pull DeeNee and my files out, and then we’re home.”
“Then take a minute and copy it to another computer,” Cecily insisted.
Rube hesitated. “Cessy,” he said softly. “I don’t know how the stuff on here will make me look. The minute I let a copy be made, it’s out of my hands. Somebody can steal it. Somebody can leak it.”
“Then leave the PDA with me,” said Cessy. “I’ll take better care of it than you can. There’ll be no chance of it falling out of your pocket or getting bumped when another army of mechs walks into Arlington.”
“There’s information in it that I might need while I’m in DC,” said Rube.
“You really aren’t going to part with it for any reason, are you?” said Cessy.
“How do you think I kept it secure for the last two years?” he said with a sad smile. Then he kissed her. “Cole and I are going to haul now, Cessy. When you talk to the kids, remind them they have a dad and I love them.”
“We love you too, Soldier Boy.”
Cole saw that Reuben walked away grinning. “So it’s okay if she calls you soldier boy?”
“I’m not in love with Torrent,” said Rube.
FIFTEEN
GREAT FALLS
History is an omelet. The eggs are already broken.
On the way down US 15 to Leesburg with two Secret Service agents in the back seat, Cole and Rube debated about where they should stay. Neither Rube’s house nor Cole’s apartment seemed like a good idea, given that there were people who thought it was quite important to get them out of the picture.
The Secret Service guys voted strongly for a single hotel room. “We patrol the hall in shifts all night.”
“That’s not subtle,” said Rube.
“If we meant to be subtle,” said the agent, “would we dress like this and openly scan the crowds?”
“So the ‘secret’ part of your agency’s name—”
“A holdover from the old days,” said the agent. “We’d rather scare amateur assassins away. And make life very hard for any pros that might give it a try.”
“You’d really take a bullet on purpose?” asked Cole.
“For the President,” the agent said. “For you, I’ll just subdue the guy who shot you so we can try him for the crime, and then call an ambulance.”
“I wouldn’t think to ask for more.”
In the end, Rube and Cole shared one hotel room and the agents shared an adjoining one. Cole had argued for the Ritz-Carlton but they settled for the Tyson’s Corner Marriott. It was expensive enough.
As soon as they were safely installed in the room and the agents had swept for bugs and other surveillance devices, Rube called DeeNee’s home phone on his cell. Cole only heard Rube’s side of the conversation, but it was clear enough. Rube ascertained that DeeNee still had access to all the files and that none of the office locks had been changed. Then he asked DeeNee to come to work at 0500 so they’d have less chance of being interfered with. “I don’t want confrontations.” She resisted, but finally agreed.
Then Rube called the other members of his team and set up a rendezvous for 0730 at the same Borders where they had met before. “But be up early,” he said to each one of them. “Because if something goes wrong at the Pentagon, our rendezvous may change, time and place.” Every one of them volunteered to come along to the Pentagon with them, but he turned them down. “If something goes wrong, if I get arrested and Cole, too, I don’t want you guys caught up in it. I don’t want them to know your faces. Besides, we have Secret Service protection.”
Every single one of them commented that so had the President on Friday the Thirteenth. Every single time, Rube gave the same little smile.
They both showered before they went to bed, so there’d be no delays in the morning. By the time they were done with their showers, the agents showed up with the uniforms Rube and Cole s
hould wear to work, and several other changes of clothes. They apparently had sent some flunky from the office to both their homes to pack for them.
So when they got to the Pentagon, they were crisply dressed in the right kind of uniform. Cole would rather have been wearing fatigues and body armor, but the idea this morning was to be relatively unobtrusive.
There was a discussion with the guards about the pistols the Secret Service agents were carrying. The Secret Service won, partly because of Rube’s letter from the President. Orders from the President superseded the standing policy. The guards pointed out that Rube and Cole weren’t the President. The Secret Service agents said to shut up and let them through.
Cole noticed that Rube didn’t lead them on the same route through the building that Cole had always taken. There were about nineteen different ways to get from point A to point B in the Pentagon, none of them convenient. Cole memorized this one as an alternative route.
When they got to the office, DeeNee was already there, with files stacked in boxes. How early did she arrive, Cole wondered. He was happy to see that she had the same cold and sarcastic attitude toward Rube that she had toward him. It wasn’t just that he was new—she talked to everybody that way.
“You know that everything in here has already been photocopied about three times. If they removed anything, I don’t know. And I’m not helping you carry this out to your car.”
“I never expected you to,” said Rube as he picked up one of the two boxes.
Cole looked at the Secret Service agent nearest him and gestured for him to feel free to pick up the other file box. The agent looked at him coldly. Apparently protecting somebody did not allow for carrying boxes. Cole stepped forward to pick up the other.
“So you’re on assignment from LaMonte Nielson?” asked DeeNee.
“We’re going to prove that these Progressives planned and carried out Friday the Thirteenth,” said Rube.
DeeNee bent over and opened a desk drawer. “Well, I can tell you right now who copied your assassination plans and kept the one with your fingerprints to use as evidence against you.” There was a .22 pistol in her desk drawer. She pulled it out. Why was she showing them a weapon? Did she feel that some threat was imminent?
“I did it,” said DeeNee. Then she stepped toward Rube and aimed straight at his left eye and shot him with the barrel no more than two inches away.
First Rube dropped the box of files. Then he followed them to the floor. He never made a sound. He was dead the instant the bullet entered his skull. It did not come out. There was no functioning brain inside.
Cole realized that the Secret Service agents had started reacting the moment they saw the pistol in the drawer. They were only a split second too slow. They both fired simultaneously and their bullets knocked DeeNee halfway across the room.
Immediately two doors opened and men with weapons came into the office. One of the agents shoved Cole backward and down as they began shooting at the intruders.
But Cole was not going to leave without two things: the PDA and the car keys. So he lunged for Rube’s body and got both of them out of his pockets. In the midst of doing it, in the midst of all the noise of gunfire, he heard one of the bad guys say, “PDA.”
The agents were good at what they did. Neither of them was hit as they scooted out of the room through the still-open door. Cole didn’t follow the route they had just taken to get there; his own normal route got them out of the corridor sooner. Because the bad guys weren’t wasting any time in following him. Whether they cared about Cole was moot. They wanted the PDA.
As he and the agents raced down the stairs, one of them said, “They’ll have somebody in the parking lot watching your car.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I would,” said the agent.
Nobody was shooting now—the gunfire that had already taken place had alerted the security guards, and they would instantly call for support. Soon enough the chasers would be chased.
Unless the security guards were in on it.
They weren’t. But they weren’t helpful, either. They saw the drawn guns of the Secret Service agents and had their own weapons out.
“We’re Secret Service assigned to protect Captain Cole. We’re being pursued by assassins. They’ve already hit one of our men.”
But while this explanation was still registering, the bad guys got into the hall and now the shooting began again. They hit one of the guards and one of the agents. The other agent and the other guards returned fire.
Between shots, the remaining agent hissed at Cole. “Get out of here while we keep them busy.”
He was right. There was no reason for an OK Corral showdown, if Cole could simply get away. He broke for the door and headed for the car.
If there was somebody watching the car, they didn’t shoot at him. Maybe they were waiting for Rube to come out.
As he started the engine and pulled out of the parking place, Cole noticed Rube’s cellphone sitting in the cup holder. All the numbers he had called last night would be in its memory. Thank heaven Rube left it here. Thank heaven Cole hadn’t thought of the cellphone back in the office and wasted time trying to find it along with the keys and the PDA.
As he drove—at a normal pace, because there was no obvious pursuit—he tried to make sense of it. DeeNee. Did they bribe her? Blackmail her? No. Her hand didn’t even shake as she aimed the weapon. And she knew where to shoot to make a .22 lethal without fail. She had been trained.
She was a civilian employee. She never chose the military the way soldiers did. Maybe her nastiness to soldiers was because she hated the Army. Maybe she originally took the job because she needed the money. Or maybe she was a true believer who planned all along to bide her time until she could cause real damage to the evil U.S. Army.
Trust. Who else could have drawn a weapon on Reuben Malich without triggering an instant response. If his hands hadn’t been full with the box she gave him, if he hadn’t simply assumed that DeeNee meant no harm, she would never have gotten that shot off.
Oh, God! Rube is dead! He found himself gasping with the shock of it.
Then he heard the screel of tires behind him. Once again he went with the adrenalin and set aside his feelings. Survival first. Mission second. Grief next week, next month, but not now.
A van and a sports car—one pursuer with mass and the other with speed. He wasn’t going to get away easily, not in a PT Cruiser.
His only hope for the moment was to get into traffic, where they’d find it harder to catch him.
Monday morning traffic. But still early. Barely 0530. Not enough cars.
So he made turns. Enough turns that he ended up on the bridge heading into DC.
But he didn’t want to go there. His only help would be Rube’s jeesh. They were planning to gather in Tyson’s Corner.
He couldn’t just turn around. These guys wouldn’t hesitate to ram him if they saw him coming the other way. Besides, Cessy had complained yesterday about the PT Cruiser’s lousy turning radius. If he tried, he’d just run into the concrete wall of the bridge.
He didn’t want E Street or Constitution Ave. He took the exit leading toward the Rock Creek Parkway.
All the cars were coming the other way, into town. There was no park traffic at this time of day—nobody went to the zoo this early.
But as he got up into the park, there were joggers everywhere. A lot of them kept out of the way of traffic. But a lot of them thought that they had as much right to Cole’s lane as he had.
I’m so clever, thought Cole. I’m taking a PT Cruiser uphill in order to evade pursuers.
Very quickly they were right behind him. They weren’t shooting yet. But as the sports car slowed down to let the van pass, Cole could see the plan easily enough. A few bumps from that van, and the PT Cruiser would be in the creek, against the cliff, or wrapped around a tree.
He picked up the cellphone and pressed SEND. Nothing happened. It wasn’t on. So he struggled to fi
nd the power button, and when there wasn’t one, he pressed everything, one at a time, and held it down until finally one of them worked and the screen lighted up. Then he pushed SEND.
Meanwhile, he was trying to drive around oncoming cars—there were rather a lot of them, this was a major commuting route into the city—and joggers. He couldn’t steer the winding road, hold the cellphone, and lay on the horn at the same time.
Where were the cops when you wanted to be arrested?
No. He didn’t want cops involved. They’d gone to too much trouble yesterday trying to save the lives of cops for him to want any of them to die today.
Rube was dead.
Don’t think about that. He pressed the cellphone to his ear with his shoulder and steered while pressing on the horn. The van came up behind him. He tried to swerve and nearly hit a runner. He hoped the guy was still on his feet and flipping him off instead of flat on his face torn up by asphalt.
It was Drew, the American University professor, who answered.
“Rube’s dead,” said Cole. “DeeNee shot him in his office. I’m alone, in his car. I’ve got his PDA. I know his password. I’m in Rock Canyon with two vehicles in pursuit, trying to ram me, and I don’t know where the hell I’m going.”
“I know the park,” said Drew. “Stay on Beach Road. Way up the canyon you come to a place where Wise Road is a very, very sharp left. Take that turn. It gets you up to Oregon Avenue. Take that to Western Ave. There’ll be traffic. You want traffic, right?”
“I want my mommy,” said Cole. But it wasn’t really a joke even though he meant it to be. “Rube’s dead. I’m sorry. It came out of nowhere. We were holding file boxes.”
“Shut up. I’ll call you back in a minute. I’m calling the other guys. We’ll try to get you some help.”
Cole pocketed the phone in time to swerve sharply. There were weapons in the car. He hadn’t thought to grab any when he got in. He reached behind him, fumbling to find something.
He was hit from behind. It nearly knocked him into a jogger, a woman, who screamed at him as he swerved and fishtailed. An on coming car ran off the road. Sorry sorry sorry. Not my fault. He got control of the car. He also got his hand on a pistol. That was something. He felt better.