Page 81 of Cross Down
A serial number. Nice and clear and whole: ANZ-10-8907688 P Q.
I stare at it, turn it over and over again in my gloved hand.
Then I slip it in a thigh pocket of my BDUs and stand up.
Deacon is about five yards away. “Everything okay?” she asks.
“Sure is,” I say.
Then rapid gunfire breaks out, the rounds snapping over our heads and ricocheting off the rubble.
Together, we start running.
Chapter
90
General Wayne Grissomis back at the White House for another briefing with the president. Well, technically, he’s underneath the White House, nearly two hundred feet down in one of the most recently built bomb shelters.
He’s been here twice before, but only on training modules, and he feels sick knowing this is the first time he’s entering the place officially.
Grissom is in a room adjoining the president’s temporary office, sitting on an uncomfortable couch, briefcase at his feet, hat in his lap, clear disposable gloves on his hands. The walls are concrete and painted a sickly green color, and two Secret Service agents in full battle gear are staring at him.
Earlier, Grissom went through the humiliation of having every part of his body searched. Then his temperature was taken, his blood drawn—to make sure he wasn’t carrying any communicable pathogens—and he and his briefcase were x-rayed.
“Sorry,” a Secret Service technician had said. “New procedures.”
He held up his hands. “And the gloves?”
The technician seemed almost ashamed. “Sorry. Always a possibility there’s poison under your fingernails. We have to account for that.”
Sure,Grissom thinks. Always new procedures to protect POTUS. Like this shelter, built a few years back to protect the president in case a Russian Borei-class submarine off the coast of Maryland suddenly lobs an SS-NX-30 into DC, giving the White House maybe five minutes’ warning before nuclear destruction.
Now the shelter is protecting the president not from a foreign adversary but apparently from some of his very own people.
The heavy steel door of the president’s quarters opens. A female Secret Service agent in a black pantsuit comes out and says, “The president will see you now.”
“Thank you,” Grissom says. He gets up and takes the few strides into the large room.
Unlike the Oval Office two hundred feet up, this place is well lit, though the fluorescent lights overhead give the place a sickly pallor. The president is sitting behind a reproduction of the Resolute Desk, and there are two flat-screen televisions set into the concrete wall, one showing a forest and the other showing a lake.
Grissom thinks,If those screens are supposed to brighten up the place, they’re utterly failing.
President Lucas Kent looks about ten years older than he did when Grissom met with him on the Oval Office patio. He’s dressed casually in blue jeans and a checkered flannel shirt.
Kent doesn’t get up, and Grissom doesn’t make the effort to shake his hand. He takes a seat in front of the desk. The room is the same sickly green as the waiting area, and even though the place is carpeted, there’s a chill in the air.
“Well?” the president says.
“Sir, we’ve come to an impasse, I’m sorry to say.”
The president says nothing for a moment, then starts talking quietly. “I’ve felt something for the past several days,” he says, his voice hoarse. “The news media hasn’t picked up on it yet, but most members of Congress are gone, out taking tours or visitingtheir home districts. The vice president is at Mount Weather, and even most of the cabinet secretaries are out in the countryside.” He wipes his face with a trembling hand. “The First Lady and the girls…they’re in California, at the western White House.”
“That does sound prudent,” Grissom says, not liking the thought of the president of the United States riding out this storm of violence alone in a deep bunker. Too many dreary historical parallels.
The president finally acknowledges his presence. “Yes, it is prudent, just like this administration. But the latest I’ve heard from the CIA and the NSA is that the attack is coming in one or two days. And it will probably involve a nuclear device or some other weapon of mass destruction.” The president stops speaking. There is utter silence in this underground office. Then: “I’m sorry, General. You were saying? Something about an impasse?”
Grissom says, “That’s correct, sir. We are at an impasse. It’s doubtful that, after months of investigation, we will be able to come up with the sources of these terrorist attacks and halt them before the major attack that’s expected.”
