Situation Room

“You’d better talk to Susan directly,” Kat said.

“Yes. I’ll remind you that I asked to do that at the beginning. So that we didn’t waste time.”

“I understand.”

The line went dead again.

Ed was staring at Luke. Ed’s eyes were large, but not in his typically frightening way. His face was pained. He looked like a man who had just been given an unpleasant surprise, or a child who had been told there were no more cookies.

Behind Ed’s head, buildings and billboard zoomed by. They were on a highway overpass now.

“I’ve got the chopper pilot on the phone. That’s the best I could do.”

“Okay, what does he say?”

“He’s on the chopper pad here in Atlanta. And he’s in touch with the FEMA facility.”

“Okay, Ed, let’s not play twenty questions. Give it to me.”

Ed shrugged. His eyes narrowed.

“Li Quiangguo is dead.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

12:30 p.m.

The Situation Room, United States Naval Observatory – Washington, DC

“Should I be in on this?” Michael Parowski said.

Susan nodded. “I want you there.”

They were on the ground floor of the New White House, walking briskly toward the Situation Room. Kat Lopez trailed two steps behind them. Two Secret Service men trailed two steps behind Kat.

“What do you want to tell people?”

Susan shrugged. “There’s no need to tell anyone anything, or even announce your presence. Kurt Kimball often kicks some people out if things go to a high level, but otherwise, no one would be shocked to see a sitting Congressman in there.”

“When will we tell people?”

Susan glanced back. “Kat?”

“We’ve got a tentative date of Wednesday, nine a.m. We’re putting together a press conference. If the weather looks good, we’ll do it on the back lawn. If not, we’ll do it in the communications room. Does that give you enough time, Congressman?”

“Two days? You’d be surprised at the amount of stuff I get done in two days.”

They passed through the open double doors of the Situation Room. Two more Secret Service men flanked the entryway. Big, bald Kurt Kimball, Susan’s National Security Advisor, was already inside, standing in front of a large flat-panel screen mounted on the wall. He was talking to a young tech guy and holding a remote control in his hand.

The place was filling up. Kurt had several staff members in the room, and his two top intelligence analysts, both of whom he’d brought over from the RAND Corporation as soon as he arrived.

Trish Markle, the new Secretary of State, was in a seat facing Kurt, and talking to two of her young staff members. Trish had been in her job six weeks already. She had been an Under Secretary at the State Department when Mount Weather happened, and Susan had simply promoted her to the top slot. Trish was forty-seven years old. She had spent long years as a government bureaucrat – maybe too many. So far, she was doing an unremarkable job as Secretary.

“Kurt,” Susan said, cutting through the background chatter.

He looked Susan’s way, then came over. He shook hands with Congressman Parowski. “Mike, good to see you. I hear there’s a big announcement coming.”

Parowski glanced at Susan. “Interesting. I just heard about it myself.”

Kimball smiled. “Word travels fast down these hallways.”

“Kurt,” Susan said, “if you’re ready, I want to get started. I feel like we’re already behind the eight ball on this. There are huge gaps in my knowledge.”

“I’m ready. But people are going to continue to straggle in while we’re talking. And the analysis we have is very, very preliminary. Mark Swann just finished uploading the last of the files to secure servers maybe twenty minutes ago.”

“That’s okay. I don’t need all the details. Just get me, and everyone else in this room, up to speed about the overall threat.”

Susan sat down at the head of the long conference table. Kat Lopez stood behind her and Mike Parowski sat to her left. For a second, Susan remembered how she used to feel in this room. In the early days, after the June sixth attacks, and during the Ebola crisis, she felt overwhelmed. Everything almost took on a surreal quality.

She had dropped into the Presidency as if from outer space. There were a lot more men around her in those days, and a lot of military men. It made her paranoid. The former President had just been assassinated, in part by military men. When the men stared at her, they looked like sharks eager to feed upon a tender morsel.

Things were different now. She was the quarterback. The people around her were her people – either hand-picked by her, or people from the previous crew chosen to stick around, in many cases vetted by Kurt Kimball personally. She liked the team she had.

“Okay,” Kurt said now. He raised his hands in the air. “Okay, everybody, let’s listen up. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and more is coming in all the time, so we’re going to get started. Anybody who doesn’t belong in here, you know where the door is.”

He looked at Susan. “Madam President, thanks for coming.”

She made a spinning wheel motion with her hand. Let’s go.

Behind Kurt, a photo of the Black Rock Dam appeared. It was a giant, made of gray concrete, looming high above the camera angle.

“Okay. All of you know by now that the floodgates opened early yesterday morning at the Black Rock Dam in western North Carolina, near Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Millions of cubic feet of water were released before workers could close the dam again, inundating a resort and several towns downriver from the dam. Preliminary estimates are that a thousand or more people died in the sudden flooding, and there was more than a billion dollars in property damage. The Black Rock resort, three miles south of the dam, was completely destroyed.”

Next to the image of the dam a new photo appeared. It was of a large Asian man in an orange jumpsuit, his arms and legs shackled as he was led from the back of an SUV. “This is a man identified as thirty-two-year-old Chinese national Li Quiangguo. We have no idea if that was his real name. We suspect that it wasn’t. We do suspect he was a Chinese intelligence agent.”

“Was?” Susan said. “Wasn’t? Why are you putting him in the past tense?”

Kimball looked at her. Then he looked at Kat Lopez. “Okay, somehow that little piece of news didn’t reach you. Li Quiangguo is dead. There was an incident at the FEMA camp where Li was being held. Luke Stone and another operative were there to question him this morning, on your orders.”

Susan nodded. “Yes, I’m aware of what my orders were.”

“No one is quite sure what happened because we haven’t talked to Stone yet, but apparently the prisoner soiled himself during the course of the interrogation.”

“Wonderful,” Susan said.

Susan thought of Luke Stone, and the idea of bringing him back for this operation. She wondered for a second if maybe it would have been better to let a sleeping dog lie. “How did that happen?”

Kimball shrugged. “People become afraid during aggressive interrogations. Afterwards, Stone told the camp director that the subject had been cooperative, and he and his team were going to investigate a lead Li had give them. Rather than have Li sit around with poop in his pants, the director decided to let him have a hot shower. This is also a pretty standard operating procedure. If a subject gives you something, you give them something in return. The reward makes it more likely they’ll give you something else.