House Divided

Liz stared out the window, her pretty middle-aged face numb, her brain frozen in shock. For a long moment, she could not understand what was happening out there. It didn’t make sense. The unfamiliar data simply did not compute.

On the other hand, somewhere deep inside her mind, she knew she had stored footage of what had just transpired. If she replayed it, she knew what she would see – the plane approaching over the mountains, then a flash of light on the right side of the plane about halfway back, just behind the wing. She had seen it happen in real time, but had been unable to process it. She had been psyching herself up for the disembarking, and didn’t realize what she was looking at.

The plane had cracked apart in midair. There were two pieces at first, then three, then four. The rear of the fuselage spun away like a boomerang. The front section came forward and down. It turned upside down, moving very fast, crashing into the foothills and spraying into a thousand shards. The wings disintegrated as they fluttered to the Earth.

Liz stared and stared. Now there were fires all over the hillsides. All around her, her team stood silently, statues in Dennis black and gold. Behind them, in the terminal, people were still screaming, and now people were running.

Several people had collapsed to the floor.

“Was that really the plane?” Liz said to no one.

CHAPTER TWO

4:35 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

The White House Residence

Washington, DC

The phone rang.

It made a funny sound, not so much a ring as a buzz, or a hum. But it was loud. Also, on each ring it lit up the early morning darkness in blue, like the siren lights on a police car. Luke Stone hated that phone.

He lay somewhere between asleep and awake. Images flashed in his mind. The past few years: an explosion at the old White House, the stately colonnade blowing apart, chunks of it flying up into the air; a gun and rocket battle in a vast open-air stadium in North Korea; Ed Newsam’s fierce eyes, a container ship engulfed in flames behind him; Mark Swann, skinny and bearded in an orange jumpsuit, eyes vacant, chained to a group of other ISIS prisoners; Becca’s pained and angry eyes, her face thin, her skin like paper… Gunner’s big worried eyes, staring at him, looking to Luke for…

Luke opened his own eyes. Next to him on the bed table, in the dark of the Presidential bedroom, the infernal phone kept ringing. A digital clock sat on the table next to the phone. He glanced at its red numbers.

4:35. As he watched, it blinked and changed. 4:36.

“Jesus,” he whispered. He had been asleep for three hours.

A female voice, thick with sleep: “Don’t answer it.”

A tuft of her blonde hair poked out from under the blankets. The heavy blinds were drawn, and if it weren’t for the phone, it would be pitch-black in the room, just the way Luke liked it. But the phone kept throwing crazy blue light around the room.

“It’s like a disco in here.”

He picked up the phone. Mercifully, the stark blue light died.

“It’s for you,” he said, and held the receiver out to her.

A thin hand snaked out, took the receiver, and brought it back under the covers. She held it to the side of her half-hidden face, her eyes still sealed shut.

“Susan Hopkins,” she said in a serious voice, as though she had been up for an hour, had already eaten breakfast, and was being interrupted while going over some important paperwork – the President of the United States never slept.

A thought came to Luke: How many times?

How many times had he, or she, been awakened in the middle of the night because something horrible had happened, or was happening right now, or was about to happen? How many moments of intimacy, of normalcy, of just plain life – something many people took for granted – had been cut short or even demolished by phone calls like this one?

Half-asleep, he allowed himself to imagine another world, one where they didn’t have these jobs. The phone didn’t ring in the middle of the night with terrible news. She was on TV in some capacity. He was a college professor. It was a busy life, but things could be scheduled, plans could be made, and they didn’t have to hide their relationship.

He still worried about that part of it, maybe more than ever. The world seemed to have given them a free pass these past few weeks. Maybe it had been the influence of the holidays – people had their own lives and families to think about. Susan’s daughters had come in from the West Coast. He and Gunner had spent a lot of time here at the Residence over a few days. It had been awkward at first – Gunner was a little younger than Michaela and Lauren, and he had no experience dealing with the rare bird children of some of the richest people on Earth. Even so, they had all settled in together a little bit, and had a weird sort of Brady Bunch Christmas. It even snowed on Christmas Eve.

And somehow, some way, it all stayed out of the media. When Luke dropped Gunner back at his grandparents’ house, there were no news trucks parked outside. No reporters called Luke at his office, pressing him about his close advisory relationship with the President. It was quiet on the media front – too quiet. Whenever he asked Susan how this was staying out of the news, she just smiled mysteriously and said:

“Don’t worry. We have our methods.”

But he was worried. The situation gnawed at him. Mostly, he was worried about Gunner. The boy was growing up, and Luke wanted him to have something like a normal life. God knew he deserved it after everything he’d been through. He was still with Becca’s parents, and that was fine – if anything, they had been more cordial than usual just lately. They were nothing if not social climbers, and their former son-in-law was now quietly dating the President.

Truth be told, Luke would love nothing more than to have Gunner move back in with him. But he was still in the spy game, and running his own agency now. It was a lousy thing to admit, but he just didn’t have time to raise a son right now. If Gunner moved in with Luke, the boy would spend a lot of time on his own. For now, Luke made every effort he could to be a presence in Gunner’s life.

Luke shook his head, clearing the wandering thoughts away. Under the blankets, Susan was listening intently. For a moment, Luke held out hope that maybe this call wouldn’t be so bad. Heck, maybe it was even good news – something so good that it just couldn’t wait until morning. What would that be?

“Oh God,” Susan said, the tone of her voice dashing any hope he might have had. She took a deep breath and let out a long exhale. “All right. Look. I was asleep until a minute ago. Give me about a half hour to take a shower and have a bite to eat. In the meantime, start pulling together the usual suspects.”

Susan paused while the person on the other end spoke.

“Okay. Thanks.” The hand snaked out again and gave the receiver to Stone. Luke placed it back in its cradle.

“Bad?” he said.

“Yeah.”

She still hadn’t made any attempt to surface from under the covers. Luke’s eyes had already adjusted to the darkness, and she looked like a small child under there – one who didn’t want to get up and go to school.

“Plane crash in the Sinai Peninsula,” she said. “It’s a real mess. Jack Butterfield was on board. So was Sir Marshall Dennis and about sixty other people of varying degrees of importance. We don’t have the whole passenger list yet.”

She pulled back the covers. Her head was propped up on one elbow, her eyes open now and staring at him. They were blue eyes, framed in thick eyelashes. Her hair was beginning to get long. Gone was the conservative (and famous) Hopkins Bob, or Hopkins Helmet, depending on whether you loved her or hated her.

She was getting maybe just a little daring for official Washington, embracing her feminine side more than she had.

“Survivors?” Luke said.

She shook her head. “No.”

She sighed.

“I’ve known Hatchet Jack Butterfield for fifteen years. He was a fool and he was a drunk and he was a good ol’ boy – not my favorite combination. But he was also a decent man, very smart, and very close to the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon.”

“I know who he was,” Luke said.

She shook her head slowly. “I’ve known Marshall Dennis since I was a teenager. He was also a fool and a drunk, and he spent way too much time pawing at teenage girls, but…” She paused.

“Eh, forget it. Nobody’s going to miss Marsh Dennis. His ex-wives are probably all on the phone with their lawyers right now, directing them to make inquiries about the will.” She gestured at the phone. “That was Kurt Kimball.”

Luke nodded. “Of course it was.”

Suddenly, she slid out of bed. In the dim light, he watched her pad naked across the room. One last fleeting image of a different life passed through his mind – a life where it wasn’t time to get up yet.