The Oval Office
THE FLOOR SHOOK, and several chunks of plaster fell from the ceiling of the Oval Office. Rafique Aziz had his back pressed against the fireplace and was holding Russ Piper tightly at knifepoint. The loud cracks of rifle fire told him his men were close. Aziz was enraged with himself for letting the president get away. He had been so close.
Seconds later Bengazi burst into the Oval Office, sweeping the smoking-muzzle of his rifle from one end of the room to the other and back. The only two men in the room were Aziz and Chairman Piper. Bengazi’s other men joined him within seconds and covered the hallway. Not daring to ask the obvious, Bengazi lifted his gas mask and retrieved a pistol from his thigh holster. He extended the grip toward Aziz.
Aziz threw Piper to the side. The chairman of the DNC stumbled over a chair and fell to the ground. He propped himself up on one elbow, still not quite sure what he had done.
“What are you doing?” Piper yelled with a look of utter shock on his round face. “This can’t be happening!”
Without hesitation, Aziz pointed his weapon at Piper and squeezed the trigger. The bullet struck the chairman right between the eyes and sent his heavy head thudding to the floor. A pool of crimson blood flowed from the Piper’s head and began to work its way across the plush blue carpet and onto the presidential seal.
“I have been waiting to do that all morning,” growled Aziz. Then extending his hand, he said, “Give me your radio.” Bengazi turned his back, and Aziz withdrew the small radio from Bengazi’s combat vest. Aziz unplugged the headset jack and brought the radio to his mouth. With the gun in one hand and the radio in the other, Aziz started for the doorway. “The president has made it to his bunker. Cut the communications immediately, secure the building, and take as many hostages as possible.”
9
THE SMALL JET cleared the dark expansive water of the Atlantic, and within minutes the jagged shoreline of the Chesapeake Bay came into view. Mitch Rapp looked down at the familiar body of water with a determination and focus that had been missing just hours earlier. When Irene Kennedy had called and recounted the startling events at the White House, Rapp found himself awash in a sea of shock. For a decade he had followed, more closely than any other individual, the actions of Rafique Aziz. There had been the kidnappings in Beirut, Istanbul, and Paris; the bombings in Spain, Italy, France, Lebanon, and Israel; and the event that had led Rapp into his unusual occupation, the downing of Pan Am Flight 103.
Despite Kennedy’s insistence that Aziz was, in fact, in control of the White House, it took several minutes for the sheer scope and gravity of the situation to sink in with Rapp. As more of the morning’s events were relayed, the fog hanging over Rapp’s mind began to dissipate. Instead, Rapp saw before him, in this turmoil and tragedy, an opportunity to bring the destructive chase to an end. He was sick of showing up to count the bodies and look at the evidence. He was sick of chasing Rafique Aziz, always missing him, sometimes by months and days, or even seconds.
As the plane descended toward Andrews Air Force Base, Rapp looked out the window at the rolling Maryland countryside with a clear and precise plan in his mind of what he needed to do. In Paris he had hesitated because of a single innocent bystander. At the time, he did not know it, but he had traded the lives of all the people who had died this morning for the life of that one woman. The logic was irrefutable. If he had pulled the trigger in Paris, none of this would have happened. Never again, he told himself. This would be the end of the road for one of them.
The Learjet set down gently and taxied to a portion of the base the CIA leased from the Air Force. As the plane approached a brown hangar, the large doors were opened, inviting the jet out of the sunlight and away from prying eyes. Once inside, the doors were closed and the pilots shut down the engines.
Rapp peered out the small window and saw a group of a half dozen people waiting in the hangar’s glass office. He immediately recognized Irene Kennedy and Director Stansfield. Rapp grabbed his backpack and started for the door while Jane Hornig appeared from the bedroom. Rapp lowered the door and took one large step to the ground. Out of habit he turned and offered his hand to Hornig. The two of them walked across the spotless concrete floor to the fluorescent-lit office. Rapp opened the glass door, and the loosely hung venetian blind swung away and then back, clanking several times.
Director Stansfield stood in the sparsely furnished military office, the handset of a secure mobile phone held firmly against his ear. His SPO, or security protection officer, was standing next to him holding the rest of the unit, which was roughly the size of a camera case. Stansfield looked up at Rapp and said into the receiver, “He’s standing right in front of me.” The director’s gray eyes then looked to the ground, and he nodded several times. “I was planning on it. We should be there in about twenty minutes.”
Stansfield handed the phone to his SPO and said, “Would everybody excuse us for a minute?” The four other people who had been waiting in the office with Kennedy and Stansfield filed out of the room, leaving the director and Kennedy alone to talk with Hornig and Rapp.
Irene Kennedy grabbed a garment bag from the back of one of the chairs and handed it to Rapp. “You need to get changed. We have a meeting at the Pentagon in twenty minutes.”
Rapp took the bag and looked to Stansfield. He didn’t like the idea of showing his face to a roomful of politicians and bureaucrats. “Who was that on the phone?”
“General Flood. He wanted to make sure I was bringing you to the meeting.”
“Why?” asked Rapp as he started to take off his holster.
“He didn’t say.”
Rapp looked at Stansfield with some concern. “Am I giving a briefing?”
Kennedy fielded the question by pulling a leather wallet out of her purse. “Your credentials? Same cover as always. Mitch Kruse, Middle Eastern analyst on my counterterrorism team. You have been with the CIA for five years, et cetera, et cetera. . . .” Kennedy handed him the wallet. “You know the routine. We want you there if the need arises. We would, of course, prefer it if you kept a low profile.”
Rapp took the wallet and set it on the desk next to his holstered 9-mm Beretta. He quickly stripped down to his boxers while Kennedy and Stansfield began to question Hornig. A small pinkish scar was visible just above his left hip, about the size of a quarter, the mark left by the bullet of an overzealous and confused FBI agent. On his tanned lower back was a scar left by the knife of the surgeon who had removed the bullet.
“Have you got an exact number out of him yet?” asked Kennedy of Jane Hornig.
“Yes”—Hornig shrugged her shoulders—“at least we think so. Remember that everything we get out of him is what he thinks to be the truth. As far as Harut knows, there are twelve of them, counting Aziz.” Hornig folded her arms across her chest and assumed a wider stance.
“What type of weapons?”
“Besides your standard firearms”—Hornig looked to Rapp, who was pulling on his dress pants—“a lot of plastique explosives. Mitch?”
Rapp grabbed a white T-shirt and said, “More than enough to blow the whole place to kingdom come.”
Stansfield shook his head and asked, “What about his demands?”
“I haven’t had the chance to get around to that yet, but I’ll start as soon as we get him moved.”
Stansfield nodded. “We have arranged to transfer you to one of the safe houses in Virginia. You are to talk to no one other than Irene, Mitch, and me. Very few people outside of our immediate circle know we have Harut, and we would like to keep it that way. I need you to focus your questioning in the area of demands. We need to know what Aziz is going to ask for, before he asks for it.”
Hornig accepted her orders with a nod and cautioned, “If he knows what the demands are, I will find out.”
“And,” started Kennedy, “it would help if we got as complete a list as possible of the men Aziz brought with him.”
Hornig made another mental note. She was
prepared to extract every last piece of information from Harut, and if they had a shopping list, she was more than willing to oblige.
“Mitch, can you think of anything else?” asked Kennedy.
Rapp shoved the tails of his white dress shirt into his pants and buttoned them. “Yeah. I’d like to know how long he plans on hanging around, and how in the hell he plans on getting out of there. If I know Aziz, he has a timetable, and he’s planned this entire thing down to the last minute.”
Stansfield nodded in agreement and said to Hornig, “You know how to get ahold of us. We’ll try to stay out of your way, but I want to be updated the moment you find anything of consequence.”
“I’ll get to work immediately.” Dr. Hornig pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose and nodded.
“Good. Mitch, let’s go. You can finish in the helicopter.” Stansfield started for the door with Kennedy and Hornig on his heels. Rapp grabbed the garment bag and the rest of his stuff and followed. As he stepped out of the office, he saw a gurney being wheeled across the smooth floor toward an ambulance. Harut was strapped to the top under a gray blanket.
A small outer door to the hangar was opened, and a stream of bright sunshine shot across the floor. Rapp could now hear the spinning rotors of a helicopter waiting on the tarmac. He paused for a second and watched as the gurney was shoved into the ambulance. Jane Hornig and her two assistants climbed in, and the doors were closed. Rapp was now frozen in thought as he looked at the ambulance pulling away.
Irene Kennedy appeared in the small door with her sunglasses on and her hair blowing in the wind. “Come on, Mitch. We’re going to be late.”
Rapp, his concentration broken, turned to his boss and blinked several times. Kennedy waved for him to hurry, and Rapp jogged to the door, still wondering what it was that he was missing.
VICE PRESIDENT SHERMAN Baxter had returned to Washington from a fund-raising trip to New York as fast as his entourage could pull up stakes and ship out. Air Force One had landed at Andrews about forty minutes before Rapp and Dr. Hornig had set down.
Baxter sat in the back of the tanklike presidential limousine with his chief of staff, Dallas King, and Attorney General Margaret Tutwiler. As the motorcade of Secret Service vehicles raced through D.C., Dallas King laid out their strategy. The Stanford Law grad and San Diego native ran a hand through his signature bleach-blond hair.
“This crisis presents us with a unique opportunity.” King paused for emphasis and then looked at Attorney General Tutwiler. “Your job in this is going to be crucial, Marge. We need to let the FBI know that Sherm is in charge. We can’t have them withholding information from us, and we definitely can’t have them trying any rescue operations without our approval.” The thirty-two-year-old rising star smashed his fist into the palm of his hand for emphasis. “Nothing goes down without our approval. Am I clear on that?”
Marge Tutwiler was just starting to get used to Dallas King’s ambitious style. Vice President Baxter’s lap dog was a charmer. He had good looks, a sharp mind, and good sense of humor. The only thing he lacked was a sense of his place in the pecking order. Marge Tutwiler—California political activist, self-anointed law enforcement critic, and former USC law professor—was not used to anyone speaking to her in such a tone, let alone someone not much older than her not-so-former students.
With a tired expression, Tutwiler said, “Dallas, I was dealing with the FBI when you were still riding around your little San Diego neighborhood on a Big Wheel. Don’t worry; I can handle them.”
Dallas smiled and reached across the back of the limo, gently placing his hand on the attorney general’s knee. “I’m sorry, Marge. I didn’t mean to imply you didn’t know how to handle the FBI.” The perpetually tanned chief of staff released her knee and held both hands up in a token form of surrender. “I just meant we need to strategize together.” Dallas flashed his wily smile and thought to himself, This bitch’s ego is bigger than her ass.
Sherman Baxter the Third, former governor of California and current vice president of the United States, cleared his throat and interjected, “No matter what our titles are, we are outsiders in this town, and don’t forget it. Dallas is right, Marge, and it doesn’t hurt to remind us that we need to keep the FBI on a short leash.” Sherman Baxter, like most politicians, had two very distinct personalities. Behind closed doors Baxter was extremely demanding and prone to fits of rage. The fifty-four-year-old Californian had grown to look at the Oval Office almost as if it were his birthright. In his mind, he deserved it a hell of a lot more than his running mate. If it hadn’t been for Baxter and his California connections, President Hayes would never have made it to the White House.
In public they were the perfect picture of cooperation, but behind closed doors Baxter’s contempt for his boss could not be concealed. In his eyes, Hayes was a complete simpleton who had managed to stumble into the White House because he had a cleaner sexual past than any of the other candidates—and, most important, because Sherman Baxter had delivered California. When Baxter had decided to run with Hayes, he had looked upon the endeavor as a stepping-stone to the presidency.
After a grueling campaign and just five short months in office, Baxter was already tired of playing second fiddle to Hayes. Sherman Baxter the Third, heir to one of California’s finest family wineries, did not take kindly to receiving orders from a man whose family had made their money manufacturing radiator hoses. Three more years would be hard enough to take, and seven was absolutely unthinkable.
As King and Tutwiler continued to talk, Baxter gazed out the window. His black hair was thinning, and he wore it slicked back. Baxter folded his left arm over his slightly bulging midsection and remembered something that King liked to say when they discussed the agony of another three years underneath Hayes the simp: “Don’t forget, you’re one heartbeat away from the presidency, boss. You never know when some nut might punch Hayes’s ticket.”
How prophetic Dallas could be, Baxter thought to himself. As the motorcade pulled onto the George Mason Memorial Bridge, the tightly wound Baxter allowed himself a moment to relish the fact that for now, he was for all intents and purposes the president of the United States.
SPECIAL AGENT SKIP McMahon of the FBI looked down at the White House from the Secret Service’s Joint Operations Center on the fifth floor of the Executive Office Building. From his vantage point he could count the bodies of nine Secret Service officers. He had been told there were more on the other side of the building, but an accurate number was impossible to ascertain. Even now, four hours after the attack, information was sparse. No one knew what was going on inside the building.
McMahon was a twenty-six-year veteran of the FBI who had seen it all, or at least he thought he had. He had started with the Bureau right out of college and after doing a four-year stint investigating bank robberies in Las Vegas, he was moved back to Washington, where he started working counterintelligence cases. After almost a decade of chasing spies he was moved into the FBI’s violent crimes unit. It was a transfer that led to the downfall of his marriage and almost his career. The former defensive tackle for Penn State had quickly found that he had a knack for getting inside the twisted minds of the individuals he was charged with catching. Six years of sloshing through the septic tank of American society had taken its toll. McMahon had been asked one too many times to step into the shoes of a serial killer and visualize how some sick pervert had abducted, raped, tortured, and then killed an innocent little girl.
Fortunately for McMahon he had seen the writing on the wall and gotten out before the job destroyed him. McMahon had recently been put in charge of the Bureau’s Critical Incident Response Group, or CIRG, which was the lead organization in resolving hostage situations. The FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, or HRT, was under his command along with another half dozen investigative and support units. But not once in the hundreds of meetings that McMahon had attended on urban terrorism had he ever heard someone postulate that the White House was vul
nerable to a full-scale assault.
McMahon shifted his attention from terra firma to the horizon. On a more immediate note, he was not happy with the current command-and-control situation. Both FBI and Secret Service sniper teams occupied every rooftop within a block of the White House. Each team reporting to and taking orders from its own agency. In short, it was not the way to handle a crisis, and it was something that needed to be rectified immediately.
A female agent standing next to McMahon held her watch in front of his face. “You’d better get moving. The meeting is in twenty minutes.”
McMahon nodded. With sagging shoulders, he looked at the fallen officers on the South Lawn and asked, “What’s the body count?”
Special Agent Kathy Jennings looked at a small notebook and said, “We have it at eighteen, with God only knows how many more inside the building.”
McMahon shook his head as he took in the carnage. He looked tired, and the crisis was only in its infancy. After a moment, he turned and headed for the door. McMahon dreaded attending meetings with the bigwigs. On his way out, he thanked several of the Secret Service agents for allowing him to take a look from their vantage point.
Jennings followed a half step behind, and as soon as she was sure no one could hear, she said, “I don’t think they were too happy to see us. Do you think they know we’re going to be running the show?”
“I don’t know. They’ve lost at least eighteen men . . . probably double that, and the White House is their baby.” McMahon turned for the stairs and started down.
“But they’re not set up for this kind of thing. This is clearly . . .” Jennings stopped talking for a second as they passed two Secret Service officers who were on their way up the stairs. In a lower voice, she continued, “This is clearly the Bureau’s territory. It’s a domestic terrorist activity.”
“A lot of people are going to want to stick their hands in this pie before it’s over.”