“So, Darrell,” Tulrude said in a deliberately soothing voice, “like I have been telling you all along, your job is simple. All you have to do is wait. And be ready.”
“I’m unclear . . . on the plan,” he said, sounding unsteady. He craned his neck back and forth.
“You don’t need to know the plan,” she said in a liquid tone. “Just that you will be the president of the United States. You want that, don’t you? I know you do.”
“The question is how? Hewbright has already beaten the impeachment trial in the Senate. He’s not the type for a sex scandal. And besides, he’s a widower. What could you possibly have on him?”
“Washington is always full of surprises,” she said with a little smile. Zandibar still looked unsettled. Tulrude put her glass down on the coffee table. “Look, Darrell, I am going to ask you a very important question. And you need to answer it like a man. Do you really want to know all the details of Hank Hewbright’s future? Because once you become privy to that there’s no unhearing it. Wouldn’t you rather retain a blissful state of deliberate avoidance? A plausible state of denial—even passing a polygraph test if necessary. Wouldn’t that be better?”
Darrell Zandibar tipped his glass up and sipped the last drop. Then he threw Jessica Tulrude the kind of look that said he really needed a third drink but thought it would reflect poorly if he had to ask. “I suppose you’re right,” he said.
“Of course I am,” she said, smiling. “Now let me freshen up your glass.” She stood, grabbed the crystal whiskey glass out of his hand, and sauntered over to the bar to fill it up once more.
THE WHITE HOUSE
Washington, D.C.
Secret Service Agent Decker had made it clear he wanted to be with Agent Ted Booth when the man met with President Hewbright. It was something Booth had said in passing—something casual, seemingly irrelevant. But Decker had a paranoid side, and he’d decided to follow the new guy closely for a while, just to be sure. He’d even made arrangements to have someone else join them with the president, as an added precaution.
However, something had gone wrong. His third party was a no-show.
And then Decker had been unexpectedly called out to the outside portico on the report of a disturbance. As he stood there and surveyed the area, he saw nothing unusual. Confused, he asked the guards at the security booth if they had reported anything. They said no.
“Then why’d I get a code to come out here?”
“We just got a message from Ops Center that their system went down for a sec. Then booted back up. Must have been a computer glitch. You probably just got a random message code when it happened.”
A bad feeling began to sweep over Decker and he tapped his earpiece. He wanted to alert the Emergency Operations Center to prepare for a possible move of the president to the secure bunker of rooms below the basement of the White House. Just in case.
But . . . nothing. His wireless earpiece wasn’t working.
Sure, it could have been a malfunction. The encrypted radio channels for their earpieces were connected to the same system that had just gone down. But the paranoid part of his brain remembered something else—something that made him go cold. A security study done last month had indicated that, theoretically at least, someone inside the White House with his own password and enough cyber knowledge might be able hack into the communications system. They’d planned on doing something about it. But the Service had priorities that were higher on the “fix it” list. So it was never investigated further.
After all, it was just theoretical.
Decker spat out a few angry epithets, then turned and sprinted back toward the West Wing. This better just be a systems glitch . . .
A White House security guard strolling nearby called to him. “Hey, it took awhile, but that FBI friend of yours finally got cleared through security—”
But Decker wasn’t stopping to chat.
Inside the White House, Agent Ted Booth, aka Vlad Malatov, and Agent Kevin Arnold waited side by side at the entrance to the Oval Office. As an added touch of authenticity, Malatov even had an old-fashioned ink pen in his top suit coat pocket. After all, he was supposed to be asking the president for his autograph today.
The agent on duty checked his e-pad for the orders. For that precise time of day, it read, POTUS meets new SSA Ted Booth in OO. President Hewbright insisted on conducting a short meet-and-greet with every new Secret Service agent. Today would be no exception.
The agent on duty reread the electronic orders again and then looked up at Agent Arnold. “Agent Decker is supposed to be here.”
Agent Arnold explained, “He was called out to the portico. A report of a disturbance.”
The door agent thought about it for half a second before he waved the two of them in and shut the door behind them.
Inside the Oval Office, the president was not in sight. But they could hear the water running in the sink in the private bathroom off the main room.
Malatov whispered, “You place the body behind the desk when I’m done. Then we both walk out.”
Agent Arnold appeared stunned.
“Don’t worry about the cameras in the room,” Malatov continued. “I’ve put them on a timed failure. Part of my hack into the Comm system. They’ll be out for the next seven minutes.”
Arnold flashed an expression of distress. “I was told that this was only going to be an intel mission into POTUS operations,” he replied in a hoarse whisper.
“Negative. This is a hit. You have a problem with that?”
Agent Arnold didn’t respond. Not verbally. But a second later he gave his reply—he grabbed for the handgun under his coat. Malatov was faster and struck Arnold in the throat. As the agent gasped, Malatov grabbed him with his left hand, felt his chest where Arnold wasn’t wearing his Kevlar vest, and raised his right hand into the air. Knifing his fingers together, he swung them down like a mechanical pitching arm into the man’s stomach, piercing through his flesh and rupturing his stomach. Agent Arnold collapsed on the floor, bleeding profusely.
Malatov pulled out the SIG Sauer P229 pistol he had modified with a silencer just as President Hewbright strode into the room. Malatov dropped the gun to his side and out of sight.
Hewbright started to smile, but then noticed the fallen agent on the floor. “He’s hurt—”
“No, Mr. President. I believe he may already be dead. And you will be too unless you do what I tell you.” Malatov, who was standing over Agent Arnold, brandished the pistol and waved for Hewbright to step over in front of the famous Resolute Desk. Agent Arnold had changed the game plan, and now the kill shot would have to look like it had been fired from Arnold’s position in the room.
Malatov thought he knew everything about White House security precautions. But as President Hewbright nodded in compliance with the order and shuffled slowly sideways toward the desk, his hand brushed across the top of a library table where there sat a paperweight with the presidential seal on it. The paperweight fell to the floor.
Malatov instantly realized the fall was no accident. It might have sent an emergency signal down to the Secret Service headquarters, and farther below that down to the Emergency Operations Center. He had to act fast.
Malatov raised his pistol at Hewbright’s forehead, and before the president of the United States had a chance to react, he pulled the trigger. There was a muffled zing and Hewbright fell to the floor, bleeding from the fatal wound in his head.
Quickly Malatov tucked his gun away, then reached down and twice fired the weapon that was still clutched in Agent Arnold’s hand, making it look like a firing by Arnold. The shots hit the Resolute Desk.
Turning toward the door, Malatov burst out of the Oval Office and shouted to the agent on duty outside, “Agent Arnold shot the president! I disabled him. But there’s a coconspirator somewhere on this floor! I’m going to find him . . .”
As the other agent raced into the Oval Office, Malatov tore down the hall. But he was soon forced to an abru
pt halt. Fifty feet in front of him Agent Decker stood in a firing position, with his pistol aimed at Malatov. He got off two shots, one of which zipped into Malatov’s left leg, before the Russian got his gun out and returned fire. He hit Agent Decker in the hip and the man went down.
But Malatov didn’t see what was approaching him from behind. Former FBI agent Ben Bolling, there for the meeting with the president at Agent Decker’s request, charged down the hall like a fullback. He tackled the brute from behind and took him to the floor, knocking the handgun out of his hand. It clattered to the ground.
Enraged, Malatov tossed Bolling off of him, grabbed his pistol, and fired at him point blank. There was only an empty click. He had already fired the only two bullets in the clip that had been issued to him.
Bolling didn’t have time to be thankful. Like a crazed bull, Malatov pinned him against the wall with his powerful left forearm and swung his right hand up in the air. Bolling knew what was coming; he grabbed frantically at the top pocket of Malatov’s suit coat as Malatov swung his deadly hand toward Bolling’s chest. But when it connected, it hit with a sickening metallic clang. Malatov recoiled in pain.
Taking advantage of the assassin’s confusion, Bolling angled the sharp end of the ink pen he had snatched from the man’s suit pocket and thrust it into Malatov’s jugular vein. He watched as the Russian killer stumbled forward for a few feet, grabbing at the pen in his neck and at the jugular that was now surging blood. After a few more unsteady steps the assassin collapsed to the ground.
Bolling pounced on him and searched his limp body for other weapons but found none. By then the agent on duty was standing over them with his own gun drawn.
Vlad Malatov, with his last moments of consciousness, looked at the broken fingers of his right hand with a confused look of bewilderment. Bolling leaned into the assassin’s face. “I know your moves, creep. I thought it was you on that UEFM fight video.” Then he unbuttoned his shirt, revealing his homemade defense system—the uncomfortable seventeenth-century metal breastplate from his private armory collection that he had worn that day. It had caused him to be delayed in getting clearance through White House security.
He slipped off the breastplate and scampered over to Agent Decker. The hall was now crawling with Secret Service agents and special-ops men in black attack fatigues. But they were all too late. That was when the scope of the somber tragedy really started sinking in.
“Did he get to the president?” Decker asked, choking on his words as another agent applied pressure to stop his bleeding.
“I’m afraid so,” Bolling said, trying to fight back tears. But he couldn’t stop them, and they started to stream down his face.
Bolling stayed with Decker, even after they loaded him in the EMS vehicle and it raced toward Georgetown Medical Center. “I had a kinda weird feeling about that guy,” Decker explained, trying to raise his voice above the siren as Bolling squatted next to him in the ambulance. “Couldn’t put my finger on it.”
The medics told Decker not to talk, but Decker ignored them. “I had this hunch, but nothing concrete, except our first conversation. Kept thinking back to it. That’s why I asked you to come today, to check out the new guy, just on a lark . . .”
“What about that first conversation?”
Decker was trying to manage a smile. “His papers said he was transferred from the Miami office. He told me he was a Marlins fan. He said that only after they fired Ozzie Guillen as manager way back in 2012 did the team start to take a nosedive. But any Marlins fan would know that wasn’t true. The season before that, they were in last place in the National League East.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
NORTHERN IRAQ
Rivka had been flown to a hospital where the Kurds were still friendly to the Americans. Ethan didn’t want to leave her alone, but the two helicopter pilots from the CIA promised they would arrange trusted guards to keep her safe for the next few days while she recovered. That had to be good enough for Ethan.
He bent down at Rivka’s hospital bed and gave her a long kiss. “There’s more where that came from,” he said, smiling. “When I get back.”
But she didn’t smile in return. Ethan figured she had a pretty good idea where he was going next, and she knew that for him the danger was only just beginning.
“You have to promise me you’ll be safe,” she said with a gentle quality to her voice. “You’re going into the belly of the beast.”
He nodded and took her pretty face in his hands. She was shockingly pale from blood loss, and they had her hooked up to a transfusion line. Although he was preparing to leave her, he was drenched in lingering regrets. Man alive, I wish I could stay here with her. He bent down next to her ear and whispered, “When I get back, I have a question to ask you. I’ll even get down on my knee to ask it. And the answer has got to be a yes.”
In her bleary state, Rivka just stared back at first, but then a light bloomed in her eyes. “Oh, Ethan . . . I love you so . . .”
With a final kiss, he let her go and stepped out into the hall where the two CIA helicopter pilots were waiting for him.
Ethan had already heard the shocking news that Hank Hewbright had been assassinated. The mainstream press was spinning the story that it had been a hit orchestrated by Moscow as revenge for Hewbright’s support for Israel, the nation that thoroughly embarrassed Russia by miraculously withstanding Russia’s terrifying coalition attack a few years before. But Ethan knew better than that. Bart Kingston and his staff at AmeriNews would now have to tell the real story: that Alexander Colliquin wanted a new president in the White House for his own purposes, someone who would do his bidding and bring the U.S. into the Global Alliance. And so he’d made it happen.
Ethan was one of the few people who saw the really big picture. He had experienced it firsthand as a guinea pig in one of Colliquin’s cruel labs. Colliquin’s plan was to track and then control the human race through his 3-D digital holography system. But he still needed a computer data center that had adequate computing power to accomplish that. But which one, and where? Dr. Iban Adis was the one who had been tasked to nail that down for him. Ethan needed that intel immediately. It had been nearly two weeks since he had heard from him.
The pilots told Ethan that the Agency had received orders to transport Ethan back to the White House for a debriefing regarding the Global Alliance. The chief pilot added, “Even with President Hewbright gone now, and with President Zandibar sworn in, we still have to follow a standing order, unless someone—the director or DOD or the White House—reverses it.”
They looked as if they were waiting for Ethan to fill in the blanks. So he did. “That’s fine with me,” he said. “I just need to ask a favor: you may need to take me on a little side trip first. I just have to figure out where.”
The two CIA guys nodded. “Just name the place.”
Rivka had given her Allfone to Ethan before he left the hospital. He needed it to call into his encrypted Remnant site to pick up messages that may have collected for him after his capture in Hong Kong. As he was being driven to a secret CIA air base in the north outside of Kirkuk to be flown back to the U.S., he logged in. On his digital message bank there were calls from Rivka and Pack. There were also several from Remnant supporters in Iraq, mentioning the torture and killing of an unnamed lab scientist in New Babylon. Following those, he saw a text from someone he didn’t recognize at first—Farrah Adis.
Then it struck him. She was Dr. Iban Adis’ wife. And judging from the other messages that he had received, he realized she must now be a widow. It was clear that Alexander Colliquin’s people must have found out Dr. Adis was undercover for the Remnant. But apparently not before he sent an encrypted e-mail to his wife containing three vital pieces of information she was now sharing with Ethan.
The first thing she shared was the location of the computing center that Colliquin was after: the National Data Center at Bluffdale, Utah. Ethan nodded at that. Of course, it all makes sense—why Colliquin nee
ded access to the United States. To take over its massive intelligence computer center.
Second, Farrah recited a Bible verse that her husband had messaged to her. Revelation 13:15. Ethan knew that one by heart: “And it was given to him to give breath to the image of the beast, so that the image of the beast would even speak and cause as many as do not worship the image of the beast to be killed.”
But the third piece of information in Farrah’s message was perplexing. It read, Binary aka base 2 and was followed by a string of ten binary characters in 0s and 1s.
Ethan immediately forwarded the text to Chiro Hashimoto up in the Yukon Territory with an urgent plea for him to call back. He then leaned forward in the sedan and addressed the pilot and copilot in the front seat. “I’ve got the location I would like to visit first.”
“Shoot,” the pilot said as he drove.
“Bluffdale, Utah. Or as close as you can get.”
The two CIA operatives shared a quick side glance. Ethan wondered if the U.S. government wasn’t already aware of the importance of that location to Alexander Colliquin.
“There’s a military airport right next to the National Data Center,” the pilot shot back. “We’ll give you door-to-door service.”
As they drove through Kirkuk, heading to the air base miles outside of the city, Ethan leaned his head against the window. He was exhausted, and his head was still dizzy and swimming in pain, but there was no time for that. He watched the scenes of life in Kurdish Iraq flash by the window—the modern office buildings, the neighborhoods that had been bombed into rubble interspersed with palm trees and a few gardens.
The car pulled to a stop at an intersection. Ethan spotted a group of old men in turbans sitting in a courtyard, smoking and talking. They seemed oblivious to the cataclysm that would soon be visited on the earth. They had to be warned. They had to be told about Jesus Christ. Everyone needed to hear that. Back in the lab, God had given Ethan a glimpse of the heavenly kingdom to come. Ethan wanted everyone to have a chance to be transformed by the love of Jesus. Before it was too late.