Page 54 of Enemy Within
Jaws dropped. Doc whistled. Coleman’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. Ruiz shook his head left and right like he was trying to shake something off. Wright stared over the crashing waves, cursing under his breath. Kobayashi rubbed his hands over his face. Park stood still with his legs spread, staring down at the ground, his face hidden.
“Wait, rendezvousing with them?Where?” Doc spread his arms wide, gesturing to the emptiness surrounding them on all sides. “How?Are the Russians coming to America?”
Adam smiled. “It'll be amazing for you, Doc. Everything you love most.”
Doc slumped and tipped his head back, groaning.
“I’m waiting for the call.” He waved the sat phone. “We’re a little early, but I don’t think we’ll be here more than two days. I want to inventory our food and water. We need to make it last. And get changed into your dry suits. When we go, we’re going fast. Make sure you’re ready. Weapons clean and ready to go, dry suits on. Doc, I want a rundown of your pack and a full inventory. Everyone, make sure you rest. This will be our last chance to catch our breath before we’re on the move. We’ll be going until this ends, one way or the other.” He looked over his team. They stared back, no longer joking, no longer laughing. “Questions?”
Eyes slid sideways toward Faisal, standing aside from the group. Adam refused to squirm. He stared his team down, even though his stomach was shredding apart and his spine felt like it was liquefying.
“A word in private, L-T?” Coleman finally grunted.
He nodded. “The rest of you, get going. Sergeant?”
Coleman jerked his head away from the group, toward the boulder beach. Adam followed him down and tried to swallow his screaming heart.
23
Washington DC
WELBY WAITED UNTIL LEVI was out of Horsepower and back with President Wall in the Oval Office. When Levi went back in with the president, he had Scott’s laptop under his arm and a stack of folders that he held in a tight fist.
Welby radioed for Keifer to take over his post, and then he slipped down to the ground level and headed for Horsepower.
He badged his way in, entering his code and ducking into the dim office. Some agents sat at desks, typing up reports on laptops. Intel agents interfaced with Headquarters on H Street. On the big screen, a gigantic digital map of the White House showed glowing dots moving around like ants, labeled with the codenames of the people the Secret Service were detailed to protect. Three agents racked out in the back, sleeping in the bunks against the far wall.
No one played basketball, like they used to all the time. The foam ball and plastic hoop were forgotten.
The air was heavy, filled with rancid bile. Failure. Recrimination. They’d let their president be hit, be taken out. It was their main job, and they’d failed.
Shame slicked up each of their backs like a painted stripe, a mark of failure.Yes, I’m a Secret Service agent, Welby imagined saying.Yes, I was there when President Spiers was killed.
I carried his body out of the rubble.
Welby headed for the front, for the big desk. For four administrations, Agent Hoffer had run the detail and sat at the big desk. Ethan had been his handpicked successor.
What had happened to them all? How had they gone from twenty years under Hoffer to cycling through three detail leads before one term was up? How had this happened? How had they all come apart?
He sat down, smoothing his tie. No one paid him any attention.
He logged into the system. At his fingertips was everything in the Secret Service surveillance archives. Hours and hours of tapes, all of the footage from the White House. For a moment, he didn’t know what to search for. What was he even doing? What would he hope to find?
Ethan. That was the first question. Where was Ethan?
He hadn’t come back to the White House after Sochi. Welby didn’t blame him. How could Ethan have shared the White House with Leslie back in President Spiers’s life?
On the flight back from Russia, he’d seen Ethan go to Scott’s office on Air Force One, carrying a duffel bag. And then he’d heard him, sobbing like he’d lost everything. Like his heart had been destroyed.
Had that been the end? Was Ethan justgone? Had the president really died, and were he and Ethan already through, already broken up? After the reveal of Leslie’s status as a clone and an assassin, the nation had turned their support back to Ethan, a near-overwhelming show of love and solidarity for the first gentleman they had once decried. Where had that kind of affection and support been before, when the two men needed it?
No, White House tapes wouldn’t help him find Ethan.
Scott, then. The last he’d seen of Scott had been running through Bethesda Naval Hospital, running alongside Jack’s gurney and the doctors as they rushed him into emergency surgery. Jack had come to, almost in a fit, just before the surgery. He’d screamed for Ethan. Tried to rise. Flailed when he was held down, like an animal caught in a trap. Even his eyes had been wild, inhuman. The memory haunted Welby at night and every time he closed his eyes.
What had happened that day, the president’s last day?
He wound back the tapes until he found when he woke Spiers during the night, bringing him out of the White House and to Lawrence Irwin as Leslie had been taken down, captured for being the mole she was. He went further back, to the afternoon. President Spiers had spent the day in his West Wing study, sometimes reading. Sometimes staring into space. Sometimes holding one of the framed pictures of him and Ethan, gazing down at the glass like it was a crystal ball.
