TWO
Acting United States Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Arthur Petrie levered up the seatback of his leather recliner as he scrubbed sleep from his eyes with the heels of his hands.
The C-37B’s engines spun down and died after a long night’s work, and Petrie squinted out through the executive jet’s oval side window. On the wet tarmac outside the parked aircraft a stretch Lincoln sat, glistening with rain from a just-tapered downpour, and bookended front and back by two black Suburbans.
Petrie turned to the other person in the jet’s passenger cabin, who stood in the aisle dripping rain onto the carpet. “Modesto? Shepard, why the hell am I in Modesto?”
The acting secretary’s aide had been out here in the Bay Area since the bombing, and his eyelids drooped as though he had been awake the whole time.
Ben Shepard brushed with a three-fingered hand at rain that had soaked his suit when he had dashed through the downpour from the Lincoln and boarded the jet. “The storm’s still sitting across SFO and San Jose like a gorilla, Mister Secretary. The Golden Gate’s still closed, so accessing the city from the north is terrible. This was as close as we could get you, sir.”
Petrie frowned. “How close is that?”
Shepard shrugged wet shoulders. “With the escort, you should be in your suite in an hour and a half. The rest of the staff’s there now, preparing a full brief for you.”
Arthur Petrie kept frowning. He didn’t want a full brief. He wanted a full breakfast. Thirteen hours before he had been hustled out of a New Year’s morning meet-and-greet brunch in Paris, introducing him to his opposite numbers in the NATO countries.
Hustled out because California had been attacked, and somebody in the West Wing had decided that the Department of Homeland Security needed to look concerned about a state that later this year would cast fifty-five electoral votes for the next president of the United States.
So instead of quality Frog food and wine, Arthur had eaten too many airplane peanuts from a jar, washed them down with blended scotch from the plane’s galley that proved the government really did buy from the lowest bidder, then tried to sleep sitting up, in his clothes, for most of the flight.
He stood, stretched, rubbed his eyes, and sighed. “Can you tell me enough during the drive over so I can tap out of the briefing?”
Shepard rubbed his own eyes, nodded. Dark circles painted the skin beneath them, and blood let by a razor nick had dried on his collar. “I thought you might be anxious to get into the loop, sir. I worked up a prebrief summary during the night.”
The secretary stepped forward to the plane’s open doorway, and paused. Outside, the rain now merely trickled through the chill air, a few wide-spaced drops wrinkling the puddles that glistened on the tarmac. He sighed again.
He had brought Shepard along with him when he moved from the Senate to the cabinet. Ben Shepard was his second ex-infantry aide, and the first with a Purple Heart, plus a visible dismemberment that advertised Petrie’s Sincere Support For Our Troops.
Grunt vets were as loyal as Labrador retrievers. But brighter, at least if they had been officers. They worked themselves to exhaustion without complaint, said “sir” if you so much as farted, and the brownie points for hiring them were off the charts. Petrie had fired the first one only because the guy had not only the loyalty of a Labrador retriever but also a similar political IQ.
The more universal problem with ex-grunts in government as a class wasn’t that they believed bad food and staying out in the rain were small prices to pay for the privilege of serving their country. The problem was they assumed everybody else in government believed the same thing.
The secretary turned to his drenched, shivering aide. “There are still drops out there. Next time, remember to bring me an umbrella.”
* * *
As the three-vehicle convoy sped toward San Francisco it ran again under rain that thundered on the Lincoln’s roof. Petrie chewed Tums from the accessories bag that Shepard carried for him, while Shepard leaned across the Lincoln’s rear compartment from his jump seat and passed executive summary pages to his boss.
The lights of the Suburbans ahead and behind flashed in through the Lincoln’s windows, so Shepard’s drawn features turned from paste white to pale blue and back to white six times every second. Jet lag, a peanut gut bomb, and cheap scotch were already making Arthur ache from his brain to his ass. The disco show made it worse. He squeezed his eyes closed.
Shepard said, “The instant wisdom was that it was Boston Marathon copycats, sir.”
Secretary Petrie opened his eyes, then unwrapped a granola bar from Shepard’s bag. “The instant wisdom was wrong?”
Shepard nodded. “In the first place, there was only one casualty.”
Petrie chuckled. “The average terrorist’s too stupid to plan a good crap.”
Shepard shook his head. “Actually, the inference the response team’s drawing from the casualty is this incident wasn’t terrorism, sir. And the bombers weren’t stupid.”
The secretary wrinkled his brow. “Five-thousand-person footrace event. Bomb so big it blows a car sky-high. Defiles a goddam American landmark. How’s that not terrorism?”
Shepard rubbed his gimp hand with his good one. “The bomb wasn’t actually that big. Not even a bomb, really. Explosively Formed Penetrator emplaced under the bridge deck. Sort of a cannon shot up into the car’s belly. Neither we nor our correspondent foreign intelligence services saw the spike in terrorist community chatter that usually precedes an attack. And none of the usual suspects, foreign or domestic, have claimed responsibility. Besides, the casualty doesn’t seem random.”
The secretary raised his eyebrows at that last. “Oh?”
“Manuel Colibri.”
“Who?”
“I’d barely heard of him myself. But everybody’s heard of Cardinal Systems. Apparently he deflects the spotlight onto the people in his organization who do good work. But he’s—was—the CEO.”
The secretary’s eyebrows rose higher. “I missed a sixty-one Chateau Latour because somebody whacked a one-percenter?”
“Maybe. I mean, the thing still seems like terrorism. We’re hitting it hard like it is, sir. Yes, if it hadn’t been for the storm, there could’ve been more casualties. But not massive losses. The bomb was planted a half mile from the crowd. If the idea was to kill and maim people the same explosives could have been planted in a backpack full of nails near the start line. And the race start wasn’t until fifty minutes after the detonation, so the north end of the bridge was nearly empty when the device was set off.”
“Set off how?”
“Remote transmission. Basically, dialing a number on a cell phone.” Shepard rubbed his hand again and stared at the rain. “So simple a twelve-year-old Iraqi can do it.”
“So foreign nationals were involved?”
Shepard shook his head. “Only if you count Kenyans.”
“What?”
“Between the rain and the power outage there’s no useful imagery from the traffic and surveillance cameras on the bridge. The only significant eyewitness evidence we’ve got so far comes from a Kenyan distance runner who was warming up out on the bridge when the storm hit. He was sixty yards away from the bomb when it blew.”
“He saw something?”
“He saw there was nobody in Colibri’s car but the driver. He saw, beside the traffic lane, what he describes as a heavy man. To a Kenyan, that could be anybody who weighs over one forty. The man was wearing a ski mask and jogging clothes. When the device detonated, this man was running back toward the crowd at the starting line, but looking over his shoulder. He apparently got lost in the panic after the explosion.”
“There was a footrace. He was wearing jogging clothes. It was cold. He was wearing a ski mask. There was an explosion. He ran the other way. What’s suspicious?”
“The Kenyan said that, as the guy ran, he threw something the size of a phone over the side of the bridge.”
Petrie’s jaw dropped so far that he drooled granola crumbs. “We found it?”
Shepard shook his head again. “The storm chased the police boats and helicopters that would have been below and above the race. We can’t even find the car. Speaking of which, if the sun ever shines again, the water under the Golden Gate turns out to be three hundred feet deep. And the currents pump two million cubic feet of water under the bridge every second. So there’s no telling where what’s left of the car or of Colibri ended up, Mr. Secretary.”
Petrie drummed his fingers on his armrest as his convoy blew past snarled California traffic. “Mr. Secretary.” He liked the sound of it even better than he had liked “Senator.”
Arthur Petrie got this job because he had called the loudest and most visibly for his predecessor to quit it after the Port of Savannah fiasco. Also because Petrie’s poll numbers had convinced him that another Senate campaign was as promising as jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. And mostly because Arthur Petrie knew where just enough bodies were buried on Capitol Hill that he could get nominated and confirmed.
Pending hearings, he had drifted in interim limbo for six weeks, with the compromise title of Acting Secretary.
He swallowed.
The prospect of being on the witness’s side of the confirmation hearing room table made him even dizzier. Arthur had a few buried bodies of his own.
He knew real estate. He knew politics. About terrorism he knew dick. But he had assumed that, Savannah notwithstanding, the Department of Homeland Security had people for that.
He yawned, tossed his crumpled granola bar wrapper to Shepard, then closed his eyes and leaned back for a minute while his intestines made gas and his head pounded.
He fervently hoped that those people at DHS were managing his first crisis more competently than Shepard was managing his diet. Arthur was tired enough that he dozed anyway.
* * *
“Sir?” Shepard’s voice woke him.
Petrie’s aide hung up the rear cabin phone that connected to the stretch’s driver, then raised the Cardinal C-phone that he held in his other hand. “Sir, they say they may have him.”
“Have who?”
“The guy the Kenyan saw. The guy running away on the Golden Gate Bridge.”