The days were clearly getting shorter. Although it wasn’t yet 7 p.m., early evening sunlight streamed through her windows. The day was already ending. Luke thought again briefly of his interaction with Becca when he dropped Gunner off. He shook the image away. It was too much to think about.
He sat on the opposite side of the coffee table from the President. Kurt Kimball sat at an angle to both of them. Kat Lopez stood behind Susan and to her right.
“Yes,” Susan said. “There is no more Special Response Team. Most of the former staff have been absorbed into other roles within the FBI. At this point, it would be rather difficult to rebuild what you think of as your team.”
“Susan,” Luke said. “I’d like to remind you that you’re asking me to come out of retirement again. You know what I’ve been doing for the past two months? I’ll tell you. Camping, fishing, hiking, sailing. A little bit of hunting. A little bit of diving.” He rubbed his beard. “Sleeping late.”
“So you’re fit for duty,” Kurt Kimball said.
Luke shook his head. “I’m caked in rust. I need my team. I trust them. I can’t really function without them.”
“Luke, if you’d stuck around instead of disappearing, we might have been able to carve out a little agency for you…”
“I was trying to save my marriage,” he said.
Susan stared right at him. “How did it go?”
He gave her a tiny head shake. “Not too well, so far.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“So am I.”
Susan glanced behind her. “Kat, can we have the status on Luke’s former team members?”
Kat Lopez glanced down at the tablet in her hand. “Sure. That’s easy enough. Mark Swann left the FBI for a job with the National Security Agency. He works at their headquarters here in suburban DC. He’s been there three and a half weeks. He’s moving through their classification system, and should begin work on the PRISM data mining project within another month.
“Edward Newsam is still with the FBI. He was out on medical leave for most of June and July. His hip rehabilitation is complete, and he’s been reassigned to the Hostage Rescue Team. He is currently in training at Quantico for possible overseas intelligence work to begin later in the year. There’s a note in his file that his employment status is likely to become classified in the coming weeks, at which point a Top Secret security clearance will be required to discuss his status or his whereabouts.”
Luke nodded. Neither of these were much of a surprise. Swann and Newsam were among the best at what they did. “Can we get them on loan?” he said.
Kat Lopez nodded. “In all likelihood, if we request them, the agencies will honor our request.”
“And Trudy?” Luke said. “I need her, too.”
“Luke, Trudy Wellington is in jail,” Susan said.
Luke felt his stomach drop at the words. He stared for a full five seconds, trying to process the words.
“What?” he finally said.
Susan shook her head.
“I can’t believe you don’t know. What have you been doing, hiding under a rock? Don’t you look at the newspapers?”
He shrugged. “I told you what I was doing. I’ve been off the grid. They don’t sell newspapers where I’ve been, and I’ve been leaving the computer at home.”
Kat Lopez read from her tablet. Her voice was automatic, almost robotic. She had detached herself from what she was saying.
“Trudy Wellington, age thirty, was Don Morris’s mistress for at least a year during the planning of the June sixth attacks. Email, telephone, text, and computer records suggest that as early as last March, she became aware of a plan to assassinate both the President and Vice President of the United States, and she was aware of who at least some of the conspirators were. She has been indicted on charges of treason, conspiracy to commit treason, more than three hundred counts of conspiracy to commit murder, and a host of other charges. She’s being held without bail at the Federal women’s prison facility in Randal, Maryland. If convicted of the charges against her, she faces penalties starting with multiple life sentences, up to and including the death penalty.”
Luke ran a hand through his hair. The news hit him like a punch in the head. He thought of Trudy, pictured her with her funny red glasses on, her eyes peeking over the top of her tablet computer. He thought of her on the night he went to her apartment at 3 a.m., opening the door with nothing on but a long, flimsy T-shirt, a gun in her hand. He thought of the two of them, and their bodies, together that night.
She was in prison? It couldn’t be real.
“Trudy Wellington is facing the death penalty?” he said.
“In a word, yes.”
“Basically, because she didn’t turn Don in?”
Susan shook her head. “It’s treason, no matter how you want to spin it. A lot of people died, including Thomas Hayes, who was both the President of the United States and a personal friend of mine. Wellington could possibly have prevented it, and chose not to. She chose to not even try. About the only way she can save herself at this point is to testify against the conspirators.”
“I have trouble believing that she knew,” Luke said. “Has she confessed?”
“She denies everything,” Kat Lopez said.
“I would tend to believe her,” Luke said.
Kat held out her tablet. “There’s about two hundred pages of evidence. We have access to most of it, which you can review. You might feel differently after you do.”
Luke shook his head. He looked at Susan. “So where does this leave us?”
She shrugged. “You can have Mark Swann and Ed Newsam for a couple days if you feel you need them. But you can’t have Trudy Wellington.”
She looked at him.
“And your chopper leaves in under an hour.”
CHAPTER FIVE
August 16th
7:15 a.m.
Black Rock Dam, Great Smoky Mountains, North Carolina
From Luke’s window, nothing seemed out of the ordinary as their sleek black helicopter flew low over the dam. They came in over Black Rock Lake, which was long, undulating, and picturesque, bordered on all sides by dense green wilderness and steep hillsides. A narrow roadway crossed the top of the dam. They flew past it, and the dam itself fell away, fifty stories down to the power house and the floodgates. The floodgates appeared to be operating normally, a small trickle of water flowing out from beneath them. About a quarter mile of electricity transformers, a spider web of steel towers and high tension wires, stretched away from the dam. They seemed to be intact.
“Not much to see,” he said into his headset.
To his left sat big Ed Newsam, staring out the window on the opposite side. Ed’s broken hip was mended, and it looked like he had been hitting the weight room. His python-like arms were more swollen than Luke remembered, his chest and shoulders were even broader, his legs even more like oak trees. He wore jeans, work boots, and a simple blue T-shirt.
In the row behind them sat Mark Swann. He was long and lean, his blue-jeaned legs jutting out in the aisle, his checkerboard Chuck Taylor sneakers crossed at the ankles in front of Luke. His sandy hair was longer than before, tied in a ponytail now, and he had swapped out his aviator-type glasses for the round John Lennon style at some point in the past two months. He wore a black T-shirt with the logo from the punk rock band The Ramones. The NSA offices must be quite the fashion show.
“The water went out the floodgates just like it’s supposed to do,” the chopper pilot said. He was a middle-aged man wearing a black nylon jacket with the capital letters FEMA in white on the back. “There was no damage to the dam or the dam facilities, and there were no casualties among dam personnel. The only thing that happened here was the access road got washed away. About three miles south is where the real action starts.”
They had flown on a Secret Service jet from DC to a small municipal airport at the edge of the National Park. They had arrived just before sunrise, and this chopper was waiting for them. They didn’t talk much on the flight down. The mood was somber, given the circumstances, and Trudy Wellington, as the intel officer, would normally have done most of the talking. Susan had offered Luke a different intel person, but Luke declined. They were coming down to brace a prisoner anyway. He could give them all the intel they needed.
Luke sensed they were all feeling the loss of Trudy, and a certain amount of shock at her situation. He also sensed, or thought he did, that both of these guys had moved on in their lives. New assignments, new training, new team members and co-workers, new challenges to look forward to. A lot could change in two months.
The Special Response Team was gone. Luke could have chosen to save it in some form – after the coup attempt and Ebola attacks he could write his own ticket and take them all with him – but instead he chose not to. Now the SRT was old news, and so was Luke Stone. He had retired, and that was one thing. But he had also disappeared, and he hadn’t made much effort to keep in touch. Team cohesion was a big part of intelligence and special operations work. With no contact, there was no cohesion.
Which meant that right now, there was no team.
The chopper banked and headed south. Almost immediately, the devastation became clear. The entire area below the dam was flooded. Large trees were ripped out everywhere and tossed around like matchsticks. In a few minutes, they reached the site of the former Black Rock Resort. Parts of the upper floor of the main building were still intact, rising up out of the floodwaters. Cars were stacked up against the wrecked hotel, along with more trees, a few of which reached out of the water with arms to the sky, like religious converts imploring God for a miracle.
The effect of the cars and the trees and the various piles of flotsam was to build a mini-dam, behind which a wide lake had formed. About a dozen Zodiacs were parked on the lake, with teams of divers in full scuba gear either preparing to drop in, or climbing out, depending on the boat.
“They find any survivors here?” Luke said.
The pilot shook his head. “Not a one. At least that was the word as of this morning. They found about a hundred bodies in the resort cafeteria, though. They’re bringing them up one by one. I don’t think they’ve started the room to room search yet. They might even let the waters subside before they do that. Moving through corridors underwater is dangerous work, and probably unnecessary. Ain’t nobody alive down there.”
Ed Newsam, who had been sprawled out in his normal laid-back style, shifted in his seat and sat up just a touch. “How do you know that, man? Could be air pockets under that water. Could be people down there hanging on for a rescue.”
“They’ve got underwater listening equipment on those boats,” the pilot said. “If anybody’s alive under that water, they didn’t make a peep all day yesterday or last night.”
“Even so, if I’m in charge, I’ve got my best divers going room to room right now. We already know the people in the cafeteria are dead. And the divers signed on for danger. The civilians didn’t.”
The pilot shrugged. “Well, son, they’re working as fast as they can.”
The chopper moved further south. The flood had cut a swath through the valley, ripping a path across the forest. It looked like a giant had blundered his way through here. There was water everywhere. Wherever the original riverbed had been was lost under all the water.
They passed over the town of Sargent, still four feet deep in water. The devastation here was not as complete. There were a lot of empty lots where Luke assumed houses must have stood, but other houses, buildings, and fast food signs stuck up out of the water like fingers. The chopper flew over a cinderblock building with a stack of cars and SUVs piled up against it. HONEST ABE’S PRE-OWNED CARS, said a sign sticking halfway out of the water. One of its support beams had caved in.
“How many dead here?” Luke said.
“Five hundred,” the pilot said. “Give or take some spare change. Still a hundred or more missing. It was early morning, and there wasn’t much warning. A lot of people got swept away in their homes. You’re asleep in bed and the old Cold War air raid signal goes off, what do you do? Some folks apparently went downstairs to their basements. That’s nowhere to be when a flood comes.”
“No one expected the dam to break?” Swann said. It was the first thing he had said since they boarded the chopper.
The pilot was busy with his controls. “Why would they? The dam didn’t break. That dam was built to last a thousand years.”
“Okay,” Luke said. “I’ve seen enough. Let’s go talk to the prisoner.”
*
8:30 a.m.
Chattahoochee National Forest, Georgia
The camp appeared out of the deep forest like some weird mirage.
“Pretty, it ain’t,” Ed Newsam said.
It sat in a perfect clear cut, one mile by one mile, a brown and gray square amidst all the dark green. As the chopper came closer, Luke could make out dozens of barracks, row upon row of them, and a large, square reservoir of water in the center of the camp. Outbuildings surrounded the reservoir, and a steel catwalk traversed it.
The chopper began to drop down, and Luke could see the helipad approaching. It was in an area in the far west corner of the camp, with a few large administration buildings, a swimming pool, and a couple of parking lots. He could now clearly make out concrete yards, an access road, streets inside the encampment, and a wall topped with barbed wire and guard towers around the perimeter. The place was an open wound in the midst of the surrounding forest.
“What is this place?” Luke said into his headset.
The chopper pilot was busy working his controls, but not too busy to talk. “I’ve heard it called Camp Enduring Freedom,” he said. “People around here tend to call it Camp Nowhere. It’s one of ours. Federal Emergency Management Agency. You won’t find it on any maps. I’d guess it doesn’t officially have a name.”
“Does it exist?” Luke said.
The chopper was low now, the grim gray buildings of the camp rising up all around them. Luke noticed glass reinforced by steel wires on the closest buildings.
The pilot shook his head. “Does what exist? This is uninhabited wilderness. There’s nothing out here as far as I know.”
A signalman in a yellow vest and holding bright orange wands stood to the side of the helipad and guided the chopper in. The pilot set the bird down perfectly in the middle of the pad. He killed the engine and the rotors immediately began to slow. There was a whine as they powered down.
“When you see that Chinaman,” the pilot said, “give him a couple of knocks for me.”
“We don’t do that kind of thing,” Luke said.
The pilot turned around and smiled. “Sure you don’t. Son, I fly people in and out of places like this all the time. I know who does what just by looking, believe me. One glance at you guys and I know they’ve decided to turn up the heat a few notches.”
He, Swann, and Ed exited the chopper, heads ducked low. A man was already waiting on the pad to greet them. He wore a gray business suit and a blue tie. His hair was blown about by the slowing blades of the helicopter. The fabric of his suit rippled from it. His black shoes were polished to a bright sheen. He looked as if he had just stepped off a commuter train in Manhattan. He was about as out of place as a man could possibly be.
As Luke came closer, the man’s face took form. He appeared ageless – not old, not young, some indeterminate place in between. He extended a hand. Luke shook it.
“Agent Stone? I’m Pete Winn. They told me the President sent you. Thanks for coming down to see us.”
“Thanks, Pete. Please call me Luke.”
Luke, Ed, and Swann followed Pete Winn away from the chopper and toward a corrugated aluminum hut at the far side of the pad. Even the chopper pad was surrounded by barbed wire fencing. The only way in or out of the helipad was through that building. The doors to the building were operated by a seeing-eye device. They opened automatically as the men approached.
“What is this place?” Luke said.