Extinction Machine

Chapter Eight

Nothing was happening. That’s how Duty Officer Lyle Ames liked it. The ideal day for the Secret Service Presidential Detail was one in which the president did nothing, shook no hands, saw none of the public, and basically stayed indoors, out of sight, and safe.

The press hated days like this.

Ames loved them.

According to the duty log on his desk, nothing much had happened all day. It was slow. Boring.

Perfect.

He sipped coffee from a ceramic mug with the presidential seal on it and flipped the duty log over to the last page. Nothing there, either. Nice.

The office was nearly empty. His agents were at their posts, and Ames’s only company was Regina Smallwood at the ops desk. Smallwood sat in front of a row of computer monitors that displayed real-time feeds of security cameras. Each monitor screen was divided into many smaller windows that displayed telemetric feeds, coded to correspond with the heartbeat of an individual. Green lights pulsed for the president, the first lady, their family, the vice president, and the key members of government who formed the line of succession — the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, secretary of the Senate, all the way down to the secretary of Homeland Security. Most of the green lights pulsed with the slow, rhythmic beating of sleeping hearts. A few were more rapid, indicating that these people were night owls or in different time zones.

The signals were sent by RFID chips — radio frequency identification chips the size of rice grains. Each VIP had one surgically implanted in the fatty tissue under their triceps. Unlike the passive chips used to store medical information, these were true telemetric locators. The chips were late-generation models manufactured by Digital Angel, and as long as GPS tracking satellites circled the earth the chips would locate the wearer and send a continuous feed to establish location and proof of life. It was one of the technologies that allowed agents like Ames to dial down his Maalox consumption.

Ames set down the duty log, stood, stretched, yawned, and took his cup over to the Mr. Coffee to pour some hot into it. As he raised the carafe he heard a bong-bong sound. An alarm from the telemetry board. A soft, unthreatening sound; more of a notification than a crisis shout.

Smallwood snapped her fingers at him. “Got a transponder failure,” she said. “POTUS just went dark.”

“Balls,” growled Ames. He set his cup down and hurried over. “Is it the panel or the transponder?”

“Unknown, but the other signals are strong and steady.” She looked up. “You’d better call it. Gil stayed over tonight.”

Ames was already hitting the speed dial for Gilbert Shannon, the president’s body man.

A sleepy voice answered, “Shannon.”

“Gil, this is Lyle. Are you with the president?”

“No, I’m in my room down the hall.”

“Okay, I need you to go put eyes on the president. Have the agent at the door accompany you in.”

All the sleepiness vanished from Shannon’s voice. “Is there a problem?”

“Probably not, but the boss’s transponder stopped transmitting.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll call you in one minute.”

Ames set down his phone and made a second call to alert the agents outside the president’s bedroom door. That done, he bent over Smallwood’s shoulder to study the telemetry feeds. The small pulsing green light had been replaced by two words in red LED letters: SIGNAL LOST.

Ames did not yet feel panic. There was only a tingle.

“Could have happened at Camp David,” suggested Smallwood.

“Hm?” asked Ames.

“The transponder. The president was all over the place. Basketball, jogging, that softball game at the barbecue. He could have banged his arm when he tried to steal second base in the third inning. Remember, he dove in headfirst? Brierly tagged him pretty hard and I think that was on the upper arm.”

Ames shook his head. “He reached for the base with his left arm.”

“Sure, but he was tagged on his right. The ball could have hit the transponder.”

“Maybe,” said Ames.

“Or, it could have been—”

The phone rang.

Ames snatched it up. “Talk to me.”

It wasn’t Gil Shannon. It was Sam Holly, the senior agent on shift at the residence. His voice was ratcheted tight with tension.

“Sir, we have a situation…”

Chapter Nine

Agent Jeremy Nunzio had his weapon in a two-handed grip as he ran along the row of hedges outside the Oval Office. The radio in his ear was a crazed jumble of yells, commands, contradictory orders, questions, and desperate demands for fresh intel.

“We’ve got movement,” cried one of the other agents. Sziemesko. “We’ve got movement.”

Sziemesko shouted the location and everyone was in motion, a fist closing around a specific point outside the White House. Nunzio was the closest, he got there first, rounding a corner, bringing his weapon up, finger laid along the trigger guard, all his years of training bringing him to this moment. He saw Sziemesko standing a few yards away, his back to the building, staring into the darkened lawn. Suddenly a dozen additional security lights flared on.

“On your six,” Nunzio called, as he caught up with Sziemesko. The other agent’s gun was also raised, pointing to a specific spot within the darkness. Nunzio sighted down the barrel of his own piece.

And saw nothing.

Just darkness and security lights and …

He and Sziemesko moved at the same time, their guns jerking left as one of the lights moved.

“Freeze!” bellowed Nunzio.

“Step into the light with your hands raised,” yelled Sziemesko. “Do it now.”

But no one stepped out of the darkness and into the glow of the lights. The light itself moved. It looked like a lightbulb, but there was no flashlight attached to it; it projected no beam. It was simply a light. Simply there.

Drifting slowly from left to right in front of them. Unattached, unsupported.

Just a light.

“Freeze!” Nunzio repeated.

The light continued to move. It was forty feet away from them.

“The fuck—?” murmured Sziemesko.

The two agents edged forward, weapons ready. Voices in their earbuds told them that the White House was now in full crash mode. Doors and windows were locked. Every agent on duty was involved in a search for the president.

Nunzio felt panic exploding in his chest.

The president was gone. Missing from his room.

And what the hell was this thing?

The light stopped moving for a moment, then it dropped down to the grass and hovered inches above the lawn.

“Go,” said Sziemesko, “I’ve got your back.”

Nunzio edged tentatively forward.

The light suddenly rose from the lawn and began moving away. Nunzio broke into a run, yelling at it to stop. Yelling at a person to stop, even though he could not see anyone out here. The light moved faster and faster and Nunzio almost — almost — took the shot.

Two things happened to prevent that. Two things that made him almost forget he was even holding a gun.

The other five security lights, the ones that had switched on when he’d run to this part of the lawn, also began to move. The movement was abrupt, without warning, and they accelerated until they caught up with the first light. They moved across the lawn in a straight line of retreat from Nunzio, then they slowed and formed a circle of lights that seemed for a moment to be frozen against the night. Then the circle rose.

Straight upward.

Very fast.

Too fast.

As Nunzio watched, the circle of lights tightened until there was only one large light.

It pulsed once.

Twice.

And shot away into the eastern sky so fast that it was gone before Nunzio was aware that it was in motion.

Nunzio stood there, gaping up at the sky. The dark and empty sky.

“Nunzio!”

He whirled at the sounds of Sziemesko’s shrill yell. Nunzio ran back to the other agent and skidded to a stop, remembering his gun, fanning it right and left.

Sziemesko stood with his pistol hanging limply from his right hand, his slack face staring in total confusion at the lawn. Nunzio realized that there was something wrong with the grass. The lawn had been trampled as if a hundred people had run through here.

He thought that, but even as that idea formed the rest of him rebelled at the assessment. The lawn was not trampled. No one else had been out here. No one had been out here since Nunzio had come on shift.

He glanced at Sziemesko and their eyes held for a moment. Then slowly, wordlessly, they began backing away from the trammeled grass. They backed up almost to the White House itself, then they stopped. Nunzio heard Sziemesko say something under his breath. A denial, maybe. A curse. A prayer. He wasn’t sure.

For his own part, Nunzio had no idea what to say. What words would really fit?

The grass was not haphazardly smashed down. The blades looked folded. Nunzio knew that there was a name for something like this, but his mind did not want to think it. That name was connected to something that had nothing at all to do with the White House, and the president, or anything in Nunzio’s world.

Except that maybe it did.

The name, those two words, despite all his denials, whispered inside his head anyway.

This was a crop circle.

Chapter Ten

Linden Brierly was still awake. He lay in his bunk, staring up through the skylight at the infinite starfield that was spread like a jeweler’s display above the Chesapeake. His boat, a thirty-six-foot custom Beneteau, rocked gently, keeping him at the edge of sleep but not yet tumbling him over. His wife lay curled against him, soft and warm and beautiful. Her hair was still tangled from lovemaking, and the cabin smelled of her expensive perfume, superb wine, and sex.

Brierly stroked her hair, careful not to coax her to the surface of her dreams. By starlight her naked body was alabaster perfection. After nine years of marriage he still marveled at her, lost in the graceful lines and curves that only he knew with such intimate familiarity.

He glanced at the luminous face of the bedside clock and watched it turn from 3:29 to 3:30. He and Barbara were three and a half hours into the tenth year of their marriage.

Nice.

The boat rocked on a series of small, slow rollers.

And then Brierly’s cell phone rang.

His hand snaked out and snatched it off the night table, his thumb hitting the ringer mute halfway through the first jangle. He cut a look at Barbara, but she was still down deep. Then Brierly looked at the screen display and his heart lurched in his chest.

No name. Instead there was a coded symbol: ***!!!***

Jesus Christ, he thought. No, no, no …

He answered the call.

“Brierly.”

“Sir,” said Lyle Ames, “we have a Jackhammer situation. Please verify that confidential protocols are in active play.”

Brierly’s heart was thundering now.

Jackhammer.

God almighty.

He punched in the three-digit code that activated the scrambler.

“The blanket is down,” said Brierly.

“Verified.”

“What’s happening?”

“Linden,” said Ames in a voice that was strained to the breaking point, “the president is missing.”

Beside him, deep inside a dream, Barbara Brierly groaned as if in pain.

Chapter Eleven

Two hours later, Linden Brierly ran up the stairs of the White House. A phalanx of agents followed him, and even with everything that was going on, Brierly wondered how many of them were eyeing his back and wondering if they would fall with the director? Brierly was the youngest man ever to hold the position as director of the Secret Service. There had been a lot of controversy over his appointment. Too young, they said. Not enough experience.

God.

He fitted a speaker-bud into his ear and adjusted the gain to a restricted channel. It was abuzz with chatter but no one was saying anything he wanted to hear. Talking about finding Jackhammer.

Jackhammer.

Each president has two code names assigned by the Secret Service. At all other times, this president was Spider-man. But now, with him missing and the chance that someone could possibly hack the team radio channel, a crisis code name was employed. Jackhammer. An appropriate name, thought Brierly. Something that would break everything apart and turn it all to rubble.

The president has been kidnapped.

God almighty.

Every light in the building was on. People were shouting, running. Brierly knew that not all of them were aware of the exact nature of the calamity. The agents who didn’t know were giving fierce looks because they wanted top marks in what they’d been told was a high-profile surprise drill. The ones who suspected that this was something real were scared and, as they’d been taught, they fine-tuned their fear to bring them to a deadly level of alert preparedness. Brierly could spot the ones who knew, though. They had a different look in their eyes. They were scared — for their own careers as much as for the president — but more than that they were angry. It was their job to protect the president. Something had happened, someone had made them fail at that job. The cold fury in their eyes promised awful things to whoever was behind this. Brierly knew that it wasn’t bravado. He felt it, too. The rest of the staff — anyone who was not part of the security detail — was under armed guard. Interrogations were already underway. The entire White House had been crashed and locked down so hard that a fly couldn’t slip through without a body cavity search.

But the president was still missing.

No, Brierly corrected himself. Not “missing.” Taken.

His cell rang and Brierly glanced at the screen display. He slowed to a stop, wincing, steeling himself to take this call.

He said, “Yes, Mr. President?” Addressing the man who had been vice president less than two hours ago. William Collins. A man Brierly personally and professionally despised.

“Where do we stand?” demanded Collins.

“I just arrived on-site and—”

“I didn’t ask that,” Collins snapped. “I asked for a status report.”

Brierly was young for his directorship but he was a very experienced agent. He never let his personal feelings color his words or flavor his tone.

“At this time we have not located the POTUS,” he said crisply. “The first lady is being interviewed by one of my best men along with a staff psychologist. Ditto for the president’s body man and the team who were on duty outside the room.”

There was a heavy pause in which Brierly knew he was supposed to appreciate the full weight and scope of the acting president’s imperial disdain.

“Have you searched the building?”

No, asshole, Brierly thought, that never occurred to us. So glad you called.

“Yes, sir. Every room, every closet, under every desk.”

“And the transponder? Still no signal?”

“That is correct, sir.”

“Have you considered that the surveillance systems and computers may have been compromised?”

“Yes, sir. We have teams—”

“I’ve requested specialists from my Cyber Crimes Task Force,” Collins said briskly, emphasizing the word “my,” as if he was anything more than a nominal head of the investigation. “They’ll be there within the hour. You are to give them full access and total cooperation.”

Brierly frowned. “Sir, surely you appreciate the necessity of keeping this matter restricted to as few people as—”

“A great number of those few people are suspects.”

“I understand, sir, however we have protocols for this kind of an investigation and—”

“Protocols? For this kind of thing? Really? Tell, me, Brierly, when have you ever even heard of this kind of thing? This is outside of the scope of your experience,” said Collins, leaning on the word “experience,” making a point with a sledgehammer. “And surely even you have to realize that this is connected with the terror campaign being waged against our country. Get your head out of your ass. Expect my team within the hour.”

“Yes, sir,” said Brierly in as flat a monotone as possible. “Thank you, sir.”

“Brierly … this happened on your watch.”

“Thank you, Mr. President, I am fully aware of my responsibilities in this matter.”

And fuck you, you arrogant little shit.

“We are going to have to discuss your handling of things,” warned Collins.

“Yes, sir.”

“And one more thing,” said Collins. “I don’t want to hear about you running to Church or the DMS with this.”

“May I ask why not? Something like this could not have been accomplished without advanced technology and the DMS is—”

“The DMS is on my list, Brierly. Don’t think they’re not.”

“What exactly do you mean, Mr. President?”

“Surely it’s occurred to you, Brierly, that only a system as sophisticated as MindReader could have accomplished the intrusions and done the damage we’ve seen. Either Church is involved or he’s bungled his own security so badly that someone else has accessed MindReader and is using it to systematically attack some of this nation’s most highly classified projects.”

“Mr. President, are you accusing Mr. Church of—”

“I’m not accusing anyone of anything yet. When I do it will be spelled out on a federal warrant. In the meantime, you might want to decide where your loyalties lie.”

“Sir, I—”

The line went dead.

Brierly looked down at the cell phone. He took a moment to compose his face and then hurried down the hall to the president’s bedroom. Lyle Ames met him at the door.

“Talk to me,” said Brierly, and he could hear the edge of pleading in his own voice.

Ames, an old friend, touched his arm. “There’s nothing here, Linden. I mean nothing. No signs of a struggle, no forced entry. Video of the hallway verifies the report of the agents on the door. If the president was abducted by force there is no sign of it. Nothing.”

Brierly lowered his voice to a sharp, confidential tone. “That’s not acceptable, Lyle. I just had my ass handed to me by our new president. He’s sending some agents from his Cyber Crimes Task Force and he expects us to cooperate with them. If there’s anything to find I want us to find it, not them.”

Ames grunted. “The only thing we have is something two agents found on the lawn. They found it during the first sweep of the groups, so the timing fits, but we have no idea what it is or what it means.” He produced a high-res color print and handed it to Brierly. “It’s about ten feet across, so to get a clear picture I had to put a guy in a helicopter.”

Brierly frowned at the image. “This was on the lawn?”

“Pressed into it, yes.”

The pattern was odd but orderly; a strange ratcheted pattern, radiating out clockwise from a smaller circle at its center. On the top arc of the circle were three smaller circles in descending size.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. It’s not the symbol of any terrorist organization I’ve ever heard of. We’re running it through the symbols and logos database.”

“Are you sure this was left by whoever abducted the president?” asked Brierly.

“Not sure of any damn thing,” confessed Ames. “It was on the lawn and the agents walking the grounds say that it wasn’t there before the alert.”

“I want to see the surveillance cameras for this part of the lawn.”

Ames cleared his throat. “Those cameras have a four-minute window where all they show is static. The pattern is not there before the static and is there afterward.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Collins is going to call that a cyber-attack and he’ll use it to take this whole thing away from us.”

“I know.”

“Besides — it’s bullshit,” snapped Brierly as he slapped the picture against Ames’s chest. “You can’t make something this big and complicated in four minutes. Come on, Lyle, I don’t need fucking fairy stories right now. Give me some actual goddamn evidence.”

Ames colored. “Linden, I’m giving you what we have and aside from this thing on the lawn we have nothing. We’re working everything. We have the first lady downstairs. I spoke with her already, but she said she slept through it and didn’t wake up at all until Gil and the door team entered the room.”

Brierly searched his face and took Ames by the elbow, pulling him out of earshot of the other agents. “And—?”

“And I believe her. We can ask her to take a polygraph, but I know what it will say.”

“Will she consent to a blood test?”

Ames nodded. “Already has. She insisted we do it, and she wants those results as badly as we do. We’re also running tests on the glass of water beside the president’s bed, his toothpaste, pills in all of the bottles in the medicine cabinet…”

“He doesn’t take a lot of pills.”

“I know, most of them are vitamin supplements, but we don’t know if he took anything tonight. Or if the first lady took anything. She says that she doesn’t even remember lying down.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s what she said. She and the president came into the residence, changed into pajamas, and that’s it. That’s all she remembers before the agents opened the door and woke her up.”

“How was she when she woke up?”

“Borderline hysterical, but that was a reaction to the events. She didn’t appear logy or dazed. None of the reactions you’d expect from a chemical sedative. Even so, there might have been something in her system, maybe slipped into something she ate or drank. We’ll look for contact substances, too — something that could have been placed on a surface they might have touched.”

Brierly nodded. “What about Gil Shannon?”

“Same thing. I have two men with him now — both top interrogators — and they’re working him pretty hard. I spoke with the agents who were at the POTUS’s door and I laid it on pretty thick, too. Promise of immunity if they had anything to do with this and could provide actionable information.”

Brierly grunted. “You get approval from the attorney general?”

“No, the AG’s in Florida. I lied. I figured, fuck it.”

“What’d you get?”

“I got some very angry, very outraged agents who I think will pass a polygraph. But … they also know that they’re done as far as the Service goes.”

Brierly said nothing.

Ames sighed. “I guess we’re all done. I know I am. POTUS goes missing while I’m shift supervisor? I won’t be able to get a job guarding a landfill after this.”

“If you do, put in a good word for me, ’cause I’ll be the first one out on my ass.”

Brierly knew that he would be in the crosshairs because some people were going to try and use this to build or protect their own careers by making sure they were seen as executioners of the guilty. Brierly would go down as the Secret Service director who had managed to lose the president. You don’t recover from a career stumble like that. Even if this turned out to be something completely beyond Brierly’s control, he would take the bullet. A head must always fall, otherwise the system looks like it’s driving on a bad tire.

They traded small, grim smiles, then turned to survey the bedroom.

There were a dozen people in there. Forensics techs dusting and collecting. Photographers. Agents looking everywhere in hopes that they’d be the ones to find the first thread. Every single person in the room looked frightened, even the techs who had no reason to be.

He stared down at the empty bed, and its emptiness seemed to mock him. The heavy covers, the rumpled sheets, the dented pillow. The absence of sense.

“Let me see that goddamn photo again.”

Ames handed it over. Brierly scowled at it. It was bullshit. Total bullshit. No way it could be connected.

“God … we need the Deacon and his geek squad. We need the DMS.”

“It’d be your ass, Linden. The president said not to call him.”

Brierly bared his teeth. “My president didn’t give that order.”

Chapter Twelve

Mr. Bones was Howard Shelton’s minion. It was not how it was supposed to be, but it played out that way. It was an arrangement that developed over time and it settled into a relationship that worked for them both. Bones — whose real name was Alfred Bonetti — knew that he was never going to be the alpha of their little pack. Howard was, and that was clear from the first time they met.

“Minion” was, perhaps, an inexact word, but after nine years Mr. Bones did not know which would be a better fit. Ostensibly he and Shelton were colleagues, two of the three governors of Majestic Three. In practice, Howard was the mastermind and Mr. Bones was…? What? Assistant was the wrong context. Lackey was too weak. Henchman was a bit old-fashioned. Enabler was too New Age. Number two sounded scatological.

He liked “minion.” Minion had a strangely appealing ring to it. It made Mr. Bones feel like he was an acolyte in some secret cult of immortals.

Fun stuff.

There were even sacrifices. Last week it was the entire staff at the Wolf Trap lab. Some good people, too, including that redheaded secretary. Yum. A body in a box now, of course, but yum once upon a time.

He and Howard were in the big kitchen at Shelton’s estate in Pennsylvania. The kitchen was enormous and the estate was positively obscene. Howard had the entire VanMeer Castle disassembled and brought over from Europe, then rebuilt with a few alterations. Howard and Mr. Bones referred to it as their “secret lair.”

They were mad scientists, after all, and that was a hoot.

Howard poked at half a grapefruit. “How the fuck am I supposed to feed my brain with this shit?”

Mr. Bones peered at him over the glasses that were halfway down his nose. “You’re not. The protein drinks and the vitamins and the flower essences are for your brain. This is to keep your waistline and your IQ from reaching parity.”

“Tastes like sour piss.”

“And you’d recognize that taste how?”

“Oh, very funny.” Howard speared a chunk of fruit, shoved it in his mouth, winced, and chewed.

Bones poured himself a fresh cup of coffee, added some hot to Howard’s, and went back to studying the data flow on his laptop. It was an odd-looking computer, known within M3 circles as a Ghost Box, and it was unlike anything on the market. There were two wings that folded out from the screen to form a three-sided box above the keyboard. This allowed for some very nice holographic imaging. There was also a unit attached to the back that looked like an extended-use battery, but wasn’t. This was an encryption-intrusion drive that allowed the Ghost Box to operate in almost the same way as the MindReader system. It was a much newer technology than MindReader, and it combined elements of the Chinese GhostNet along with a few radical design jumps drawn from technology sources particular to M3.

“What’s happening in the world?” asked Howard.

It was not a general question. The information that flowed across the laptop was a very private news feed comprised of information, updates, and intelligence from hundreds of sources within the M3 network, including quite a lot of it that came from sources that had no idea they were reporting to senior members of a secret cabal hidden within the U.S. government. Some of those people would have rebelled at the idea and they would begin inconvenient witch hunts. As neither Mr. Bones nor Howard Shelton fancied having their heads on poles, they kept such information on a need-to-know basis.

“It’s been a busy night.”

“Give me the highlights,” said Shelton. “Don’t tell me stuff I don’t need to know about.”

“Okay … well, the air show is still on track, though two more exhibitors have dropped. Belmann-Kruas and Mitsubishi are out.”

“Good. That’s what — eight gone?”

“Seven, GE decided to stay in. Apparently they were able to transfer their entire project to Houston, so all they really lost is four days.”

“Hm. Should we hit them again?”

“Oh, I think we have to.”

“Do it.”

Mr. Bones nodded. For seven weeks now they had been running a very carefully crafted series of cyber-attacks. Ghost Box’s intrusion technology allowed them to sneak into virtually any company’s computer and, once in, introduce viruses of all kinds. Some were tapeworms with very specific agendas, some were what Howard called “romper-stomper programs” that just randomly destroyed things. So far every major private contractor working with the Department of Defense had been hit, and the DoD itself had taken a few punches below the belt. Even Shelton Aeronautics had been attacked, though this self-immolation had been carefully planned to give a very realistic appearance of maximum damage to their new Specter 101 ultra-high-speed stealth aircraft program. As far as anyone in the upper echelon of the industry was concerned, Specter 101 promised to be the first of a brand-new generation of stealth craft. A Mach 20 masterpiece that was a ghost to everybody’s radar.

It was the lamb that Howard was placing on the altar that was the Project.

The real Project.

The Project that M3 had been working on for a very long time.

Everything else — even the quite lovely Specter 101, mattered so much less. Just like the sixty employees at Wolf Trap mattered so much less.

“If you want to hide in plain sight,” Bones had said when he’d suggested the slaughter to Howard, “and even get some sympathy from people who would ordinarily love to see your spleen on a platter — namely the boards at Boeing, Lockheed, and all the rest — then become a victim. Let them console you, Howard. Hell, let them pity you. God knows they will. So will everybody who reads a newspaper or logs on to a news feed. You’ll be the heroic Howard Shelton, publically mourning at funerals, donating gaudy amounts of money to trust funds that provide for the offspring of whoever works at Wolf Trap. You’ll embody the tragedy so much that you’ll receive more sympathy cards than all the families together.”

Howard Shelton had stared at Mr. Bones for nearly a full minute before he said, “You are an actual evil genius.”

“This I know.”

“If you had a twin sister I’d bang her silly.”

“That is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard,” laughed Mr. Bones.

That discussion was two months ago. The slaughter was a little over two days ago. The offices of Shelton Aeronautics were so crammed with sympathy bouquets that it looked like a tropical rain forest. The president had called. The CEOs of every major defense contractor called. Celebrities had called. It was delicious.

“How would you like to hit GE this time? Cyber or something more physical?”

Howard thought about it as he winced his way through another chunk of grapefruit.

“Let’s up the game. I think a fire in the corporate offices might do it.”

“Done,” said Mr. Bones and sent a coded e-mail to someone who loved to play with matches. Then he wired a third of the payment to a Cayman Island account. Good faith money for a useful contractor.

“What else?” asked Howard.

“Well … if we’re going to keep this up, then we’re going to have to give the feds someone to look at. Too much blame is being directed at China, and they’re starting to complain to us.”

“Pussies.”

“Agreed, but they do have a point.”

Howard pushed the grapefruit aside. “God, I’d rather eat a dead rat than another piece of that shit.”

“Lose forty pounds and we can discuss pancakes.”

Howard sipped his coffee. “So, you want to throw someone to the wolves. Good call. But who?”

“I still want to point them at Mr. Church.”

“Good luck.”

“Oh, come on. He’s mysterious, he’s devious, and people don’t even know his real name. He’s perfect.”

“He’s a Boy Scout,” said Howard. “The only reason you think he looks good for it is because he has MindReader, but it’s a bad fit.”

Mr. Bones scraped butter onto a cold piece of toast. “Has to be one of his people, then. That nerd who runs their computer department, what do they call him? Bug?”

“No. He’s too small fry. He looks like a puppy. No one would buy him for it.”

“Aunt Sallie?”

“Not a chance. Besides, she scares me more than Church.”

They thought about it through toast and coffee refills.

Then Howard snapped his fingers. “Christ, I know … and it’s been staring us right in the face.”

“Who?”

“Church’s pet psychopath. I mean, he was right there at Wolf Trap for fuck’s sake. He found the bodies. He’s perfect. People will think it’s like an arsonist calling in a fire.”

It took no time at all for Mr. Bones to recall the name. “Ledger?”

“Ledger.”

Mr. Bones nodded. “Oooh — I like it.”

He sent some e-mails to get that process going and at high gear. The phone rang as he was finishing. There were three cell phones laid side by side on the kitchen table. This was a gray one. The coded one. Mr. Bones picked it up and listened.

After fifteen seconds of listening, he said, “Jesus Christ.”

“What?” demanded Howard, but Mr. Bones held up a hand.

“Bullshit. Don’t tell me that there’s no information, goddamn it. You fucking well find out, and get back to me right away.”

He closed the phone with a sharp snap. His hand was trembling as he set the phone down.

“What the hell was—” began Howard, but the look on Mr. Bones face stopped him.

Mr. Bones said, “The president of the United States has been abducted. He was taken from his bedroom at three twenty this morning. There was no intrusion, no attack. The Secret Service agent at the door heard and saw nothing. There is no physical evidence, no trace. He is simply … gone.”

“What? Who did it? How did they do it?”

After a dreadful silence, Mr. Bones said, “If it’s true that he simply vanished from his bedroom without a trace of physical evidence … Well, Howard, there’s only one way to do it that I know of.”

Howard Shelton stared at him.

“Oh … shit,” he said.