The Book of Truths

Chapter 11

The person who was supposed to find out that information was on board a Nighthawk helicopter, flying around Washington, DC, toward Pennsylvania. Neeley was seated in the back, peering at an iPad screen, scrolling through the scant amount of information Hannah had managed to forward her about Deep Six. An Asset was sitting next to Neeley, pointing at images, diagrams, and maps as they came up. He filled her in on what he knew about Raven Rock, having been stationed there for six years in the signal battalion that manned the main facility.

Where Hannah had found him on such short notice didn’t matter. It was what Hannah did. Hannah had also made sure a duffel bag full of gear was waiting on the floor of the chopper along with the iPad.

The Asset came to a halt as the scrolling did, when they were somewhere over Frederick, Maryland.

“You’ve never been inside Deep Six?” Neeley asked.

“No one I know has been inside their vault door other than the contractors. Those guys are crazy. No one messes with them.” He shook his head. “You’re never going to be able to breach the security at the Rock in the first place.”

“I’m not going to.”

The Asset pointed at the iPad. “I can show you where the ventilation shafts are. You might be able to—”

“Why would I want that information?” Neeley asked as she opened up the duffel bag, revealing all sorts of weapons and war gear.

“To get in. As I said, security is very tight. Lots of armed guards at all the entrances to Raven Rock.” The Asset had seen too many Mission: Impossible movies.

“I’m not worried about getting in the main facility,” Neeley said. “Raven Rock, the overall facility, is run by the Department of Defense, correct?”

The Asset nodded.

“Then I can get in,” Neeley said as she considered the various “covers” she had and which was best to deal with a DOD facility.

“They closed Fort Ritchie,” the Asset said, “which used to be the supervising post for Raven Rock.”

“Who is Deep Six’s higher command?” Neeley asked.

The Asset frowned. “I don’t think Deep Six has a higher command; they definitely didn’t fall under the military. I’m not even sure the CIA has a handle on those people. It’s all foreigners. They never mingled with us. We provided logistic support as required but no one I know ever went inside and I never saw anyone come from DOD or any government agency to check on it.”

Neeley had suspected as much. Deep Six was a top-secret facility inside of a secret facility, and to ensure deniability no one wanted command of it. After Abu Ghraib, no military officer in their right mind would want to be anywhere near this. And the CIA had Guantanamo, which allowed them to do as they pleased in Cuba. But here, on US soil, deniability ruled.

“Deep Six is in what used to be the old reservoir, right?” Neeley said.

The Asset nodded.

“Let me see those schematics again. It’s a prison. It’s designed to keep people from getting out, not getting in.”

Secure in his office, Colonel Johnston watched on screen what had gone from groping to a complete, naked orgy down in the lab.

It was not a pretty sight watching a bunch of scientists go at it with their deepest and darkest fantasies freed of inhibition.

Upton had joined in. Johnston shook his head in disgust. They all had nothing to lose down there. There was a good chance they might get wiped out when whoever was on the other end of the 666 line got here. It was why they all got paid the big bucks.

But not Johnston. He got O-6 pay, straight up.

He turned off the monitor.

All his outside lines were dead, but not before he’d learned that Brennan had been taken to Deep Six, and it was highly likely the First Daughter and General Riggs were infected.

Who knew how far Cherry Tree would blossom?

There was no doubt that the cutoff was the result of the 666 call. DORKA was in external lockdown and when it was unlocked after Cherry Tree burned out here, he was going to be the one in the line of fire. He wore the rank, he was responsible. He’d lived his life by that code.

The White House.

The Pentagon.

This was bad.

Johnston hit the button on the side of his pistol, ejecting the magazine.

He knew he’d never make O-7, get that star. When he’d been given this assignment, running herd on a bunch of geeks, it was implicit. This was a dead-end, an end-of-the-career, get-ready-for-retirement slot.

All the years he’d given the army and this was his reward. To be undone by a bunch of geeks who’d never seen a day of combat.

Johnston took off his coat and carefully hung it on the hanger on the back of his locked door.

Johnston pulled open one of his drawers. He pulled out a single 9mm round.

He’d saved it for more than two decades, from the First Gulf War.

He laughed bitterly over the fact that it was now called the first. What had been the point if they’d had to go back and do it all over again?

This bullet had been in his pistol when he’d left his company CP to take a leak during the heady days when they had the Iraqis on the run.

But not all of the Iraqis had run.

A kid in an ill-fitting uniform, maybe seventeen, but no more, had run into the alley with just a bayonet in hand.

Dick still hanging out, piss dribbling, Johnston had drawn the pistol, finger on the trigger, but not been able to pull it.

It was just a kid. But he kept coming, screaming something, bayonet glinting.

Johnston had still been frozen when the kid stabbed him, knife sliding off the body armor covering his chest and slicing into his arm, causing him to drop the pistol. As the kid stabbed him again, this time in the gut, just below the end of the armor, Johnston had finally reacted, grabbed a piece of cinder block and swinging it, hitting the kid in the head, stunning him.

Then he’d kept swinging until the kid wasn’t moving anymore, his head a bloody pulp.

Johnston had slumped against the wall, bleeding from two stab wounds, the kid’s mangled head cradled in his arms, weeping. For how long he’d never known, but it couldn’t have been long, because he was able to finally compose himself, stand up, zip up, and make it back to his CP, blood dripping from his wounds and his chest and face drenched in the kid’s.

Johnston looked over at the rows and rows of medals lining the jacket chest.

He’d gotten the Purple Heart for the knife wounds and the Bronze Star for killing an enemy combatant in hand-to-hand combat. He still remembered an interesting tidbit about medals, although he could no longer recall the source: Napoleon was credited with inventing the modern version of medals, pieces made of ribbon and metal, awarded for bravery. In medieval days, bravery was rewarded in real terms — with land, with riches, with titles that were worth something. But now a man was supposed to be satisfied with just a piece of cloth?

Of course, it wasn’t that simple. It was what the cloth represented.

Johnston stared at the two ribbons at the top of several rows of awards.

What exactly did they represent?

He hadn’t thought of that incident in Iraq in years. Not consciously. A secret buried deep inside, in the depth of his soul, that he’d wanted no one to ever know about, least of all himself.

It was a visceral revulsion of himself.

The truth.

He pulled back the slide on the pistol that locked it and dropped the bullet in the chamber. Then he hit the release, slamming the receiver in place.

Loading it.

Locked and loaded.

Johnston got up and turned the uniform jacket around, hiding the medals.

Then he put the gun to his temple.

His military aide had stomped out in a huff because General Riggs had just told him he was the most worthless human being ever and to find Brennan. It was strange that Riggs had told the full-bird colonel off like that because, like all aides, he was something important to someone important (a nephew, an important wife, holder of some good blackmail) and that mattered more than if they could do the job.

Still it was kind of funny that Riggs had finally bothered to tell him what he’d always thought. Outside of that aide who had been foisted upon him, every member of Riggs’s inner circle was intensely loyal to him, owing their careers to his rising star. As he went, so went they. They also shared his philosophy that the military needed to be given a freer rein to deal with the problems in the world, that the civilians could fuck up a soup sandwich.

Let the aide sulk. That just proved the point that he was useless, taking things personally. The damn idiot was an aide to the vice chairman of the JCS. Didn’t he realize his ticket was already punched by some rabbi somewhere who had the strings to get him that job? Riggs might be number two in the Department of Defense but he knew who controlled the purse strings and also knew who got the lucrative contracts and could offer jobs to retiring generals to make lots of money.

The game was rigged, and it disgusted Riggs, but like the Robert Heinlein quote hanging on his wall said, “Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet, you can’t win.”

The key, of course, was that each man’s idea of winning was different. Money, unlike most people, interested Riggs not in the slightest.

Riggs prided himself that he’d never been anyone’s aide. He’d worked his way to this position. He was a good soldier and a smart soldier, meaning he did the damn job, not aided someone else to do it. Although, technically, he was number two to the chairman, Riggs was the one who did the real work.

Like the whole Cherry Tree thing. Think the chairman would go within a mile of that?

His intercom crackled. “Sir?” The terse inquiry still emanated hurt feelings.

Fucking loser, Riggs thought. “What?”

“I’ve got news. It’s important.”

“Get in here.”

Riggs shoved the last bit of candy bar into his mouth as the door opened and the colonel rushed in.

“The White House is in lockdown!”

It didn’t occur to him to ask the first question most normal people would ask: Why? “What about the Emergency Operations Center?”

The aide shook his head. “Just the main building. They’ve cut off the East and West Wings. The only news came from McBride — something about a surprise emergency exercise by the Secret Service to test the security system.”

“Bullshit. Where’s Brennan?”

“The Secret Service took him into custody after he attacked the president’s daughter.”

Riggs smiled. “Finally grew a pair, did he?”

But that was also a preemptive strike, he suddenly realized.

It was adding up. They were coming after him. Locking the president in and coming after the only man who could save the country.

“Who’s got the football right now?”

The aide blinked. “Sir?”

“The Duty, dammit.” Said that way, with a capital D, got through to the aide.

“Major Preston, sir.”

Riggs nodded. “Good, good. He’s a good man. Reliable and knows his priorities. He’s one of ours. Where’s the vice president?”

“With the chairman, sir, in Scotland, working on SAD.”

“So no one’s in charge.”

“Sir, the—”

“Get my car. Assemble the staff. We’re going to the PEOC.”

“Sir, we—”

Riggs fixed the man with a withering stare and he scurried to get the car.

Riggs hefted himself, with difficulty, out of his chair.

Time to face his destiny.

He opened his drawers and pulled out what he would need: his pistol, a copy of the Constitution, a Bible, and four Snickers bars.

Once Moms got them moving and they understood the threat was a pathogen, the Secret Service inside the White House reacted with precision and alacrity. The corridors leading to the East and West Wings were sealed. All doors leading in and out were also shut just after the two agents who’d dumped Brennan at the helipad returned. The president, along with the First Lady and First Daughter, had been hustled upstairs to the private residence, all shouting at each other.

It seemed the First Family had a lot of unresolved issues.

“What about tunnels?” Moms asked McBride, who seemed to be the one who knew who did what here.

“We’ve shut all the doors below,” McBride said. “I’ve got an agent on each one. The head of the Secret Service is outside and he’s got people in hazmat right up against the building on an interior line and then an exterior line working both ways. What the hell is going on?”

Moms took a deep breath. The building was secure for the time being, and McBride had issued a cover story for concealment about a no-notice security exercise. How long that cover story would last, she had no idea. There were a lot of people milling about, at a loss what to do now that the routine of preparing for Christmas at the White House had been interrupted.

And the president and his family had apparently gone insane.

They’d lined everyone up and made them dump cell phones and any other communication devices into a large barrel. All trunk lines in and out were shut off. Complete blackout.

“Get these people occupied doing something,” Moms said to McBride.

“Hold on,” McBride said. “What’s wrong with the president? I need to know what is going on.”

So Moms spent two minutes and twelve seconds telling him about Cherry Tree and that somehow it was loose here in the White House. The color drained from McBride’s face when she told him what Cherry Tree did: A politician’s worst nightmare had just been thrust in his face.

“You mean he can’t lie?” McBride asked when she was done.

“From what I understand, it’s worse than that,” Moms said. “Whoever is infected can’t stop telling the truth. And the problem is we don’t know how many people in here have been infected. You need to quarantine anyone who has had physical contact with the First Family. His daughter brought it in here, so start with her.”

McBride shook his head. “That’s not going to be easy.”

McBride turned to the crowd of Secret Service agents, stewards, staffers, media reps, chefs, maintenance personnel, and others who were now trapped inside and began to try to make sense of this insanity as they backtracked to the moment Debbie Templeton left her lunch with Brennan and entered the White House. Each person he thought she might have had physical contact with was hustled into the State Dining Room.

But Moms was focused elsewhere, also trying to stay physically distant from everyone. A woman was sitting in a chair near the staircase up to the residence. She’d been hovering near the president when Moms interrupted the already cut-off news conference. The woman seemed quite detached from all the turmoil tornadoing around her. From the appearance of the chair it was supposed to be one that was admired, not sat in. The fact this woman felt secure enough to do that said something on top of her lack of alarm.

She had a large leather-bound book on her lap. It reminded Moms of her mother’s photo albums. The ones with the little black corners holding everything together. As the chief of staff tried to put a lid on a pot inside the White House that was beginning to boil with Cherry Tree, Moms wondered how different it was now that pictures all seemed to be on hard drives or in the cloud, not tangible, not in a book like real memories. It made memories seem less real.

As Moms made her way around the crowd toward the woman, she considered the fact that people probably still made scrapbooks, even if they were electronic and could be wiped out with the flash of EMP from a nuke. (Nebraska wasn’t that far away in her own memory scrapbook.)

Her mother’s scrapbook had been full of pictures of her brothers, all younger, all of whom were now leading normal lives — doctor, salesman, actuary, and the youngest taking over the farm. Moms had never really considered that there were no pictures of her in that scrapbook. Did that mean she didn’t exist?

Moms could make out more as she got closer. The woman wore a nondescript business suit and had the tag on the chain around her neck that everyone else who belonged here had. The color indicated the highest security clearance.

The woman was too aware, yet detached at the same time. It took one to know one, and Moms had a good idea this woman came from the same dark world she did. Moms didn’t like people with their own agenda on her mission. This woman was up to something and it most likely wasn’t the same thing Moms was up to, so therefore she was a potential problem.

Moms stopped in front of her and the woman stood, book clutched to her chest. Exactly the way suicide bombers almost always took off their bomb-laden backpacks and clutched them to their chest before pulling the fuse. It was a level to which Freud had not dared go, clutching that which meant life and death closest to your core, your heart.

“What are you doing in the middle of my op?” Moms asked.

The woman smiled. “You must be Moms.”

It wasn’t the smile that relaxed Moms slightly; it was the way her eyes matched the smile. Nada always said, “watch the eyes.” Moms had been face-to-face with lots of dangerous people and those who wished her harm, and this woman was neither.

Not directly. But she was something and Moms needed to know what that was.

And she knew her Nightstalker name, which was a bit disconcerting.

The woman, Elle Keep, her nametag said, was still a problem, but probably not a dangerous one. A loose thread in a big building full of loose threads. Moms needed to cut this one or reel it in so she could move on to the next one. That plan unraveled with the woman’s next words:

“It’s my mission. Even better, and more professionally, we could call it our mission.”

Nada watched the eyes, but Moms had another way to evaluate. She looked down at the woman’s shoes. Shoes told you a lot about a person. These were expensive but functional. Which meant she knew how to fit in, but also how to be practical.

“What’s our mission, Elle?” Moms asked.

The woman shook her head. “Call me Keep.”

Frak me, Moms thought. “Keep?”

“More correctly, the Keep. I’m from the Cellar. I always wondered if I’d ever meet a Nightstalker. I wondered, but hoped not to because of the circumstances that would be inherent in such a meeting.” The Keep looked past Moms at the media people screaming about their rights to the chief of staff and two chefs on the marble floor wrestling because they had finally let loose on each other about whose dessert POTUS liked better. “But I certainly could not have imagined this.”

“We usually can’t imagine most of our missions,” Moms said as she processed Cellar. Mac had always bet the under, saying it was a myth. Sort of the way people in Black Ops always said, “I thought you guys were doing that!” and the other person said, “No, we thought you were doing it!” But everyone always hoped there was something like the Cellar, which really was supposed to be doing “it.” Because “it” needed to be done.

“Good point,” the Keep said. “You work for Ms. Jones, and I hate to be rude, but she works for Hannah. As do I.”

Nada wins again, Moms thought. “And what does the Keep do?”

The Keep rolled her fingers on the book she held so tight. “This book. I know you have to keep containment here and I don’t want to be an inconvenience, but above all, we must protect this book. It’s more important than the president.”