Transfer of Power

BACK IN THE control room at Langley, all eyes were on the big board. A surveillance device had been activated by Rapp, and its grainy transmission was being received on one of the monitors. The technicians at Langley worked with Marcus Dumond, who, with the aid of the communications boom on the back of the van, was homing in on the frequency and trying to filter out the disturbances. Over the course of several minutes the picture began to clear, eventually revealing a lone man in a lit doorway.

Without taking his eyes off the screen. General Campbell asked Kennedy, “Is that the president’s bedroom?”

“It must be,” replied Kennedy as she squinted at the monitor.

She watched as the man in the doorway turned and walked quickly back into the room. A second man’s profile appeared in the doorway, and Kennedy immediately recognized it as Rapp’s.

“Why are they going back into the closet?” asked Campbell.

Kennedy frowned.

“I don’t know.”

One of the technicians turned around and said, “We’ve got audio on the unit.”

“Put it on the speaker system,” stated Kennedy, without taking her eyes off the monitor. A second later a scratchy audio came over the room’s overhead speaker system.

There was a loud noise, and General Flood, who was sitting one row behind Kennedy and Campbell, asked, “What in the hell was that?”

Kennedy stared at the monitor showing the open doorway of the president’s bedroom with the lit hallway beyond and said, “It sounded like a scream.”

Just then a man appeared in the doorway dragging a woman behind him. As if on cue everyone in the control room moved closer to the screen in an attempt to discern what was happening. Within seconds it was brutally apparent what was unfolding before them. Kennedy, in an unusually tense voice, snapped, “Get me Iron Man on the radio right now!” Kennedy knew Rapp better than anyone in the room and possibly better than anyone in the world. Kennedy knew she had to assert some control over him and assert it quickly, if she had even the slightest chance of stopping him from doing what she knew he was contemplating.