William Tyree - Line of Succession

“Oh, right. Sorry. I forgot you didn’t know. They announced it while you were sleeping. President Hatch is dead. They killed him.”

Madge grabbed the remote control, pointed it at the little TV on the bookshelf and turned up the TV. A FOX News camera was trained on the Presidential motorcade, which was winding away from the White House. A ticker ran along the screen that said CHAOS IN WASHINGTON.

“Madge,” Nico said, “Forget about the President for a sec. This isn’t what I wanted to tell you.”

“Forget about it? The President is dead!” Madge ran to the bathroom, slammed the door and locked it. Nico heard the sound of running water, then uncontrollable sobbing. As much as Nico wanted to comfort her, there was no time. Nico turned back to Madge’s computer and resumed his exploration of the Ulysses network. There had to be something he could do, some wrench to throw in the machine.

The White House

11:43 a.m.

Agent Carver crept up the staircase to the Executive Residences. He slung the M4 Rios had taken from the weapons locker over his shoulder and held his SIG out in front of him. If given the chance, he would use his bare hands. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself.

He stopped at the next corner and held his breath, listening. He heard the dry slap of cards against a wooden table. “Gin!” someone said. It was a man’s voice, and he was just down the hall.

“Screw you, cheater,” the other soldier said. “Shuffle ‘em, will ya? I want revenge. Gotta take a piss.”

Carver heard a chair slide backwards and footsteps on the floor runner. Carver backpedaled, ducking into a doorway that he soon realized was an open bathroom. He stepped behind the door just as the soldier entered. The soldier did not bother to shut the door behind him, nor did he bother to raise the toilet seat as he unzipped his cargo pants and sprayed his urine into the bowl, onto the seat and onto the floor.

A bronze bust of Jefferson Adams stood on a wooden nightstand beside him. It looked heavy, and the thought of using it to bash the kidnapping bastard’s skull in brought a smile to Carver’s face. But the soldier would inevitably clang head-first into the mirror or toilet bowl, which would alert his colleague. Carver was all alone. Stealth was key. Carver decided he would have to get his hands dirty. It was the only away.

Carver quietly holstered his pistol and took a towel from the hook behind the door. In one motion, he stepped out from behind the door and looped the towel tight around the soldier’s neck, squeezing hard enough so that he could neither breathe nor scream. The only sound was the stream of urine splashing the vanity, wall and flooring. The urine flowed long after the point that the man’s heart stopped. Bending to a near-squat, Carver settled the soldier’s dead weight noiselessly down onto the bathroom floor.

He left the bathroom and crept back to the corner. He held his hand over his mouth and began coughing. “Mike?” the other soldier called. “You okay in there?” Carver coughed again, more violently. “Mike?” the soldier repeated. Carver launched into a series of choking sounds, the likes of which he had not tried since he was in seventh grade, when he and his friends would pretend to have asthma attacks to get out of algebra class.

He heard the other soldier’s chair slide behind him, then footsteps. Carver kept up the charade until his target rounded the corner. Then he chopped him hard to the neck. Once he was on the ground, the soldier’s face froze in shock as he grappled at his shattered windpipe. Carver put one hand over the man’s mouth and used the fingers of his other hand to pinch off his nose, effectively shutting off his airways. The soldier blacked out thirty seconds later. In sixty seconds, he was dead.

Carver dragged the body into the bathroom, laid it next to the other Ulysses soldier, and shut the door. Then he proceeded down the hallway to the bedroom that the men were guarding. The door was slightly ajar. As Carver approached, he heard the bleeps and bloops of a video game. He nudged the door wider with his foot and saw LeBron Jackson in his native habitat — happily playing his first video game since his father had taken him and his mother on that fateful Chesapeake fishing trip.

*

Agent Rios knew very little about arson, and even less about making a bomb. But he knew that the White House had one of the most sophisticated smoke and chemical detection systems in the world. He wasn’t going to be able to simply walk into one of the kitchens and turn the gas on, wait a few minutes, and light a match. The sprinkler system would have the fire out in no time. He would have to be more creative.

He took the elevator to the White House bowling alley and walked through the back, down the stairs, to the boiler room. Early in his career, he had occasionally accompanied city officials here to read the gas meter, and he remembered the pipes snaking overhead to every part of the White House complex.

The room was pretty much as he remembered it, except that the old steel gas pipes had all been replaced with new copper. He sat on the floor looking up at them, hoping for some type of eureka. It did not come. He opened up the janitor’s closet and looked around. It was then that he spotted a can of WD-40. As a kid growing up in East L.A., one of his cousins had taken him out into the desert and showed him how to make a flamethrower using a lighter, some metal tubing and a can of WD-40, which was highly flammable. He remembered standing over a giant anthill, holding the flame in front of the aerosol can, and torching thousands of red ants. At the time, he had considered it the coolest thing he had ever seen.

He looked back up at the gas pipe.

The White House had twenty-nine fireplaces and three kitchens. It stood to reason that the gas pipe funneled natural gas to all those places, where it was bottled up and stored at one of many valve endpoints. If Rios could find a way to inject flame into the pipe from the boiler room, he saw no reason why the flame wouldn’t be carried through the gas pipe to all the fireplaces and each of the stoves in the White House, causing fires in many or all of those places. He doubted even the White House’s system had access to enough water pressure to put out 29 fires at once.

He went to work rummaging through the crates of tools for a drill, an ice pick, anything to inject fire into the pipe.

As he worked, thoughts of Haley Ellis drifted in and out of his mind. He realized how much he had looked forward to their lunches over the past year. The little things. Hoping she would show up with her hair down. Hoping she wouldn’t bring up old boyfriends. Or new ones. But he never pushed anything.

He didn’t want to die without spending another night with Haley. And he didn’t want to be remembered as the man that had blown up the White House. But Rios understood duty. He would do what he had to.

Fort McNair, Washington D.C.

12:17 p.m.

The Presidential motorcade swung down Maine Avenue and took a right at P Street SW toward Fort McNair’s gated entrance. Eva, Dex, Speers and McClellan shared the back of the Beast. Dex was on the phone with the commander of several Virginia National Guard units. “I am still the Defense Secretary of these United States!” he shouted. “I am relaying a Presidential Directive to deploy your troops to the White House immediately!”

The commander’s response was evident in Dex’s face. He had been unable to convince a single one to confront Wainewright’s Ulysses forces in the streets around the White House. They were afraid of Wainewright’s retaliation, and Dex didn’t blame them. Unless they could somehow get Eva safely into the White House, and secure it, anyone who had ever opposed Wainewright was going to end up on the wrong end of a firing squad.