John Barnes - Directive 51

“Ready.” Her assistant’s fingers poised above her laptop keyboard.

“Contact list from this meeting, available for all of us ASAP. See about a tentative meeting two days from now; DoF folks, Graham wants to talk to you right after this meeting. Sorry to run but I have to.”

Everyone stared at her. She didn’t blame them; she’d have been staring too. She folded her laptop, dropped it into its case, and was out the door.

Cell, pill drive, laptop, survival stuff, good till next morning if I have to be. Ready to go, just the same as the old days. There’s a dance in the old dame yet, she thought smugly. Hey, if I’m not entitled to be arrogant, who is?

She had just time enough to notice what a beautiful fall day it was, with the leaves a wild uproar of bright colors in damp golden sunlight, before the limo shot up the main drive and braked in front of her.

Man, this is big and someone is worried , for real. The driver seemed military; as she climbed into the front seat and got a better look, she saw it was a Secret Service ERT in light-duty uniform, no external armor, but a telltale holster-buckle bump on his left shoulder. “You’ll want to buckle up.”

“Always do,” she said. As her belt clicked closed, he whipped the big car out into the mid-day traffic, letting tires squeal and horns honk as they would, and gunned it across three lanes of traffic.

“Isn’t Homeland Security in the Nebraska Complex?” Heather asked, since they were going the other way.

“Most of it still is. Secretary Ferein and some key offices have already moved to the new complex at St. Elizabeth’s.” He took another turn fast and tight. “Escort should pick us up next block, then we can go faster.”

A DC police cruiser with siren and lights going cut in front of them, and the driver gunned the engine, apparently trying to park the limo on the cop car’s bumper. They roared up an entrance ramp to the parkway, zagged across to the left lanes, and headed south at what the speedometer said was just over eighty miles an hour, the regular traffic fleeing to the right in front of them and re-merging behind them.

Heather had never realized that St. Elizabeth’s was this close; usually, she supposed, it wasn’t. The driver turned off with a wave to the cop, drove without touching the brake through four gates that opened inches in front of his grille, and followed a short driveway to a side door on a big, old mock castle of a building.

“Let me guess,” Heather said, as he pulled the car around the little circular drive. “They just said deliver Heather O’Grainne to this door, as fast as you can?”

“That’s all they told me.”

The limo halted and Heather opened her door. “Thanks for keeping it down to terrifying.”

He grinned at her in a not-quite-professional way and departed at a much more sedate pace.

A slim young woman, discreetly armed and overtly capable, led Heather to an elevator, which must have descended at least eight floors.

St. Elizabeth’s had originally been built as the first national insane asylum, before the Civil War, and over the decades had been used for many things that needed to be hidden from the public: advanced weapons, cryptology, off-the-record briefings on black ops, meetings with outlaw governments, meetings to make decisions no one wanted to own—like a toxic dump for unspeakable secrets, as if the madness and violence at its foundation had drawn every dirty, secret thing to the old fake-feudal brickpile.

The elevator door opened, and Cameron Nguyen-Peters was waiting for her. “Hey, there, buddy,” she said, grinning and throwing an arm over his shoulder, a half hug that she knew would simultaneously please him (he’d had a crush on her for fifteen years) and offend him (he’d grown steadily stuffier in his dignity with time, and he hadn’t exactly started off as an egalitarian hippie, anyway). “How the hell are you?”

“Life’s been better. We have one big mess on our hands.” He seemed to be looking at something through the wall, twenty miles away.

“Well, if you’re holding this meeting on the day of Game Seven, I know it’s nothing small.”

“Exactly.” He glanced around. “Gotta say the Pirates appear to be getting a very unfair level of divine intervention. Anyway, thanks again for coming right—”

“Mr. Nguyen-Peters,” a female voice said from a speaker somewhere, “the DoDDUSP”—she pronounced it daw-duss-pee—“and the liaison from Deep Black are here.”

Dude, Heather thought. This is big .

Deep Black was the satellite reconnaissance office. They didn’t show up for many meetings because the breach of security in talking to or about them was so often worse than any situation that might have come up.

But if “Deep Black” was a red flag, DoDDUSP was a shrieking siren—the painfully long abbreviation for Department of Defense Deputy Under Secretary for Policy, which could be roughly defined as the guy in charge of having at his fingertips all the plans for all the wars the United States seemed likely to get into, in case the President should say, “occupy Sudan,” or “seal the Mexican border,” or ask “How long would it take us, starting from right now, to seize Abu Dhabi?” For forty years and more, DoDDUSPs had planned Grenada, Haiti, Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Eritrea, Jordan, the Second Korean War, the Taiwan defense, both Iranian wars, and the Myanmar Relief in Force—and a few more things the public had never heard about.

If DoDDUSP was here, it was because Cam thought there might need to be a war.

Cameron was nodding slightly, his lips pressed together, signaling her, Yes, that’s right, it’s that bad. “I have to confer with—”

The voice over the speaker said, “Mr. Nguyen-Peters, the President is just now coming in through the ultrasecure entrance.”

“We should talk some time when there is time to talk. Meanwhile I have bigwigs to prep for the ops room. I know you can be ready on your own. Down that way, then left, someone’ll set you up.”

“Thanks.” She hurried down the hall. He did say the ops room, didn’t he? A real working space for things that were truly bad.

At the door, she was retina-scanned by an apologetic young man. Inside, no one looked up as she came in. A map of the West Coast and the Eastern Pacific dominated the big central screen, with tables and graphs scrolling by in adjoining windows. Grim-faced people in headsets, some military, some civilian, many that radiated “cop,” a handful of geeks, a few who had the spy’s trick of giving off nothing, were all staring into screens and tapping the keys on their desks.

Lights were low so everyone could read screens easily, and to keep voices low; it felt like two minutes to midnight. A hundred feet up it was a nice fall afternoon with the trees bursting with color, and the people didn’t know this place was here. For a fleeting moment, Heather envied them, and then she strode to the station where a slim, olive-skinned young woman was beckoning her.

God, she’s young—surely they’re not using interns in here? Damn. No, I’ve just reached an age where some real live adults look young to me.

A transparent screen wrapped the far edge of Heather’s desk like an armor plate, so that she could look through the screen to see everyone else, or opaque it to concentrate.

A small shelf with indentations for cups slid out of the desk to her left. The young woman set four containers into the nearest ones. “Water, Gatorade, and coffee; the last container has squeeze bottles of half and half, vanilla extract, and honey, is that right?”