9:35 p.m.

Fairfax County, Virginia - Suburbs of Washington, DC

Whiskey on ice.

There was something exquisite about the way it was cold in his mouth and then ignited a fire inside him when it reached his stomach.

Luke sat on the sofa in his own living room. He had just walked in the door moments ago. He glanced at the clock, thinking back. He hadn't been here in almost exactly twenty hours. He had gone out with purpose, and full of energy. He had worked hard to avert disaster, he had risked his own life again and again, and for what? Disaster had happened anyway.

He turned on the TV set and set it on MUTE. He flicked through the channels, watching the imagery. MountWeather, where he had been earlier today, on fire. The distraught First Lady being interviewed at a resort in Hawaii. She broke down and wept in front of the cameras. Spontaneous candlelight vigils in many places. A hundred thousand people in Paris, a hundred thousand in London. Deserted streets in DC and Manhattan. Rioting in Detroit and Los Angeles and Philadelphia, places where the President had been beloved. Talking heads talking, talking, talking, some teary-eyed and sincere, and some angry and gesturing emphatically. Someone had to pay, of course. Someone always had to pay.

Now the news changed. Somewhere, fighter planes were being scrambled. Bombs were hitting targets in the Middle East. Nuclear submarines in the North Sea. The American fleet in the Persian Gulf. The Russian president addressing a news conference. Chinese cabinet members in Beijing. Iranian mullahs. Chanting crowds, men in turbans and sandals brandishing AK-47s, kissing babies and hoisting them up to God. A riot in the alleyways of an ancient city, soldiers firing tear gas, people running, being trampled in the darkness. A man, a traitor of some kind, being stoned to death in a dusty town.

All of this flowed past, image after image after image. The American President had been murdered, and the whole world had gone mad. It was impossible to grasp the magnitude of what had happened.

Luke reached down, untied his boots, and kicked them off. He sat back. Less than twenty-four hours ago, he had been on the verge of retiring from the intelligence game. It had been almost unbelievably pleasant these past six months, teaching a couple of classes, playing some pickup basketball with the students, relaxing here with his family. Maybe his days as a soldier and a spy and a kamikaze really were over.

He glanced around the house. They had a great life here. It was a beautiful home, modern, with floor to ceiling windows, like something out of an architectural magazine. It was like a glass box. In the winter, when it snowed, it was just like one of those old snow globes people used to have when he was a kid. He pictured Christmas time—just sitting in this stunning sunken living room, the tree in the corner, the fireplace lit, the snow coming down all around as if they were outside, but they were inside, warm and cozy.

God, it was nice.

He could never afford this place on his government salary. Becca could never afford it on a university researcher salary. The two of them together couldn't afford this place. It was her family money that bought it.

And that told him all he needed to know about the job. It didn't matter if he worked two days a week or if he never worked again. They were set, probably for life.

A dark thought occurred to him. If war broke out among the great powers, it would be almost impossible to stop it. Even so, maybe he could let these gigantic forces fight it out amongst themselves. He didn't have to participate. Maybe, if given enough time away, he could put the whole thing out of his mind. The worst atrocities could be something that happened to other people, somewhere far away.

He picked his phone up off the coffee table and called a number.

The lines were open now. The cell towers weren't overwhelmed anymore. People had given up.

The phone rang. On the third ring, she picked it up.

Her voice was thick with sleep. "H'lo?"

"Babe?"

"Hi, baby," she said.

"Hello. What are you doing?"

"Oh, I was tired, so I decided to go to bed early. Gunner was running me all day long. So I hit the hay right after I hung up with you. How did everything go? Did you watch the President?"

Luke took a deep breath. She went to sleep before the President's speech. Which meant that she didn't know. He couldn't bring himself to tell her. Not now.

"Nah. I was too tired. I decided to take a night off, and unplug from everything. No TV, no computer, nothing. I'm sure people will fill me in tomorrow."

"Now you're thinking," she said.

Luke smiled. "Okay, sweetheart. Go back to sleep. I'm sorry I woke you."

She was already falling asleep again. "I love you."

He sat on the sofa and smiled to himself for a moment. He took another sip of the whiskey. It made him happy to think of Becca and Gunner running around all day, and now sleeping in the deep quiet of the country house. Luke was going to enjoy retirement, he really was.

Just not yet.

He dialed another number.

A clipped female voice answered. "Wellington."

"Trudy, it's Luke."

"Luke, where are you? Everything's gone haywire."

"I'm home. Where are you?"

"I'm at headquarters, where the hell else would I be? Luke, half the Congress was at MountWeather. The President and his aides and his chief of staff. The Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Secretary of Education. They are all down there. The place is on fire and no one can put it out. There was a firestorm in the elevator shafts. The emergency stairwells were blown up. The firemen can not get down to the fire."

"Is there any contact at all?"

She made a sound. It was almost a laugh. "The President's chief of staff, David Halstram, managed to call out. He called 911, if you can believe that. There's a 911 dispatcher tape. I heard it a little while ago. He sounded terrified, talking very fast. He said his legs were pinned and he was afraid the President was dead. He said you called him just before it happened, and told him to get the President out. He..." Trudy's voice shook... "said he wished he had listened to you."

Luke didn't say anything.

"Did you call him?" Trudy said.

"I did, yeah."

"How did you know? How did you know what was going to happen?"

"Trudy, I can't tell you that."

"Luke—"

He cut her off. "Listen, I need you to do something for me. Is the Secretary of Defense alive? David Delliger?"

"He's alive. He's at Site R."

"I need a direct line for him. Some way to contact him."

"Why him? Shouldn't you talk to the President instead?"

Luke shook his head. "There is no President."

"Not yet. But they're swearing the new one in... ten minutes from now."

"Who is it, if not Delliger? Who's even alive to become President?"

"Luke, don't you know? It's Bill Ryan, the Speaker of the House."

Luke thought back to the various Representatives and Senators he saw gathering at MountWeather earlier in the day. "Ryan? How did he survive?"

Trudy's voice sounded unsure. "They say it was dumb luck. He didn't go to MountWeather."

Ryan, Luke thought, flabbergasted. A hawk among hawks. That could only mean one thing: they were going to war.

*

10:02 p.m., Site R - Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania

It was a nightmare from which he could not awake.

His name was David Delliger, and he was the United States Secretary of Defense. He had been appointed to this role by his longtime friend and college roommate, Thomas Hayes, the former President of the United States.

Delliger was a surprising choice for the position, by any standard. He was a professor of history at the NavalAcademy, and an attorney who had spent much of his career as a third-party mediator. In the years before he took this job, he had consulted with the CarterCenter, monitoring elections in new democracies, countries with long histories of despotic rule. That job was the opposite of making war.

And that's why Hayes the liberal had chosen him. Thomas Hayes was dead now, and had been for an hour. There was currently no way to tell who else was alive and who was dead in the wreckage of what had been the Mount Weather facility. The Vice President was missing and assumed dead. Fires still raged on several floors deep underground. Hundreds of people were trapped inside, including many of the members of Congress, and at least some of their family members.

Delliger stood in a concrete room, also deep underground, but more than sixty miles from the disaster. About thirty people were in that room with him. A blue curtain had been pulled across the concrete walls to mask the sheer ugliness of the room. On a small dais, two men and a woman stood. Photographers snapped pictures of them.

One of the men on the dais was short and bald. He wore a long robe. He was Clarence Warren, Chief Justice of the United States. The woman's name was Karen Ryan. She wore a bright blue suit with a red rose in her lapel. She was holding a Bible open in her hands. A tall, good-looking man in a dark blue suit and tie stood with his left hand on the Bible. His right hand was raised. Until this moment, the man had for years been the Representative from North Carolina, and the Speaker of the House.

"I, William Theodore Ryan," he said, "do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States."

"And will to the best of my ability," Judge Warren prompted.

"And will to the best of my ability," Ryan said.

"Preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Ryan repeated the words, and with less ceremony than many local moose lodges employed to induct their new members, abruptly became President of the United States. Delliger was in something like shock. Yes, his good friend was dead. Thomas Hayes was a great man and his loss was a tragedy, both personally for Delliger, but even more profoundly for the people of America.

But even worse, one of the President's most formidable enemies in government had just taken over his job. The very man who had threatened the President with impeachment this morning was now President himself.

It didn't make sense. How had both the White House and MountWeather been destroyed on the same day? Why had the President and Vice President been evacuated to the same facility? They should have been separated as soon as the Secret Service realized they were together.

As Delliger watched, Ryan and his wife, Karen, shared a kiss. Then, for a brief moment, Ryan mugged for the cameras, and several people in the room laughed. Delliger glanced around to see who the people were. He recognized many of the people in attendance. They were the most rabid war hawks in government. Members of the Joint Chiefs. The Director of the CIA. Congressmen with close ties to defense contractors. Lobbyists from the defense industry, and from the oil industry.

How did they all wind up here? No, a better question was how did he wind up among them? He was an alien to them, an outsider. He was the Secretary of Defense, but he had been appointed by a dove, a man who was doing everything in his power to avoid a war. A man who was dead.

This was the military bunker. These people felt at home here. David Delliger, even with his military background, would feel more at home in the civilian bunker, which was a place...

...that had just been destroyed.

A strange feeling came upon Delliger. For a moment, the faces of the people in the crowd seemed distorted, like funhouse faces. Everyone was smiling. The biggest disaster in American history had happened an hour ago, and people here were smiling. Why shouldn't they smile? They were in charge now.

Delliger glanced around the room again. No one was paying any attention to him. Why would they? He was the Defense Secretary of a dead President. He was a joke to them, part of a regime that had swept away.

On the dais, Ryan was serious again. He faced the gathering.

"No one wants to become President the way that I have. But I'm not going to stand up here and pretend I didn't want this job. I did want it, and I still do. I want it because I want to make America great again. Thomas Hayes was a great man in many ways, but he was also a weak man. He could not stand firm against our enemies, and as a result, he paid the ultimate price. Those policies, the policies of weakness, stop now."

A cheer went up from the crowd. Someone let loose a long wolf whistle. The clapping went on for an extended period. Ryan raised his hands to ask for quiet.

"Tonight I will address the American people, and by extension, the people of the entire world. What I tell them will give hope to those who have been terrorized by the events of the past day, and of the past several months. I plan to tell them that we are going to war, and that we are going on the offensive, and that we will not stop until the perpetrators of this terrible atrocity are brought to their knees. And even then, we will not stop. We will not stop until their palaces and towers are consumed by fire, and their people run screaming in the streets. And even then, we will not stop."

The cheering was so loud now that Ryan had to stop speaking. There was no sense continuing. No one could hear him.

He waited. Slowly the sound died down. Ryan stared directly at Delliger.

"We will avenge our losses," he said. "And we will avenge our loved ones. And we will not stop until the country of Iran can never project its power in the world again. We will not stop until they cannot feed themselves unless we feed them, and clothe themselves unless we clothe them. Eventually, there will be a time for mourning, and for remembering. But not yet. The time now is for vengeance!"

As another cheer went up, and the phone in Delliger's pocket vibrated. He took it out and glanced at it. He had a text message. This was his private phone. He rarely got texts. He opened it.

My name is Luke Stone. I know why the President died. Meet me.

aria-muzS