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It was packing for J.P. that took the longest, but it was as if they had rehearsed for such a move for years, it went that smoothly. They were backing out of the driveway only half an hour later.
They went out Route 7 and crossed the Potomac above Leesburg. The bridge was packed and it took almost two hours to get past the bottleneck—hardly a
surprise, since all the Washington bridges were closed and this was the first bridge open to the public. After that it was still slow going, so it wasn’t until after dark before they pulled into Margaret’s driveway. Aunt Margaret had the front door open before they were out of the minivan.
“Your soldier boy called,” she said. “He’s being debriefed and everything’s fine.”
But she and Aunt Margaret both knew that nothing was fine. The President was dead, Reuben had shot some of the assassins, and he had sent his family out of town in a rush and without explanation.
In some ways it was worse than when he had been in Special Ops. At least in the field, Americans were all on his side. He had support. But for all she knew, he was in serious trouble and couldn’t count on anybody.
Except her. He had assigned her to take care of their children. As long as he knew his kids were safe, then he could face anything else with courage. Her own dreads and worries had to be set aside. She had a job to do, and she was going to do it well.
SEVEN
TEAM
The great irony of war is this: While war is the ultimate expression of mistrust, it cannot be waged without absolute trust. A soldier trusts his comrades to stand beside him and his commander to lead him wisely, so that he will not be led to meaningless death. And the commander trusts his subordinates and soldiers to act with wisdom and courage in order to compensate for his own ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, and fear, which all commanders possess in ample measure.
Reuben was being followed—but that’s exactly what he expected. By the time he was through a long debriefing—three different interrogation teams—it was nearly dark.
The real question was which group was following him—the FBI, the Army, or the CIA. Maybe all three. Or—always possible—some other agency within Homeland Security. How many parking places should he look for when he got to Reagan National? He wouldn’t want to inconvenience them.
Reuben could hardly blame them for expending resources on following him. What else did they have to go on? The bodies of the terrorists would undoubtedly have no information on them; it might be days before anyone came forward with information about rooms they occupied. And in all likelihood they would be far more disciplined than the 9/11 terrorists had been—there would be no notes, no letters, no convenient ID that might lead to an easier trace.
The only thing they had was Reuben himself—with poor Captain Coleman being interrogated just as thoroughly in another room, by his own teams of debriefers. He had told Cole to answer everything, thoroughly and fully. Including as much as he wanted to of Reuben’s conversation and actions afterward, and all their speculations about why things might have fallen out as they did.
“Tell the truth,” said Reuben. “We want these guys to get the terrorists. Of course they’ll suspect me, and if we pretend we don’t know that I’ll be suspected, the more they’ll think I have something to hide. We’ll answer this weird conspiracy with pure truth, so that they never have a moment where they can say, Here’s what you said, but here’s what we know you actually did. They’ll never catch us in a lie. Clear?”
Reuben had followed his own advice. While he didn’t tell them anything about his activities for Steven Phillips, that was because they were highly classified and his interrogators did not have clearance for it. “If Phillips tells me to go ahead, then I’ll happily tell you everything.” They understood and accepted this—the fact that he told them Phillips’s name was in itself a sign of extraordinary cooperation on his part, since he really shouldn’t have told them even that much. “But we’re all on the same side, here, and I’m not going to let foolish red tape keep you from finding out what you want to know.” Holding back Phillips’s name would have been foolish red tape, with the President and Vice President dead; but keeping his actual activities secret until he was cleared to divulge them was not foolish—it was essential. These guys interrogating him were just as faithful about sticking to protocols, or they wouldn’t be in their positions.
After they decided to call it a night, Reuben went to his office, which he assumed had been searched, and then to the little coffee room, where, inside a brown lunchsack labeled “Keep your hands off my food you greedy bastards—DeeNee,” he reached under a sandwich and took out his newly acquired cellphones. If they had been thorough enough to find these, they must already be convinced of his guilt and he wasn’t going to accomplish anything anyway.
Now Reuben was heading from the Pentagon to the airport—not much of a drive, and probably the one that would make his followers the most worried. He could imagine cellphone speed-dial buttons getting pressed and teams being mobilized. “Stop him before he can board a plane, but otherwise just keep him in sight,” they told each other.
But the followers could take care of themselves. It was the men he wanted to meet with whose response he wanted to see. They hadn’t foreseen anything like what was happening, or even that he would try to assemble them. But he had once told them, jokingly, that if they ever had to save the world, he’d give them a call and meet them at the Delta ticket counter at Reagan National. Just a joke.
But guys in Special Ops didn’t forget things—they were trained to memorize things so they could debrief accurately later. They would remember.
Remember, but . . . do what? Would he really find a miniconvention of extraordinarily fit men in civilian clothes standing around waiting for him?
No. They would have recognized him on the TV news. They would know that his call to them had something to do with the assassination, and the cryptic nature of his message, along with the context of the old joke—saving the world—would prompt them to call each other. Maybe one of them would meet him there. Maybe none.
He didn’t even get to the Delta ticket counter before they made contact. Lloyd Arnsbrach stepped onto the escalator just in front of him. “South of the border restaurant in town center,” he said—in Farsi. If he had said “Rio Grande Café in Reston Town Center, the words “Rio Grande” and “Reston” would have been easy enough to understand for any English speaker.
And since there was nobody within earshot, that must mean that Lloyd—“Load,” they had always called him—believed that they were being overheard—either a big-ear listening device or a bug planted on Reuben’s clothes.
“You’re being followed,” continued Load in Farsi. “Get on the toll road on the hill of spring”—which meant Spring Hill. “We’ll make sure you have a clear mile, so get off the toll road immediately.”
When they got to the top of the escalator, Load headed off in another direction from the Delta ticket counter.
So all that was left for Reuben to do was go and buy a ticket on the DC-New York shuttle for tomorrow. If asked—and he would certainly be asked—it was his intention to fly up to join his family tomorrow on their spur-of-the-moment visit to Aunt Margaret.
It was late enough in the evening that there weren’t many ticket buyers, which would make it harder for his followers to remain unobtrusive. But they were apparently pretty good at what they did—he didn’t see anybody with that agentish look of studied nondescriptness. It would be surprising if they didn’t have somebody near enough to hear what he said. But then, they could count on being able to ask the ticket agent what he had said—those federal badges were so helpful.
Or . . . and this is something he should have thought of before . . . they might very well have planted a bug in his clothing. So they were just sitting in a van somewhere, listening. Or everything was getting piped into somebody’s iPod earphone.
And it wouldn’t have made any difference if he had stopped in his office and changed clothes. They would have bugged the uniforms he kept there. Or if they didn’t they were idiots and he preferred to think the assassination of the President was not being investigated by idiots.
