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Nine thousand people.
Three times as many people than died in the fall of the Twin Towers.
Nearly twice as many as died during the Iraq War; more than twice the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan.
Nine thousand. All in one day, on American soil.
On his watch.
During 9/11 he’d been a junior senator from a midwestern state, and he’d been at home when the tragedy happened. He met with dozens of groups of citizens, from a few dozen at a Rotary Club to tens of thousands at a memorial service in a baseball stadium. He saw something in each one of them, something that connected them, one to another, while also binding them to that moment in time. It was a pervasive, shared wound that would never really heal. The scar itself would hurt, and it would continue to hurt for years, possibly for the lifetime of each person who’d lived through that terrible day. Even now, so many years later, if you mentioned the Towers or 9/11, there was a flicker behind the eyes. Not exactly pain, but a memory of pain, an awareness of that scar gouged into the national soul.
Now this.
Nine thousand people dead. Not from a foreign enemy or fanatics prosecuting a radical ideology, but from within the U.S. government. Illegal bioweapons research. Military action against civilians.
It wouldn’t matter that the research was initiated before his presidency and conducted without his knowledge. He would still be blamed.
It didn’t matter that the Colonel Dietrich’s attack on Stebbins and the school were desperate measures to prevent the pathogen from spreading and killing millions. If your dog gets out of the yard and bites people, you get no sympathy. You’re still to blame.
Which meant that in the eyes of the public he was the villain of this piece.
It would destroy him. His career, his credibility, and his legacy.
The only chance he had, the only way he could imagine to save some shred of his presidency, would be to prove that Volker acted alone and without sanction, that the man was mentally unstable, and that all actions taken were the only ones left.
All of which was true.
But none of which could be proved.
Without the flash drives.
As the night wore on, he began to regret Blair’s suggestion that they label Billy Trout as an anarchist hacker and cyber-terrorist. That was useful in the heat of the crisis, but if this thing was truly over, then the truth about Trout would come out and he’d become the hero opposing the big, bad villain in the White House.
“Shit,” he muttered. He decided that it was Scott Blair’s problem to fix.
His intercom buzzed. “Mr. President, the secretary of state is here.”
The president rubbed his eyes and sighed. “Okay. Send him in.”
He listened to that aide, and others, and still others; hearing what they said, interacting, pretending to give his full attention, while all the time waiting for General Zetter’s call. Waiting to be told that the drives had been obtained.
Waiting for a lifeline.
Then he got a call from Scott Blair.
“Mr. President,” said Blair, “the FBI have located Dr. Volker…”
CHAPTER THIRTY
GOOD-NITES MOTOR COURT
FAYETTE COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
The two FBI agents who parked in front of the motel were named Smith and Jones. Actual names, and the pairing was done by random chance rather than due to some supervisory sense of humor. Adam Smith and Miriam Jones were both of average height, average build, early thirties, with good hair and off-the-rack suits. They carried the same model handgun, wore identical wires behind their ears, and worked out at the same gym.
And they liked each other.
Smith privately thought that Jones was a closet liberal who was probably using the job as a way to leverage herself into the much higher-paying world of corporate security. Jones thought that Smith was a semiliterate mouth-breathing Hawk who yearned for the chance to shoot someone.
