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“Easy—just have the White House file your flight plan.”
They had descended rapidly over the city, and Stone saw the White House directly ahead. A crowd was gathered under the West Wing portico, and someone was speaking into a small forest of microphones.
“That press conference is for your benefit,” the pilot said. “Keeps the press around that side while I’m unloading you on the presidential pad.”
Then the helicopter was on the ground, and they were hurrying toward a door held open by a Secret Service agent. Shortly, they were in the Oval Office, where menus from the White House Mess were distributed. Everybody ordered sandwiches, and as they were delivered, the president walked into the room and sat down in a comfortable chair.
“Good morning, Holly, Stone, Dino, and Mike, and thank you all for coming.”
Everybody voiced greetings, then they were handed trays, and the president’s mouth seemed always too full for him to speak. The trays were taken away, and he stood up. “Come on, we’re going to have coffee downstairs.”
Stone thought that meant the White House Mess, but when they got on the elevator it went down quickly for a greater distance than he had anticipated.
They stepped off the elevator and into a vestibule, where a naval officer distributed picture IDs that were hung around their necks, then they were ushered into a large conference room with many screens on the walls.
Stone immediately recognized Steve Rifkin, who had been in charge of the presidential Secret Service detail at The Arrington; Tim Coleman, the White House chief of staff; and another two men whom he knew to be bomb specialists, along with a man Stone recognized from newspaper photographs as the head of the Secret Service. Kate Lee was already seated at the conference table, at the opposite end from her husband, the president. She was the first to speak.
“Good morning, Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen. You will have noticed that the group around this table—the president, the chief of staff, the chief of the Secret Service, and I excepted—were in the suite at The Arrington when a nuclear device was discovered in a trunk. The people responsible for building and delivering it are now deceased, so those of you in this room are the only persons with direct knowledge of that day’s events. You’ve been asked here for what we hope will be the final briefing on this subject, so that all of you will understand what could have occurred at The Arrington if you had been less vigilant, and the vital importance of keeping every detail of those events confined to the people around this table. No other person in the government not in this room has the knowledge that you are about to possess. I’ll turn you over to Steve Rifkin now.”
“Thank you, Director,” Rifkin said. “Since you were all present at the scene you know what occurred. Our purpose today is to fill in the blanks that some of you may not know. Our chief bomb technician here has put together a short film, cobbled together from photographs, film and sat shots, along with computer-generated animation, that will give you an accurate idea of what might have happened that day. He was the only person to work on the film, and he is the narrator. What you will see is the only existing version of the film. All the other materials have been destroyed, and after you see it, it will be sealed, placed in a vault at the new Will Lee Presidential Library, which is about to begin construction in Delano, Georgia, and not made public until fifty years after the death of President Lee—and then, only with the consent of whoever is president at that time.”
The lights went down and the film began, displayed on four screens in the situation room, so that no one would have to crane his neck to view it.
The first image was the planet from outer space; the shot zoomed in to contain California, then farther, to embrace Los Angeles. The zoom slowed as the grounds and buildings of The Arrington came into view.
“This was to be the origin of the worst attack of any kind on the United States in the country’s history,” the bomb chief’s voice said, as the view zoomed in farther to the building containing the suite, then traveled into the bedroom, where a closet door opened to reveal a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk.
“This is the suite occupied by this man”—a photograph appeared on-screen—“born Ari Shazaz, but known to others as Hamish McCallister, who was born of a Scottish mother and an Algerian father, then raised in Britain and educated at Eton and Oxford. We now know that his father, who was divorced from his mother and remarried, fathered another son and a daughter, and was a close associate of Osama bin Laden from a time when they were both students together in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Shazaz was caught up in a sweep of al Qaeda operatives by CIA and MI-6 personnel in a house in Cairo and was almost immediately transported to the naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba. He was held there for nearly three years, during which time he never disclosed his identity, in spite of enhanced interrogation. He died there of a stroke, after having been waterboarded more than fifty times. His sons and daughter, all of whom had had intensive Islamic education, became radicalized by his capture and death.
“Al Qaeda operatives made contact with them, and a cell was formed, funded by Osama bin Laden personally. After bin Laden’s death in a Navy SEAL raid last year, they dedicated themselves to perpetrating a monumental terrorist attack on the United States in revenge for the deaths of their father and bin Laden. They enlisted this man”—another photograph appeared—“Dr. Ahmed Kharl, who had been a highly placed scientist in the Pakistani nuclear program and who later worked on both the Iranian and North Korean programs. When the Pakistani program was shut down, he became a freelancer. He designed a device that would fit into a large trunk and had various parts machined at diverse shops, so that no one person ever knew what was being constructed. The parts were smuggled into the United States, along with three kilograms of enriched uranium, and Dr. Kharl traveled to Palo Alto, California, where he met with the three Shazaz siblings and assembled the device in an apartment rented by them.
“The device and three smaller, non-nuclear bombs were transported to Los Angeles from the San Jose airport to a hangar at Santa Monica Airport. The three smaller bombs were assigned to McCallister’s three coconspirators, all of whom had gained employment at The Arrington. We now know that their purpose was purely diversionary—to make us think the attack was a conventional one. The device in the trunk was transported to The Arrington in a hotel vehicle by one of the three coconspirators and placed in the suite reserved by McCallister.
“As you know, the presidents of the United States and Mexico were resident at the hotel for a conference and the signing of a treaty on security and immigration. Hundreds of other prominent people were either resident in the hotel or taking part in its grand-opening festivities. Two of the three smaller bombs were discovered by our teams before they could be detonated. The third was detonated in the Santa Monica Airport hangar, destroying the Caravan and killing its pilot and the third coconspirator. We believe this was the work of McCallister, who was covering his trail.
“McCallister then set the bomb to go off at eight-thirty in the evening, near the end of a concert in the Arrington Bowl, attended by fifteen hundred people. He left the bomb in the closet, as you see it, then was driven to LAX and boarded a flight for London.
“A magazine reporter who had met McCallister and had had sex with him in his suite accidentally saw the trunk in question and that evening, when she
heard that we had been searching for a large piece of luggage, informed Mr. Freeman and Special Agent Rifkin of the presence of the trunk in Mr. McCallister’s suite. You all know what transpired after that. The following is what would have happened if the device had not been stopped from detonating.”
The camera then zoomed out to an apparent altitude of several thousand feet, and an animated version of the nuclear explosion began.
Everyone started as the explosion of the device filled the screens. First there was an intense white light, followed by a fireball consuming the entire twenty-acre site of the hotel, and beyond, obliterating the Bel-Air neighborhood. This was coincident with a huge roar, shaking the speakers, and a visible shock wave that spread in all directions, destroying nearly all the buildings at UCLA, across Sunset Boulevard, and extending for miles farther. Fires broke out everywhere.
Everyone took a breath, but the event was not over. Up Stone Canyon, two city reservoir dams broke, and a high wall of water swept down the canyon, through the UCLA campus, and past Wilshire Boulevard.
The chief bomb technician’s voice rose again. “The three and a half billion gallons of water in the two reservoirs would have had the effect of extinguishing most of the fires caused by the initial fireball.”
The camera zoomed slowly upward, exhibiting the enormous swath of ruin left by the explosion.
“We estimate that more than a million people would have died in the first hour after the blast, and that as many as two million more would have died within ninety days from their injuries or from radiation sickness.”
The camera continued to pull back, and the scar on the face of Southern California was still visible as the curvature of the earth came into view. The room went dark, and then the lights came up slowly.
The president spoke for the first time. “I want to thank all of you who had a part in finding and disabling this device before it could be set off. The entire country—indeed, the entire world—owes you all a debt of gratitude that can never be fully expressed. Indeed, it will never be expressed, since no one will know until most of us are dead. The public knowledge of this incident will be limited to the announcement that two bombs were discovered and disarmed on the site of the hotel and that one was set off by a coconspirator at Santa Monica Airport. After that, the airplane carrying McCallister to London was diverted to Kennedy Airport in New York, where his brother attempted to help him escape. Both were shot and killed by a CIA team dispatched to stop them. Dr. Kharl met his death a few hours later in Dubai, shot by a CIA sniper, who then made good his escape.
“As I’m sure you know, last year both houses of Congress passed a bill called the National Security Act, which I vetoed, because I felt that some parts of the bill were unconstitutional. Both houses then passed a revised version that I signed into law. One of the provisions of that act is that, by order of the president, information harmful to national security can be suppressed until fifty years after the death of that president. I view the nuclear nature of this event as falling under that provision of the act, and I am issuing an executive order, which you may read in the folders before you, invoking the National Security Act. Also in each folder is a statement that I wish signed by each of you present, saying that you are aware that the Act has been invoked, and that you swear to keep secret everything you have seen and heard here today, even to the extent of discussing them with each other, and also to keep secret your part in the events covered by the Act.
