Chapter Twenty-One

Washington DC

USA, Day 35


The Secret Service spared no expense. A helicopter picked him off the roof of the NSA building and carried Toby over towards the White House. Toby could see armed Marines patrolling the grounds, with Secret Servicemen staying well back and policemen working frantically to get the mob of protesters at the gates moved back for their own safety. As soon as the helicopter touched down, a mob of security officers surrounded him, checked his identity and then pulled him into the White House and down the steps to the bunker. The President was heavily protected at all times, but this was something greater. Toby had been a child the last time anyone had carried out an attack in Washington, when an airliner had been flown into the Pentagon. It had been chaotic back then too.

“It’s bad news,” the President said. He looked stunned, as if someone had hit him neatly between the eyes. It was hardly the most reassuring look for the most powerful man in the world, but then… all of the politicians who might be good in a crisis tended to be driving out of the running before they could even stand for President. And then those who survived often found that they were not up to handing crisis after crisis. “Air Force One has gone down in midair.”

Toby stared at him. Air Force One — actually, there were several planes decked out as Air Force One, but only one holding the title and callsign at any given time — was normally the President’s exclusive transport. But the President had had to send the Vice President to Japan to reassure the Japanese about America’s commitment to certain treaties and, just to ensure that they took him seriously, he’d ordered him to fly on Air Force One. And now something had happened to his flight… he’d been over the Pacific Ocean, if memory served, escorted by a flight of Tomcats from a carrier heading home to the United States.

“My God,” he said, finally. Why… who… if the President was the world’s number one target for terrorist activity, the Vice President certainly ranked as number five or six. His security was almost as good as the President’s security; there was literally no more secure aircraft than Air Force One. And the Japanese wouldn’t have played fast and loose with American security, not like some Middle Eastern nations he could name. It was already shaping up into a horrific nightmare. Fingers would be pointed everywhere…

He thought rapidly. Who benefited? Islamic terrorists would definitely be the prime suspects, but very few of the groups that had managed to remain active after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq would have the capability to mount such a successful strike. Most of them had started to concentrate on soft targets, mainly outside the United States. No halfway sane terrorist wanted to give the United States an excuse to wage war on their host countries. And then there were the aliens…

On the face of it, the aliens didn’t benefit at all. The Vice President had been, like so many others in government, a compromise candidate. He’d brought valuable support to the President’s administration, but few other qualities of value. On the other hand, he had been a good sounding board for some of the President’s qualities and he balanced the ticket nicely against Jeannette McGreevy…

Toby would have sworn aloud if he’d been alone. Jeannette McGreevy, the Secretary of State, the woman who was using the aliens to build an impregnable power base for herself… and a woman who stood alarmingly close to the Presidency. After the Vice President, the Line of Succession ran through The Speaker of the House of Representatives and The President Pro-Tempore of the Senate before reaching the Secretary of State, but neither of them could be expected to serve as Vice President, if only because they had few backers. McGreevy was almost the only choice for Vice President, yet she couldn’t be trusted. And the President didn’t know it…

He looked down at the President, who seemed tired and worn. Somewhere on his person, or scattered around the room, was an alien bug, a surveillance device so tiny as to be literally invisible to the naked eye. He couldn’t reach out to the President, or tell him about the resistance… or, for that matter, convince him to invoke presidential authority to help the resistance. If he did, the aliens would know… and then what would they do?

* * *

“We flew SAR aircraft out of Diego Garcia to link up with helicopters from the Truman,” Major Dalton said. He sounded nervous. Briefing the President was never easy at the best of times. Toby could hardly blame him. Washington sometimes operated on the ‘shoot the messenger’ theory of government. “They found nothing, apart from trace debris. The aircraft literally disintegrated in midair.”

The President seemed more composed now, but Toby suspected that it was partly an act. “What happened?”

“We have gun camera footage from one of the drones overseeing the flight,” Dalton said. Air Force One never flew alone, no matter what the movies claimed; there had been a powerful fighter escort from the carrier accompanying the flight. Terrorists might not fly in fighter jets, but one of the more persistent nightmares was a rogue state launching an attempt to shoot Air Force One down. But they should have been safe over the Pacific Ocean… “The footage suggests, after a preliminary look, that there was a bomb on the flight, which detonated with impressive force. They would all have been dead in the first few seconds after detonation.”

Toby frowned, inwardly. No one should have been able to slip a bomb onto the aircraft. The USAF only put the most reliable flight crew on Air Force One, and the ground crew were all specially trained and vetted. There might have been a lone Japanese terrorist who’d somehow managed to get onto the base housing Air Force One while the Vice President was in Japan, but Toby couldn’t see how he would have been able to conceal a bomb onboard. The security sweeps should have picked up anything before the Vice President got anywhere near the plane. No one — no one human — would have been able to plant a bomb on Air Force One.

He would have expected the aliens to simply shoot the aircraft down from orbit, but he had to admit that this was more subtle. A laser-type directed energy weapon could have only one possible source, an alien starship. It would have been an open act of war. This way, there would be considerable doubt over who had carried out the bombings, rendering it impossible to extract revenge. The aliens had carried out a neat strike and there was no way to prove what they’d done.

“We’re currently organising a sweep to pick up what remains of the wreckage, but the surrounding environment will make that difficult,” Dalton continued. “Once recovered, the wreckage will be flown to the nearest base for analysis, while the FBI conducts interviews of personnel who could have conceivably planted a bomb on the craft. We’ll vet everyone who might have had any access at all, Mr President. We will find the people responsible.”

The President’s eyes crossed the room to the CIA Director. “Who,” he said, coldly, “was responsible for this?”

Toby winced. The CIA Director had almost certainly come to the same conclusion as himself, but they didn’t dare say it out loud, not when the aliens might hear. No, they would hear. Gillian’s device might not be ready for mass-production yet, but the NSA had deployed a series of increasingly sophisticated detectors in the White House and they’d located at least nine active bugs. There could be dozens more that weren’t transmitting to anyone.

And McGreevy, who was almost certainly a traitor, was sitting at the other side of the room.

“Well, we’re only just looking at communications intercepts and human intelligence sources, but the general conclusion is that the attack was carried out by Islamic terrorists,” the CIA Director said, finally. “Three of the crewmen assigned to Air Force One were Muslim; all three of them went down with the plane. There has been a considerable upswing in chatter between known terrorist cells over the past two weeks and it is quite possible that one of them has made the shift from plotting to action.”

“A very clever strike,” the President observed, bitterly. “How did this happen?”

There was an uncomfortable pause. “Well, Mr. President,” the CIA Director said, finally, “there are always problems with ensuring that the security barriers surrounding any target are impregnable. We are not allowed to discriminate against anyone just on suspicion, or because they practice a religion that includes terrorists who want to kill us all as brutally as they can. At times, people slip through the holes and managed to get into a position they can use to hurt us badly.”

“So these terrorists managed to join the USAF and operate undetected for years before they struck,” the President said. He sounded angry; Toby didn’t blame him. The cock-and-bull story they’d given him made the USAF’s security division look very bad. And no matter what happened, chances were that three innocent crewmen were going to be posthumously declared the worst terrorists since the men who’d struck at America on 9/11. The lives of their families would be blighted by the investigators, trying to prove a link between their dead relatives and international terrorism. And it was quite possible that the aliens had turned someone on the plane into an unwitting traitor. “Why now?”

“The Middle East has been going through a series of political earthquakes,” the CIA Director said. “The price of oil has fallen dramatically ever since we started to turn to fusion power. We may not have made a complete shift just yet, but perceptions are important — and perceptions say that there won’t be more than two years before demand for oil falls sharply. And then the money runs out.”

Toby nodded. The latest alien miracle introduced by the Welcome Foundation was a set of batteries that could store vast amounts of power almost endlessly, turning the long-held dream of electric cars into a reality. All one had to do was plug the battery into the mains socket — power supplied by fusion, of course — and the car would be ready to drive within hours. The designers had pulled an engine out of a popular car, replaced it with a battery, and let the results speak for themselves. There were already ecological pressure groups getting organised to demand that all newly-produced cars were powered by fusion power, rather than gas.

“I think we will be looking at far more terrorism in the near future,” the CIA Director said. “Whatever they say openly, far too many Arab governments — Saudi and Iran in particular — back the terrorists. If they can force the Galactic Federation to abandon Earth, they could reclaim their former prominence as oil suppliers to the world.”

“So they’ll keep attacking the Federation,” the President said. “We may need to increase security at their bases…”

“I think there is another problem,” McGreevy said, sharply. “How do we know that this was an Islamic strike at all?”

“We don’t,” the CIA Director admitted. “However, the Islamic terrorists have been threatening the Galactic Federation…”

“And so they struck at the Vice President,” McGreevy said. “I’m not sure I follow their logic. They want to hurt the Galactic Federation so they kill the Vice President of America? Where’s the logic in that?”

“Terrorists,” the CIA Director said, carefully, “tend to look for spectacular strikes. Destroying an aircraft in flight is irritating, but largely harmless in any long-term sense. Assassinating the Vice President, however, gives the impression that they can strike anywhere — and if the Vice President isn’t safe, no one is safe.”

“The fact remains that this serves no logical purpose,” McGreevy said. Her eyes fixed on the FBI Director’s face. “I think we should be looking closer to home. Is it not a fact that we have been seeing an increased number of threats against federal agents from home-grown right-wing militia groups?”

Toby kept his face impassive, but he was starting to see her line of logic. They’d lost Blake Coleman… and the only reason the FBI hadn’t descended on Coleman’s family to discover what he’d been doing had been that the body hadn’t been recovered. And no one human could have removed the body before the police arrived. If the aliens had worked out who’d intercepted their team of assassins, they might be trying to put the blame for the Vice President’s assassination on Toby’s father, ensuring that two of their enemies wound up fighting each other.

The FBI Director sighed. He knew little about the alien threat. “The FBI has been monitoring the militia movement ever since it became an issue,” he said. “We have placed agents and informants within most of the militia movements — and, quite frankly, most of them pose more threat to themselves than to others. Despite their often fiery speeches, the most serious criminal offense they do is hording illegal weapons — some of which are often illegal based on technicalities.”

“The law is the law,” McGreevy said. “And why have you not arrested them?”

“There is a general feeling that they’re largely harmless,” the FBI Director said. “You may recall Waco and other nasty incidents — I assure you that they do. If we were to crack down on them — over minor issues that take a weapon from legal to illegal — we would run the risk of transforming a marginalised bunch of nutcases into a serious movement that would pose a serious threat to the stability of the country. The vast majority of militias are peaceful — we have had some cases of people talking about striking back at the Feds — that’s us — and being pushed out of the movements.”

McGreevy snorted. “And they are the ones with a real grudge against the Vice President,” she said. “Wasn’t it he who took their money and then pushed for heavier restrictions on assault rifles? Wasn’t it he who personally put forward the money for interfaith centres in all American states? His reputation among the far right was lower than Bill Clinton’s — maybe, with the Galactic Federation offering us a way to live in peace, one of your harmless movements has moved from talking to action.”

“It’s a possibility,” the FBI Director conceded. “However, in order to carry out such an operation, they would have to plot it, put their people in place and conceal it until the time came to strike. None of the militias have that sort of patience — many of them would prefer to act at once rather than wait for the right moment. I think that the evidence will eventually lead to Islamic terrorists.”

The President held up a hand. “Enough,” he said, with surprising force. “We will double our security precautions everywhere — perhaps attempt to halt demobilisation until we can get better security networks in place.”

“The Galactics won’t like that,” McGreevy warned.

“Their timetable is too short anyway,” the President countered. “They’ll live.”

He looked up at her, grimly. “You’ll be nominated as Vice President tonight,” he added. “Congress will, I suspect, approve you as soon as possible. I trust that that meets with your approval?”

McGreevy’s eyes glittered. “It does, Mr. President,” she said. “I’ll hold onto State until my Deputy is up to speed, and then transfer it to him.”

The President nodded. “We will not allow this tragedy to destroy us, or everything we hold dear,” he said. “America will endure, whatever happens.”

* * *

“Am I making a mistake?”

Toby winced, inwardly. The President often asked him for advice on political matters; one of the many reasons he was so useful to the President was that he kept his finger firmly on the pulse of opinion, both public and political. Politically speaking, appointing McGreevy Vice President was a sound move. Her constituency would be happy, the feminist lobby would be delighted to see a woman in the Vice President’s position and it would limit her ability to take independent action. On the other hand, it would put her right next to the President — and if something happened to him, she’d be President. And she was working for the aliens.

But he didn’t dare say it out loud. The aliens would know that he knew about them — and then they would act. If they drew a line between Toby and his father, they might be able to uncover most of the resistance and then destroy it. And they might be able to follow up by destroying the cells of resistance members in the government… Toby knew too much to be allowed to fall into enemy hands. He just hoped that he’d be able to commit suicide if the enemy ever did get their hands on him.

“I think that she would be an asset,” he said, untruthfully. And politically — he was right. “But her ambition does make her dangerous.”

The President nodded, slowly. Ambition was always dangerous in political subordinates; given a chance, they might see advantage in stabbing their superiors in the back. But if McGreevy took the Vice President’s position, she would take part of the blame for any failures by the President’s government. Whatever they might have said publically, Toby knew that certain members of the Democratic Party had breathed a sigh of relief when Gore had failed to beat Bush in 2000. Gore, a former VP himself, would have found himself taking much of the blame for 9/11.

“But there’s no strong alternate candidate,” the President said. He smiled with black humour. “I think we’re stuck with her.”

And hope that the aliens don’t use her to strangle us, Toby thought, sourly. By now, the entire world would know that the VP was dead. And America would want to see the President taking control, to remind them that life would go on.

Silently, he drew his plan together in his mind. If they had enough time, perhaps they could give the aliens a shock. And maybe, just maybe, expose them for what they really were.

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