Written in Fire

CHAPTER 3

“You can go in now, sir,” the assistant said. “Can I get—” The ripping whine of a circular saw cut him off. When it died, he said, “Can I get you—” Again the saw screamed through lumber. The moment it stopped, the man opened his mouth to try again.

“I’m fine.” Secretary of Defense Owen Leahy rose and walked into what had been the Speaker’s office.

From behind a desk of heavy wood, Gabriela Ramirez nodded at him, held up one finger, and continued talking on the phone. “I understand. Yes. I’m trying to get you that assistance now.” A pause. “Well, Governor, perhaps if you had declared a state of emergency when the Children of Darwin first attacked, you wouldn’t be in this position. Yes. You’re welcome.” She tugged the headset from her ear and tossed it on the desk.

Leahy said, “Madam President.”

“Owen,” she said. Out in the hallway, a pneumatic nail gun went thunk, thunk, thunk, the sound only slightly more muffled here. “Sorry about the racket. You’d think that the Speaker’s office would have been pretty secure in the first place, but evidently the Secret Service disagrees.”

In 1947, Congress had codified the line of presidential succession to seventeen places, although in the decades since, there had never been a need to go beyond the VP. Then in a span of three months one president was impeached and his successor murdered, and now Gabriela Ramirez, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, had become the president of the United States.

“I think the Secret Service is right,” Leahy said. “You should relocate to Camp David for now.”

“America needs to know their government is still functioning.”

“America needs you to stay alive.”

“What do you think about the yahoos in the desert?”

“Seriously, ma’am, Camp David is a fortress—”

“Wyoming, outside Rawlins. This morning’s security briefing said there are a couple of thousand now?”

“About five thousand,” Leahy said. “With more arriving every day. They’re chartering buses, coming in pickup trucks with gun racks in the back. The camp is a mile from the New Canaan Holdfast fence line. Tri-d news picking up the story hasn’t helped. May as well be running advertisements.”

“All civilians?”

“Depends what you mean. They’re survivalists, right-wingers, that sort of thing. Plenty are former soldiers. But there’s no structure. Just disparate groups keeping to their own. Drinking beer and yelling anti-abnorm slurs. Firing guns in the air.”

“You’re not concerned.”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What would you say?”

“That I’m monitoring the situation.”

“Fine. Mind if we walk and talk? I’ve got an AFL-CIO thing.” Gabriela Ramirez stood, took a charcoal suit jacket from her chair back, and slid into it. “What’s the status on the military retrograde?”

“On schedule. All nuclear warheads were secured following December 1st. As of this morning, all ground-based missiles have been deactivated. Those carried by—”

“I’m sorry, but when you say ‘deactivated’—there’s no way that Erik Epstein can reactivate them?”

“No, ma’am.”

“You’re sure? His computer virus launched a missile that destroyed the White House, and no one thought he could do that.”

Leahy fought the urge to grit his teeth, said, “They’ve been physically disabled. Like removing the spark plugs from a car. Nothing a computer can do about that.”

The president took a final slug of coffee, set the mug on her desk, and started for the door. Leahy held it open. To her assistant, Ramirez said, “Geoff, tell them I’m coming down.” Out in the hallway, the cacophony of construction noise bounced off the polished marble. Sawdust hazed the air. Two Secret Service agents fell into step in front of them, another two behind.

“What about naval vessels?”

“Long-range ordnance has been disabled on ships and submarines both. Which leaves us vulnerable to enemies abroad—”

“The air force?”

Leahy sighed. “All but mission-critical flights have been grounded, and those planes are flying disarmed. Throughout the entire military, distributed communications are being replaced with hard networks, computer-aided navigation and vehicle support are being taken offline, front-line technology is being gutted . . . look, ma’am, my office sent over a detailed report, but the short answer is that we are well on our way to turning the clock back to 1910.”

“Are you on board with this, Owen?” Ramirez glanced sideways at him. “Speak your mind.”

“I’m the secretary of defense of the United States. I’ve spent my whole life strengthening America’s military, and I don’t enjoy tearing it apart.”

“I understand,” she said. “But for whatever reason, on December 1st, Erik Epstein limited his attack to the White House and the soldiers threatening the New Canaan Holdfast. His computer virus resulted in almost eighty thousand deaths, but it could have killed tens of millions. Epstein had complete operational control. He could have annihilated our military and vaporized our cities with our own weapons. He claims he didn’t because he was only acting in self-defense, but I won’t leave him the opportunity to change his mind.”

Acting in self-defense, Leahy thought. She doesn’t know it, but what that really means is, responding to my order to attack. My illegal order.

Since 1986, when the existence of the abnorms was first discovered, America had been heading toward open conflict. The gifted were simply too powerful. Though they accounted for only one percent of the population, they were explicitly better than the other 99 percent. Demigods in a world of mortals. Unchecked, they would make regular Americans obsolete—or slaves.

Along with a few like-minded individuals, Leahy had fought to contain them. Public dissent and fear had been sowed. Special academies had been developed to reeducate the most powerful. And after John Smith planted bombs that destroyed the stock exchange and killed more than a thousand people, legislation had been passed to implant microchips in every abnorm in America. In the months leading up to the December 1st attacks, Leahy thought they had things under control. They had been so close.

But then President Walker’s role in the plan had been uncovered, and he’d been impeached and brought up on charges. Vice President Lionel Clay was a good man but too weak for the big chair; he’d only been put on the ticket for electoral math reasons. As further terrorist attacks rocked America and an abnorm splinter group known as the Children of Darwin isolated three cities, Clay had dithered and hesitated. He’d even been on the verge of allowing the New Canaan Holdfast, Erik Epstein’s abnorm enclave, to secede.

There had been no choice but to force his hand. So Leahy had ordered an attack on the NCH.

He hadn’t made the decision alone. He owed his career and allegiance to Terence Mitchum, officially the number three man at the NSA. In reality, Mitchum had been the leader of their shadow government, a clear-eyed patriot who had understood that protecting a nation required firm action. Unfortunately, Mitchum had been in the White House when the missile struck. One more casualty in a war the rest of the nation is only just acknowledging.

Leahy said, “Self-defense or no, once we’ve successfully retrograded the military to boots and bayonets, we’re going to have to invade.”

“I haven’t made that decision.”

“Madam President, the public—”

“I know that everybody wants payback. But at some point we’re committing to an ugly path. There has to be a solution besides genocide.”

They stepped outside Longworth onto South Capitol. The Secret Service had commandeered the narrow street and built heavy gates and guard posts at either end. The only vehicles allowed were the presidential motorcade, today four armored Escalades, six motorcycles, and the limo itself. The morning was cold, exhaust steaming from the running vehicles, low clouds roiling above.

“I agree,” Leahy said. “I don’t want to wipe out the gifted. But we have to dismantle the New Canaan Holdfast. And we have to implement the Monitoring Oversight Initiative. Sign it into law and we can have 95 percent of abnorms microchipped within three months. I know it sounds old-fashioned, but it will work.”

“What if they don’t comply? What if they’d rather fight to the death?”

“In that case—”

A blast of sound and force tossed him into the air.

Swirling sky, gray marble, then concrete rushing toward him, falling, he was falling, and he put his hands out as he slammed into the street, a shrieking hum in his ears like an endless scream, and all around smoke and fire and bodies and people staggering, bleeding, an agent staring at her left shoulder where her arm no longer hung, her face lit by the burning ruin of the limousine.

Leahy gasped, coughed, saw blood spatter the street along with flesh—he’d bitten part of his tongue off. There it was, part of his tongue, lying on the concrete.

Hands seized him roughly, hauled him up, and he flailed, threw an elbow that was blocked, his arms were pinned as two men dragged him, and he tried to tell the agents to wait, that he needed his tongue, but then one of the Escalades was in front of him, agents leaning against the hood with sidearms out, firing gunshots he could barely hear, aiming in different directions—it wasn’t just a bomb, it was an assault—and then the agents hurled him in the open door of the SUV where he collided with someone, the president, both of them landing in a tangle, the door slamming shut, someone thumping on it, and before either he or Ramirez could move, the driver jammed on the gas and the truck lurched, tossing them against the backseat, more gunfire, he could hear it more clearly now, fast pop-pop-pops, then a shivering crunch and they were flung again, the Escalade clipping something, out the window an inferno, the limousine, and then a burst of speed as the driver cleared it.

Leahy looked down, realized he was on top of the president. He started to move, then caught himself and shielded her body with his, lying on her like a lover, their faces inches apart, her eyes dilated and cheek torn. He could smell smoke and her perfume as his mouth filled with blood and the truck gained speed and the driver said something he couldn’t hear through the hum in his ears and the thought that kept repeating: a voice in his head saying, over and over, that this was on him.