The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(55)
“Come on Teddie. Don’t waste my time. Bugs?”
“Don, I’m—”
She never got the chance to try to defend herself, which was good, because she was pretty sure she was going to say something lame. Instead, they were both interrupted by Rennie LaClair yelling at them across the office.
She followed Don over to the bank of monitors by Rennie’s desk.
“Is that Delhi?”
Rennie didn’t look at either her or Don. “Yep. NBC just put it up. They had a crew on the ground shooting B-roll, but now they’ve got a satellite linkup. Running it live. It’s complete f*cking pandemonium on the ground there, and they don’t have an actual reporter working, just a cameraman, but man. Look at this shit.”
It didn’t matter that Teddie wasn’t able to recognize the New Delhi Railway Station. What mattered was that the camera crew was shooting from some sort of elevation. Maybe on top of a nearby building. And what mattered was that there was enough of an open expanse that they could capture the panic. People were running everywhere. No. Not running. Fleeing. They were fleeing. For obvious reasons, none of the televisions had their sound on, but it wouldn’t have made anything more clear. The headline read Panic in Delhi—Possible Terrorism? Whoever was running the show at NBC was thinking of the Mumbai attacks in 2008.
They had it wrong. Teddie knew that immediately. She knew it even before the camera zoomed in on one of the building entrances.
A black thread.
The thread turned into a ribbon.
A river.
A flood.
The White House
Manny didn’t usually run. He walked with purpose, and he was often walking and talking, but running inside the White House wasn’t normally part of the equation. Normally. But today was different.
If it had been anybody else going full sprint toward the Oval Office, he would have been, at the very least, tackled and pinned to the ground, but the agents on duty knew Manny, and they were alarmed by his alarm. He was already sweating and out of breath, a cell phone in each hand and trying to talk on both at the same time. He broke off his conversations to tell the agents and Steph’s bodywoman—political jargon for her personal assistant—to clear the room, but Steph barely glanced at Manny.
The office was crowded. Two congressmen with seven or eight high-rolling donors, a young man who looked familiar to Manny, maybe an actor or singer, and several overwhelmed-looking parents chaperoning a quartet of Girl Scouts in full uniform. Steph, as always, under control, finished the grip and grin, leaning over and putting her arms around the Girl Scouts, grinning on cue for the poof of the camera flash. And then a quick thank-you, the full smile, and stepping back so the handlers could get everybody out. Thirty seconds from the time he entered the room. The woman was a pro. Manny hadn’t even caught his breath yet when the office was empty.
As soon as the doors were closed, Steph’s smile dropped. “The Chinese?”
“No. India. Alex and Ben should be here any minute. Billy’s on his way.” Both of his cell phones started ringing at the same time, but he let them go.
“India? Shit. Has Pakistan retaliated?”
Manny looked at her for a second, confused, and then shook his head. It was an obvious conclusion for Stephanie. India and Pakistan had been at war or on the verge since the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947. One of those brilliant British ideas, the partition of India. There hadn’t been an outright conflict in a while, but both states were nuclear, and some years the governments were more stable than others. Right now, neither country was exactly led by a group of levelheaded people. But they had a playbook for hostilities between India and Pakistan. Scenarios sketched out by analysts. Backup plans and contingencies and coordinated lines of communication. Guns and bombs and jets and escalation were all things they had planned for. But they hadn’t planned for this.
“No. Not Pakistan. Think China.”
“China?”
“The f*cking spiders.”
“Okay,” she said. “How bad is it?” No hesitation. No disbelief. Just a need for information.
That was one of the things Manny liked about Steph, one of the reasons he’d pushed her to go for it. Because, despite all his political manipulation, despite his thinking of politics as a game, despite his ability to read a poll and spin a message, despite the way he could work a phone and twist arms and his willingness to ruin somebody’s life if they didn’t deliver a vote, he was still a bit of a romantic. A realist, but a romantic one. And he believed in the idea of the president of the United States of America. He believed the president had to be the one to step up, that most of the time it didn’t matter who was sitting in the hot seat, but those few times, those once-in-a-generation moments, it mattered, and with Steph sitting in the chair, with Steph’s finger on the button, he knew she’d make the right decision. She had that knack of filtering out the noise, of letting go of distractions and cutting to the core, and as soon as she heard him say “spiders” she did the math. China. Nukes. Henderson’s body in Minnesota. And now India. She wasn’t going to waste her time thinking that it couldn’t be possible, and she wasn’t going to dither.
Something wicked this way comes, Manny thought. Any time for hesitation was gone.
“Manny, how bad?” she asked again.