The President Is Missing(24)

Not her. What I see in her eyes, behind the impenetrable wall of her face, is pure loathing. Hatred of me, this office, everything it stands for.

But she’s tense, too, on alert—wondering if someone will jump her, handcuff her, throw a hood over her head.

She fits the physical description I received. She gave the name at the gate that we expected. It’s her. But I have to confirm, regardless.

“Say the words,” I tell her.

She raises her eyebrows. She can’t be surprised.

“Say it.”

She rolls her eyes.

“‘Dark Ages,’” she says, curling her r’s, as if the words were poison on her tongue. Her accent is heavily eastern European.

“How do you know those words?”

She shakes her head, clucks her tongue. There will be no answer to my question.

“Your…Secret Service…does not like me,” she says. Doze not like me.

“You were setting off the metal detectors.”

“I do that…always. The…what is your word? The bomb frag—the—”

“Shrapnel,” I say. “Parts of a bomb. From an explosion.”

“This, yes,” she says, tapping her forehead. “They told me that two…centimeters to the right…and I would not have woken up.”

She curls a thumb into the belt loop of her jeans. There is defiance in her eyes, a challenge.

“Would you like to know…what I did to deserve it?”

I’m going to guess it had something to do with some military strike ordered by an American president—maybe me—in some faraway land. But I know next to nothing about this woman. I don’t know her real name or where she’s from. I don’t know her motivation or her plan. After first making contact with me—indirectly—four days ago, on Monday, she fell off the map, and despite my considerable efforts to learn more about her, I failed. I don’t know anything about her for certain.

But I am reasonably sure that this young woman holds the fate of the free world in her hands.

“I was walking my…cousin…to mass when the missile hit,” she says.

I shove my hands in my pockets. “You’re safe here,” I say.

Her eyes drift up and away, enlarging them, a beautiful copper color. It makes her look even younger. Less of the hardened image she’s trying to project and more the scared kid she must be, underneath it all.

She should be scared. I hope she’s scared. I sure as hell am, but I’m not going to show it any more than she will.

“No,” she says. “I do not think.” I donut zink.

“I promise.”

She blinks her eyes heavily, looks away with disdain. “The American president promises.” She reaches into the back pocket of her jeans and produces an envelope, tattered and folded in half. She straightens it and places it on the table next to the couch.

“My partner does not know what I know,” she says. “Only I do. I did not write it down.” She taps the right side of her head. “It is in here only.”

Her secret, she means. She didn’t put it on a computer we could hack or in an e-mail we could intercept. She is storing it in one place only, a place that not even our sophisticated technology can penetrate—her mind.

“And I do not know what my partner knows,” she says.

Right. She has separated herself from her partner. Each of them, she is telling me, holds part of the puzzle. Each of them is indispensable.

“I need both of you,” I say. “I understand. Your message on Monday was clear about that.”

“And you will be alone tonight,” she says.

“Yes. Your message was clear on that, too.”

She nods, as if we have settled something.

“How do you know ‘Dark Ages’?” I ask again.

Her eyes turn down. From the table by the couch, she picks up a photograph of my daughter and me walking from Marine One toward the White House.

“I remember the first time I saw a helicopter,” she says. “I was a young girl. It was on the television. There was a hotel in Dubai that was opening. The Mari-Poseidon, it was called. This…majestic hotel on the waters of the Persian Gulf. It had a heli—a heli…pad?”

“A helipad, yes,” I say. “A rooftop landing for helicopters.”

“This, yes. The helicopter landed on the roof of this hotel. I remember thinking that if people could fly, they could do…anything.”

I’m not sure why she’s telling me about Dubai hotels or helicopters. Maybe it’s nothing more than nervous chatter.

I approach her. She turns, puts down the photo, and steels herself.

“If I do not leave here,” she says, “you will never see my partner. You will have no way to stop this.”

I lift the envelope from the table. It is nearly weightless, flimsy. I can see a trace of color through the paper. The Secret Service would have inspected it, checked it for any suspicious residue and the like.

She steps back, still wary, still waiting for government agents to burst through the door and whisk her away to some Guantánamo Bay–style interrogation room. If I thought that would work, I’d do it in a heartbeat. But she has set this up so that it wouldn’t. This young woman has managed to do something that very few people could pull off.