The President Is Missing(97)

I take a breath. “So that’s it,” I say. “You can choose freedom, and probably riches, with a complete cover-up of what you’ve done. Or you can be remembered as the Ethel and Julius Rosenberg or the Robert Hanssen of this generation. This is the easiest decision you’ll ever have to make.

“This offer expires in thirty minutes or until the virus goes off, whichever is sooner,” I say. “Make a good decision.”

I terminate the connection and walk out of the room.





Chapter

90



I stand in the kitchen looking out over the backyard, the woods. The light is quickly dimming outside. It’s an hour, give or take, until sunset, and the sun has fallen behind the trees. “Saturday in America” has only five hours remaining.

And it’s been eleven minutes and thirty seconds since I issued my offer to the circle of six.

Noya Baram walks up beside me. Takes my hand, wraps her bony, delicate fingers in mine.

“I wanted to give my country a new spirit,” I say. “I wanted to make us closer. I wanted us to feel like we were all in this together. Or at least get us moving in that direction. I thought I could. I really thought I could do that.”

“You still can,” she says.

“I’ll be lucky if I can keep us alive,” I say. “And keep us from killing each other over a loaf of bread or a gallon of gas.”

Our nation will survive this. I do believe that. But we will be set so far back. We will suffer so much in the process.

“What haven’t I done, Noya?” I ask. “What am I not doing that I should be doing?”

She exhales an elaborate sigh. “Are you preparing to mobilize all active and reserve forces if necessary to preserve order?”

“Yes.”

“Have you secured the leadership of the other two branches of government?”

“Yes.”

“Are you preparing emergency measures to stabilize the markets?”

“Already drafted,” I say. “What I mean, Noya, is what am I not doing to stop this?”

“Ah. What do you do when you know an enemy is coming and you can’t stop it?” She turns to me. “There are many world leaders in history who would have liked to know the answer to that question.”

“Count me as one of them.”

She turns and looks at me. “What did you do in Iraq when your plane was shot down?”

A helicopter, actually—a Black Hawk on a search-and-rescue mission for a downed F-16 pilot near Basra. The time between the Iraqi SAM obliterating our tail section and the bird spiraling to the ground couldn’t have been more than five or ten seconds.

I shrug. “I just prayed for myself and my team and told myself I wouldn’t give up any information.”

That’s my standard line. Only Rachel and Danny know the truth.

I’d somehow been tossed from the rapidly descending aircraft. To this day it’s a blur of spinning, stomach-churning motion, the smoke and smell of aircraft fuel gagging me. Then the desert sand rose up to absorb much of my contorted hard landing but knocked the wind from me nonetheless.

Sand in my eyes, sand in my mouth. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t see. But I could hear. I could hear the animated shouts of the Republican Guard approaching, calling out to one another in their native tongue, their voices growing closer.

My rifle was nowhere in sight. I tried to make my right arm work. I tried to roll over. But I couldn’t reach it. My sidearm was pinned underneath my body.

I couldn’t move at all. My collarbone was shattered, my shoulder badly dislocated, my arm like an appendage broken off a toy doll under the weight of my body.

So the next best thing I could do—the only thing I could do, helpless as I was—was lie perfectly still and hope that when the Iraqis arrived to claim their prize, they’d think I was already—

Wait.

I grab Noya’s arm. She jumps in surprise.

Without another word to her, I rush down the stairs to the war room. Casey almost jumps out of her chair when she sees me, the look on my face.

“What?” she asks.

“We can’t kill this thing,” I say. “And we can’t clean up its damage afterward.”

“Right…”

“What if we tricked it?” I ask.

“Tricked it—”

“You said when you delete files, they become inactive, right?”

“Yes.”

“And the virus only overwrites active files, right? That’s what you said.”

“Yes. So…”

“So?” I rush over to Casey, grab her by the shoulders.

“What if we play dead?” I say.





Chapter

91



Play dead,” says Casey, repeating my words. “We destroy the data before the virus can destroy it?”

“Well—I’m going by what you told me,” I say. “You said when files are deleted, they aren’t really deleted. They’re just marked as deleted. They don’t disappear forever, but they become inactive.”

She nods.

“And you told me the virus only overwrites active files,” I continue. “So it won’t overwrite inactive, marked-as-deleted files.”