I put my arm over his chair, as if we are old friends or family.
“Here’s how this is going to work,” I say. “You’re going to tell me how you know those words. And you’re going to tell me whatever else you came here to say. And then I’m going to decide what to do. If you and I can work together—if I’m satisfied with our conversation—then this could turn out very well for you, Augie.”
I give that a moment to sink in, the light at the end of the tunnel for him. There has to be one in any negotiation.
“But if I’m not satisfied,” I continue, “I’ll do whatever is necessary to you, to your girlfriend, to anyone else you care about in this world, to protect my country. There’s nothing I can’t do. There’s nothing I won’t do.”
His mouth curls into a snarl. There is hatred in that expression, no doubt, hatred of me and everything I represent. But he’s scared, too. He’s dealt with me thus far from a distance, using his partner to contact my daughter overseas, using his technology remotely, but now he’s here, in person, with the president of the United States. He’s passed the point of no return.
He leans forward, elbows on knees, an attempt to move away from me. Good. He’s rattled.
“You would like to know how I have come upon ‘Dark Ages,’” he says, his voice less certain, shaky. “You would also like to know why the electricity in the White House continues to…falter?”
I don’t respond to that outwardly. He’s saying he’s responsible for the flickering of the lights in the White House. A bluff? I try to remember if Nina saw them flicker while she was there.
“Is annoying, one would think,” he says. “Engaging in important matters of national security and economic policy and political…machinations in your Oval Office while the lights blink on and off as if you live in a shack in a third-world country.”
He draws a deep breath. “Your technicians have no idea why, do they? Of course they do not.” The confidence in his voice is restored.
“You have two minutes, kid. Starting now. If you don’t talk to me, you will talk to people who work for me who will not be as friendly.”
He shakes his head, though it’s hard to tell whom he’s trying to convince, me or himself. “No, you came alone,” he says, hope in his voice, not conviction.
“Did I?”
The crowd roars at the sound of a bat hitting a ball, the people around us getting to their feet and cheering, then fading out as the long fly ball veers foul. Augie does not move, still leaning forward, a hard look on his face as he stares into the back of the seat in front of him.
“One minute, thirty seconds,” I say.
In the game, the batter takes a called third strike, a slider that paints the corner, and the crowd hoots and hollers its reaction.
I check my watch. “One minute,” I say. “And then your life is over.”
Augie leans back to face me again. I keep my eyes on the field, don’t accord him the respect of looking in his direction.
But eventually I turn to him, as if I’m now ready to hear what he has to say. His face is wearing a different expression now, intense and cold.
He’s holding a handgun in his lap, trained on me.
“My life is over?” he asks.
Chapter
24
I focus on Augie, not the gun.
He has it low in his lap, safe from detection by other ticket holders. I understand now why the seats on either side of us are empty, as are the four seats behind and in front of us. Augie bought them all to give us a semblance of privacy.
From its boxy shape I can see it’s a Glock, a gun I’ve never fired but a 9mm all the same, capable of firing a bullet into me at close range.
Once upon a time, I might have stood a chance of disarming him without suffering a fatal shot. But the Rangers was a long time ago. I’m fifty years old and rusty.
It’s not, by any means, the first time I’ve had a gun pointed at me. When I was a prisoner of war, an Iraqi prison guard put a pistol to my head every day and pulled the trigger.
But this is the first time in a long time, and it’s my first time as president.
Through the pounding of my pulse, I think it through: he could already have pulled the trigger if his plan was to kill me. He didn’t have to wait until I turned to look at him. He wanted me to see the gun. He wanted to alter the dynamic.
I hope I’m right about that. He doesn’t look like someone with a lot of experience in handling a firearm. I’m a nervous twitch away from a bullet in the ribs.
“You came here for a reason,” I say. “So put that gun away and tell me what it is.”
His lips purse. “Perhaps I feel safer this way.”
I lean forward, lowering my voice. “That gun makes you less safe. It makes my people nervous. It makes them want to put a bullet through your head right now, while you’re sitting there in your seat.”
He blinks hard in response, his eyes moving about, trying to remain in control. The notion that someone is training a high-powered rifle on you can be unsettling on the nerves.
“You can’t see them, Augie. But believe me, they can see you.”
There is risk in what I’m doing. It might not be the wisest move to scare the hell out of a man with his finger on the trigger of a gun pointed at you. But I need him to put that gun away. And I will continue to make him believe that he is not dealing with one man but with a country—one with overwhelming force, shock-and-awe capabilities, and resources beyond his comprehension.
“Nobody wants to hurt you, Augie,” I say. “But if you pull that trigger, you’ll be dead in two seconds.”
“No,” he says. “You came…” His voice fades out.
“What, I came alone? You don’t really believe that. You’re too smart to believe that. So put the gun away and tell me why I’m here. Otherwise I walk.”
The gun moves in his lap. His eyes narrow again. “If you walk away,” he says, “you will not be able to stop what is going to happen.”
“And you’ll never get what you want from me, whatever that is.”
He thinks about that. It’s the smart thing for him to do, all things considered, but he wants it to be his idea, not mine. Finally he nods and hikes up his pants leg, holstering the gun.
I release the breath I’ve been holding.
“How the hell did you get that gun past the metal detectors?”
He slides down his pants leg. He looks as relieved as I am.
“A rudimentary machine,” he says, “knows only what it is told to know. It has no independent thought. If it is told it sees nothing, then it sees nothing. If it is told to close its eyes, it closes its eyes. Machines do not ask why.”
I think back to the metal detector as I went through it. There was no X-ray, as there is at an airport. It was just a doorway, and it either beeped or didn’t beep as you passed through it, as the security guard stood by, waiting for an audible signal.
He jammed it somehow. He disabled it while he passed through.
He hacked into the electrical system at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
He downed a helicopter in Dubai.
And he knew “Dark Ages.”
“Here I am, Augie,” I say. “You got your meeting. Tell me how you know ‘Dark Ages.’”
His eyebrows rise. He almost smiles. Obtaining that code word is quite an achievement, and he knows it.
“Did you hack in somehow?” I ask. “Or…”
Now he does smile. “It is the ‘or’ that concerns you. It concerns you so much that you cannot bring yourself to say the words.”
I don’t argue the point. He’s right.
“Because if I was not able to obtain this remotely,” he says, “there is only one other way I could have obtained it. And you know what this means.”
If Augie didn’t learn “Dark Ages” through a hack—and it’s hard to see how he could have—then he got it from a human being, and the list of human beings with access to “Dark Ages” is very, very small.
“It is the reason you agreed to meet me,” he says. “You clearly understand the…significance.”
I nod. “It means there’s a traitor in the White House,” I say.
Chapter
25