“Carrie.”
“Mr. President, this was calculated. She’s no rookie. She knew she was going to be asked the question. She had that response—”
“Carrie! I get it, okay? She did it on purpose. She stabbed me in the back. She’s distancing herself from me. I don’t care! Do you hear me? I. Don’t. Care!”
“We have to respond. It’s a problem.”
“There’s only one problem right now, Carrie. Have you heard? It’s the one that might bring our country to its knees any minute now. We have”—I look at my watch; it’s just past 2:00 p.m.—“about ten hours before ‘Saturday in America’ comes to an end, and any time between now and then, our country could go up in flames. So as much as I appreciate your loyalty, keep your eye on the prize. Got it?”
Carolyn bows her head, chastened. “Yes, sir, I apologize. And I’m sorry I let her leave the operations center. She refused to listen. I couldn’t very well order Secret Service to detain her.”
I breathe out, try to calm down. “That’s on her, not you.”
Politics aside, is Kathy’s disloyalty significant? Kathy is, after all, one of the six people I haven’t ruled out of suspicion.
If I’d died last night, she’d be president right now.
“Carrie, get hold of her,” I say. “Tell her I want her back in the operations center in the subbasement. Tell her that when she gets there, I’ll call her.”
Chapter
66
Bach positions herself on the seacraft, gripping the arms, much as a child would hold a kickboard when learning to swim. Except those kickboards aren’t propelled by twin jet thrusters.
She pushes the green button on the left arm and aims the vehicle downward, plunging below the surface of the lake until she evens out at thirty feet below the surface. She pushes the button to accelerate the thrusters until she’s moving at ten kilometers per hour through the murky water. She has a fair distance to travel. She is at the eastern end of this huge body of water.
“Boat to your north,” says the voice in her earbud. “Veer south. Left. Veer left.”
She sees the boat on the surface of the water, but not before her team did, with their GPS and radar capabilities on the boat.
She veers left, thrusting through the foggy green water, the weeds and fish. The GPS on her console shows her the destination with a blinking green dot, and the number below ticks off her distance.
1800 m…
1500 m…
“Water skier from the right. Hold. Hold.”
She sees the boat above her, to her right, its engine chopping at the water, followed by the skimming of the water by the skier.
She doesn’t stop. She’s well below them. She guns the watercraft and speeds past them, beneath them.
She’ll have to get herself one of these toys.
1100 m…
She slows the watercraft. The lake bottoms out at fifty meters at its deepest, but as she gets close to shore, the land rises up sharply to the water, and the last thing she needs is to slam into the earth.
“Hold. Hold. Stay down. Stay down. Sentry. Sentry.”
She comes to an abrupt halt nine hundred meters from the shore and doesn’t move in the water, nearly losing her grip on the watercraft, allowing herself to drift lower in the lake. A member of the security detail—US Secret Service or the Germans or Israelis—must be in the woods near the shore, looking around.
There can’t be very many of them patrolling the woods. It would require hundreds of people to secure more than a thousand acres of heavy woods, and their security details are light.
Last night—of course the agents walked the entire acreage, swept it thoroughly, before the president arrived.
But now they can’t afford to patrol the woods. Most of the security will be around or inside the cabin, with a few at the dock and a few in the backyard, where the woods end.
“All clear,” the voice finally says.
She gives it another minute for good measure, then proceeds onward. When she’s three hundred meters from shore, she kills the engine entirely. She rides the momentum of this fun little toy upward until she’s coasting on top of the water, much like someone riding a surfboard to shore. She stays low—as low as she can with an air tank, her rifle, and a bag tied to her back—until she beaches on the small clip of sand.
She removes the scuba mask and breathes fresh air. She glances around and sees nobody. This part of the lake bends around, so that she is entirely out of the sight line of anyone by the dock. The Secret Service cannot possibly see her.
She climbs up onto the land and finds the spot where she is to hide the watercraft and scuba gear. She does so quickly, stripping off the gear and throwing on clean, dry fatigues from her bag. She towel-dries her hair and makes sure her face and neck are free of any moisture before she applies the camouflage paint.
She uncases her rifle and slings it over her shoulder. Checks her sidearm.
She is ready to do this now. Alone, as she prefers it, as she’s always been.
Chapter
67
The woods provide Bach excellent cover. The tall, lush canopy trees block most of the sunlight, which renders visibility difficult for two reasons—the darkness itself and the intermittent strips of sunlight penetrating the canopy, which play tricks on the eyes. It’s hard to see much of anything in here.
She finds herself back in the Trebevic mountainside, on the run, in hiding, after it was over, after she turned the tables on the sniper, Ranko, the redheaded Serbian soldier who, for pity or sex or both, had taught her how to fire a rifle.
“Here, again, you’re using your arms too much!” Ranko said as they sat up in the bombed-out nightclub that served as a sniper’s hideaway in the mountains. “I do not understand you, girl. One day you can shoot a bottle of beer off a tree stump from a hundred meters away, and today your mechanics are those of a beginner? Let me show you once more.” Taking the gun from her, settling into the perch. “Hold steady, like this,” he said, his last words before she stuck the kitchen knife into his neck.
Taking his rifle, on which she was now well trained, to the open window of the nightclub overlooking Sarajevo, aiming down at Ranko’s comrades, the patrolling Serbian soldiers who had beaten her father to death and carved a cross in his chest, all for the crime of being Muslim. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop, firing the rifle in rapid succession, picking them off one after the other after the other, having to lead the last one as he dropped his weapon and sprinted toward the trees.
She hid in the mountains for more than a week afterward, hungry and thirsty and cold, moving about constantly, afraid to stay in the same spot, as they hunted for the young girl who killed six Serbian soldiers, one of them up close and the others from a hundred meters away.
With the pack and rifle on her back, she moves forward gingerly; with each step, she plants her foot before shifting weight onto it. To her right, something jumps, and her heart skips a beat as she reaches for her sidearm. Some little animal, a rabbit or squirrel, gone before she can make it out. She waits for the adrenaline to drain.
“Two kilometers due north,” they tell her in her earbud.
She continues her gentle, quiet movements forward. Her instinct is to move quickly to her spot, but discipline is essential. She doesn’t know these woods. She never scouted the location, as she’d normally prefer. The ground is dark and uneven, obscured by the brush and lack of light, full of tree roots and branches and who knows what else.
Foot forward, weight forward, stop and listen. Foot forward, weight forward, stop and listen. Foot forward, weight for—
Movement.
Up ahead, appearing from around a tree.
The animal is no bigger than a large dog, with thick salt-and-pepper fur, tall ears perked at attention, a long snout, and beady black eyes that focus on her.
There aren’t supposed to be any wolves around here. A coyote? Must be.
A coyote that is standing between her and her destination.