Blackmail Earth

Chapter 23





Jenna sat in the front passenger seat of Forensia’s rattly, rusty Subaru wagon with the rifle held tightly in her hands. Forensia had gladly surrendered the driving duties to Dafoe; his truck, with a single bench seat, could never have held the four of them. Riding shotgun, Jenna constantly searched their surroundings as Dafoe drove cautiously down a series of country roads before merging onto the New York State Thruway.

Forensia and Sang-mi huddled in the backseat and kept their heads down. They might not have been sure whether the drive south was safer than trying to hide in town, but they’d cast their lot with Jenna and Dafoe, and there was no looking back—except to check if they were being followed.

Dry lightning cleaved the night sky to the west, an atmospheric sideshow that did little to ease the tension in the car, though the threat paled compared to the real danger of a highway shootout. But the trip was unavoidable if they were to get Jenna to the set of The Morning Show early on election day. She held the rifle firmly and her finger never strayed far from the trigger.

Every pair of headlights that overtook the old Subaru felt like a mortal threat, and when a large vehicle raced onto the highway behind them just after they passed a rest area, Jenna could feel everyone stiffen with dread. Dafoe used the mirrors to track the car’s rapid approach. Forensia turned around, gasping, “It’s a big black SUV,” repeating the very words she’d used to describe the black Expedition that she’d first spotted idling by Dafoe’s driveway.

But this three-ton behemoth sprinted by so fast that it almost blew their doors off. It had to be doing a hundred and twenty, hardly the low-key profile of a vehicle packed with foreign assassins scouring the thruway for three Americans and the daughter of a North Korean defector.

“Would it bother you if I put on some news?” Jenna asked Dafoe.

“That’s fine. Go for it.”

“I’m hoping to hear a bulletin that a car full of Asians has just been apprehended.”

No such news, but it didn’t take long before they heard a headline about the tanker takeover, followed by a reporter’s breathless warning about how a world catastrophe could be unleashed “at any second” in the Maldives.

From breathy to boozy—Rick Birk’s voice filled the car: “Live from the heart of the hoth-stidge taking over on the than-ker Dick Cheney.”

Birk sounded drunk to Jenna, though she could hardly imagine that he’d scrounged cocktails from gun-wielding jihadists. Maybe he was exhausted, or frightened half to death. Still, he was definitely slurring his words: “Ther-ists demanding fast, fast action. You hear me? Ther-ists want it fast.” Then she heard a loud bang, like he’d pounded a table for emphasis.

Christ, he sounds belligerent. Maybe he is wasted.

“How well do you know that guy?” Dafoe asked, keeping his eyes on the road, the rearview, and everywhere else at once, it seemed.

“Not very. He chewed me out the only time I ever talked to him. It was so offensive that I hung up on him. Then he tried to apologize, but I never took his calls. After that, he got taken ‘hoth-stidge.’” She giggled, couldn’t help herself. “I shouldn’t be joking about an old guy who’s had three fingers chopped off,” although it did feel good, amid all the worry, to experience a few seconds of relief, “but he’s a real creep. I haven’t met anyone who likes him.”

Dafoe listened closely to the radio. “Maybe he’s drinking himself to death. He sounds really plastered. If he’s found some booze, he’ll be lucky if they don’t chop off his head next.”

* * *

Birk could sniff out a purebred teetotaler in less time than it took him to knock back a Manhattan and suck down the damn cherry, and Suicide Sam hadn’t ever had a drink. I want his liver, Birk thought, when the time comes.

Raggedy Ass had nodded off, so Birk had tried several times to get Suicide Sam to wrap some tape around the captain’s mouth to shut … him … the … f*ck … up, but this jihadist either didn’t understand English or didn’t care.

For chrissakes, that weasel’s still whining. It’s only three f*cking fingers, p-ssy. I should be the one whining, putting up with your bullshit. Your goddamn fingers stink like gefilte fish, and I’m the one stuck with them on my shirt? I’ll never get these goddamn stains out. We get out of this jam and you’re getting the cleaning bill, buddy.

Birk felt that he had serious grounds to feel so aggrieved. Weasel mouth had tried to bite him—that’s right, bite him—when Birk stepped over his head on the way to the facilities. That did it. Birk whipped out the old avenger and tried to pee on him—give the sourpuss a serious dose of humiliation—before Raggedy Ass pushed him toward the head.

“F*cker needs a muzzle,” Birk said to the cracker jihadist after he’d drained the lizard.

“Tha’s lack the pot callin’ the ol’ kettle black,” Raggedy Ass drawled, treating Birk to more of his twisted Southern tongue.

Ye gods, get me away from these people. Birk hadn’t been able to stomach crackers in the States—Why should I, of all people, have to suffer fools gladly?—and he’d seen no evidence that transplanting them to Muhammad’s sacred soil had done anything to improve the bizarre species festering on the murky side of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Birk eyed the captain, knowing that he should be grateful that the f*cker hadn’t bled to death. Dying, Birk had seen, did nasty things to fingers—curled them up like croissants. Made them goddamn near as crusty, too. You learn all kinds of shit as a reporter. That could get Raggedy Ass searching for a new supplier of fingers. Even seeing double, Birk couldn’t come up with any potential donors but Suicide Sam and himself. And Sam over there, with his f*cking bomb, had a little more clout—in every sense of the word—than Birk.

Speaking of Sam, the bottle of Johnnie Walker was damn near empty, so Birk waved it around to give him a heads-up that the talent needed a new one. But he did it off camera. Least he was pretty sure he’d done it off camera. Maybe not. Who gives a flying turd? Look at me. Birk waved the bottle at Sam again and mouthed, “Go get a goddamn refill, a*shole.”

Sam wasn’t moving. Birk stared into the tiny computer camera, glanced at Raggedy Ass snoring contentedly on the other side of the wheelhouse, and covered the lens with his bandaged hand.

“Get me another one,” he growled at Suicide Sam, “now.”

Birk swallowed the last of Johnnie Walker’s best and threw the bottle at Sam, underhanded. Easy catch, but instead of grabbing the goddamn thing and doing what he was told, Sam jumped aside like it was a bomb. The bottle crashed to the deck and shattered. When the jihadist looked up from the broken glass, Birk made the “hurry-hurry” motion with his unbandaged hand, palm up, fingers waving. A little impatient, perhaps, but given the Job-like challenges Birk was facing, he felt that he’d offered the cretin a pretty forgiving gesture. But goddamn, the “hurry-hurry” didn’t move Sam a wee bit, so Birk flipped him off. And when that didn’t do the trick, he gave him one more universally understood hand signal: He slid his index finger across his throat.

It never occurred to Birk that threatening to murder a suicide bomber was among the world’s most ill-advised acts. And now Raggedy Ass was arising, no doubt shaken from his slumber by the bottle breaking. He glared at Birk.

But Suicide Sam didn’t spare the aged eminence so much as a glance, returning his eyes to the Shopping Channel and a particularly alluring pair of zirconium earrings.

* * *

It was almost 5:00 A.M. and still dark when the dilapidated Subaru rattled up to the elegant entrance of the Shaughn Hotel on the city’s West Side, which felt marginally safer to Jenna than returning to her apartment. Seeing the dilapidated car, the hotel’s doorman started to wave them on—then recognized Jenna climbing out of the front seat. He hurried to open her door. She left the rifle behind.

“We’re keeping the keys and leaving the car right there where you can keep an eye on it,” Jenna said to the doorman. Nicci would be showing up in an hour and there wasn’t a moment to spare.

He shook his head. “Maybe for a few minutes, but no longer. The owner”—real estate magnate Daniel Straub, who was reputed to have pretensions so grand that they trumped Trump’s—“is not going to want this thing out here at all.”

Jenna strode past him, stuffing a Benjamin into his neatly pressed navy blue jacket. “Take care of that car, and I’ll take care of you again on my way out.”

After checking into a well-appointed suite, Dafoe went to work on his laptop. She’d never seen him in hacker mode. His fingers flew over the keyboard so fast that he looked like a maestro on a baby grand, and she realized that he must have had a ton of RAM because she’d never seen a laptop with that much speed.

Jenna rushed into the bathroom, spending the next forty-five minutes showering and trying to make herself look professional enough that network security wouldn’t bar her from the building.

When she stepped back into the main room, she saw Nicci arriving. Dafoe corralled the weather producer to review a long list of instructions he’d prepared for her. Jenna’s phone rang, but she ignored it; let voice mail pick up. She sat next to Sang-mi on the couch.

After carefully going over the list, Dafoe told Nicci, “If you don’t hear from us after The Morning Show has been on for fifteen minutes, or you don’t see Jenna on the air talking about those rockets, then do everything on this page just the way you see it. This is critical.”

“Don’t worry about her,” Jenna said, “she’ll have us covered.”

“What am I going to be hacking into?” Nicci asked.

“Let’s just say that it’s a widely viewed venue,” Dafoe said. “But none of this will be traceable to you. And remember, this is a backup plan. You should do it only if Jenna doesn’t make it onto the show.”

“Right,” Nicci said. “I understand. Now who might I be hacking?”

“Tell her,” Jenna said. “She has a right to know.”

“The White House Web site,” Dafoe said.

“Whoa.” Nicci smiled. “We’re really making history here.”

“I wish we didn’t have to do this,” Dafoe gave his computer a nod, “but if we do, you’re right, this one’s going to get remembered.”

Minutes later, Jenna and Dafoe stepped onto the sidewalk. The Subaru was missing. “Where is it?” she asked the doorman.

“I couldn’t stop the tow company. They’ve got a contract to tow away anything that looks ‘unfit.’ I tried to tell you. I even called up there but all I got was the message center. Here, this is their card. This is where they’re taking it.”

Jenna grabbed the business card and swore. Their weapons were on the way to a locked car compound in the Bronx.

“I’m really sorry,” the doorman said.

“Jesus Christ, Dafoe. Look.” Jenna glanced pointedly down the street. At a well-lit intersection three blocks away, a big black SUV loomed from behind a shiny silver Smart car.

“Cab?” Jenna cried out.

The doorman bolted to the street and blew his whistle loudly, as if to redeem himself.

A yellow cab, waiting at a nearby taxi stand, raced right up. Jenna and Dafoe piled in. She shouted out the address of The Morning Show’s studio, looked back, and saw the SUV a half block behind them, close enough to see that it had a dented grill.

She shoved a one hundred dollar bill into the tiny money tray in the Plexiglas shield that separated them from the driver, and shouted, “There’s two more of those if you don’t stop for anything.”

“I take you,” he said in deeply accented English, roaring away so fast that Jenna was slammed back into her seat.

“They’re almost on top of us,” Dafoe said.

Not quite: The Expedition was boxed in by the Smart car and an ancient, pale green Volkswagen Beetle. The SUV looked like Goliath as it rode the bumper of the Smart car. The Bug’s bleary-eyed driver appeared oblivious to the aggressive tactics in the lane just to his left.

The cabbie, Korfa Waabberi Samatar, according to his prominently displayed license, raced down the streets like he’d been born in the Big Apple and knew its every rut and pothole, putting some distance between his vehicle and the boxed-in Expedition.

“Where are you from?” Jenna yelled.

“Mogadishu.” Somalia. That explained his composure when, in the next few seconds, the Expedition grew wildly reckless.

First, the SUV’s horn sounded a long, continuous blast. Then the big, black beast edged up against the Beetle, visibly startling the sleepy driver before ramming his fragile-looking car. The old Bug—a notoriously unstable model under the best of circumstances—flipped and rolled twice, narrowly missed by another hard-charging taxi two lanes over.

“Holy shit,” Jenna whispered. She was beginning to feel like she’d landed in the middle of her own Black Hawk Down.

Seconds later, as the Expedition raced out from behind the diminutive Smart car, the beret-wearing sport at the wheel changed lanes. Perhaps Monsieur Smart car thought he was doing the tailgater a favor, but in a swift and cruel demonstration that no act of kindness goes unpunished, the Expedition plowed right into him without slowing. The Smart car tumbled like a die from the hand of a crazed gambler. Then a Nissan Stanza plowed into the roof of the Smart car, and both of those battered vehicles were smashed by other early morning drivers, resulting in an eleven-car pileup.

Jenna watched, stunned by the unraveling mayhem.

When the SUV was two car lengths back, a bullet shattered the taxi’s rear window and glanced off the Plexiglas behind Korfa’s gleaming bald head. Jenna and Dafoe dove below the firing line, though bullets ricocheting off the security glass could find them easily.

Jenna inched up, saw the Expedition gaining on them in the left lane.

“They’re trying to kill us,” she shouted to Korfa.

“No shit,” he yelled back.

“Faster,” she screamed.

Korfa shocked her by darting into the left lane. The SUV braked and smacked into a series of parked cars on the driver’s side. A metallic screech filled the air. Jenna looked back to see the SUV rocking wildly on its wheels. The taxi was racing away at eighty-five miles an hour. Nice move, Korfa.

But the Expedition regained its legs quickly and accelerated powerfully. Jenna pulled out her cell. Dafoe stopped her, saying, “If you’re calling 911, there are sirens all around us.”

Squealing sirens—but no cop cars in sight yet. Their assailants were still roaring toward them. It looked like the Expedition was about to ram the cab. Korfa pressed the pedal to the metal and gained half a car length.

Jenna, fingers flying over the phone’s keypad, yelled to Dafoe, “The police should know they’re chasing a bunch of North Korean assassins.” They’ll kill themselves to kill you. Wasn’t that what Sang-mi said?

“Turn left on Forty-ninth,” Jenna shouted to Korfa. “There’s an entrance halfway down on your right.”

The cab slid sideways as the driver braked, whip tailed as he came out of the sudden turn, then shuddered, straightened, and sped down the street. Jenna finished yelling at the 911 operator and peeked out the passenger side window. She saw that Korfa was about to rip past the studio’s entrance. “Stop,” she bellowed.

He slammed on the brakes so hard that her face smacked into the Plexiglas. In her adrenaline rush, Jenna barely felt the impact. She jammed two more Benjamins into the tiny tray.

Dafoe dragged her out of the cab and the two of them sprinted toward the entrance. The cab peeled out as the SUV slid sideways to a stop, smashing its mangled grill into the side of a Town Car. An outraged chauffeur jumped out and started shouting at the men pouring out of the Expedition. They shot him twice in the head.

Jenna screamed, “Gunmen! Trying to kill us!” as she raced past the two stunned security guards who patrolled the entrance.

A second later, she heard another round of gunfire. A lot of it, and much closer. Gulping air, she and Dafoe burst through the metal door and careered off the lobby desk where Joe Santoro and Joe English screened all the building’s visitors from behind bulletproof glass. She shouted “Killers!” at them, but with gunshots now flying at them from fifty feet away, Jenna’s warning proved unnecessary.

The two Joes stepped to the side of the Plexiglas and fired at the darkly clothed men pouring into the lobby.

Jenna heard someone shout and turned to see that Dafoe had been hit in the back. He lay on his side with the wound blooming red.

“Go,” he screamed in agony. “Get out of here.”

Joe Santoro took a bullet to his shoulder that whipped him around so fast that he might have been dropped into a blender. He smashed into the white marble wall next to him and slid down it, leaving behind a long crimson smear. Dafoe rolled onto his back and his muscles went slack.

“Don’t die. Don’t,” Jenna cried.

“Run,” Joe English shouted. Then he ducked, and she caught a glimpse of the assassins gunning him down before she threw open a fire exit door and started lunging up the stairs.

Three flights. They rose like Everest before her. Her first steps were scorched by the certainty that she would be murdered any moment. As she made it to the second floor, the door below banged open, and she heard the sound of at least three, maybe four assassins racing up the stairs.

Gunshots crackled and bullets glanced off the concrete stairwell walls. Using the handrails, Jenna hauled herself up the steps as stony chips exploded inches from her head, almost blinding her with edges hard and sharp as shrapnel. She felt wetness on her face; when she swiped her hand across her cheek, it came away pink, and Jenna knew she was bleeding.

She dragged herself up the last flight of stairs. She wanted to get out of the stairwell, but she didn’t dare use the second-floor exit. There was only minimal security on that level. One flight up—if she could make it—The Morning Show had armed guards. On her way to the city, Jenna had worried that the security detail for the set would keep her away from the cameras; now she hoped those guys would keep her from getting killed.

Her body felt brittle; her arms trembled from the strain of pulling herself up the final flight of stairs. The hours of fear and the long trip were all starting to take their toll. She heard the assassins gaining on her, heavy footfalls that shadowed Jenna with the darkest possibilities. If they gained a few more inches, they’d have a clear shot at her.

She jerked open the door for the third floor, racing through the opening as a shot zinged past her hip with a sizzling sound that fried her nerves. She could tell from her clouded vision that tears were washing down her cheeks, mixing with the streaks of blood from the concrete chips. She bolted directly through another metal door and down the long hallway that was lined with the photographs of network news stars. Gasping, frightened almost senseless, she ran as hard as she could and threw her shoulder into the door on the left that opened to the studio. As she plowed toward the set, she was dimly aware that the theme music for the show had started to play.

Andrea Hanson, who suddenly seemed far more pregnant than Jenna remembered, sat before one of the six precisely positioned studio cameras. She was beaming even more brightly than the lights that lit up her supremely radiant face.

In front of televisions all across the United States, viewers became aware of what was happening at the same moment Andrea did. The commotion drew her attention first, and she turned toward the noise. Viewers saw the shock on the anchor’s face as Jenna Withers burst onto the set. What they didn’t see were the makeup artists and hair stylists, the stage hands, the lighting and audio techs—more than two dozen people in all—gaping at Jenna’s blood-streaked face.

Jenna stumbled in front of the camera that had been trained on Andrea. The startled operator had time to mumble only an incredulous “What?” before the first gunshots tore through the studio and sent everyone scrambling for shelter. The staff of the show had trained for an attack on the set—a dismal sign of the times—but procedures were forgotten in the rocketing terror unleashed by the gun blasts.

Andrea froze. Jenna grabbed her and pushed her toward a hallway. “Get out of here,” Jenna shouted above the boiling madness.

Andrea fled, and Jenna turned back as the security team started firing at the North Koreans. She spotted at least four men in black clothes, and realized that with a full-fledged gun battle underway, she had no hope of getting on the air—and maybe even less chance of surviving if she didn’t get out of there.

She backed away as fast as she could until she bumped into Marv, who was standing by the side of the set. It looked like he’d rushed down to see what was going on and, having found the horrifying answer, had stepped into a freeze frame. She grabbed her boss and pulled him down before he got himself shot.

“You’re going to get killed,” she said. “Leave.” Which was what she intended to do post haste. But as she started crawling toward the hallway, a fusillade chewed up the floor no more than two feet ahead of her.

Rolling hard and fast back toward the set, she ducked behind the giant, paper-thin flat screen that the weather “map” appeared on. The screen extended from the top of the set to about two feet off the floor.

Jenna hunkered behind the corner where the tranquil climes of Southern California often appeared. Marv slipped under the bottom of the screen seconds later and pressed against her. “Get me out of here,” he sputtered. “Get me out of here.”

“Shush,” she whispered.

Their flimsy refuge couldn’t possibly save them; their feet protruded below the map, and Jenna guessed that no one, especially a single-minded assassin, could miss them. But the North Koreans were not the first to discover their hiding place—Geoff Parks was. Kato’s handler was gunned down and fell to the floor not five feet from where Jenna and Marv hid. She spotted horrendous wounds to his arm and leg; blood flowed freely from his thigh, like an artery had been severed. He looked tortured by pain, jaw clenched so hard his teeth had to be cracking. Even so, he caught Jenna’s eye and valiantly tried to push his gun toward her, though he was unable to move it more than an inch.

Where’s Kato? Jenna wondered.

Parks tried to raise himself up with no greater success, then collapsed to the floor with a thud that Jenna heard over the crackling gunfire. She wondered how long the shooting had been going on, but had no idea. Thirty seconds? Three minutes? It seemed an eternity, more so when she saw another security guard taken down from behind by a knife-wielding Korean. Jenna closed her eyes, but not before she saw the blade slice into the man’s throat.

She felt like she was awaiting her own execution, and Marv was still whining next to her. “Shut up,” she hissed furiously. Then she realized that she could not remain unarmed in a studio rife with murder. She leaped toward Parks’s gun and grabbed the semiautomatic, hoping the magazine was full.

Bullets ripped past her, chewing up the weather screen. Holes shattered the surface where Arizona bordered with Mexico, and she heard Marv crying. Jenna detected no pain in his desperate utterances, only panic.

Jenna rose with Parks’s weapon gripped firmly in her hands. The corner of her eye caught movement, and she wheeled, ready to fire. A North Korean actually smiled as he turned his revolver from the weather map to her, aiming directly at her head.

But she had the jump on him and pulled the trigger. Nothing—the pistol wouldn’t fire: She’d forgot to rack the slide on top of the barrel. The Korean’s smile broadened, and she knew she was dead.

Frantically, she reached for the slide. As she did, a blur flashed in front of her—and Kato clamped his powerful jaws down on the assassin’s arm so hard that Jenna heard the sound of a bone snapping. The gun discharged anyway. A bullet grazed the side of Jenna’s head, burning her severely. She fought the urge to cry out in pain. Millimeters closer and she would have been dead.

She unloaded on her attacker, but Kato’s intrepid attack, and her gunfire, had made them targets. The dog yelped piteously as three bullets ripped into his side, slamming the shepherd into the news anchor’s desk with such force that he shattered the network logo.

Enraged, Jenna turned her weapon on the man who’d shot the dog, hitting him twice in the neck. Then she saw a wounded Korean hobbling for cover and reaching for his ankle holster. From thirty feet away, she took him out with three shots.

She spun around, as stunned by the sudden lull as much as she had been shocked by the onslaught of killing.

Five New York City Police officers rushed into the studio, weapons drawn. The North Koreans were all on the floor, bleeding and unmoving. One of New York City’s finest was on his radio. Another came up beside her.

“Jenna Withers,” he said gently, “can you give me your weapon?”

She heard him, knew that he’d requested the gun, but she wasn’t giving it up. She simply couldn’t, and did not know why. The next instant, Jenna heard whimpering and rushed to Kato, shadowed by the cop who wanted her gun. The dog’s long body shook visibly and blood spilled from his mouth, but he wasn’t the creature making the sad sound.

When she looked around she spotted a Korean aiming his gun at an officer who had his back to him. Jenna shot the Korean twice—and almost got herself killed in the momentary confusion that followed. Three officers drew their guns on her, but the cop who’d asked for Jenna’s weapon jumped in front of her, shouting, “No, don’t shoot. Don’t shoot.” He took her weapon. She did not resist.

As the police stood down, Jenna heard the whimpering again. Disgusted, she walked to the bullet-riddled weather screen and looked behind it, finding a disturbance that felt far more objectionable than any muscle flexing by Mother Nature: Marv.

Jenna looked at him crouched down, and checked her anger. “It’s okay, Marv. It’s over. You can come out now.”

“It’s never going to be over. I’m going to have post-traumatic stress disorder the rest of my life because of you.”

“Marv, I just saved your life,” she managed to say evenly.

“You? You saved me?” He stood up. “The only reason you’re alive is that I dragged you to safety, and then you almost got me killed when you started freaking out and trying to run away.”

Jenna shook her head and turned from him: She had no time for Marv, not with Dafoe shot and possibly dead downstairs. But as she rushed away she did notice that camera one was still on, and a monitor on the studio wall showed a wide shot with Marv clearly visible at its very center. She realized that the gun battle had been broadcast live, every gritty second of it. Every hugely embarrassing second—if you were Marv.

She never stopped in front of the camera to warn the world about the North Korean rockets. Shock was slowly overtaking Jenna, and her thoughts could not escape the fallen. She paused only once before racing downstairs: She knelt by the German shepherd that had saved her life, and checked his pulse. Then she yelled, “Someone call a vet, please.” The stalwart heart still beat.

Jenna bolted out of the studio, past officers and emergency medical technicians consumed by the crime and all its gruesome tally. She didn’t stop till she found Dafoe lying on his back, eyes open but unseeing. Their emptiness formed a void in Jenna that felt dark and rank and endless.

She dropped to her knees in a puddle of her lover’s blood, and with her hands shaking visibly, she controlled herself long enough to check his pulse. He had a heartbeat, but it wasn’t strong—and the puddle swelled.

Two EMTs ran up.

“He was hit in the back at least once,” Jenna said, moving aside for them.

Now, for the first time, she realized that tears were spilling down her face. She wiped them away, smearing more blood on her cheek. It also dripped to her neck from the bullet that had grazed her head.

Slowly, as she stood, she became aware that news photographers and video camera operators were focusing on her, present like phantoms, silent and surreal.

Jenna never could have known during these grief-filled moments that the photos of her that would appear in seconds on the Web would never be forgotten, or that one of them would earn a Pulitzer for a journalist at the Times. His carefully framed shot would reveal a beautiful young meteorologist with a wash of blood in her white blond hair and red streaks painting her face, standing with her hands hanging limply by her side, eyes wide with deepening sorrow.

* * *

Nicci sat in front of Dafoe’s laptop carefully—scrupulously—executing the keystrokes. No room for error. None. Dafoe had been adamant about that: “Hunt and peck only. I don’t care how good you are. Go slowly. One mistake and the whole sequence falls apart, and there’s no going back.”

The pressure on Nicci was enormous. Jenna hadn’t given the world the warning it needed. Nicci had seen it all—Jenna’s bloody entrance into the studio followed by a brief disappearance. Then her star had gotten a pistol from somewhere and come up firing. Nicci had guessed that with every passing second, millions of new viewers had tuned into The Morning Show. Nothing like this had ever been seen on television—a gun battle in real time, with real death.

And real consequences: Jenna had looked like she was in shock when the shooting stopped. When she’d walked past the camera without pause, Nicci had glimpsed horror on her friend’s face, and had understood her muteness: Although Jenna had grown up hunting, and had been handy with both a rifle and pistol since childhood, she’d never shot a person before. When her face had filled the screen for that fleeting second, Nicci had seen not only the horror, not only blood and tears, but sadness so deep that she herself had filled with the ghostly presence of grief. Her own eyes had quickly pooled and spilled.

Two more keystrokes. “Don’t f*ck up,” Nicci admonished herself aloud. Forensia and Sang-mi stared at her, faces wracked by tension.

Nicci finished typing. All she had to do was hit “return.” She pointed her index finger, noticed it trembling, and tapped the bar. She breathed like it was the first air she’d taken in a century.

“Let’s check,” Forensia said immediately.

“You do it.” Nicci couldn’t sit still a moment longer.

Forensia took her seat, navigated to WhiteHouse.gov, and saw the result of their hacking in all its cyber-glory: A news banner about the North Koreans and the sulfate rockets crawled across the screen beneath a photograph of President Reynolds in the Rose Garden. Nicci guessed that it might take thirty seconds for CNN, FOX, and all the other networks, cable channels, and news websites to hijack the banner as effectively as Al Qaeda had taken control of that supertanker.

“You did it,” whispered Forensia. The Pagan witch sounded awed.

Sang-mi took Nicci’s hand and held it tightly. Then she whispered three simple words: “Thank you, Nicci.”

* * *

Nine thousand miles away, Adnan stared at the TV in the wheelhouse of the Dick Cheney, struck speechless by the shootout in a New York City studio. Even the Shopping Channel could no longer entice him with its bejeweled watches and floral tableware. Adnan had abandoned the consumer paradise for Al Jazeera, which replayed the video of the shootout over and over. He could not look away from the mesmerizing violence.

There they were, all kinds of people getting killed—right now—then dying all over again in slow motion. Even a big dog had been shot.

Adnan stared in open wonder, watching each gripping moment unfold, completely unaware of the approach of a Navy SEAL, who tackled him and used a familiar-looking device to snip the wires sticking out of Adnan’s suicide vest.

Almost in the same instant, a single bullet killed the Waziristani and ended the hijacking.

Adnan, pinned to the floor with his vest stripped off and his hands cuffed behind his back, heard the old guy who’d been drinking Satan’s nectar talking again, speaking a sloppy language that the devout Muslim would never understand.

* * *

In a mountain fortress near Pyongyang—long hidden from Western eyes in the sky—Jae-hwa held the old Bakelite phone to his ear with one hand; his other rested on the world’s most powerful switch.

All the missile silos were open. All the rockets were ready to launch. Jae-hwa had watched them roll into position, moved by an army proud of its mission, prouder still of its Supreme Leader.

Now Jae-hwa waited to hear the most important words that would ever be spoken on this planet—an order only the Supreme Leader could give.

Jae-hwa’s ears soon thrilled to the man’s voice. The Supreme Leader spoke gravely, as appropriate for the command that must come. But the loyal soldier, who would have given his own life to spare the Supreme Leader so much as a bee sting or splinter, could scarcely believe what he heard:

“Do not fire the rockets. Every country in the world looks to us for guidance now. I command the world stage. Even men who think they are stronger than us are bowing to me. We do not wish to destroy the world when they know they must give us their full attention—and so much more.”

Yes, command the world stage. That is your due, Supreme Leader. Jae-hwa wanted to say this and so much more, but he remained silent until he was sure the Supreme Leader had finished speaking. Then Jae-hwa kept his words simple and humble, as he knew he should, thanking the Supreme Leader for his wisdom, and assuring him that every man, woman, and child would fill with gratitude for his most cherished words.

The Supreme Leader hung up. Jae-hwa took his hand from the shiny silver button, and his thoughts turned to the child in his home, the son who was the treasure of Jae-hwa’s life. He felt certain that his boy would sleep tonight—and many more nights to come—in a world no colder than the one he already knew.