“I don’t know yet. It has to be some sort of trigger. There’s a countdown going. We better clear out of here in case he dropped something in a trash can on his way in.”
The agent who’d spoken to them over their comms, shouted, “I didn’t see him put anything anywhere. He walked in, didn’t stop, didn’t toss anything. He never took his hands out of his pocket except to pull out the knife, so I think we’re okay.”
A huge relief, Mike thought, since clearing an ICU would be a nightmare.
Nicholas pulled out his laptop, set it on the counter. “I’m going to plug it in, see if I can override the program.”
The phone was an Android and he had a cord for it in his bag. It didn’t look like it could do much, yet the countdown was still going on.
He plugged it in, set his code to override the countdown and break into the phone’s software.
After a few minutes, he said, “I’m in. Phone was encrypted, but I have it now.”
“Where’s the bomb?” Mike asked.
Nicholas was staring at the screen of his laptop.
“Nicholas, what is it?”
He turned the screen. She saw silver metal, a complicated control system, half-moons in blacks and oranges, blues and greens. An altimeter, a horizon, engine loads.
“It’s a plane. Spenser planted a bomb on a plane.”
“It’s not just any plane,” Nicholas said. “See the insignia in the middle top? It’s bloody Air Force One.”
Wednesday
Noon–4 p.m.
70
BISHOP TO C5 CHECK
Air Force One
Over the North Atlantic
President Jefferson Bradley was alone, finally, in his private office in the upstairs of Air Force One. They’d gotten a late start, a threat there was a sniper on a building near Air Force One, and wasn’t that just par for the course? Everyone was on edge until they took off.
Now, six hours later, he was nursing a lovely single-barrel Blanton’s bourbon and all his aides were elsewhere, either talking about the aborted peace talks, or maybe about what they were going to do Saturday night, who knew? At least he no longer had to deal with those treacherous two-faced fools who’d supposedly come to talk peace. He consigned the lot of them to the deepest pit of Hell.
He sighed. Those small undetectable bombs Callan had told him about. Were they real? If so, that was a worry. What was going on?
Calm, he wanted calm, and distraction. He picked up a new biography of Churchill, wished it was a thriller instead, something to distract him, and had flipped a page when alarms began to sound. He slapped at the conference button on his speakerphone. “What’s happening?”
The pilot—Air Force colonel Simon Moore—came over the speaker. “Sir, we’re experiencing some computer issues down here. We’ll be fixed up in a moment, we’re waiting for an upload from Command.”
“Turn off the alarm, then. No sense freaking out the whole plane.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was buzzing behind the alarm. For the briefest of moments, he could hear the faraway squelch of the copilot on the radio speaking to their air recon planes, telling them they’d lost an electrical port, then the alarm turned off and the pilot released the speaker button.
It was suddenly deathly quiet. Bradley shrugged it off, set down the book on the table in front of him. He closed his eyes, and there they were, all pomp and circumstance—the Iranian negotiators, and look what they’d done. At crunch time, they’d thrown it all away, with smug smiles, and lies pouring out of their mouths. The reactors lit up? Soldiers massing? All a misunderstanding, only their normal scheduled tests.