No Corner to Hide (The Max Masterson Series Book 2) (25 page)

“Shit,” exclaimed one agent, ignoring her plight. The sudden appearance of the inappropriately dressed socialite had sprung him back into survival mode. “Go down to that boutique down the hall and find the warmest ladies’ coat you can get your hands on, and some comfortable boots for the Vice-President. Better yet, grab that candle, get Ms. Conroy, and bring this lady with you. It’s going to be cold outside.”

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CHAPTER 64

M

ax Masterson, it’s not nice to scare an old lady like you did,” Leila Fox was busy serving up a dinner for six people that would have fed twenty. “I nearly had a heart attack when you peeled off your face and tossed it onto the La Z

Boy chair,” she said, while spooning a mountain of mashed potatoes onto Andrew’s plate.

“Mrs. Fox, I had no intention of frightening you to death, but that disguise was getting to me. I startled myself when I looked in the mirror after putting it on. Rachel and I had them made so we could get out in public without it becoming a major event. Pretty good, eh?”

“Pretty bad, I’d say,” Andrew chided. “Max, you can’t go around without Secret Service protection. Not with the country on high alert.”

“That’s what I keep telling him, but he keeps coming up with ways of getting around established protocol.” Armstrong took the rare opportunity to voice his opinion, but he knew that Max would disregard it.

“Fat lot of good that did for Kennedy and McKinley, and don’t forget that nut job that shot Reagan,” Max responded.

“Max, you keep on doing things your own way,” Leila Fox interjected. “That is one thing I like about you. But be careful. I don’t want you to end up dead like my dear departed Joseph. I can’t deal with any more dying until my own time comes.”

“Mrs. Fox, I’ll try to stay alive long enough to come to your hundredth birthday,” Max replied.
Armstrong’s communicator alerted him. He had been in continuous contact with Secret Service to monitor anything that arose while he was away from the White House. “Mr. President, another device has been detonated in New York City, and we have lost contact with the Vice-President. We need to leave immediately. Sorry for your loss, Ma’am.”

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Max, Rachel, and Andrew flew back from the Midwest, with Rachel as pilot and Armstrong as co-pilot, with Max and Andrew free to strategize in the jump seat during the hour-long flight back. Andrew shared his mother’s advice that had not been repeated by her at the gargantuan dinner she had prepared for after the funeral. There wasn’t much left to advise, and Andrew was relieved that Max had been free to ask questions without his acting as an intermediary. Neighbors had prepared dishes for the wake at the community center, and what wasn’t consumed by the neighbors in the middle of the day remained on tables that lined the dining room. They had carried as many leftovers as the cargo hatch could hold, and Andrew knew that his mother’s home-cooked meals would be devoured by the White House staff before the sun set.

“Mr. President, we have a problem.” Andrew Fox and Roger Sinclair stood in the doorway of the Oval Office, their faces grim. “Good! If we didn’t have any of those, I’d have nothing to do, other than look at what they did to New York. When is this going to end?” Max sat confidently behind his desk, reviewing the evening’s reports on his monitor. Shortly after dark, a burst of gamma radiation had burst from the top floor of Trump Plaza in Jersey City, taking out most of New York City’s electronics, on the far side of the Hudson River. The power grid fell shortly thereafter, plunging the city into blackness. All transportation was shut down, and reports from outside the blast zone had indicated that a geostationary satellite which transmitted all communications for the greater New York and New Jersey metropolitan area had been rendered useless. Nobody was moving, and nobody was talking. The electronic components of every cell phone and cellular tower had become fused by gamma radiation.

Sinclair chose to ignore Max’s sarcasm and reported what he knew. “The same folks as the ones who disrupted your inauguration are responsible for shutting down New York. This time, they did it on a much larger scale. They put the bomb on the highest floor of a building so that it would spread over a larger area.”

“What are they capable of?” Max inquired, his eyes glued to the screen. “We don’t know how many of these things are out there or where or whether they intend to do it again.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” said Sinclair. “We have been unable to communicate with anyone inside of New York City for more than two hours, and the Vice-President was last heard from about an hour before the blast. She and her Secret Service contingent of four agents were in her hotel, and they planned to attend a social function and dinner at the Waldorf Astoria hotel later. She was scheduled to give her speech to the UN tomorrow morning about our response to domestic terrorism. We haven’t been able to raise Secret Service or the hotel, and we fear the worst.”

“Don’t go there,” said Max.

“I don’t have to go there. It’s already here,” replied Sinclair. His concern for Scarlett’s well-being had caused his eyebrows to knit together, despite his controlled effort to remain calm. What the words didn’t communicate was more than projected on his face.

“Retaliate.”
“We can’t. They’re here. Among us,” replied Sinclair. “I have been trying to tell you all along. Unless we find out that there is a central command that is running this terror operation and can bomb the hell out of them, or we can find the head honcho and put him away, we have to do the prudent thing and continue to run this government. We have the FBI investigating whether other bombs of this type have been found, and CIA is checking for links to foreign terrorists. They must have obtained the bomb-making material somewhere, and my guess is that it came from somewhere outside the U.S.”
“Are we still in COGCON 1?”
“No, once we got through Inaugural Day and assessed the damage, we stepped down security. At the time, we looked at it as an isolated incident,” replied Sinclair. “Everyone is back at work here in the Capitol, thanks to our hardened power grid and Faraday shielded electronics. It’s the civilian population that we failed to protect…” Max interrupted.
“We are back at COGCON 1. You know the protocol. To insure the continuity of government, we must go in there and rescue the vice-president, and we need to do it now. The longer we wait, the worse it will be, and I seriously doubt that her security detail is sitting in a dark, cold hotel fretting about what they are going to do next. How are we going to find her in a city of 24 million people, all of them traveling on foot?”
“We are already on the way,” Andrew Foxannounced. “Two Helos are over New Jersey at the moment. We can watch it all on the monitor. Dawn will break in another ten minutes, and we will be able to see what is happening out there. Right now, the only visuals we have are what we can see from the searchlights and night vision electronics, and most of the city is huddled indoors trying to stay warm. There aren’t many people out on the streets yet, but my guess is that they will be, once the sun comes up. They have nothing else to do if they want to survive.”
Sinclair interrupted. “Always assume there is a second bomb. And after the second, a third. We are dealing in unknowns, but if we put a lot of people in the air…look, a lot of people are going to die. This blast was ten times the size of the Inaugural Event, and we don’t know how many there are. Our shields have not been field-tested, and we don’t know if they will…
“I don’t care. We have to do something, and fast. They are to retrieve the vice-president, while we figure out what to do next.” Max sat down hard and wrung his hands.

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CHAPTER 65
I

don’t know, I just don’t know,” said the woman as they emerged onto the street. Brown boots. They don’t go with my Chinchilla.” Scarlett had managed to find a full-length mink with a hood, and the same brown boots in her size, but the

rescued woman was having a fashion meltdown. She desperately clung to the arm of one agent, who, despite desperate efforts at shaking her off, had resigned himself to the idea that she would be along for the desperate journey.

“Are we going to find my husband? He had a dinner meeting with some clients at the Russian Tea Room. He told me to make myself look pretty and to wait…he said he wouldn’t be long…” She broke into tears. They didn’t respond.

There was no moon, and clouds covered the stars. They were in total blackout. The streets of downtown Manhattan were abandoned, but they could see the twinkling of fires far off in the distance. Although the temperature was below freezing, people were gathering in the streets in the residential section miles away, and they made their way in the direction of the lights.

Scarlett, her Secret Service Detail, and the bereft socialite made their way in the direction of Central Park. The going was slow, and by the time they had traveled ten blocks, they were cold, wind-blown, and craving shelter. “We need to get inside. And soon,” announced Scarlett. “What I wouldn’t give for a roaring fireplace right now.”

“Why didn’t you ask? My friend Mitzi has a huge fireplace. She lives near the park, right over there.” Scarlett and all of the agents looked at the woman with amazement. “Do you know the address?” they inquired in unison. “Well, we don’t just sit in our hotel and order room service,” she said defensively. “Whenever we visit, oh, about three, no, four times a year, we get together with our Palm Beach friends who have properties in the city, and we compare tans and complain about the weather, and Mitzi just separated from her husband, you probably know him, he’s a big…”

“Can you introduce us to Mitzi right now?
“Well, I usually call first…Oh, I guess I can’t…She might have already gone back to Palm Beach. She told me how much she missed us and couldn’t wait to lounge by the pool. It would be gauche to drop in unannounced. It just isn’t done.”
“Miss, what is your name?”
“Britney. Britney Shalowan. From the Palm Beach Shalowans,” she replied, suddenly becoming sheepish.
“Britney, do you know who I am?”
“No, I’m thinking that you’re somebody famous, because you look familiar, and I would never forget hair as gorgeous as yours.”
“Hon, I’m Scarlett Conroy, the Vice-President of the United States.”
“Oh, Hi, I was going to vote for you, but Biff, that’s my husband, Biff said that I had to register before I voted, and I had a manicure that day, and you know how hard it is to get in. My manicurist schedules them four months in advance…Can you believe that? Four months!”
Scarlett smiled for the first time that day. “Britney, darlin’, would you be so kind as to take us to where Mitzi lives? Now, you don’t think she would mind if you brought the vice-president over for a little visit, do you?”
“I guess it would be OK, but what about them?” Britney looked at the four burly agents, who silently monitored the perimeter for signs of danger.
“Oh, I’ll vouch for them. They are perfect gentlemen,” replied Scarlett, recalling her moment of high exposure the previous evening.
They knocked on the ornate wooden door to the upscale Manhattan flat of Mitzi, but there was no response. Without seeking permission, one agent kneeled before the door and produced a tool kit the size of a credit card from an internal pocket and inserted a thin metal device into the keyhole. In less than ten seconds, they were inside the room as two frightened models, bundled in the warmest clothes they could find, looked on from the end of the hallway.
It was their second day without shopping for eyeliner and lingering over a Grande Caramel Macchiato from Starbucks. They looked and felt miserable. Scarlett had the fleeting thought that they would need to cope or die, and they were as suited for survival as a butterfly in a hurricane. From her briefings and research on EMP incidents, she knew it would be months or years before New York would again become habitable for people with their sensitive fragility.
She stared at the shivering women and tried to imagine how ill-suited their lifestyles were for survival, starving and drugging themselves to stay thin enough to provide bony support for the latest designer clothes. They would cling to the familiar and perish, she surmised. She silently wondered whether they would want to survive in a world as harsh as the one that awaited them outside their front door. Attending to the task at hand, she made a mental note to leave the door unlocked when they left.
The Secret Service agents immediately checked the spacious residence for the presence of Mitzi or anyone else, and once they were satisfied that they were alone, they began the task of making a fire. Mitzi had left enough wood in the bin to look “rustic” even though her tastes bordered on Art Nouveau. She bought the brownstone built in the 1920’s for a steal during the real estate crash in 2012. The large fireplace was a centerpiece for entertaining, with a mantelpiece made of granite and matching stone panels that rose two stories. She had dabbled with the idea of converting it to gas or electric, but the thought mortified her frequent guests, who enjoyed milling around the warmth that it provided during her infrequent visits in the Winter months.
This year, Mitzi came for Christmas and was gone before Valentine’s Day, longer than her usual stays. She had been anxious to return to Palm Beach shortly after she had arrived, but problems with her trust fund had delayed her return while dealing with lawyers and other “annoyances”. The management of her wealth was her only business activity. The rest of her time was spent immersed in the elite society that remained separate and insulated from the rest of the world. The longer stay in New York had compelled Mitzi to stock up on more wood for the party fire, but most of it was gone by the time it was needed for their survival. A few hours at most, and then they would be scrounging for wood if they wanted to stay warm.
Britney was clearly unhinged by the unannounced and unintended intrusion into Mitzi’s home. She walked around aimlessly, bundled against the cold that seemed to seep inside of her clothes, muttering.
“This won’t do. It just won’t do. What will I tell her? I’ll certainly be vilified for this when I get back…Will I get back? Oh my…” She crumpled onto the plush couch and began to sob. Her world had fallen apart in a momentary flash.
“I figure we have about a half-day of wood there, and then, we’ll have to start using the furniture,” surmised one agent. Let’s see what she left behind for us to eat.” They scrounged in the massive kitchen, unused mostly, with a double-doored refrigerator that shined with stainless steel that matched the massive electric stove and cupboard doors. It contrasted starkly with the black granite countertops that lined the walls. The refrigerator held bottles of Perrier, but no food. The freezer was the better provider. A dozen thick steaks in butcher wrap sat partially thawed, along with two large cartons of mint chocolate chip Hagen Das ice cream. The cupboards provided caviar and smoked oysters in large cans, along with crackers, olives, and midget kosher gherkins in jars. “We’re gonna eat like high society for awhile,” surmised one agent. “I love those little pickles.”
“Take one of those cartons of ice cream to the hummingbirds down the hall,” commanded Scarlett. “If they want to show their gratitude, don’t hurry back. They looked like they needed a little warming up.” “Yes Ma’am,” said the youngest. He grabbed the carton and three spoons and eagerly departed. Two minutes later, he burst back into the room. “That just made them colder. I’m wondering whether the Lady of the House left behind any furs that they could borrow.” He bounded up the stairs to the master bedroom and emerged with two full length blonde mink coats. “When a man gives a woman a mink, he’s about to get lucky,” They shook their heads and watched with amusement.
“This won’t do. This just won’t do,” protested Britney.
On the street, the usual hangers-out were restless. Most were drunk or stoned. Awake, they sat leering at the families, watching. They were like a pack of wolves, snarling and circling, waiting to attack. They wouldn’t go after the families, who tried to stay in the center of the street, fearing that they would get plucked off the sidewalk and dragged into the shadows, where an uncertain fate hid. It was the fear that propelled them in a half-run toward the park, looking down alleys with sideway glances, shuffling, maneuvering through the acrid smoke.
The buildings were beginning to burn. Some may have been started intentionally and others the result of fires built in places that were the wrong place, but there would be no investigation, no news reports or onlookers in the street. There was no way to put them out, and nobody cared. In survival mode, you protect what you can save, and delaying the inevitable was a waste of time.