Red Dawn Rising (Red Returning Trilogy) (9 page)

The moisture in the air further amplified the sound of the piano. Cass trained her binoculars back on the lone pianist in the long black cape, her arms swathed in something soft and clinging, her hands clad in half gloves that left her fingers free to dance along the keyboard. That dance was coming to an end, Cass sensed, its intensity building to such a pitch that the sudden explosion seemed part of the performance—until screams erupted behind them and the music suddenly stopped. All heads turned from the ceremonial platform to see a burst of smoke in the opposite direction, near the reflecting pool.

It was the frantic shouts from the platform, though, that made Cass
turn
back in time to see a swarm of Secret Service agents descend like a collective cloak over that small, elevated assembly. But not before Liesl Bower sprang from the piano as if it might devour her. What was happening?

Cass saw a hulk of a man in a dark coat lunge for Liesl and haul her to the floor, covering her body with his. Other Secret Service agents did the same with those closest to the piano. Some guests ran from the platform into the Capitol. Those who couldn’t move as quickly were physically lifted and whisked away.

Simultaneously, a platoon of agents surrounded the president and vice president, manhandling them out of their seats and up the stairs into the building.

Just then, Jordan grabbed Cass’s arm and pulled her against him, his eyes searching the grounds. “I don’t know what just happened, but we’re getting out of here,” he shouted over the rising cries of the confused and frightened crowd. “If we aren’t blown up, we’ll be trampled.”

He turned to their friends. “Let’s go!” They fell in behind Jordan, his arm tight around Cass’s shoulders, and they all moved as one unit, forging a narrow exit line toward the perimeter of the Capitol grounds. When they cleared a line of trees, they broke into a full run toward the C Street apartment where they’d spent the night. Others ran alongside, wild-eyed and headed down random avenues of escape—no longer spectators but potential targets.

Now came the sirens, confirmation that something, indeed, had happened. But unlike the terrified witnesses fleeing the Trade Center disaster, those who now ran from the Capitol had seen very little. A small explosion. Pandemonium on the platform. And nothing else but the surge of a frenzied crowd.

Something, though, had made Liesl Bower jump from the piano bench and whip around as if confronting an attacker. Is that what had happened? Besides the explosion on the Mall, had someone targeted the inaugural party? An attempt on the president’s life? No one spoke as they ran, as if their silence would hide them from an unseen enemy.

Cass was the first through the door of the apartment, its owner a friend
of
the Brockmans away on business. She went immediately to the television and turned on the breaking news, a barrage of sound bites.

“A malfunctioning explosive device discovered inside the piano … first detected by Senator Brad Campbell, who saw smoke seeping from under the lid of the piano … this preceded by an explosion of a portable toilet near the reflecting pool … one dead … nearly a dozen taken to area hospitals … one Washington policeman suggesting the explosion was a diversion from what is believed to be an assassination attempt on the president and everyone near him.”

“Turn it up!” came a chorus around her, and Cass obliged, watching but not seeing the big-eyed blond newswoman speaking so urgently before the camera. Cass felt gripped by some insurgent paralysis, a numbing down of senses in the aftermath of trauma. Her mind couldn’t piece it together.

The remote still in her hand, she hit the mute button and turned to her companions. “Who did this?”

Three sets of eyes rested on her, but no answers issued for a long moment. Then, “Should be obvious,” Myrna supplied.

Jordan shook his head. “It’s dangerous to assume the obvious, isn’t it? I mean, sure, it’s easy to call it an Al-Qaeda hit, but it could be some lone-wolf nutcase standing right in front of you with his little bag of tricks.”

Cass looked incredulously at him. “How do you get those kinds of tricks past the tightest security in the country?”

No one spoke.

Cass’s phone rang. Something both undefined and foreboding lurched when she saw the caller was Hans. She swallowed hard to retrieve her voice, now pinched. “Yes.”

“Cass, are you all right?” Hans asked, his own voice laced with panic.

“I’m fine. We’re fine.” She did and did not want to talk to him. What could he possibly tell her? What was it he had
already
told her? Warned her of? The woman who’d tracked her and Jordan to their homes? She heard Hans’s words again in her head.
You don’t know who you’re messing with
. And why had he insisted she stay in New York on Inauguration Day? Wild, unsubstantiated thoughts took on more solid flesh by the second.

Reg took the remote from her hand and restored the volume on the news. Cass retreated into the kitchen with her phone, catching Jordan’s worried eye.

“What did you see at the Capitol?” Hans asked.

She wondered how much he already knew. “The same thing you’re watching on TV, I presume. Don’t worry about me. We got away quickly.”

“Thank God for that,” he said.

God?
She’d never heard him speak of God before. Almost acidly, she said, “You told me not to come, didn’t you, Hans?”

There was no response.

“Didn’t you?” she pressed.

“Well, of course I did. The weather is horrible. You should be here in front of our fireplace. Your mother prepared a sumptuous brunch. I’m sorry you missed it.”

Why was he so talkative? Why did she even ask the question of him? What did it matter?

But something did. Cass couldn’t deny it was there—suspicion, elusive and noxious, like a darkroom negative sloshing about in solution, its image slowly lifting into recognizable form.

She ended the call and returned to the living room. Mustering a steady voice, she announced, “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to get back to New York right now.”

Chapter 12

T
he White House crackled like a firestorm. Those responsible for the inauguration attacks were still at large, trailing not even a scent. After Wednesday morning’s crush of press conferences and debriefings by law enforcement officials, national security advisors, Pentagon brass, and the newly installed Homeland Security director, President Noland had temporarily retreated from the situation room of the White House. Only FBI director Rick Salabane followed him back to the Oval Office, where Noland settled into an armchair and rang for lunch.

Salabane dropped a file containing a faded blueprint and hard-copy diagram of the Capitol complex onto a coffee table, then lowered himself to a sofa in front of it.

Eyeing the contents of the oversized folder, Noland said, “You know we’ve got a computer file on that, Rick. CADD, or some such thing.”

Salabane looked back at the yellowing sheets flung into the manila file. “Yeah, well, call me a dinosaur.” He hunched lower over the table and shook his head slowly. “This whole place has been on lockdown for days. How did these phantom bombers get in and out without detection?”

“One of us?” the president asked, running a hand over the top of his silver head. The thought of another traitor in the White House launched him from the chair and into his usual pacing pattern to and from a
window
overlooking the Rose Garden. At sixty-one, his knees ached each time he pivoted, the arthritis in his joints grating more each day.

Salabane looked grimly at Noland. “Quite possibly, sir. Someone with clearance. Secret Service. An independent contractor aided by a rogue agent. We’re interviewing everyone who even breathed in the vicinity of that piano. And those who supplied the toilets. That was the diversion from what was supposed to happen on the platform.”

“That’s the telling thing, Rick. ‘Supposed to happen.’ Was it or wasn’t it?”

“Our bomb squad claims the piano device was too small to do much damage, except to those closest to it, which would include you, sir, though you were below it. It’s just a fluke the thing didn’t go off. Or call it what you will. Providence? Maybe. But my people think the bomber was probably too pressed for time or too distracted to set it correctly, and the subfreezing temps may have been a factor as well.” Salabane shuffled through more reports and diagrams spread before him. “But to go to all this trouble, why not take out the whole platform? Unless you just want to prove something—that the American giant is helpless to protect itself.” Noland let the director’s thoughts flow without interruption. “But if that was your intent, you’d want us to know who you were, to claim responsibility, which no one has. No grainy videos from Al-Qaeda, though they might surface yet. No chest pounding from a lone-wolf crackpot. Nothing.”

The president stopped midstride. “Well, who wants to claim responsibility for blowing up a porta-potty? Or for botching the piano job?” He rubbed his forehead and looked away.

Salabane reserved comment.

After a moment, Noland went to a cabinet behind his desk and removed a flat, metal box about the size of a legal pad. He returned to sit opposite Salabane and set the box on the table. Lifting the lid, Noland removed the only contents, a
Washington Post
news article about Ted Shadlaw, the White House staffer who just over a year ago had confessed to selling classified information to Russia, and a photograph of pianist Liesl Bower and violinist Max Morozov in concert together.

As Salabane reached for the photograph, a knock came at the door.
Noland
quickly returned the items to the box and closed the lid. “Come in,” he called. A steward in a crisp black-and-white uniform brought in a tray of sandwiches, fresh fruit, and coffee, placing it on a nearby sideboard.

When the man left, Noland reopened the box and handed the photograph to Salabane. “That was taken not long after young Max led an Israeli commando unit to Corsica, France, and dug up this box from where his father had buried it underneath an old olive press. You know what was inside it then.”

Salabane nodded. “A mother lode of evidence against the KGB conspiracy to take over its government. It was all the Russian president needed to stop his own countrymen from assassinating him and the Syrian president.” Salabane stared at the empty box, then back at Noland. “Are you thinking our bombers speak Russian?”

Noland didn’t answer but instead walked calmly to a window overlooking a slushy lawn. Soon after the inaugural crowds had fled the grounds, the skies made good on their promise to rain ice over Washington.
Fitting
, Noland thought, as he lamented the added weight of weather piled onto the day.

He returned to his chair near Salabane and picked up the photo of the two musicians. “Incredible,” Noland said, “that two gentle, peace-loving souls who just wanted to make beautiful music could have brought down such a savage conspiracy on the heads of its underworld Kremlin architects.” He paused. “Just a couple of musicians.” He looked pointedly at Salabane. “And one of them was seated at that piano.”

Later that afternoon, the president summoned Ben Hafner, his young domestic policy chief, to the Oval Office. Ben had been expecting the call.

“Sit down,” Noland said as Ben closed the office door behind him. “I want to talk about Liesl.”

“I know you do, sir.”

“You do?”

“We have to be thinking the same thing, sir. Were they after you or Liesl?”

The two men looked at each other as if they’d just summoned a tempest and couldn’t return it to its lair.

“Our FBI director, like most of the talking heads on television, believes that Al-Qaeda is probably behind this attack,” Noland said.

“And you, sir?”

“Who can be sure? But the Russians are heavy on my mind.”

Russians
. In Ben’s mind, there was no other explanation for the events on Monday. And now the president himself had said it. The face of the KGB threat this administration had confronted a year ago was leering at them again.

But the media had never uncovered that particular threat or what had really happened in the fall of 2011. All they’d reported was that Russian agents had recruited Ben’s own senior aide, Ted Shadlaw, to supply them with unspecified information. The media never knew about the music code Liesl Bower uncovered that October, identifying a Russian mole in the Israeli Department of Defense. They never knew that a secret network of elite Kremlin insiders had plotted to assassinate their own president and seize power, determined to reclaim the might of the Soviet Union. Never knew that the Syrian president had also been marked for death. Never knew the Russian mole in Israel had falsified documents that would “prove” to the world that Israel had pulled the trigger on both presidents. The Russian plotters had calculated that in retaliation, the Arab world would have annihilated Israel while an outraged America turned its back on its Jewish ally.