LITMIR.BIZ

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then and looked at him. “Brother,” he said.

      “Yes?”

      “These missiles are a secret, you know. No one can hear of them.”

      The driver nodded. “Of course.”

      “You have friends, family?”

      The driver smiled. “I do. A wife, three children. Little ones. I still have my mother. I am well known in my village and the nearby areas. I have played the violin since I was very young, and everyone demands a song from me.”

      He paused. “It’s a full life.”

      The sayyid nodded, a little sadly.

      “Allah will reward you.”

      The driver didn’t like the sound of that. It was the second time Qassem had mentioned such a reward. “Yes. Thank you.”

      Near Qassem, two big men took rifles down from their shoulders. A second later, they held them ready, aimed at the driver.

      The driver barely moved. This didn’t seem right. It was happening so fast. His heart pounded in his ears. He could not feel his legs. Or his arms. Even his lips were numb. For a second, he tried to think of anything he might have done to offend them. Nothing. He had done nothing. All he had done was bring the truck here.

      The truck… was a secret.

      “Wait,” he said. “Wait! I won’t tell anyone.”

      Qassem shook his head now. “The All-Knowing has seen your good work. He will open the gates of Paradise to you this very evening. This is my promise to you. This is my prayer.”

      Much too late, the driver turned to run.

      An instant later, he heard the loud CRACK as the first gun fired.

      And he realized, as the ground came rushing up to meet him, that his entire life had been in vain.

      CHAPTER TWO

      December 11

      9:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

      The Oval Office

      The White House, Washington, DC

      Susan Hopkins almost couldn’t believe what she was watching.

      She stood on the carpet in the sitting area of the Oval Office – the comfortable high-backed chairs had been removed for this morning’s festivities. Thirty people packed the room. Kurt Kimball and Kat Lopez stood near her, as well as Haley Lawrence, her Secretary of Defense.

      The White House Residence staff were all here at her insistence, the chef, the servers, the domestic staff, mingling among other invited guests – the directors of the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the National Park Service, to name a few. A handful of news media personalities were here, as well as two or three carefully selected camera people. There were many Secret Service agents, lining the walls and peppered among the crowd.

      On a large TV monitor mounted near the far wall, Stephen Lief, a man whom Susan could expect to never see in the flesh until her term as President was over, was about to take the Vice Presidential Oath of Office. Stephen was late middle-aged, owlish in round glasses, hair gray and thinning and receding across the top of his skull like an army in disordered retreat. He had a vaguely pear-shaped body, hidden inside a three-thousand-dollar blue pinstriped Armani suit.

      Susan had known Stephen a long time. He would have been her main competition in the most recent election, if Jeff Monroe hadn’t interceded. Before that, in her Senate days, he was the loyal opposition across the aisle from her, a moderate conservative, unremarkable – pig-headed but not deranged. And he was a nice man.

      But he was also the wrong party, and she had taken a lot of heated criticism from liberal quarters for that. He was landed aristocracy, old money – a Mayflower person, the closest thing that America had to nobility. At one time, he had seemed to think that becoming President was his birthright. Not Susan’s type – entitled aristocrats tended to lack the common touch that helped you connect with the people you were supposedly there to serve.

      It was a measure of how deeply Luke Stone had gotten inside her skin that she considered Stephen Lief at all. He was Stone’s idea. Stone had brought it up to her playfully, while the two were lying together in her big Presidential bed. She had been pondering out loud about possible Veep candidates, and then Stone said:

      “Why not Stephen Lief?”

      She had almost laughed. “Stone! Stephen Lief? Come on.”

      “No, I mean it,” he said.

      He was lying on his side. His nude body was thin but rock hard, chiseled, and covered with scars. Thick bandaging still covered his recent bullet wound – it was molded to his torso along the left side. The various wounds didn’t bother her – they made him sexier, more dangerous. His dark blue eyes watched her from deep inside his weathered Marlboro Man face, half a mischievous smile on his lips.

      “You’re beautiful, Stone. Like an ancient Greek statue, uh, wearing a bandage. But maybe you better let me do the thinking. You can just recline there, looking pretty.”

      “I interviewed him at his farm down in Florida,” Stone said. “I was asking him what he knew about Jefferson Monroe and election fraud. He came clean to me very quickly. And he’s good with horses. Gentle. That has to count for something.”

      “I’ll keep that in mind,” Susan said. “The next time I’m looking for a ranch hand.”

      Stone shook his head, but kept smiling. “The country is fractured, Susan. Recent events have made the feelings worse than ever. You’re still doing okay, but Congress has the lowest approval ratings in American history. If you can believe the polls, then politicians, the Taliban, and the Church of Satan all rate well with a similar percentage of Americans. Lawyers, the IRS, and the Italian Mafia have much higher approval numbers.”

      “And you say that because…”

      “Because what the American people want now is for right and left, liberal and conservative, to come together a little bit and start to get some things done on behalf of this country. The roads and bridges need to be rebuilt, the train system belongs in a museum, the public schools are falling apart, and we haven’t built a new major airport in almost thirty years. We’re ranked thirty-second in healthcare, Susan. That’s low. Can there really be thirty-one other countries ahead of us? Because I tell you, I’ve been around the world, and I run out of good countries at twenty-one or twenty-two. That puts us behind a bunch of bad ones.”

      She sighed. “If we had some buy-in from conservatives, we might be able to get my infrastructure package through…”

      He tapped her forehead. “Now you’re using your noodle. Lief did eighteen years in the Senate. He knows the game as well as anybody.”

      “I thought politics wasn’t your thing,” she said.

      “It’s not.”

      She shook her head. “That’s what scares me.”

      He started moving toward her. “Don’t be scared. I’ll tell you what is my thing.”

      “Do tell.”

      “Getting physical,” he said. “With someone like you.”

      Now she shook the memories away, a ghost of a smile on her face. She had drifted there for a bit. On the TV monitor, Stephen Lief was getting ready to take his oath. It was happening in her old study at the Naval Observatory. She remembered the room and the house well. It was the beautiful, turreted and gabled Queen Anne–style 1850s mansion on the grounds of the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. For decades, it had been the official residence of the Vice President of the United States.

      She used to stand at the big bay window that was visible on the monitor, staring out at the beautiful rolling lawns of the Naval Observatory campus. The afternoon sun would come through that window, playing incredible games with light and shadow. For five years, she had lived in that house as Vice President. She’d loved it there, and would

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