It made a funny sound, not so much a ring as a buzz, or a hum. But it was loud. Also, on each ring it lit up the early morning darkness in blue, like the siren lights on a police car. Luke Stone hated that phone.

He lay somewhere between asleep and awake. Images flashed in his mind. The past few years: an explosion at the old White House, the stately colonnade blowing apart, chunks of it flying up into the air; a gun and rocket battle in a vast open-air stadium in North Korea; Ed Newsam’s fierce eyes, a container ship engulfed in flames behind him; Mark Swann, skinny and bearded in an orange jumpsuit, eyes vacant, chained to a group of other ISIS prisoners; Becca’s pained and angry eyes, her face thin, her skin like paper… Gunner’s big worried eyes, staring at him, looking to Luke for…

Luke opened his own eyes. Next to him on the bed table, in the dark of the Presidential bedroom, the infernal phone kept ringing. A digital clock sat on the table next to the phone. He glanced at its red numbers.

4:35. As he watched, it blinked and changed. 4:36.

“Jesus,” he whispered. He had been asleep for three hours.

A female voice, thick with sleep: “Don’t answer it.”

A tuft of her blonde hair poked out from under the blankets. The heavy blinds were drawn, and if it weren’t for the phone, it would be pitch-black in the room, just the way Luke liked it. But the phone kept throwing crazy blue light around the room.

“It’s like a disco in here.”

He picked up the phone. Mercifully, the stark blue light died.

“It’s for you,” he said, and held the receiver out to her.

A thin hand snaked out, took the receiver, and brought it back under the covers. She held it to the side of her half-hidden face, her eyes still sealed shut.

“Susan Hopkins,” she said in a serious voice, as though she had been up for an hour, had already eaten breakfast, and was being interrupted while going over some important paperwork – the President of the United States never slept.

A thought came to Luke: How many times?

How many times had he, or she, been awakened in the middle of the night because something horrible had happened, or was happening right now, or was about to happen? How many moments of intimacy, of normalcy, of just plain life – something many people took for granted – had been cut short or even demolished by phone calls like this one?

Half-asleep, he allowed himself to imagine another world, one where they didn’t have these jobs. The phone didn’t ring in the middle of the night with terrible news. She was on TV in some capacity. He was a college professor. It was a busy life, but things could be scheduled, plans could be made, and they didn’t have to hide their relationship.

He still worried about that part of it, maybe more than ever. The world seemed to have given them a free pass these past few weeks. Maybe it had been the influence of the holidays – people had their own lives and families to think about. Susan’s daughters had come in from the West Coast. He and Gunner had spent a lot of time here at the Residence over a few days. It had been awkward at first – Gunner was a little younger than Michaela and Lauren, and he had no experience dealing with the rare bird children of some of the richest people on Earth. Even so, they had all settled in together a little bit, and had a weird sort of Brady Bunch Christmas. It even snowed on Christmas Eve.

And somehow, some way, it all stayed out of the media. When Luke dropped Gunner back at his grandparents’ house, there were no news trucks parked outside. No reporters called Luke at his office, pressing him about his close advisory relationship with the President. It was quiet on the media front – too quiet. Whenever he asked Susan how this was staying out of the news, she just smiled mysteriously and said:

“Don’t worry. We have our methods.”

But he was worried. The situation gnawed at him. Mostly, he was worried about Gunner. The boy was growing up, and Luke wanted him to have something like a normal life. God knew he deserved it after everything he’d been through. He was still with Becca’s parents, and that was fine – if anything, they had been more cordial than usual just lately. They were nothing if not social climbers, and their former son-in-law was now quietly dating the President.

Truth be told, Luke would love nothing more than to have Gunner move back in with him. But he was still in the spy game, and running his own agency now. It was a lousy thing to admit, but he just didn’t have time to raise a son right now. If Gunner moved in with Luke, the boy would spend a lot of time on his own. For now, Luke made every effort he could to be a presence in Gunner’s life.

Luke shook his head, clearing the wandering thoughts away. Under the blankets, Susan was listening intently. For a moment, Luke held out hope that maybe this call wouldn’t be so bad. Heck, maybe it was even good news – something so good that it just couldn’t wait until morning. What would that be?

“Oh God,” Susan said, the tone of her voice dashing any hope he might have had. She took a deep breath and let out a long exhale. “All right. Look. I was asleep until a minute ago. Give me about a half hour to take a shower and have a bite to eat. In the meantime, start pulling together the usual suspects.”

Susan paused while the person on the other end spoke.

“Okay. Thanks.” The hand snaked out again and gave the receiver to Stone. Luke placed it back in its cradle.

“Bad?” he said.

“Yeah.”

She still hadn’t made any attempt to surface from under the covers. Luke’s eyes had already adjusted to the darkness, and she looked like a small child under there – one who didn’t want to get up and go to school.

“Plane crash in the Sinai Peninsula,” she said. “It’s a real mess. Jack Butterfield was on board. So was Sir Marshall Dennis and about sixty other people of varying degrees of importance. We don’t have the whole passenger list yet.”

She pulled back the covers. Her head was propped up on one elbow, her eyes open now and staring at him. They were blue eyes, framed in thick eyelashes. Her hair was beginning to get long. Gone was the conservative (and famous) Hopkins Bob, or Hopkins Helmet, depending on whether you loved her or hated her.

She was getting maybe just a little daring for official Washington, embracing her feminine side more than she had.

“Survivors?” Luke said.

She shook her head. “No.”

She sighed.

“I’ve known Hatchet Jack Butterfield for fifteen years. He was a fool and he was a drunk and he was a good ol’ boy – not my favorite combination. But he was also a decent man, very smart, and very close to the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon.”

“I know who he was,” Luke said.

She shook her head slowly. “I’ve known Marshall Dennis since I was a teenager. He was also a fool and a drunk, and he spent way too much time pawing at teenage girls, but…” She paused.

“Eh, forget it. Nobody’s going to miss Marsh Dennis. His ex-wives are probably all on the phone with their lawyers right now, directing them to make inquiries about the will.” She gestured at the phone. “That was Kurt Kimball.”

Luke nodded. “Of course it was.”

Suddenly, she slid out of bed. In the dim light, he watched her pad naked across the room. One last fleeting image of a different life passed through his mind – a life where it wasn’t time to get up yet.

“I need you at this meeting,” she said. “As much as I hate to say it, the Special Response Team should be in on this one.”

“Because of Jack Butterfield?” Luke said.

Yes, Butterfield was close to the intelligence community in the sense that he liked to visit their offices, listen to their stories, and play with their toys. In exchange for being treated like one of the big boys, he pushed their budget requests through Congress. The hatchet in Hatchet Jack came from his passion for cutting after-school activities and social programs for poor people.

Luke had been expecting a call, and then a visit, from Hatchet Jack one of these days. He didn’t look forward to playing footsie with Jack Butterfield, but it had to be done. The SRT was the President’s pet agency, but Congress made the budget decisions.

Well, he supposed that particular visit wouldn’t be happening now. Luke smiled inwardly. He would never have wished any harm upon Congressman Butterfield, and especially not on the other passengers, but…

He stood, went over to the bay window, and pulled back a corner of the heavy drapes. The forecast had called for snow, and it had been right. It came down heavy, blown by gusting winds. It looked like there were several inches on the ground already.

“It’s snowing,” Luke said. Now he did smile. “To coin a phrase, the morning commute is gonna be a mess.”

“That plane was brought down, Luke. Kurt thinks it was a targeted assassination. Worse, he thinks it might be the start of something bigger.”

CHAPTER THREE

5:17 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

The Situation Room

The White House, Washington, DC

“I’ve already seen the photographs,” an intern said.

“Gruesome. Corpses and body parts strewn across the hillsides. To think that Marshall Dennis is one of them. God. We studied him in an entrepreneurship class when I was at Wharton. He was amazing – a real force of nature. You wouldn’t think a guy like that would ever die. Like, he wouldn’t allow it, or something.”

Luke was riding in an elevator packed with White House staffers and intelligence people. He glanced at the one who had spoken. The guy was very young, tall and fit, in a blue suit jacket and dress shirt with an open-throated collar, and a flop of blond hair nearly obscuring his face. He reminded Luke of New Wave rock bands from the 1980s.

The kid hadn’t been speaking to anyone specific, just all the elevator riders in general. He had made an announcement of sorts: he had seen the pictures already. Briefly – very briefly – Luke wondered which wealthy campaign donor the kid was the son or nephew of.

The elevator opened into the egg-shaped Situation Room. People who arrived there for the first time were often surprised at how small it was. When a crisis came, like now, for example, and the place started to get crowded, it could give a claustrophobic fits. It was hyper-modern and set up for maximum use of space, with large screens embedded in the walls every few feet, and a giant projection screen on the far wall at the end of the table. Tablet computers and slim microphones rose from slots out of the conference table in the center of the room – they could be dropped back into the table if the attendee wanted to use their own device.

Every plush leather seat at the table was already taken. The seats along the walls were filling up with young aides and assistants, most of them chatting among themselves, tapping messages into tablets, or speaking into telephones.

The young people were excited. Their futures were full of hope, and their eyes were bright with ambition. The fact that they had been awakened and summoned to an emergency meeting this early in the morning only underscored to them how important they were.

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