DavidBaldacci.com

Chapter 1

The Chesapeake Bay is America's largest estuary. Nearly 200 miles long, its watershed covers an area of 65,000 utopian square miles with more than a hundred and fifty rivers and streams barreling into it. It's also the home of myriad bird and aquatic life, and a beloved haven for legions of recreational boaters. The bay is indeed a creation of remarkable beauty, except when you happen to be swimming in the middle of the damn thing during a thunderstorm in the veiled darkness of an early morning.

Oliver Stone cracked the surface of the water and gulped in the thick salty air, a thirsty man in the center of a trillion-ton ocean. The long dive had caused him to go father down than was particularly healthy. Yet when you throw yourself off a thirty-foot cliff into an angry ocean, you should be thankful just to have a heartbeat. As he treaded water he looked around to gauge his bearings. Nothing he saw was too appealing right now. With each streak of lightning sparking the earth, he eyed the three-story-cliff he'd been standing on. He'd been in the bay less than a minute yet the chill was already drizzling into his bones despite the full-body wetsuit he wore underneath his clothes. He stripped off his waterlogged pants, shorts and shoes and then kicked off swimming east. He didn't have much time to get this done.

Chapter 1

At precisely zero hours UT, or midnight Universal Time, the image of the tortured man erupted onto the world's most popular Web site.

The first six words he spoke would be remembered forever by everyone who heard them.

"I am dead. I was murdered."

He was speaking Russian on the screen but at the bottom his tragic story was retold in virtually any language one desired with the press of a key. Secret Russian Federation police had beaten "confessions" of treason out of him and his family. He'd managed to escape and make this crude video.

Whoever held the camera had either been scared to death, drunk, or both, for the grainy film vibrated and shook every few seconds.

The man said if the video had been released that meant he'd been recaptured by government thugs and was already dead.

His crime? Simply wanting freedom.

Chapter 1

Harry Finn rose as usual at six-thirty, made coffee, let the dog out into the fenced backyard for its morning constitutional, showered, shaved, woke the kids for school and oversaw that complicated operation for the next half hour as breakfasts were gulped, backpacks and shoes grabbed and arguments started and settled. His wife joined him, looking sleepy but nonetheless game for another day as a mother/chauffeur of three, including a precocious, independent-minded teenage boy.

Harry Finn was in his thirties with still boyish features and a pair of clear blue eyes that missed nothing. He'd married young and loved his wife and three children and even held sincere affection toward the family dog, a floppy-eared golden Labradoodle named George. Finn was an inch over six feet tall, with a long-limbed, wiry build ideally suited for speed and endurance. He was dressed in his usual faded jeans and shirttail-out clothing. And with round eyeglasses on and his intelligent, introspective expression, he looked like an accountant who enjoyed listening to Aerosmith after a day of crunching numbers. Although he was amazingly athletic, living by his wits was actually how he put bread on the table and iPods in his kids' ears, and he was very good at his work. Indeed, there were very few people who could do what Harry Finn could. And live. He kissed his wife good-bye, hugged his kids, even the teenager, grabbed a duffel bag that he'd placed near the front door the night before, slid into his Toyota Prius and drove to National Airport on the Potomac River right outside of Washington, D.C. Its official name had been changed to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, but to the locals it would be forever simply National. Finn parked in one of the lots near the main terminal building, whose chief architectural feature was a series of connected domes copied from Thomas Jefferson's beloved Monticello. Bag in hand, he trudged across a skywalk into the sleek interior of the airport. Inside a restroom stall he opened his duffel, pulled on a heavy blue jacket with reflective stripes on the sleeves and a pair of blue workpants, slid a pair of orange noise mufflers around his neck and clipped the official-looking ID badge onto his jacket.

Chapter 1

There are four acknowledged ways of meeting your maker: You can die by natural causes including illness; you can die by accident; you can die by another's hand; and you can die by your own hand. However, if you live in Washington, D.C., there is a fifth way of kicking the bucket: the political death. It can spring from many sources: frolicking in a public fountain with an exotic dancer who is not your wife; stuffing bags of money in your pants when the payer unfortunately happens to be the FBI; or covering up a bungled burglary when you call 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue home.

Michelle Maxwell was currently stalking the pavement in the nation's capital, but because she wasn't a politician, that fifth choice of mortal exit was not available to her. In fact, the lady was focused only on getting so wasted she'd wake up the next morning with a chunk of her memory gone. There was much she wanted to forget; much that she had to forget.

Chapter 1

Roger Seagraves walked out of the U.S. Capitol after an interesting meeting that, surprisingly, had had little to do with politics. That evening he sat alone in the living room of his modest suburban home after arriving at an important decision. He had to kill someone, and that someone was a very significant target. Instead of a daunting proposition, Seagraves saw it as a worthy challenge.

The next morning Seagraves drove to his office in northern Virginia. Sitting at his desk in a space that was small and cluttered,and looked exactly the same as other work spaces up and down the corridor, he mentally assembled the critical pieces of his task. Seagraves finally concluded that he would do the deed himself, unwilling to trust it to a third party. He'd killed before, many times in fact; the only difference now was he wouldn't be doing it for his government. This one was all for him.

Prologue

The Chevy Suburban sped down the road, enveloped by the hushed darkness of the Virginia countryside. Forty-one-year-old Adnan al-Rimi was hunched over the wheel as he concentrated on the windy road coming up. Deer were plentiful here, and Adnan had no desire to see the bloodied antlers of one slashing through the windshield. Indeed, the man was tired of things attacking him. He lifted a gloved hand from the steering wheel and felt for the gun in the holster under his jacket; a weapon was not just a comfort for Adnan, it was a necessity.

He suddenly glanced out the window as he heard the sound overhead.

There were two passengers in the backseat. The man talking animatedly in Farsi on a cell phone was Muhammad al-Zawahiri, an Iranian who had entered the country shortly before the terrorist attacks on 9/11. The man next to him was an Afghan named Gul Khan, who'd been in the States only a few months. Khan was large and muscular with a shaved head. He wore a hunter's camouflage jacket and was checking his machine gun with nimble fingers. He clicked the mag back in place and put the firing switch on two-shot bursts. A few drops of rain fell against the window, and Khan idly watched them trickle down.

Chapter 1

The man in the slicker walked slightly bent over, his breathing labored and his body sweaty. The extra weight he was bearing, though not all that substantial, was awkwardly placed, and the terrain was uneven. It was never an easy thing to tote a dead body through the woods in the middle of the night. He shifted the corpse to his left shoulder and trudged on. The soles of his shoes bore no distinguishing marks; not that it would have mattered, since the rain quickly washed away any traces of footprints. He’d checked the forecast; the rain was why he was here. The inclement weather was the best friend he could ask for.

Aside from the dead body draped over his sturdy shoulder, the man was also remarkable for the black hood he wore, on which was stitched an esoteric symbol that ran down the length of the cloth. It was a circle with a crosshairs through its middle. Probably instantly recognizable to anyone over the age of fifty, the logo once inspired a dread that had significantly eroded with time. It didn’t matter that no one “alive” would see him wearing the hood; he took grim satisfaction in its lethal symbolism.

Chapter 1

EIGHT YEARS LATER

The motorcade streamed into the tree-shaded parking lot,where it disgorged numerous people who looked hot, tiredand genuinely unhappy. The miniature army marched toward theugly white brick building. The structure had been many things inits time and currently housed a decrepit funeral home that wasthriving solely because there was no other such facility withinthirty miles and the dead, of course, had to go somewhere. Appropriatelysomber gentlemen in black suits stood next to hearses ofthe same color. A few bereaved trickled out the door, sobbing quietlyinto handkerchiefs. An old man in a tattered suit that was toolarge for him and wearing a battered, oily Stetson sat on a benchoutside the front entrance, whittling. It was just that sort of a place,rural to the hilt, stock car racing and bluegrass ballads forever.

The old fellow looked up curiously as the procession passed bywith a tall, distinguished-looking man ceremoniously in the middle.The elderly gent just shook his head and grinned at this spectacle,showing the few tobacco-stained teeth he had left. Then hetook a nip of refreshment from a flask pulled from his pocket andreturned to his artful wood carving.

Chapter 1

Tom Langdon was a journalist, a globetrotting one, because it was in his blood to roam widely. Where others saw only instability and fear in life, Tom felt graced by an embracing independence. He'd spent the bulk of his career in foreign lands covering wars, insurrections, famines, pestilence, virtually every earthly despair. His goal had been relatively simple: He had wanted to change the world by calling attention to its wrongs. And he did love adventure.

However, after chronicling all these horrific events and still seeing the conditions of humanity steadily worsen, he'd returned to America filled with disappointment. Seeking an antidote to his melancholy he'd started writing drearily light stories for ladies' magazines, home-decorating journals, garden digests, and the like. However, after memorializing the wonders of compost and the miracle that was do-it-yourself wood flooring, he wasn't exactly fulfilled.

Chapter 1

Web London held a semiautomatic SR75 rifle custom built for him by a legendary gunsmith. The SR didn't stop atmerely wounding flesh and bone; it disintegrated them. Webwould never leave home without this high chieftain of muscleguns, for he was a man steeped in violence. He was always preparedto kill, to do so efficiently and without error. Lord, if he evertook a life by mistake he might as well have eaten the bullet himself,for all the misery it would cause him. Web just had that complexway of earning his daily bread. He couldn't say he loved hisjob, but he did excel at it.

Despite having a gun welded to his hand virtually every wakingmoment of his life, Web was not one to coddle his weapons. Whilehe never called a pistol his friend or gave it a slick name, weaponswere still an important part of Web's life, though like wild animalsguns were not things easily tamed. Even trained lawmen missedtheir targets and everything else eight out of ten times. To Web, notonly was that unacceptable, it was also suicidal. He had many peculiarqualities, but a death wish was not one of them. Web hadplenty of people looking to kill him as it was, and once they hadnearly gotten their man.

Chapter 1

The air was moist, the coming rain telegraphed by plump, gray clouds, and the blue sky fast fading. The 1936 four-door Lincoln Zephyr sedan moved down the winding road at a decent, if unhurried, pace. The car's interior was filled with the inviting aromas of warm sourdough bread, baked chicken, and peach and cinnamon pie from the picnic basket that sat so temptingly between the two children in the backseat.

Louisa Mae Cardinal, twelve years old, tall and rangy, her hair the color of sun-dappled straw and her eyes blue, was known simply as Lou. She was a pretty girl who would almost certainly grow into a beautiful woman. But Lou would fight tea parties, pigtails, and frilly dresses to the death. And somehow win. It was just her nature.

The notebook was open on her lap, and Lou was filling the blank pages with writings of importance to her, as a fisherman does his net. And from the girl's pleased look, she was landing fat cod with every pitch and catch. As always, she was very intent on her writing. Lou came by that trait honestly, as her father had such fever to an even greater degree than his daughter.

Chapter 1

The somber group of men sat in a large room that rested far belowground, accessed by only a single, high-speed elevator. The chamber had been secretly built during the early 1960s under the guise of renovating the private building that squatted over it. The original plan, of course, was to use this "super-bunker" as a refuge during a nuclear attack. This facility was not for the top leaders of American government; it was for those whose level of relative "unimportance" dictated that they probably wouldn't be able to get out in time but who still rated protection afforded no ordinary citizen. Politically, even in the context of total destruction, there must be order.

The bunker was built at a time when people believed it possible to survive a direct nuclear hit by burrowing into the earth inside a steel cocoon. After the holocaust that would annihilate the rest of the country, leaders would emerge from the rubble with absolutely nothing left to lead, unless you counted vapor.

The original, aboveground building had been leveled long ago, but the subterranean room remained under what was now a small strip mall that had been vacant for years. Forgotten by virtually all, the chamber was now used as a meeting place for certain people in the country's primary intelligence-gathering agency. There was some risk involved, since the meetings were not related to the men's official duties. The matters discussed at these gatherings were illegal, and tonight even murderous. Thus additional precautions had been necessary.

Chapter 1

He gripped the steering wheel loosely as the car, its lights out, drifted slowly to a stop. A few last scraps of gravel kicked out of the tire treads and then silence enveloped him. He took a moment to adjust to the surroundings and then pulled out a pair of worn but still effective night-vision binoculars. The house slowly came into focus. He shifted easily, confidently in his seat. A duffel bag lay on the front seat beside him. The car's interior was faded but clean.

The car was also stolen. And from a very unlikely source.

A pair of miniature palm trees hung from the rearview mirror. He smiled grimly as he looked at them. Soon he might be going to the land of palms. Quiet, blue, see-through water, powdery salmon-colored sunsets and late mornings. He had to get out. It was time. For all the occasions he had said that to himself, this time he felt sure.