The Threat

If this was really what he was beginning to think it was … the battery pack, compact yet heavy as a brick, could hold three or four pounds of plastique or RDX. That might not sound like much. But it would be enough high-energy explosive to turn Marine One, and everyone in it into an enormous fireball, peppered with very small parts.

Beside him McKoy was frowning at the transceiver. Dan was still holding it, a few inches above the open satchel. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?” he said.

“It’s a fucking bomb,” Dan muttered. “We’ve got to get this thing out of here.”

“What are you talking about? An explosive device?”

Of course McKoy didn’t see it. The protective detail had never been allowed to look inside the PES. As far as the lead agent knew, this was how everything was supposed to look.

Yes. It was very clever.

“This wire isn’t supposed to be here,” Dan said. “The black one, looks like a power cord? It isn’t. And this isn’t my satchel. Somebody switched it. This thing’s a bomb.”

The agent’s face went still. “Don’t touch anything,” he said. Dan glimpsed the female agent over his shoulder, face so pale she might have just patted it all over with flour. Behind her De Bari guffawed, at something Weatherfield had said, apparently.

McKoy put his face close. Said, just loudly enough to carry over the engine noise, “You sure about this, Lenson?”

Dan had to admit it didn’t look dangerous. What they could see of the cord looked like part of the set. Only if you were familiar with the equipment would you know it didn’t belong.

Doubt wormed into his brain. Could the Military Office comm people have upgraded the radio without telling him? Put some kind of improved rig in there? But damn it, there was already a battery in the transceiver. Why wire another battery to it?

“Yeah … well … pretty sure,” he said, but his voice wasn’t as certain as it might have been.

McKoy caught that undertone. “You mean it might not be?”

“I think it probably is. But no — I can’t be sure. There’s something funny going on here, though. I’m sure of that much.”

Shit! If it was a device … he glanced at the window. The smart thing would probably be to just pop a window or the door and chuck it out. But looking out now, he saw to his horror that they weren’t over forest anymore. The pilot had taken them back over civilization. He didn’t know where — Annandale, Alexandria — but it wasn’t woods down there but houses, streets, people. Plus, if it was just some upgrade they’d forgotten to tell him about, then throwing out the secret transceiver, with encryption and release codes for the nation’s nuclear command structure, didn’t sound like a brilliant idea.

Another possibility slammed into his brain like blunt metal. Wired to a radio, a bomb could be command detonated. Like the way Israelis killed terrorists with cell phones. Which meant it could go off any second.

His thoughts darted like a trapped sparrow, but met a wall wherever they flew. He couldn’t cut the cable. It was perfectly possible, no, probably likely, that something this sophisticated would be booby-trapped.

“We’ve got to get on the ground,” he told McKoy. “Like, ASAP. Right now.”

And it looked like the agent had come to the same conclusion in the same fragment of time, because he was already charging between De Bari and Weatherfield, banging on the pilot’s door. The two men regarded him with amazement. When the colonel slid it back he yelled up. Dan saw the marine’s eyes flick to the open satchel. To him.

Then the elevator went down. Fast.

Suddenly a lot was happening at once. He was grabbing for things as they floated up off the seat. Then, forced to his knees by g’s going the other way, felt his trousers tear as they snagged on something. The woman agent was hanging on to a strap, shouting into a small radio that had appeared from nowhere. Weatherfield was shouting too.

He clung to the seat, weightless, as they fell again, this time in a long, endless, terrifying drop, like Lucifer banished from heaven. Realizing in those seconds that if whatever they’d packed his satchel with went off, he’d never feel it. Never realize he’d just stopped living.

But much worse than that, for who could object to painless and instantaneous death, he understood in those screaming seconds that if it did, he’d be known forever as the assassin.

Someone had switched satchels with him. That was the only possible conclusion. And he suspected now it had been whoever had gone into the office while he’d been talking to Ouderkirk. Remembering that glimpse of a back, walking away. Gunning? Sebold? He couldn’t swear to either. But whoever it had been, he’d been toting a cardboard box.

The luggage switch. A classic. The guy carried in Bag A, in the cardboard box, and set it down next to Bag B. Swapped them out, bent over to mask the switch, and walked out.

But no one had seen it. So he’d be blamed. And he had a motive! The president was boffing his wife!