Jack & Jill

chest.

Jack and Jill came to The Hill
To storm your picket fences.
Once safe and sound
They easily found
The flaw in your Defenses.

    A noise in the hall! He looked up. Aiden’s boy! “Oh, Jesus God, no,” he whispered out loud. “Oh, God, no.” He felt sick all over. He wanted to run from the house.
    The boy had recognized him. How could he not? Young Aiden even knew his children. He knew too much.
Dear God, have mercy on me. Please have mercy.
    Jack fired the Beretta again.
    This was war.

CHAPTER
58

    I WAS CALLED to an emergency crisis team meeting at the White House at 8:00 A.M. on December 10. I had been causing some trouble over the past few days there. My internal investigation was making waves, ruffling feathers. The big cats on The Hill didn’t like being under suspicion—but all of them were, at least in my book.
    Jay Grayer grabbed me the moment I arrived inside the West Wing. Jay’s eyes were flat and cold and hard. His grip was strong on my shoulder. “Alex, I need to talk to you for a minute,” he said. “It’s important.”
    “What’s going on now?” I asked the Secret Service agent. He didn’t look well. There were dark puffs under both his eyes. Something else had happened. I could tell.
    “Aiden Cornwall was murdered early this morning. It happened at his house out in McLean. It was Jack and Jill. They called us again. Called it in to us like we’re mission control.” He shook his head in sadness and disbelief. “They killed Aiden’s nine-year-old son, Alex.”
    I found myself rocking back on my heels. The news from Jay Grayer didn’t make sense to me; it didn’t track with the Jack and Jill style to this point. Goddamn them! They kept changing the rules. They had to be doing it on purpose.
    “I want to go there right now,” I told him. “I need to see the house. I need to be out there, not here.”
    “I hear you, but wait a minute, Alex,” he said. “Hold on. Let me tell you the rest of what’s going on. It gets worse.”
    “How could it get any worse?” I asked him. “Jesus, Jay.”
    “Trust me, it does. Just listen for a minute.”
    Agent Grayer continued to talk in a subdued whisper in the White House hallway as we walked together toward the Emergency Command Center, where the others were gathering. He pulled me aside a few paces from the meeting room. His voice was still an urgent whisper.
    “The President is always awakened at quarter to five by the agent in charge. Happens every morning. This morning, the President dressed and went down to the library, where he reads the early papers as well as an executive summary that’s prepared for him before he rises.”
    “What happened this morning?” I asked Jay. I was beginning to perspire.
“What happened,
Jay?”
    He was very thorough and procedural. “At five o’clock the phone in the library rang. It was Jill on the private line. She was calling to talk with the President. She got through to him,
and that just isn’t possible.”
    My head involuntarily shook back and forth. I agreed with Jay Grayer: this couldn’t be happening. The idea, the concept, of the President as a murder target was a hugely disturbing one. The fact that, so far, we were helpless to stop it was much, much worse.
    “I think I understand why the call couldn’t happen, but tell me anyway,” I said. I needed to hear it from him.
    “Every single call to the White House goes through a private switchboard. Then the call is monitored by a second operator in White House Communications, which is actually part of our Intelligence Division. Every call
except this one.
The call completely bypassed the control system. Nobody knows how the hell it happened. But it
happened.”
    “This phone call that couldn’t have happened—was it recorded?” I asked Grayer.
    “Yes, of course it was. It’s already being processed at FBI headquarters and also at Bell Atlantic out in White Oak. Jill used another filtering device to modify her voice, but there might be ways to get around that. We’ve got half the Baby Bell’s high-tech lab on it.”
    I shook my head again. I’d heard it, but I couldn’t believe any of this. “What did Jill have to say?”
    “She began by identifying herself. She said,
‘Hi, this is Jill speaking.’
I’m sure that got the President’s attention better than his usual cup of joe in the morning. Then she said,
‘Mr. President, are you ready to die?’ ”

CHAPTER
59

    NEEDED TO SEE the house. I needed to be