Stone - 25 - Collateral Damage

distributed. Everybody ordered sandwiches, and as they were delivered, the president walked into the room and sat down in a comfortable chair.
    “Good morning, Holly, Stone, Dino, and Mike, and thank you all for coming.”
    Everybody voiced greetings, then they were handed trays, and the president’s mouth seemed always too full for him to speak. The trays were taken away, and he stood up. “Come on, we’re going to have coffee downstairs.”
    Stone thought that meant the White House Mess, but when they got on the elevator it went down quickly for a greater distance than he had anticipated.
    They stepped off the elevator and into a vestibule, where a naval officer distributed picture IDs that were hung around their necks, then they were ushered into a large conference room with many screens on the walls.
    Stone immediately recognized Steve Rifkin, who had been in charge of the presidential Secret Service detail at The Arrington; Tim Coleman, the White House chief of staff; and another two men whom he knew to be bomb specialists, along with a man Stone recognized from newspaper photographs as the head of the Secret Service. Kate Lee was already seated at the conference table, at the opposite end from her husband, the president. She was the first to speak.
    “Good morning, Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen. You will have noticed that the group around this table—the president, the chief of staff, the chief of the Secret Service, and I excepted—were in the suite at The Arrington when a nuclear device was discovered in a trunk. The people responsible for building and delivering it are now deceased, so those of you in this room are the only persons with direct knowledge of that day’s events. You’ve been asked here for what we hope will be the final briefing on this subject, so that all of you will understand what could have occurred at The Arrington if you had been less vigilant, and the vital importance of keeping every detail of those events confined to the people around this table. No other person in the government not in this room has the knowledge that you are about to possess. I’ll turn you over to Steve Rifkin now.”
    “Thank you, Director,” Rifkin said. “Since you were all present at the scene you know what occurred. Our purpose today is to fill in the blanks that some of you may not know. Our chief bomb technician here has put together a short film, cobbled together from photographs, film and sat shots, along with computer-generated animation, that will give you an accurate idea of what might have happened that day. He was the only person to work on the film, and he is the narrator. What you will see is the only existing version of the film. All the other materials have been destroyed, and after you see it, it will be sealed, placed in a vault at the new Will Lee Presidential Library, which is about to begin construction in Delano, Georgia, and not made public until fifty years after the death of President Lee—and then, only with the consent of whoever is president at that time.”
    The lights went down and the film began, displayed on four screens in the situation room, so that no one would have to crane his neck to view it.
    The first image was the planet from outer space; the shot zoomed in to contain California, then farther, to embrace Los Angeles. The zoom slowed as the grounds and buildings of The Arrington came into view.
    “This was to be the origin of the worst attack of any kind on the United States in the country’s history,” the bomb chief’s voice said, as the view zoomed in farther to the building containing the suite, then traveled into the bedroom, where a closet door opened to reveal a Louis Vuitton steamer trunk.
    “This is the suite occupied by this man”—a photograph appeared on-screen—“born Ari Shazaz, but known to others as Hamish McCallister, who was born of a Scottish mother and an Algerian father, then raised in Britain and educated at Eton and Oxford. We now know that his father, who was divorced from his mother and remarried, fathered another son and a daughter, and was a close associate of Osama bin Laden from a time when they were both students together in Saudi Arabia. Mr. Shazaz was caught up in a sweep of al Qaeda operatives by CIA and MI-6 personnel in a house in Cairo and was almost immediately transported to the naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba. He was held there for nearly three years, during which time he never disclosed his identity, in