Novels

I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

21.

Three minutes before he rediscovered gravity, Renicks was peering through the slats of a grate into the television studio. Trying to determine how many people were in the room below him. Whether Begley was still one of them.

He was bathed in sweat. Gritty from accumulated dust and dirt. Bloody. He’d pushed his bag, with the Kimber on top, in front of him as he’d crawled, following his own slime trail. Knowing that if he hadn’t retraced his steps he would have become hopelessly lost in the dark, cramped airway. When he reached the first junction, he turned away from his original path and followed the new duct. It angled upward slightly, and he quickly found himself looking directly down into the room. He could hear voices. He couldn’t see anyone, no matter how he angled his head.

Sweat dripped from him. He felt shaky. He imagined every breath, every twitch of his muscles to be incredibly loud.

He had no plan. It occurred to him that he was a terrible hero.

The murmur of voices was maddening. At least two people. A woman and a man. If they left, he could worm his way back around and re-enter the studio. The idea of staying in the ducts any longer terrified him. He felt like he couldn’t breathe. He wanted to scream and beat his hands against the tight, flimsy sheet metal walls.

He considered just hiding in the ducts. He could make his way back to the exchange he’d found; more room there. He had a bottle of water in his bag. And the Kimber.

He imagined himself making his last stand huddled in the goddamn air-conditioning. A twitchy, off-center smile crept onto his face. He stifled sudden laughter that threatened to convulse him.

Through the slats, he saw someone step into his field of vision.

A man. Wearing a suit. White earbud hanging from a wire over his shoulder. Renicks held his breath. One of Amesley’s agents. Moving with exaggerated slowness, Renicks reached forward and took hold of the Kimber. Checked the safety. Pointed it downward. Wondered what would happen if he shot through the slats. He knew the Kimber would blow right through the thin metal. Would it send shrapnel back at him? Would it queer his aim?

Could he kill someone? In cold blood?

Paralyzed, he lay there trying to keep his breathing slow and quiet. He became aware of a low noise. It was a low creaking sound, steady. All the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He didn’t know much about ventilation systems, but he was confident this was not a good sign.

The whole duct shifted.

There was a loud wrenching noise, and he felt the thin metal jump under him, as if he’d dropped half an inch. Gripping the Kimber tightly, he stared down through the slats of the grate. The agent below had turned. Stared up at him with a quizzical look on his face.

Renicks exhaled slowly.

With a snap like a gunshot, something gave way and the world tilted. The grate vanished, and for a second it was all darkness. Then a confused noise like cardboard boxes tumbling, and a square of light opened up below him. His bag slid down, dropping over the edge, and a second later he was sliding down, head first. The duct had crashed through the dropped ceiling, hanging on an angle.

He popped out six feet above the floor and crashed into the agent. They hit the floor in a tangle. The agent rolled Renicks onto his back and squatted on his chest. Took hold of his wrist with both hands and pointed the Kimber up at the ceiling. Chunks of drywall tile rained down on them. The silver ductwork swung up and down above them, vibrating. Renicks stared up at it for a split-second. Twisted free and flopped over onto his belly just as it snapped free and crashed down on top of them.

For a second, he thought he was pinned. Two hundred pounds of agent plus half the ceiling on top of him. With a painful twist he was able to pull himself forward. Scissored his legs and was free. The Kimber still in one hand, he got to his knees and stared at the carpet for a second. Head ringing. He felt heavy and slow, and thought he’d just stay right there for a moment. Let the world end while he caught his breath. He stared at the gun. Lifted it up. It was heavier than he remembered. Warm in his hand. He put his finger over the trigger and tried to remember what it felt like to fire it. The kick. The shockwave up his arm. The involuntary jerk of his shoulder. The involuntary wince every time he fired it that had become a joke between him and the instructor.

A noise brought his head up from his chest. A woman, another agent dressed in a sober blue pantsuit, was sitting up on the floor, one hand on her forehead. She’d been knocked down when the ceiling had collapsed. He stared at her, frozen. She was young, about Begley’s age. Pale white skin and reddish, messy hair that hung down just to her shoulders. A plain, round face with a short, flat nose. A competent face unused to passion. Her hair was almost purposefully without artifice, almost defiantly messy. She wore no makeup. Her crisp white shirt was buttoned to the top and betrayed almost no shape at all. Her nails were short and unpainted. She wore no jewelry. He couldn’t see her shoes, but he knew they would be ugly, comfortable, and not new. A serious woman who wanted everyone to know she was a serious woman. Which Renicks thought meant she wasn’t nearly as competent as she wanted everyone to think.

He compared her to Begley, who made no special efforts to be attractive and yet was, who made no special efforts to appear competent, and yet was.

A lance of alarm startled him. These two had been with Darmity. Lazily, still feeling dopey and slow, he raised the Kimber and pointed it at her. Again he wondered if he would be able to shoot someone.

The motion caught her eye and she turned suddenly. Gasped when she saw him.

For a moment, they stared at each other.

Her eyes dropped to the unconscious male agent for a second. Then jumped back to him. He told himself she didn’t know him. Didn’t know anything about him. Didn’t know he’d never fired the gun outside of a range, wearing protective glasses and earplugs. He’d stayed out of their reach and he’d come crashing from the ceiling, bloody and raw. He kept the gun steady. Tried to look calm and evil. And hoped to hell there wasn’t something giving away his pounding heart, his sense of being exposed.

“Where’s Agent Begley?” he said. His voice came out as a dry rasp. He was grateful for the dust.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Darmity took her.” She raised one hand up towards her ear. “I’m going to reach for my radio and find out for you.”

“Stop,” he said immediately. He wished he could extricate himself from the unconscious agent and the ductwork without lowering the gun, but he didn’t think that was possible.

Her hand kept moving. “I’m just reaching for my radio, Secretary Renicks,” she said slowly. Her eyes were locked on his face.

He thought about clicking the hammer back for emphasis. But his instructor had told him years ago that this was a meaningless gesture you only saw in movies. He was afraid she would know that too and it would make him look like an amateur. His knuckles were white and his arm had started shaking from the strain of holding the gun on her.

“If you don’t stop moving,” he said carefully, “I will shoot you.”

She shook her head. “No, you, won’t, sir.”

Her arm jerked downwards. His finger spasmed. The gun roared and kicked back at him. The loudest sound he’d ever heard in his life. He sprang back up straight. His hand and lower arm buzzed with the shock.

He couldn’t see the woman any more. A light spray of red blood had appeared on the wall behind where she’d been sitting. He twisted his torso and used his elbows on the carpet to pull himself out from under the agent and debris. Scrambling to his feet, he ducked down, feeling ridiculous, and duck-walked his way around the rubble. His hand had gone numb but he still clutched the Kimber, aiming it down towards the floor as he moved.

The woman came into view. Dead. Her gun in one hand. Her chest still seeping blood that slowly soaked into her shirt. Her eyes open and staring up at the ruined ceiling.

Renicks stared at her. Heart pounding. She looked like someone he could have gone to school with. He stood over her. Knew he should move. Knew that the gunshot might have been heard, that more of Amesley’s people might be on their way. Any second, they could burst in and take him. The man he’d knocked unconscious might wake up behind him. But he couldn’t move. He stared down at the dead agent. She didn’t look anything like his daughters. She reminded him of both.

Slowly, he moved to her side. Knelt down. Studied her face for a moment. Couldn’t stand her eyes, so he reached down and after a second’s hesitation moved his hand over her eyelids, gently closing them.

“I’m sorry,” he said, voice shaking.

He could feel a breakdown somewhere in the near distance. Whatever this woman had done, or intended to do, he had shot her without knowing anything about her.

He fought an urge to reach down and tidy her up. As if leaving her disheveled and bloody was wrong somehow. Like a little grooming would make up for it. He stared down at her, frozen. Then his eyes jumped to her arm, which was thrown over her belly. Like she was just resting.

He concentrated. Forced himself to move. To make tiny decisions. He flicked the safety back on the gun. Pushed it back into his waistband. Turned to make sure the other agent was still out. Stooped to retrieve his bag. The wrenching pain in his ankle as he did so made him pause and inspect himself for injuries. He was shaky from adrenaline, but aside from a million tiny cuts from his excursion into the ducts, there was nothing major.

He looked at the dead woman again. His stomach turned. He spun and staggered towards the back wall. Bent over and vomited onto the carpet. Stayed in that position for a few seconds, breathing hard, head pounding.

Then he spun away, looping the bag’s strap over his shoulder. He hesitated over the corpse and stepped over to the other agent instead, kneeling down and searching him quickly, retrieving the man’s walkie-talkie and gun. He hesitated for a moment, then pushed the radio and the new gun into his bag and went to the door. Still feeling shaky, a light film of grimy sweat all over his body, he opened it a crack and peered out into the corridor. Taking a deep breath, he opened it further and pushed his head out, looking up and down quickly.

“What they never tell you in school,” he whispered to himself as he slipped into the corridor and shut the door carefully behind him, “is that being President of the United States kind of sucks.”

EPUB | MOBI | PDF

I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

20.

Seven minutes before screaming in pain for the second time in an hour, Begley stared at the wrong end of Frank Darmity’s gun. It was a Beretta ninety-two with no accessories attached. She could hear the other two behind her. Both dressed in sober blue suits. Both agents. She didn’t know their names but she’d seen them before. The woman was tall and built, hours in the gym working the weights. The man was older. Forties. Still in shape, but with a belly starting to creep in from too many after-shift beers. Too many details sitting outside hotel rooms and in the backs of surveillance vans, eating pizza. Drinking sugared-up coffee. Smoking ill-advised cigarettes.

“Give me a boost again.”

“You already tried. You’re not going to fit.”

Despite the throbbing pain in her leg she forced herself to remain standing. To prove to Darmity that he couldn’t break her. Not with a blow to her injured leg. He might make her scream, an instinctual reaction. But it wasn’t going to break her. She moved her eyes from the gun to Darmity. He wasn’t going into the ductwork. He was one of those stocky men who wasn’t exactly fat. Just broad. Muscular. Heavy. His knuckles, she noted, were all scabbed up. Like he’d spent a few hours the night before punching a brick wall. Or someone’s face.

He was looking past her. At his two companions.

Begley watched Darmity’s face. Tried to feel out the physics of the situation. Two agents behind her. Distracted. Facing the wrong way. Darmity in front of her. Distracted. Holding his gun out in front of him like an asshole. The precise way you should never hold your gun. Straight out from you, easy to knock aside. Easy to snatch away. And if you were going to hold it that way, you should at least pay attention to the person you were covering.

She ran the possibilities through her mind: Reaching out. Fast. Could she pull the gun from his grip? He didn’t have his finger on the trigger, at least. No knee-jerk firing into her belly. One less finger to hold onto the gun. She had no balance. No leverage. The chances that she’d fail to take possession of the gun and end up in a losing struggle for it were pretty high.

She was unarmed. Darmity had done that much right. Even if she managed to knock his gun away, she would then be a wobbly, off-balance woman weighing about half of this slab of doughy muscle with both feet planted firmly on the carpet. She looked him up and down. Was pleased to note the large stain of blood on his shirt.

“Leave it,” Darmity ordered. “I know where Mr. Fancy’s going.”

Begley’s eyes jumped back to Darmity’s face. Did he? Alarm spread through her veins. Renicks had proven to be smarter than she’d expected. More resilient, certainly. There’d been no time to suggest a destination for him, and no way to help him find one even if she had — she herself would be hard pressed to navigate the ventilation system reliably, and she knew the complex better than just about anyone else in the world.

Darmity shifted his gaze and looked right back at her. Smiled. It was a mean little smile. Smug and cruel. She flinched back a second before his free hand flashed out. Pushed into her chest. Shoved her off-balance. Her splinted leg went out from under her and she fell painfully to the floor, teeth clicking together.

“Stay here,” Darmity said. “In case Mr. Fancy comes back. But he won’t. He’s alone and he’s scared and he’ll go and do what’s familiar. He’ll head back into the service corridors. Find a place to hide. Curl up and wait for his little agent here to find him and tell him what to do.”

Begley propped herself up onto her elbows. Her leg throbbed and her head ached. She remembered the bottle of pills Renicks had handed her, in her pants pocket. She didn’t want to take it out in front of Darmity. Didn’t want to show him weakness. Didn’t want him to guess how much pain she was in. And wondered what would happen if she took more, hearing Renicks’ warning about topping out at six. The last thing she needed was to be stoned, nodding off or getting spacey.

She considered the general amount of pain she was in, and the likelihood she would spend the immediate future being hurt. Nodding off did not, after all, appear to be a real concern.

Darmity stepped around her. She kept her eyes forward and listened. A second later his fist grasped her shirt collar and with a sudden jerk she was being dragged across the floor. Her hands flew up behind her neck and grabbed at his wrist. She stopped. She felt the muzzle of his Beretta against the top of her head. Froze instantly.

“Behave,” he said.

And then they were out in the hall. He dragged her for a few feet easily, without any sign of strain.

“Mr. Darmity?”

He laughed. It was disorienting. Sliding backwards, his voice behind her. “Funny how people start calling me mister at all the wrong times.”

She swerved, her leg jolting her as it banged against a wall. He was taking her towards the elevators. At least he’s not going to try to pull me up the service ladders, she thought sourly. The pain in her leg had dialed up fifty or hundred times from the rough handling. Beads of sweat had popped up all over her skin. “Why are you doing this? Why kill so many people?”

Without warning his hand let go and she dropped backwards, hitting her head dully on the thick industrial carpeting of the hallway. Then he was crouched over her. Knees on her arms, pinning her painfully. The gun under her chin. He had a dark shadow of beard already growing even though he’d been clean-shaven that morning. He was smiling in a precisely unhappy manner. His eyes were bright and heated.

“Because people like you and Mr. Fancy have fucked this country up, you stupid bitch. And there’s so much bullshit it can’t be fixed within the rules. Because you have to amputate a diseased limb. We’ve been waiting for it to happen any other way — for even a sign that it might be possible. Fuck that. We’re past that point. Change is at hand, Agent Begley.”

He straightened up and stepped around her again. She saw herself catching hold of his ankle. Pulling him off-balance. Scrambling for the gun. She did nothing. Let him hook his calloused hand into her shirt again. Resume dragging her. They were only a few feet away from the studio and a struggle would bring the other two on her before she could master the situation. And her goddamn leg. She couldn’t be sure of having enough torque to bring down someone Darmity’s size.

So, she let herself be dragged.

Change is at hand, he’d said. It stuck with her. She’d heard that phrase before, recently. She filed it away.

“What we need is a dictator,” he said suddenly. “Like in Rome. You know Rome? You read books? No one does any more. No one knows anything. Fucking Congress, supposed to represent the people. Don’t represent anyone I know. Can’t pass a goddamn nonbinding resolution any more, just endless arguing and tricks. We need someone to cut through the bullshit. The Romans had it right, they had that in law. When the Republic was threatened, pick someone who could handle it and make him Dictator. Get past the tricks, clean shit up. We don’t have that law, so we gotta make it happen. Gotta get Congress to pass the laws, to make themselves irrelevant. Gotta scare them.” He chuckled.

In the elevator, he punched in a sequence of buttons she didn’t recognize. They’d changed the code sets. Which meant she didn’t even know the correct codes to use, unless they simply switched to the next day’s set. She knew the next day; she made it her business to start memorizing them a few days in advance.

“I used to go to meetings,” Darmity said as the doors slid shut. “Like minded people. Pissed off people. And I’d sit there and listen. These were good people, you know? Citizens. Patriots. A lot of veterans, but not the smug kind. And they would talk, and talk. Campaigns and fundraisers and voter registration and targeting one asshole in Congress with another asshole who wanted to be in Congress. Shit, I couldn’t take it any more. So I started standing up, telling what we needed was to be teaching folks how to shoot, teaching them history, getting them angry. This country, when things go wrong we have an inalienable right to bear arms and make it right again. So they asked me to stop coming to meetings. I was making too much noise. Telling ’em shit they did not want to hear. That’s what we’re up against. That kind of stupidity. Cut through it. Just slice on through it. Get someone emergency powers and let them spend a few years fixing it all, one executive order after another. The right man, with emergency powers.” He sighed almost dreamily. “But to get emergency powers, you gotta have an emergency. That’s where I come in.”

Just outside the Security Office, he let go. “On your feet,” he ordered, pulling open the door and holding it. He stood there and watched as she struggled upright, using the wall for balance. With an exaggerated gesture he ushered her through the door.

She stopped right inside the familiar room. Five men and women she’d never seen before that morning were working the Security Office: Jackets off, sleeves rolled up. Hunched over monitors. Two were standing around the remote launch interface,. They glanced up at her for a second, then returned to their work. Director Amesley was standing in the midst of them, crisp and neat. His large, thick glasses made him appear to goggle at her, but she knew this was an illusion.

“Agent Begley,” he said, inclining his head slightly.

For a moment she stared at him, anger flooding her. She had served under Director Amesley. Had feared his temper. Been impressed with his knowledge and experience. Had even conceded that his passionate beliefs were inspiring for their depth and fire even if she did not always agree with his politics. And now he was instrumental in committing what could be the worst terrorist act in the nation’s history.

“Martin,” she said coldly.

“Come on,” Darmity snarled, taking hold of her arm and pulling her roughly after him. She lost balance and stumbled, pain shooting up her leg. He kept her from falling through sheer arm strength and almost threw her into a chair. It rolled backwards, spinning, and crashed into an unused rack of monitors and phone lines.

“Mr. Darmity!” Amesley said loudly. It was not exactly a shout. Simply a higher level of volume than his voice normally utilized.

“Shut up,” Darmity said. “You’ve been puttering around here for a goddamn hour and he’s still wandering around the complex free as a fucking bird. We’re gonna cut to the chase.” He holstered his gun and stood for a moment, looking around the security office. He spotted a walkie-talkie lying on one of the panels and stepped over to it, picking it up and turning several of the switches in small, precise increments. Then he stepped back to loom over Begley. She forced herself not to flinch away from him as he leaned over her and pressed two buttons on the panel behind her.

“Mr. Renicks!”

Darmity’s voice, spoken into the receiver, boomed throughout the room and echoed in the hall outside. Begley jumped in spite of herself. He’d patched in wirelessly to the PA system. His voice was in every room of the complex, including the service corridors.

Everyone else in the office had stopped. Stood staring at Darmity. Amesley was blank-faced as usual but Begley thought there was something in his posture, his attitude that hinted he did not approve — whether of Frank Darmity in general or this new tactic in specific, she couldn’t tell.

“I know you can hear me, buddy, so listen carefully. I could spend all goddamn day trying to track you down in the goddamn crawlspaces where you’re hiding from me like a coward. I don’t have time. So you gotta know something.”

“I’ve got your bitchy In-Suite Agent here. You prepped her nicely for us, so we won’t have to go through the trouble of breaking her leg to begin with.”

Begley stopped breathing for a moment. Amesley scowled and looked down at the floor. Pushed a hand into his pants pocket.

“Renicks, I’m not some polite agent, trained like a puppy to hold your hand while you piss, okay? You know what I was contracted for with the company? Involuntary Extraction. You know what that’s a euphemism for?”

Contracted. Begley nodded to herself. A mercenary. Blackwater, Goldhawk, XCE Incorporated — a company like that, handling military-type operations the military didn’t have manpower for. She’d worked with some of those types before. Darmity confirmed a lot of her prejudices about them, a lot of her experiences with them. Cowboys. They operated between the cracks — they weren’t under military or governmental discipline, and their corporate bosses didn’t much care what they did as long as the missions got done and everyone got paid. The problem was, you couldn’t just ignore them, have contempt for them, because a lot of them were ex-military, ex-CIA, and usually high-grade. Even the ones with no formal background had skills. She’d shot Darmity from five feet away and he was still there, operating.

“It’s a euphemism for this,” Darmity said. He took two brisk steps towards her and kicked her solidly in the leg.

She spun off the chair, screaming, and hit the hard floor of the Security Office, which sent a second shockwave of agony throughout her whole body. She screamed again, one final bitten-off howl, and then got control of herself. She lay as still as she could, face-down on the concrete, panting. Sweat dripping off her forehead. She watched it be absorbed by the stone.

“You listening, Renicks? I don’t know if you give a shit about your cute little In-Suite-Agent here, but imagine this was your daughter, man. Imagine that. This is just to give you some sound effects for your imagination, okay?”

Through the agony, Begley fixed on that. Your daughter. What did that mean? Darmity didn’t sound desperate. Didn’t sound like a man spinning bullshit in hopes of shaking something loose. He sounded smug and mean.

Begley heard him turn. The scrape of his boots on the floor. She twisted herself around to look over her shoulder, trying to manage it without moving her leg at all. Watched him striding towards her, the walkie-talkie in one hand. She clenched her teeth, determined not to make a noise. Not a sound. No matter what.

Darmity filled her vision. Then suddenly froze, one leg off the ground. His eyes rolled up in his head. He fell forward, landing on his face, unconscious. Right next to her. Close enough for her to feel the breeze of his passing.

Behind him, holding a small black device whose edge crackled with electricity for a second, was Director Amesley. He stared down at Darmity for a second, expressionless, and then looked at her.

“My apologies, Agent Begley,” he said flatly.

EPUB | MOBI | PDF

I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

19.

One minute before finding himself in another air duct, Renicks stood, frozen. He watched Begley tugging ineffectually at the cabinet, trying to drag it. His eyes jumped to the door as someone crashed into it, making it jump on its hinges. The lock held. It wasn’t much of a lock, though.

“Jesus, Jack!”

He blinked and sprang forward, dropping his bag and grabbing one end of the cabinet. He dragged it over to the door. Pushed it flush against it. Stood back and figured it would add another ten or fifteen seconds at best.

Repeated Stan’s words to himself: a U.S. President engineering a national emergency. Pictured the crates in the storage room. Amesley, the man ultimately in charge of President Grant’s security, running this show. The ELIRO document on The Brick.

Eliro. Renicks centered on the word again. It tugged at him. As if he’d seen it before, or ought to recognize it.

The door jumped again.

Begley turned and gave him a push. “Move!”

He stumbled backwards a step before regaining his balance. Suddenly decided Begley had grown up with brothers. Older.

“Where — ”

She pointed up. He turned to follow her arm and saw another air conditioning grate. Wide enough to wriggle into. He stood for a second, staring at it.

“Ah, fuck.”

She shoved him violently from behind. “Move!”

He whirled in time to receive several more blows to the chest. He whipped his hands up and grasped her by the wrists. The door jumped again.

“What about you?”

Staggering back, she surprised him. Pulled her weapon. Held it down against her splinted leg with her finger along the barrel. “I can’t climb, Jack. Much less push myself through a fucking duct. You’re the asset. You cannot be compromised, so climb up on the goddamn filing cabinet and get in the fucking duct.”

He stared for just a second. Brothers, he thought.

The door jumped.

He whirled and limped away, scooping up his bag and slinging it over his shoulder. Pushed his hand into his pocket and fumbled for his penknife. He pulled himself up on top of the filing cabinet, knocking the fax onto the floor. The grate over the duct was held in place by two small flathead screws.

The door jumped. There was a distinct cracking sound.

“Jack!” Begley shouted. “You don’t have much time!”

“Thanks,” he muttered, sweat streaming into his eyes as he worked the screws.

The duct plate clattered to the floor. He shoved his bag in ahead of him and squeezed his shoulders in, pushing himself up.

“Jack!”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he hissed to himself. For a split second of panic he thought he was stuck. Then, with a searing pain along each side as the sharp edges of sheet metal screws sliced into his skin he was in. “Does she think I’m taking my time?”

Then he was in the hot, gritty, echoing world of the duct. There was just enough room for him to wriggle his way forward. He was sweating immediately. Every move seemed incredibly loud.

Until the door smashed inward in the room behind him. Until gunshots. Until Begley screamed.

He froze. Realized he’d moved out of instinct. Terror. Self-preservation. He could pretend it was because he was the Designated Survivor, the acting President. Because he had to remain free, or people would die. But he suddenly wasn’t sure if he hadn’t run because he could die. Because he was afraid.

He lay there for a second. Paralyzed.

“Mr. Secretary!”

Darmity’s voice. Other voices, then. Muffled.

Renicks pushed himself backwards a few inches. He couldn’t leave Begley alone.

Then stopped.

“Mr. Secretary! Are you really gonna run from me? Are you gonna leave this gorgeous spitfire in my hands?”

What was he going to do? He couldn’t even reach around to get to his own gun. He’d be emerging from the duct backwards. Going back was suicide. Going back was putting himself directly into their hands. Slowly, shaking with frustration, he began pushing himself forward again. Inches. He had to pull himself with his finger and push with his feet. Pushing his bag ahead of him. Swollen ankle throbbing. Metal screws catching his flesh as he moved. Sweat and grime working their way into the wounds and burning.

The President. Charles A. Grant. In the third year of an increasingly disastrous term. Renicks ran it through his mind as he listened to his own hot, claustrophobic breathing. A president almost certainly playing out the string. A lame duck. He thought of the people around Grant, the people he appointed and hired. All of them had been with Grant for years, decades. All of them had been long time confidants. All of them had supported Grant in everything he did. There had been speculation in the papers that part of Grants’ decline in popularity stemmed from the Yes-Men he had surrounded himself with, people of ability who nevertheless agreed with everything the President said or proposed. Even Gerry Flanagan. Grant with his crazy charm, a charm that inspired loyalty. A charm that inspired service.

He remembered Begley’s words about Amesley. He loves this country. And he idolizes President Grant.

Grant. Tan. Tall, Charming. He’d felt the power of the man’s charm himself. Standing in the Oval Office, being grinned at. The grin. It never left. It never flickered.

Jesus, it was possible. A president, even a weak, failing downward president like Grant had immense power behind the scenes. Executive orders, protected from public scrutiny. Add in men in other positions of power ready to take his orders. It was possible. Engineering a national emergency. Someone becomes Acting President when Grant stages an attack on himself. An Acting President in an Emergency, without all of the encumbrances and obstructions of a peacetime President. Launches nuclear missiles — where? Anywhere. A world war would be emergency enough. Or hit domestic cities, blame terrorists. Declare martial law.

And suddenly a weak and downward failing President doesn’t have to worry about an election any more.

It didn’t make sense, though. If that was the plan, why him? Flanagan, as part of Grant’s inner circle, should have been the Designated Survivor. He would have done what the President wanted. Why have him murdered so that John Renicks, Ph.D., who wasn’t part of the plot and who wouldn’t go along with things, would end up Acting President?

Maybe, he thought, Gerry hadn’t been as charmed by Grant as he appeared. Maybe there’d been disagreements. Maybe Grant didn’t think he could rely on Gerry to murders hundreds of thousands of people in order to spur a coup d’etat. That might explain why Gerry had been taken out, but not why he’d been slotted in. Unless they didn’t have that much control. They could eliminate Gerry, but there hadn’t been time, perhaps, to do anything else. Maybe they’d just done the math: Gerry wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t break. Maybe – maybe – Renicks would.

He told himself that maybe he would never know why. And that he had bigger immediate problems.

Blood was staining his shirt from the dozens of shallow cuts he’d inflicted on himself. He came to a junction. Ducts branching off to the left and right. He chose the left randomly. Simply because it seemed to lead away from the studio. Away from Darmity. Behind him, he heard a hollow booming noise. Realized he was leaving a perfect trail behind. Like a snail. Oozing blood with every increment.

He tried to increase his pace. Tried to estimate his lead. When he came to the next junction, with a duct branching off to the right, he pushed past it for several seconds, moving as quickly as he could manage. Straining his ears. He pushed back at panic, forcing himself to continue forward until he’d counted to a hundred. Then he reversed direction and struggled back to the junction. Waiting for the shout, the slap of a hand on his ankle. The sudden pinpricks of light as someone shot upwards into the duct. When he’d backed up enough to make the turn to the right, he paused a moment to inspect his false trail. It wasn’t long, but in the dim light he thought it would fool anyone following him. Long enough, anyway.

He pushed thoughts out of his head. Pushed with his toes, pulled with his fingers. Breathed. Pushed his bag. Pushed with his toes, pulled with his fingers. Breathed.

Grates began appearing at regular intervals on the bottom of the ducts. He could see through the slats into the rooms below. All empty.

The available light began to increase. He could make out a widening in the ductwork up ahead, which resolved into a large exchange, three feet wide and tall enough to sit up in. Up above, behind a heavy-looking mesh was a large fan spinning in lazy circles. He pushed himself up against the side, pulling his legs up against his chest, and pulled the Kimber out. Checked that the safety was off. He hadn’t fired the gun in two years. Had never fired it anywhere but a range.

He waited. Tried to breathe shallowly. Ignored the burning scrapes oozing blood.

Nothing happened. There was no noise behind him. No sign of pursuit.

He set the gun down next to him and rubbed his hands over his face, scrubbing. Checked himself visually. His clothes were stained with blood, but it was all superficial wounds. He was filthy and sizzling with low-level pain, but he wasn’t badly hurt. He wasn’t in the hands of someone prepared to put thousands, maybe millions of people at risk for his own purposes.

He swallowed and sat forward. Opened his bag. He had to help Begley. He had to go back.

EPUB | MOBI | PDF

I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

18.

Eleven minutes before they barricaded the door, Renicks watched Begley struggle out of her chair and almost fall at him. Overbalanced. Excited. He let her snatch the receiver from his hand. Watched her face as she pressed it against her ear. Held her gaze when her eyes jumped to him.

“Jesus,” she said, smiling. “A separate line. Hell, I forgot there was even a fax machine in the complex. They overlooked it. It’s on its own dedicated line, and they forgot about it!”

For a moment, he thought she might start to jump around. She quickly deflated. Handed the phone back to him. Turned awkwardly and hobbled a few steps away.

“I can’t call any of my Emergency Numbers,” she said to the air. “Amesley set those up.”

Renicks looked around the booth. “I think we’ve left protocol behind, Begs.”

“What do I do? Call the White House?”

Renicks considered. “The FBI?”

She turned around and looked at him steadily. “If the Secret Service is compromised in this, why not the FBI?” She shook her head. “We have to go a different direction.””

Renicks spread his hands. “Call 411?” He shook his head. “All the info we need was probably in The Brick.”

She was still staring at him. “That is … not helpful, Jack.”

He nodded, grimacing. Frustration flooded him. He felt buried. underground, trapped. He was the linchpin of the whole situation. But he had no control. All he could do was play hide and seek.

“The White House will be locked down,” she said, hobbling into a slow, shuffling walk. “We’re not getting in through the switchboard. And all Secret Service contacts will have to be treated as toxic. We also have to assume we only get one shot. Maybe that fax line stays unnoticed, or maybe a big red light turns on in the Security Office when we dial out. We have to make the first call count.”

Renicks nodded. He ran through his own office, his assistant, his Deputy Secretary. His staff of researchers. None of them would be of any use, assuming he even trusted them that far. He’d never doubted them before, but he’d never had the lives of tens of thousands of people — if not more — and the fate of the world on his back either. The Director of the Secret Service was involved. There were pallets of body bags and emergency signs in storage. That spoke of a large conspiracy. Dozens of people, at least, in positions to route shipments and blackline budgets. Would something like that bother to recruit from the Department of Education? Probably not.

But he couldn’t be sure.

He looked up at Begley. She was standing still in the middle of the room, chewing her lip. She was dirty, with dried blood in her hair, her clothes torn and stained. She was beautiful, he thought. She was most beautiful when she was locked in thought. Her forehead crinkled. Her eyes distant. There was a stillness about her frame he admired. Feeling giddy with stress, he briefly considered appointing her to something in his official capacity as Acting President. Secretary of something.

He paused, memory flaring.

“I have an idea,” he said. “I have a … friend. In the CIA.”

Her eyes flashed to him. She didn’t move otherwise. “A friend,” she said slowly. “I’ve got friends in agencies, too, Jack. What does friend mean here?”

He shrugged. Knew what she was saying. She was thinking through her list of contacts and coworkers just like he was, weighing them against the fact that Amesley was involved. Which meant anyone could be. “He’s the only person I would call right now,” he said simply. Spread his hands. “I can’t guarantee him. I’ve known him for more than twenty years. But if you have a better idea, say the word.”

She sighed and turned to face him. “What’s his name?”

“Stan Waters.”

Chewed her lip again. Was silent for a few seconds. “I don’t think I’ve seen his name.” She looked back at him. “I’m trying to remember correspondence. With Amesley. Which doesn’t mean anything, either way.”

Renicks nodded. “If you saw his name somewhere, you never know what that could mean.”

“All right. Call him. We don’t have any options. As long as you’re in the facility, it’s designed to stay online no matter what. We need to get you out of here immediately, and we need help. Call him.”

He turned and picked up the flimsy plastic receiver.

“But Jack — be on your toes. No offense to your friend … but we don’t know anything. Keep your bullshit meter on, okay?”

He nodded without turning. Punched Stan’s cell number into the keypad. Watched the numbers appear on the tiny green LED screen. Heard a click, then a phantom ring in his ear.

“Stan Waters, X99-T. This is an unsecured personal line. You better have a fucking — ”

“It’s Jack Renicks, Stan.”

There was silence on the line. Then a dry scrubbing noise. It took jack a moment to realize Stan had dropped his phone.

“Jack?! Jesus, Jack? You still there?”

“I’m here, Stan.”

“Hold on. Do not hang up.”

There was a muffled sound of conversation. Renicks tried to pick out the words, the voices, but couldn’t. The ambient noise in his ear widened out. Like Stan was moving from a small space to a larger one. He heard hinges, then the echoed click of a door latch. Then a burst of static. It lessened immediately, but remained on the line. Stan’s voice came back sounding far away. The static made every other word a challenge to decipher.

“Jack!”

“I’m here, Stan.”

“What’s going on? The whole fucking government’s down here in the bunker. We’ve got two dead congressmen, we’ve got bombers in the air, and as soon as the Secret Service vets the route they’re getting Grant into a helicopter and getting him on Air Force One, where he may not ever return from the way things are going. That’s all. A typical day in my week, really. The whole Continuity System is fucked up, won’t go offline. You’re hot. What’s happening down there?”

Begley came over to stand in front of him, her face blank. Eyes locked on him. Renicks told the story in three sentences.

“Jesus,” Stan whispered, static blanking out the next few words. “… Jack, there are a lot of theories flying around here. Your name is in some of them. We can’t get anyone on the … hell, you’re about … minutes from … being blown to hell. We can’t get the complex offline, we can’t get your biometric signature out of the system, and someone’s got the fucking football online and passing packets back and forth to the fucking launch system and we can’t shut that out until we shut down the fucking complex, which so far we can’t do.” He breathed heavily into the phone. It sounded like he it was right up against his mouth. “So it’s the failsafe: We’re turning you into a blast crater.”

“What happened? At the speech?”

“Explosions. Two. Neither near Grant, though we found three more nearer the podium that would’ve turned him into dog … The security detail hustled him out of — ”

“Jesus, Stan, you can’t leave him with the Secret Service. For all we know every agent there protecting him right now is one of Amesley’s.”

Stan said something that was lost to static.

Begley’s eyes widened. She emphatically mouthed something at him, but Renicks just shook his head back.

“Stan, tell them. Tell them it’s Amesley. Tell them we’re free, but they’re searching for us.”

“Listen … to, but fuck, Jack, no one’s going to care. Someone murdered Gerry Flanagan. Someone is trying to launch warheads. You will fall easily into the category of collateral damage if we have to blow up the fucking mountain to stop it.”

“Someone murdered Gerry Flanagan?”

Under other circumstances, Begley’s expression would have been hilarious, he thought.

“Looked like a heart attack. ME is telling us it was drug-induced. Someone put him out of the way. That’s one reason why … one reason why your name isn’t drawing any water around here right now, Jack.”

Renicks felt it. Panic. It was licking the edges of his thoughts. It was oozing into the space between them. He wasn’t getting out of the complex. He was going to be trapped in it when they triggered the explosives buried underneath it. He was going to be burned alive. Killed. He thought of Emily. Of Elizabeth and Patricia. He thought, everyone calls Elizabeth Sissy because that’s what Patty called her when they were very young.

He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling a wave of exhausted fear sweep through him. Then opened them again. There had to be something.

Begley’s face mirrored it all back to him. “Tell him your ISA needs to speak with him,” she said.

“Stan — ”

“I heard. Tell your ISA I will brief everyone. My boss will brief their bosses, their bosses will brief everyone else, and someone will end up with the happy job of briefing Grant. Shit, what a fucking clusterfuck.” He sighed. “But listen, Jack. It won’t change anything for you. We can’t risk it. I’m … shit, I’m sorry, man. I really am.”

Renicks nodded absently. He had picked a spot on the wall across from and stared at it. Ignored Begley. Felt a cold despair washing through him. They’d actually found a phone that worked, and it hadn’t changed anything. No one cared whether he was telling the truth. They were going to die anyway.

He started to drop the receiver, then pushed it back against his ear. “Stan! You still there?”

“Yes, Jack. I’m still here.”

“You ever hear of something named Eliro? E-L-I-R-O?”

For a second, there was silence. When Stan spoke again, his voice had gone down to a hoarse whisper, static dancing on its edges. “Where did you hear that, Jack?”

“It was in The Brick — the handheld the Secret Service gave me. It went active when, when I went active. It was the name of a text file. It’s in code. It’s a routing code on a bunch of crates here in the complex. Crates of body bags and road signs.”

“Hell,” Stan grunted. “Hell and fucking hell.”

Renicks waited, his pulse crashing in his head. His knuckles stood out white on the receiver.

“Jack, you ever hear of an ERM? An Emergency Response Model?”

“Something like it, sure.” He thought of Begs saying they model everything.

“There are thousands of them. We do them, the FBI does them, the DoD, the Secret Service, White House flunkies, goddamn secretaries on lunch break in this town doodle ERMs on cocktail napkins. We encourage it. The idea is, whatever situation arises, once we know what’s happening someone will have written a fifty-thousand word report on how to deal with it. You’d be surprised how effective it can be. Smart people sit there and think of how things can go wrong and how to fix it, or at least minimize it, and sometimes they’re so prescient it’s kind of scary. ELIRO is an umbrella filing tag for a series of ERMs created on request about two years ago. It describes a U.S. President engineering a national emergency in order to declare martial law and seize power free from constitutional restraints.”

Renicks blinked. For a second he thought he’d had a tiny stroke; he’d lost a second. “What?”

“The idea was, what would happen if a President sought to increase the powers of the Executive through non-Constitutional means? How would they achieve that? A State of Emergency. Scare the bejesus out of the population, scare Congress itself, and have all sorts of emergency powers voted in. Send out the National Guard. Suspend Habeas Corpus and a host of other protections. All temporary, of course. But in the scenario the aim was to use those emergency powers to make the power grab permanent.”

Renicks thought of the crates in Storage room L-15. Body bags. Emergency signs. Ready to be trucked out. When Martial Law was invoked. Because terrorists had just nuked a few choice population centers around the country — from within the country. Panic. Terror. Chaos.

Stan said something else lost to a burst of static.

“Stan! Stan, what was that?”

“I said — ”

Begley suddenly snapped her head around, holding up her hand just as the call went dead in Renicks’ ear. As if she’d used psychic powers to cut the line.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered.

Renicks let the receiver fall slowly from his ear. He strained, listening. “I didn’t — ”

The next moment she was moving. “Help me!” she hissed over her shoulder.

Renicks dropped the receiver and stepped forward. “With what?”

“Barricade the door!” she hissed back, grabbing onto the end of one of the filing cabinets and dragging it away from the wall. “They’re here!”

EPUB | MOBI | PDF

I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

17.

Twenty-three minutes before they barricaded the door, Begs was trying to ignore the intense pain that exploded in her leg every time she moved. The pounding headache was helping, she thought. She felt shaky and dull, as if someone had put a piece of muslin between her and the world. She felt proud of having navigated two more access ladders without much help from Renicks, but felt exposed as they moved through Level Seven. It didn’t make any sense; Amesley and Darmity knew they’d been using the service corridors. They weren’t any safer there than in the main levels. But stepping out onto the carpet, the bright lighting, the wide hallways — it made her nervous.

She moved slowly. The splint was awkward. She had to swing her leg out in a wide, stiff arc and wobble from side to side as they walked. Renicks steadied her from time to time. She was impressed, though, by his quick first aid. She knew she needed better medical attention if she didn’t want a crooked, painful leg and an ugly scar, but she was still doing her duty. He’d kept her operational in the field.

Despite her leg, she tried to move as quickly as possible. Without letting Renicks see, she’d already taken six of the pills he’d given her.

“What are the chances we can transmit?”

She grimaced, losing her balance for a moment and staggering sideways into the wall. She bounced free and shrugged off his attempts to help. “I don’t know, Jack. It’s the only thing I can think of. Maybe they already thought of it. Maybe not. We were never supposed to get out of the suite, so maybe they didn’t bother with the studio.”

She certainly hadn’t thought of it right away, she reminded herself. The television studio in the complex had never been used. It was kept up-to-date as technology changed, and could both broadcast over the air and transmit to all satellites in active orbit. It wasn’t fancy. It was meant to be used by the President to communicate with the surviving population at large.

Begley had not been trained on any of the equipment in the studio. She’d only been in the room three times, all for spatial briefing. She could tell Renicks how best to escape the studio under a variety of circumstances. She could explain the lines of sight. That the podium with the Presidential seal was designed to be bullet resistant. That there was no back way out of the studio because the assumption was that the President would not be making addresses to the nation unless the complex was secure. But she had no idea how to actually transmit anything.

Would Amesley be able to block a satellite transmission? Would anyone be monitoring the satellites for strange activity like that? She didn’t know. She saw no profit in telling Renicks. He would just make some horribly calm joke about it anyway, a personality trait she found both irritating and comforting in equal measure. He reminded her, in some ways, of her father.

It was quiet. The complex was huge, and if she’d been right about The Brick, they had no way to track them any more. So she pushed forward. Didn’t think about the possibilities. Focused.

The studio was small. A control booth on one end, room for three people, banks of equipment designed for live transmissions. Limited editing and delay capabilities. No storage. The studio itself was narrow and deep. A blue curtain. A podium with the seal. On a tight zoom the illusion of a larger room would be easy.

“It’s 1979 in here,” Renicks said softly.

She nodded. “The basic equipment’s been kept up to modern standards. It’s fully digital. But the support tech’s low on the list for a retrofit.”

The phones were clunky black plastic wall models with cords. The chairs were old, well-worn rolling chairs. The carpet in the booth was a deep rusty orange. It was, she thought, pretty much what she would have imagined a porn editing room in 1975 would look like. There was even a huge fax machine on top of the low filing cabinet against the back wall, installed circa 1985 and not used, she didn’t think, in five years. If ever.

They each immediately crossed to one of the wall phones and inspected them. Looked at each other, shook their heads. She turned to regard the equipment.

“We’ve got to assume the second we try to transmit, they’ll know,” she said. “So we have to do our best to figure things out before we power anything on.”

“There has to be a user manual or something,” Renicks said, crossing to the filing cabinet. “The assumption has to be that a lot of these systems might have to be used by people not trained on them. You’re not going to chopper a goddamn studio team here if nukes are raining down on you.”

She nodded, studying the controls. There were a million buttons and switches, toggles and jacks. Headphone-microphone combinations hung neatly on pegs between the work areas. She thought about cockpits. Huge, complex things, with hundreds of controls and gauges — but an experienced pilot only needed a few of them to fly the plane. The rest were usually useful but not crucial. I just need to boil this down to the crucial, she thought. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It just has to be a signal. Audio-only would be fine. We just need to find out what’s happening, share information.

With some relief, she lowered herself into one of the chairs, her leg resting stiffly on the floor, and studied the banks. There would be a simplified procedure, she thought. They modeled everything. They considered every possible scenario. A scenario where the President — or someone else — needed to quickly, immediately transmit something had to have been considered. There would be a Dummy Button for it. A push-once kind of basic setup that would fire everything up on a standard, generic profile. Even if it was a sole survivor, one person. Hit a switch, walk into the studio and stand in front of the camera, speak your piece.

She listened to Renicks pulling out the cabinet drawers and dumping their contents onto the floor. Tried to push the noise out. Tried to push the pain in her leg away. The aching pressure in her head. The fear. The panic. Leaning forward, she turned and started running her eyes over everything. Top to bottom. Shift over one row. Bottom to top. Repeat.

“Any luck?” She said without turning away.

“You know what’s in here? Canned, pre-written speeches. Filed alphabetically by disaster scenario.”

She nodded, still letting her eyes roam the controls. “They model everything, Jack. All day, all week, they think of new possibilities and start writing response flowcharts, press releases, draft orders for the military and civilian agencies, and, yes, speeches. The idea is, when the world is ending, the President — or acting President — may not have their writing staff with them. Or there may just not be time to come up with something.”

She smiled. She felt a little dopey — not high, just insulated. She could still feel the intense ache in her leg and the throbbing in her head, but it was distant and unimportant. The pills, kicking in. “You know those envelopes psychics used to hand out on TV to show they predicted what you were going to say? Until I was twenty-two I swear my father had a set of those for me. And he was right, every time.”

“Until what? Law enforcement?”

She shook her head. “No, he got that too. But the next envelope was me getting married. And the one after that was kids.”

Jesus, she thought. One smack to the head, broken leg, and mild dose of codeine and you’re telling him about your father.

“Holy shit.”

For a second she thought he was reacting to her. Then she spun the chair around. He was standing with the fax machine’s phone in his hand. He was looking at her.

“I’ve got a dial tone.”

EPUB | MOBI | PDF

I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

16.

She was heavier than she looked. He had one of her arms around his neck, and held both of her hands in his as he supported most of her weight. He half-dragged, half-carried her, retracing their steps as best he could remember. Shards of glass shot up his leg every time he put their weight on it.

Thirty-one minutes before Begley passed out, Renicks was talking to himself.

“You’re not supposed to move a broken leg, dammit,” he hissed, breathing hard around his words. “You’re not supposed to move a concussion either.”

They’re coming, she’d said. He’d looked around the cramped, dark space. Not a place to be cornered by people like Frank Darmity.

Sweat streamed into his eyes. The service corridors had seemed cold before; now they were stuffy and hot.

“You with me, Begs? Stay awake, okay?”

She murmured something. Good enough. At least she was responding. He’d seen her head bounce when she’d crashed down, barely beating the seals. Blood was pouring down from a deep gash under her hairline, a sheet of it on her face. Head injuries bled. Always looked worse than they were. He knew two stories about lethal concussions. One from his father, who’d been called to a woman’s house. She was mid-thirties, in good health. Stepped on her son’s toy truck, hit her head on the bathtub. Dr. Renicks, senior, had called an ambulance and sent her to the hospital. She was fine the rest of the day. High spirits. Complained of the fuss. Definitely concussed, but seemed fine otherwise. Died in the night. Just … died.

His father had told him, quite soberly, that sometimes that’s how it happened.

The other story had been told by Uncle Richie. Who had enjoyed shocking his nephew with terrible stories from his criminal life. Renicks remembered never being too alarmed by them, because Uncle Richie was such an easygoing, humorous guy. Just a thinner version of his father who chain smoked unfiltered cigarettes and wore leather jackets.

Uncle Richie had told him of a guy reluctant to pay back some debts he’d acquired from friends of Richie’s. Renicks remembered that everyone in Richie’s stories were friends of his. Even people whose names he didn’t know were friends. The guy with the debts had been named Carlo, and Carlo had been snatched off the street by Richie and some others. The idea being to scare him into paying up. They took Carlo to an old warehouse and tied him to a chair. Richie had thought this story very comedic. He lingered on how fat Carlo was, and how his belly jiggled with anxiety. The elaborate plans they’d had to terrify him. Richie had sworn to his nephew that they hadn’t meant to actually hurt Carlo. They were going to show him various instruments of torture and let him scare himself.

First up was a tire-iron. In demonstrating how painful it would be, Richie’s friend Happy had swung it at Carlo’s head, intending to make him wince and piss his pants. Instead, he hit Carlo right across the forehead. Carlo had passed out. But then came to a few minutes later, foggy, but promising to pay up as soon as possible. The mood had become jocular, and everyone asked if Carlo was feeling okay. He said he had a headache. They drove him home. Richie found this particularly amusing — after hitting him in the head with a tire iron by mistake, they’d given him a lift home in broad daylight. He’d stepped out of the truck, turned to wave like they were dropping him off after a date, and collapsed, dead.

The punch line was that Richie had left town, convinced he was on a hitch for manslaughter. But no one ever said a word.

Every few feet, Renicks shouted at Begley or shook her until she responded somehow. She got heavier and heavier. Her blood soaked into his jacket. But he didn’t know where Darmity or his colleagues might come on their way to the airshafts. He kept moving because not moving felt suicidal. But he didn’t know where to go. He didn’t have a destination. Every direction might be a bad one, and now that Amesley knew — if he hadn’t before — that they’d been using the service corridors to move around, Renicks felt like every junction would bring him face to face with Frank Darmity again. Or several Frank Darmitys.

“Begs,” he said breathlessly. “Begs! Is there a medical office? A clinic? Someplace with medical supplies?”

She shifted against him and murmured something indistinct.

“Agent Begley!” He stopped and staggered back to lean against the wall. Sucked in painful, burning breaths. Sitting behind a desk fondling a keyboard for twenty years, he was surprised to learn, was not a fitness regimen. He jostled her. She stiffened and screamed.

“I’m sorry!” he hissed. Everything seemed loud. Every breath, every moan, every scrape of their shoes reverberated with deadly volume. “Hospital, Begs, is there anything like a hospital?”

He reached up and turned her head towards him. She peered at him as if seeing him for the first time. Blinked. “Ninth level,” she said thickly. Blinked again, rapidly. Eyes fluttering. “Where are we?”

Hefting her weight back onto his shoulder, he staggered off down the corridor again. Every other step made him wince and suck in breath as his twisted ankle rolled under him. Level nine. That was four levels up. He didn’t know how to work the elevators. He was going to have to carry her up the access ladders. If he could retrace their steps. Everything looked the same. Every door, every junction in the corridors. Every sign. The service corridors were visually slick. Impossible to latch onto details.

As he moved, sweat soaking into his shirt, he looked down and stumbled to a sudden halt.

The floor was covered in dust. A thick carpet of dust. As gray as the floor itself. He could clearly see their footprints. Putting out of his mind the fact that this meant other people could also follow their prints, he took a deep breath and started moving again, following their own tracks back to the generic metal door that led to the access ladders. He set Begley down on the floor gently and slumped down next to her, chest heaving.

“Big baby,” she murmured. “I don’t weigh that much.”

He nodded, wiping sweat from his brow. “When I get you fixed up, we’re finding a scale and checking it out.”

“Fuck you,” she said dreamily.

Taking one last deep breath he knelt over her and peered intently at her face. Wiped blood away with one shaking hand. She looked back at him with a strange sort of calm. He held a finger in front of her. Waited for her to focus on it. Moved it from side to side. Watched her eyes.

Nodding, he pushed her arm over his shoulder again and braced himself. “This is going to hurt like hell,” he warned her.

“I know,” she said.

He pushed up slowly, using the wall for balance. When he was standing she was sitting on his shoulder, braced against the wall.

“Grab the rungs,” he said. “Pull yourself up as much as you can. I’ll have you from below.”

It was slow going. She pulled, he pushed. Twice, her hands slipped and her weight came back on him. She cried out in sudden pain. They waited a moment and then he coaxed her back into motion.

At the top of the ladder, they both lay on the dusty floor for a moment, gasping. Level thirteen. Three more to climb. He gave them five minutes, counting off the seconds in his head, then forced her up. Forced her to grasp the next rungs. Forced her up, pushing as hard as he dared. He felt better being off Level Fourteen, where they would start looking. But he worried about the tracks in the dust. Worried they’d just follow them. He didn’t remember that kind of dust in the official areas. When they’d been going for the elevators, he was certain there hadn’t been that level of dust.

They repeated the pattern: Up the ladder. Five minutes gasping on the floor of the next landing. Up the ladder.

On Level Nine, he inspected his foot. The ankle had swollen and pushed the leather of his shoes to its limit. He could feel it throb with every heartbeat. Every touch brought a spike of pain shooting up his leg. When he gave up and looked over at Begley, she was out cold, lying on the dirty concrete floor.

He dragged her.

He couldn’t carry her any more. He took her collar in one hand and limped down the service corridor. Just like every other service corridor. Gray. Concrete. Obscure signs that told him nothing useful. The silence seemed untrustworthy, and every corner seemed ominous. How long before they just started sweeping each floor for them? Where would they start? He didn’t have enough information. He didn’t know how many people they had.

Turning a corner, his eyes jumped to a sign on the wall. A large red cross. And arrow below it. Relief shuddered through him.

A minute later he dragged her into a small but tidy-looking medical office. It was two rooms. First there was an examination room: A standard padded table, a small desk, a locked storage cabinet. Various instruments and supplies neatly placed on the counter tops. A doorway to the right led to a procedure room: Stainless steel table, operating height. The walls covered in cabinets. Big OR lighting rig sprouting from one wall. Behind the desk were two flags. A standard United States and a deep blue one with the seal of the President. He stared for a moment. His brain churned. After a second he snapped himself back into motion. Stepped into the second room.

The floor under the metal table had gutters carved into it. So blood and whatever else spilled down from it would just sink into the plumbing and not stay on the floor to be slipped on. It was the sort of place you could perform a lot of basics in. A lot of meatball surgeries and other emergency procedures. Gunshot wounds came to mind as he lifted Begley up and draped her onto the table.

He searched the rooms quickly. Found scissors right away and cut her pant leg up to the thigh, tearing the fabric apart. Was relieved not to see any bone. The leg bent to the left in an unnatural way, the thigh discolored and bruised. He glanced at Begley’s face and decided it was a good thing after all that she was unconscious.

He tore through the cabinets. The ones in the procedure room were locked, but they were simple cam locks like you found on filing cabinets. He snapped them open using the scissors. The wall cabinets were filled with drug bottles, all clearly marked and dated. All fresh. All labeled with generic black and white laser-printed stickers. No brand names. He ran his eyes over them, startled by the sheer number of drugs available, and selected one small bottle of pills and a glass ampoule. Kept searching until he’d located a syringe, a suture kit, smelling salts and a roll of white plastic tape. Brought all of this back to the table and placed them on a wheeled metal tray. Then stood for a moment, looking around.

With a grunt he launched himself back into the exam room. Stepped around the desk. Plucked the American flag from its holder and examined the pole. Cheap, wooden. He bunched the flag up to expose as much of the pole as possible, took it in both hands, and snapped it into two across his knee. Hands stinging, he jogged back to Begley.

“Good thing you’re still out,” he said, taking her leg in both hands and slowly rotating it. He was doing everything you weren’t supposed to do. He had even invented a few new things you weren’t supposed to do. But he need her to be mobile. He picked up the flag and tore it from the broken pole. Wrapped it around her leg, a little tight but not too constrictive. Her leg would swell. He placed each piece of broken pole on either side of her leg. Picked up the white duct tape and constructed a splint, taping the leg up as tightly as he could to hold the two pieces of wood in place.

Satisfied that he’d created the world’s ugliest functioning splint, he took a smelling salts capsule and broke it up her nose. Held it there. Counted: One, two

“Jesus Christ!” Begley shouted hoarsely, sitting up with a lurch. She grabbed onto his wrist hard enough to make him wince again. Sat there panting, staring around in confusion.

“You’re okay!” he said in something less than a shout. Aiming for reassuring. “Begs, you’re okay.”

“Define okay. Oh fuck, my head hurts,” she moaned. Stared for a moment at her splinted leg. Looked back at him.

“That’s next. But I needed to be sure you’d wake up.”

He broke the syringe out of its sterile packaging and filled it from the ampoule. Held it up and tapped it a few times.

“Procaine,” he said. “Topical anesthetic. We’re going to have to stitch up that gash.” He smiled a little. He could feel the sweat drying on him. The panic evaporating. Slowly. “It’s going to be ugly as hell. I haven’t done any suturing in years. But we need to stop the bleeding.”

She nodded slowly. Her eyes on the needle. “You know what you’re doing?”

“I used to help Dad out in the office on Saturday afternoons. Before I got older and started hating him for no good reason.” He leaned in and pushed her hair aside, positioning the needle. “And I was a Boy Scout.”

She laughed suddenly. He jabbed the needle in. She didn’t even notice.

“I can see you,” she said, sounding shaky. “In the uniform.”

He smiled, a numb expression he didn’t feel. He remembered his father. Always had that hazy half smile, that bland expression. He wore it like a shield — first in the office, telling people the bad news, the good news. Then always. His face blank no matter what, an expression calibrated to mean nothing.

The only time he’d seen the mask crack had been when the Sheriff had come around. A Sunday afternoon. They’d finished supper and were all sitting around the hot house, fanning themselves and digesting. Renicks remembered his father was listening to music on his stereo. He could remember the music, would know it if played for him but he’d never found out the title of the piece.

He remembered the Sheriff at the front door. Maybe we ought to speak outside. It’s about Lem Knowles, Doc. His family’s makin’ noise that … that you helped him along a little.

He shut his eyes for a moment, deleted the memory.

He worked as fast as he dared. He put in a dozen ugly stitches, closing up the wound. Found some basic antibiotic ointment and smeared it on. Stood for a moment staring at the butcher job he’d done. Nodded. Best he could do, under the circumstances.

Stepping back, he held up the small bottle of pills. “Acetaminophen and Codeine. Won’t be great once you start putting weight on that leg, but should keep you from screaming every time you have to move without knocking you out. Take two to start, see how it goes. Don’t take more than six. Let me see your eyes.”

He leaned in and took her face gently in his hands, angling it up towards the lights. Studied her pupils.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “For … taking care of this. Of me.”

He nodded. “I’m just glad you weren’t awake to hear me crying like a child,” he said, stepping back. “They know we’re out, now. I ditched the Brick, but they must be searching every level for us. We have to assume they know we’ve been using the service corridors.” He sighed. Shrugged. “Now what?”

She shook her head, opening the pill bottle and pouring two of the white capsules into her hand. Then she looked up at him. Almost smiled. “I’ve got one more trick up my sleeve, Mr. President.”

EPUB | MOBI | PDF

I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

15.

Nine minutes before he disobeyed a direct order, Frank Darmity sat spread-eagled on the floor of Level Eleven, right where he’d been dropped by the black bitch. He’d unstrapped his body armor but hesitated to pull it off completely. Every tug to the straps had sent a shock of agony up from his abdomen. He sat limply, bathed in sweat. He’d heard himself whimpering. He refused to call for help. He’d been in charge of the situation. And he’d been tricked by a soft yuppie and a mixed-breed cunt.

He had to clean up before reporting in.

There was blood. A lot of blood, it looked to him.

Sucking in breath, he lifted the vest up, starting from the lower right corner, where the blood was dripping. The pain smacked into him. A burning, screaming pain like he was hooked right into a nerve, yanking something out with him. The whole operation had gone to hell. Because it was riddled with people like Amesley. Pencil-pushers. Softies. People who sat behind desks and pressed a button, thought that made them men of action.

He closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. Told himself that’s where patriots like himself came into play. They would do the hard, bloody work. And set things right. And he’d be a hero, afterwards. Once the shock wore off, his name would be up there with Washington. Jefferson. Great Men. Because he did things. He didn’t talk and talk and talk. When assholes like Amesley pressed that button, it was men like him who stood up and took care of it.

Clenching his teeth, he jerked his arms and yanked the vest free.

A wave of agony swamped him, lit up his nerves. He screamed. Everything turned hot and burning for a moment. He clamped one hand down on his belly and felt the warm, wet blood. Leaking. Not spurting.

Slowly, the pain receded. He lay sprawled, panting, sweating dripping off his face. He lifted the vest up and examined it. Blinked sweat from his eyes. The vest was deformed, a shallow protrusion like a finger jutting out. A backface, he thought. The bullet hadn’t penetrated the armor, but had deformed it, pushing the vest material into him with the force of a gunshot.

He pushed the vest aside and hunched over himself, examining the wound. It was shallow. The blood had already almost stopped. It was just an ooze now.

He wiped one hand over his face. Smeared blood all over himself. Steadied himself and pushed himself up on his elbows. Stiffened and grunted as the pain slammed into him. Waited it out. When it was just a dull throb again, he pushed himself up onto his knees. Waited out another searing tendril of fire.

On the floor, still in the vest pocket, his walkie-talkie squawked.

“Mr. Darmity,” Amesley’s crisp, flat voice barked. “Report in.”

Mr. Darmity. Never Frank. Or Joe. Or whoever. Always miss this and mister that. Fucking officious little prig. Thought he was smarter than everyone else.

That would change. A whole new world was coming, and guys like Amesley, like Renicks, like his bitch agent Begley, would find themselves on the bottom, looking up. Jumbo Softies. Big titles, nice suits. But soft. They had all this rotten infrastructure set up to keep them up above everyone else. But he was there to help tear it down, even up the playing field.

The walkie-talkie crackled to life again. “Mr. Darmity. Please return to the Security Office immediately.”

Being a patriot, Darmity knew, was not about taking orders. Chain of command was important, of course, in the normal course of things, but all free men disobeyed orders when their intelligence or their experience told them it was the best course of action. The country had been built on the independent action of free-thinking men. The army hadn’t wanted him. Fuck the army. Bunch of brainwashed assholes, taking orders, strutting around with ribbons on their fancy uniforms. He’d found a way to serve his country. Had been in deeper shit and under heavier fire than anyone in the fucking army. The recognition — the medals and the rank — hadn’t meant anything to him. He’d just wanted to serve his country, his President.

He checked himself carefully, lifting up his clothes and probing his skin with his bloodied fingers. Just the one wound. Nasty. It would curdle and get infected, but it wasn’t dangerous in the short-term. In the short-term he didn’t have time to ward off infection, to dress and pack it properly. He was a hard man, he told himself. Other men would scamper to the Security Office, beg one of Amesley’s soft little agents to bandage them up. He was harder. It could wait.

He pushed himself up, using the wall for balance. Pain shot through his belly, but he clenched his teeth and took a few deep breaths, mastering it.

He walked around in a circle, breathing deeply. Watching the floor for blood droplets. His side burned and stabbed with every move, but it was tolerable, and he thought the bleeding had stopped. He knelt and picked up the vest again, looking it over. He couldn’t put it back on; the deformity would slip right back into the wound and the pain would be intolerable. He prodded the lump with his fingers but it was immovable. He dropped the vest, retrieved his gun and the radio, and stood for a moment, breathing hard.

“Mister Darmity!”

He clicked the walkie-talkie off.

He couldn’t kill Renicks. He knew that. Amesley thought he was stupid; he knew that too. Men like Amesley always thought the people that actually did things for them were stupid, but it was a logical fallacy. He didn’t get things done because he didn’t know how to get things done. It was the other way around: Guys like Amesley sat behind desks because that was all they were good for.

At least Amesley had the right ideas about most things. Renicks was just like him — a Softy — but on the wrong side of things. He thought back to the drive over. Renicks in his whiny little voice holding up his phone. Telling him he’d report him. Another asshole, thinking he could push a button, make things happen.

But what happened when all the Button Men went on strike? Turned around?

The girl he would kill. Payback. She was an enemy combatant. He’d gone into this thinking that if nothing else, at the very bottom, they were all Americans and due some sort of baseline dignity. He’d believed that. People could disagree. Enemy prisoners were treated with respect. He’d intended to treat even Begley with respect. But then the bitch had gone and shot him. He couldn’t kill the fancy Mr. Renicks, but he could hurt him, and he could kill the bitch. No loss there.

Amesley would forbid it. As Darmity moved towards the elevators, he decided not to check in. Begley was Amesley’s, and he would protect his people even if she was on the wrong side. Even if she had shot him. You couldn’t disobey orders you hadn’t actually received. If he stayed offline now, he would only be disobeying the order to check in. A misdemeanor at worst. Darmity had enough experience with disciplinary actions to know that in the flush of victory it would be forgotten. Forgiven.

He pushed a series of buttons on the elevator console. The doors slid shut. He checked the chamber on his weapon and pushed it back into its holster. Took as deep a breath as his wound would allow. The elevator began to sink. He didn’t need Amesley and his soft boys and girls. Everyone thought he was stupid. But he knew where to look for Renicks and Begley. Where Suits like Amesley never thought to look: The sewers. The service corridors.

EPUB | MOBI | PDF

I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

14.

Twenty-one minutes before ordering Renicks to get rid of The Brick, Begley watched him make a spectacularly ungraceful exit from an air duct. It was about seven feet from the floor, and for a moment she didn’t think he was going to squeeze himself through. He pushed with his arms against the wall, straining. Then popped free with a curse. Hit the floor flat on his back with a dull thud that sounded painful.

She stepped over and offered him a hand up. Ran a critical eye over him, checking him for cuts and other injuries. Lingered on his face as he brushed himself off. Looking for signs he was cracking under pressure. Running into Darmity, having a gun pushed into your back — it was disconcerting even to her. She’d seen him flinch when Darmity had fired his weapon. He was her asset, and if he was going to fall apart on her she wanted some warning.

“Do me a favor,” he said, glancing up at her. “Let’s not ever do that again.”

She nodded, satisfied. Whatever Jack Renicks did in his normal every day life — and from what she knew about the position of Secretary of Education it could not be exciting in the least — he handled the unexpected well enough.

They were back in the service corridor, dull bare concrete and harsh light. She considered the possibility that Amesley and Darmity knew about the service tunnels, but rejected the idea. Not because she didn’t think it was possible, but because there was nothing to be done about it.

“Okay,” she said out loud. “They know we’re out of the Executive Suite.” She looked at him. He was giving her his Full Attention look. It was an intent expression. Unnerving. She was acutely aware that everything she said or did was being noted, recorded, compared to what she’d done or said earlier. “We can’t expect to get out of this complex, Jack. Darmity told us they’ve sealed it off. I thought they might hold off on that until the government got an assault force into position, but they’re not taking any chances. We could fight our way up to the top level but we’re just going to find six inches of steel between us and the rest of the world.”

“Maybe we should save some time and start assuming the worst.”

Irritation bloomed under her skin. She swallowed it down.

“Jack, the worst would be that we’re all going to die in here in a very short time, so we might as well tunnel back into the Executive Suite and open up some wine. Have a party. Jesus, I don’t need smartass right now.”

He looked down at his feet. Nodded. “You’re right.” Looked back up at her. “Okay, so escape’s off the menu. We have to be careful about our movements, now they know we’re free, they’ll probably search the place for us, right?”

She nodded. Thanked him silently for not being an asshole.

He leaned back against the wall. He was a sweaty, dirty mess. His face and clothes were stained and blackened. His posture was comically casual. Hands in his pockets. Bag slung around his back. Back hunched. She didn’t think it would take much to imagine they were on his patio chatting. Maybe during a cookout.

“Okay,” he said, spreading his hands. “Escape is out. But we’re out of the suite. Our options still have to be better than they were an hour ago. We have to assume we can risk moving. We can’t stay here until the bunker blows up, right?” He smiled a little. “Seeing as it’s part of the bunker. And will be blown up.”

She nodded, ignoring his lapse back into Smartass eleven seconds after being admonished for it. “Of course. We just have to be careful. We can’t assume we’re invisible to them, and we can’t assume any area of the complex is empty.”

He nodded. “What about communication? Are there other security offices we can access, try to find an outside line?”

She shook her head, but an idea bloomed in the back of her mind. “I’m convinced now they’ve somehow cut the access overall. Not line by line. I think prowling from one security office to another would be a waste of time. But … do you have your cell phone with you?”

“In my bag.”

She pursed her lips, thinking it through as she spoke. “We can’t get out, but maybe we can get up, maybe high enough to get a signal.”

He straightened up. “How?”

“This place is designed to be self-contained for months. Years. It’s designed to take in air from the outside under even the worst conditions. Radiation, gas — it’s got a complex and comprehensive air filtration system. There are several sets of air towers — shafts — that are designed to bring air down from the outside into the plant to be processed. Filtered. Tested. It doubles as an air sensor for the outside world, in case we need to monitor air quality or radiation levels. The shafts go up to the surface. Each one has a service ladder inside. There’s no egress, but if we can climb up one of the ladders high enough, you might get a signal.”

Renicks pushed off from the wall. “How high would we have to climb? We’re what, a mile down here?”

“I don’t know. The cell signal won’t penetrate too far down, but we’d have to just check the signal every few minutes until we get somewhere.”

She watched him consider. Found it remarkable how familiar he seemed already. Knew that he was going to make some unfortunate joke seconds before he did so.

“Best idea we’ve got,” he finally said, shrugging his bag off his shoulder and rummaging through it. Came up with two bottles of water and handed one to her. “My orientation packet didn’t tell me I’d need to be in Olympian shape for this Designated Survivor gig, you know. The entire thing could have been boiled down to: pack a bag, be prepared to spend the night.”

She smiled, unscrewing the cap of the bottle. Took a sip. “Well, Jack, if at any time you feel you are not physically capable of being the Designated Survivor, you are shit out of luck.”

His booming laugh surprised and pleased her as she turned to lead him down the corridor.

Begley had a map of the complex burned into her memory. Back down to Level Fourteen, easier than climbing up. Through another maze of identical concrete corridors. Through a heavy metal door marked VENT MECH ACC. Down a stretch of narrow, low-ceilinged hall that had no installed lights. Following the blue gleam of her flashlight, she led Renicks to another door, this one as narrow and low as the corridor. It squealed on its rusted hinges and took three solid jogs with her shoulder before it opened wide enough to admit them. The air immediately felt colder, and damper.

There was enough light to see by, barely. She had the immediate sense of the ceiling soaring upwards. Just open space above them. Every noise was dimly echoed.

They were standing on a metal grating. Could feel air moving past them, sucked down into the floor by huge spinning fans. There was a hum of almost sub-ambient noise. Embedded into the wall were a series of metal rungs, stretching up endlessly.

“One of us should stay on the ground,” Renicks said, dropping his bag and kneeling to rummage through it.”

Begley considered. He was right; if they both climbed a slip by the leader could send both crashing to the floor. “You,” she said immediately. “It’s safer.”

He shook his head. Smiling. Casual. As if this was some sort of academic disagreement. She vacillated between finding his calm annoying or comforting, between wanting to smile back or knee him in the groin.

“My phone. I’m going up.”

She sighed. Affected resignation. When he stepped toward the ladder, she took hold of his arm, twisted it slightly, and caught the phone as it slipped from his fingers. He made a squawking protest — not really words so much as noises of outrage.

“Jack,” she said, pushing his phone into her pocket and striding purposefully for the ladder, “you’re the asset. You’re the acting President, for god’s sake.” She pointed. “About twenty feet up are the emergency seals. Iris seals. At any time Amesley could engage them and they will spin shut in three seconds. Anyone who happens to be on the wrong side will be trapped. Anyone who happens to be twenty feet up this ladder will be cut in half. You don’t climb the goddamn ladder, okay?”

Before he could argue, she jumped, grasped a rung, and swung her foot into position. Began climbing. Passed the iris seals with just a second’s hesitation, imagining the instantaneous severing of her legs. Being cut in half. Surviving for a minute as she bled out. Not even any pain, just the conscious awareness of her own death.

She swallowed sudden fear and kept climbing. Hand over hand. After a minute, her arms started burning. Another minute, and she was breathing hard. Decided she was high enough to check the signal. Hooking one arm in a rung, she dug Renicks’ phone carefully out of her pocket and squinted at the tiny screen. No signal. She pushed it back into her pocket, extracted her aching arm from the rung, and started upwards again. There was a persistent breeze pushing down at her as air moved into the exchange system. At first it felt cool and refreshing. Then made her shiver.

After another few minutes of climbing, she paused again. Checked the phone. No signal. Caught her breath.

Directly across from her, a yellow hazard light clicked on.

A distant, hollow-sounding noise filled the space around her. Far below, she heard Renicks calling to her.

For a moment, she froze. They were sealing the complex. It was impossible. There was no reason for them to do so, unless the army had shown up outside. Which was ridiculous. She’d seen the models herself: Any force sufficient to lay siege to a rogue secure facility like this was two, possibly three hours out at minimum. And the conventional wisdom was that no one would bother sending an assault force. They’d just trip the explosives, make the complex into a crater, and apologize to the citizens of Virginia later.

She blinked. Amesley knew they were in the air shaft.

A flash of inspiration. The biometric chip couldn’t be tracked this closely, she knew that. She’d run enough tests on it herself. Seen it in action three times before. It couldn’t be done. Something else had been planted on them … given to them …

She blinked, frozen for a second. Saw it in her mind. It had to be. It was the only explanation that made sense. There was no other reason to cut off the facility from fresh air at this stage.

“Begs!”

Renicks sounded far away.

She started climbing down.

Down was slower. Going up she’d been able to see where her hands needed to go, going down her feet were hidden and finding secure footholds was a slippery process. The yellow lights gave her more illumination, which helped, but the sudden thud of her heart and the adrenaline dumping into her bloodstream made her shaky, which didn’t.

As she descended, she tried to figure how long before the iris seals closed the warning lights came on. Thirty seconds? How long had it taken her to climb where she’d been?

Renicks shouted again. She risked a glance down and saw the dimly lit opening below. She could almost see the floor. Another ten, fifteen seconds of fast climbing and she’d be down.

The warning lights turned red. She didn’t know exactly what that indicated. It had to be the final warning. Seconds left. Five? Two? She didn’t know. Unless it was closer to thirty, the iris seals were going to snap shut before she cleared them and she was going to be trapped in the air shaft.

She closed her eyes. Let go of the rungs. Felt herself falling.

She tried to relax. She wrapped her arms around her head and bent her knees. Tried to picture the small area under the airshafts, to judge whether she had any room to roll. Wondered if she would bang up against the iris seals after they snapped shut. If she would be cut in half by them as she passed through.

For one second, it was peaceful. Air rushing past. A sense of weightlessness.

She smacked into the ground. Heard her own leg break. A pop like a shotgun, but drier, shorter. She screamed and bounced once, scraping to a halt on the gritty floor.

She lay there. Took a few selfish seconds. Her right leg throbbed in ragged time with her heartbeat, but the pain was surprisingly low-key. Muffled. Like it was far away. Her head pounded, something sizzling on her scalp. Warm and wet.

Renicks was kneeling over, then. She opened her eyes and looked up at him without moving her head.

“My leg,” she whispered.

He nodded. “It looks bad. You beat the iris by a second. You might have lost some hair as it closed.” He touched her head and she winced. “You’re bleeding, too.”

Feeling drugged, she smiled slightly. Closed her eyes again. Thought she might sleep through the rest of it. Then a spike of adrenaline jolted her, and the pain in her leg ramped up.

“The Brick,” she said, rising a little and then wincing with pain. “Drop it.”

He shook his head. “I might — ”

“They’re tracking it,” she said. She was breathing hard, her face twisted into a mask of pain. “That’s how they knew we’d be here. They’re coming. We have to move. And you have to ditch The Brick.”

EPUB | MOBI | PDF

I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

13.

Four minutes before opening the first crate, Renicks watched Begley spin, hauling her gun from its holster and leveling it in his direction. He recognized Frank Darmity’s voice with a stab of sudden horror. Those eyes in the rear-view mirror, hard and humorless.

“Step away!” Begley shouted. The gun in her hand was steady. It suddenly looked huge to Renicks. The one in his back felt larger. He considered scenarios. Twisting away, spinning and shoving the gun aside. Forcing himself backwards, knocking Darmity off his feet. He ran through the possibilities quickly. They all ended with him shot and bleeding.

He’d never been shot. Not once in his life. He tried to picture himself taking it manfully, wincing a little and shrugging it off. It was impossible. He stayed perfectly still.

Begley started moving very slowly, angling herself to get a better shot.

“Stand down, Agent Begley,” Darmity said. He sounded amused, Renicks thought. Relaxed. In control. He had a vague Bostonian accent. Broad A, non-rhotic, but softened, like he’d spent a lot of time among people with different accents, or like he’d spent a lot of time trying to chisel it off his words. “And stop moving right now, or I’ll panic and shoot the Secretary. Who I don’t like much to begin with.”

“You won’t,” Begley said, taking another small step. “You need him. You kill him, this whole complex goes offline.”

“I got impulse control issues,” he said. “You’d be amazed at the things I’ve done when under pressure. Sure, I kill him, that’s a mess. I’ve pissed people off before. I survived. And there’s a lot of daylight between dead and fucking hurt, right?”

Renicks indulged in a quick, one-second fantasy wherein Frank Darmity was crushed under falling concrete blocks.

“Besides, where do you think you’re going? This whole place is locked down. We tagged the elevators right away. Watching ‘em. You ain’t going nowhere that way. Even if you got up to the top this place is buttoned up. Nothing in, nothing out.”

Renicks took a long, deep breath. Looked at Begley’s face. It was a hard mask, determined and unflinching. Her eyes flicked to his and she shook her head slightly. Just a tiny movement. Telling him, he thought, to stay put. Stay still. Not to complicate her job by doing anything stupid.

He imagined himself calm and clear. Forced himself to try and see the scene as if from a camera. Outside his body. Objectively.

Suddenly, the gun disappeared from his back. Immediately there was a gunshot, so loud his ears rang and he jumped involuntarily. At the shooting range he’d always worn protective headgear, and the shots had been muted. Distant. The noise stayed in his ear even as the gun reappeared in his back.

Begley stopped. Still had her gun trained on them. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, let’s take a moment.”

Renicks swallowed and took another deep breath. His heart was rattling in his chest, swamped by adrenaline. His legs felt weak. He forced himself to stay alert. Calm. He pictured the hallway behind him. Picked out the junction where another corridor cut across and figured that was where Darmity had emerged from, moving softly behind them. The corridor was exactly like all the others Begley had led him down. The elevators were at a T-junction; one corridor terminating at the two sets of doors, another running left and right from there. The one elevator was still open.

“You got a moment to drop your fucking gun,” Darmity snapped.

Renicks considered the elevator. Played with the idea for one second. Saw himself shoving Darmity back and diving for it. Begley picking up on it immediately and diving after him. Hitting a button, the doors shutting just as Darmity fired, bullets slamming into the steel. Then rejected it. He didn’t have any leverage. Wouldn’t be able to make Darmity move much. And Darmity had said the elevators were being observed — of course they were. More likely they’d dive into it, hit a button, and then sit there like targets.

He looked at Begley again. She’d stopped moving, but still had her gun aimed right at them. He was standing in front of Darmity. Had the gun in his back. But Darmity wasn’t holding onto him. In the movies, when people had hostages they always draped an arm around their necks, or held onto their arms. But Renicks supposed that if you knew what you were doing you could use that against an attacker.

He was right in Begley’s line of fire. Which meant Darmity was in Begley’s line of fire, with the potentially unfortunate caveat that any bullet would have to first pass through him before hitting Darmity.

But Darmity wasn’t holding onto him. He stared at Begley and willed her to look back at him.

“You drop him, I drop you,” Begley said. Her voice was flat and the gun was steady in her hands. Renicks considered the worrying possibility that she might actually consider shooting him an acceptable sacrifice. It would solve the major problem.

Darmity laughed a hard-edged, humorless sort of laugh. Renicks remembered similar laughs from bullies when he’d been a kid. He’d been in plenty of fights with kids who thought it was fun to torture smaller, younger kids

“Listen, Agent Begley, I’m gonna reach for my radio and let ‘em know I’ve got you. And then in one minute — ”

Begley’s eyes flashed to Renicks. He winked at her, and looked down at the floor, then back up. After a second, she nodded.

“ — it won’t matter anymore, okay?”

Still looking at Renicks, Begley nodded. “Okay.”

He just let himself drop, sagging over to the left and hitting the floor hard, teeth bouncing in his mouth.

Two gunshots, one after the other. Darmity grunting, breath knocked out of him. A bone-rattling impact against the wall.

Then Begley was shouting at him, her hands digging into the fabric of his shirt and jacket, hauling him up. He stumbled into a staggered run as she dragged him behind her. After five or six steps he found his balance and she released him, pushing him ahead of her as she spun around. At the next junction she shoved him to the right, and he ran. Another junction and she pushed him left. Everything passed by him in a blur of panic. When she shouted his name and grabbed his shoulder, pulling him to a halt, he spun to face her and realized he had no idea where they were in relation to anything.

“In here,” she said, breathing hard. She pulled open an unmarked metal door. Fire rated, heavy as hell, but no lock. He ducked into nearly-total darkness and heard her step in behind him, pulling the door shut.

For a few seconds it was just darkness, a sense of being crowded, and the sound of their hitched, painful breathing.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” he finally hissed. His arm hurt where he’d fallen on it, and his ankle throbbed terribly. But he didn’t think he’d been shot, and decided that was about the best outcome he could have expected. “Thanks for not just shooting me dead and calling it a day. They’d probably have given you a medal for saving the world.”

She snorted. He realized he’d become quite familiar, and fond of, the sound of Agent Begley snorting in amused derision. “I’m Secret Service, Jack. My job is to protect my asset. Now shut the hell up for a few minutes.”

He listened to their breathing slow. Hers faster than his. Within a minute she’d dropped back to an easy, quiet respiration while he was still struggling to regulate his breathing. Out of shape. Too many glasses of Scotch with too many rich dinners. Everyone in Washington wanted to hold meetings over steaks and cocktails.

They sat in the darkness and listened. There was no sound. No footsteps, no shouts.

“Do you think you killed him?” Renicks finally whispered.

Begley stirred. He heard her moving. Smelled her perfume. “I don’t know,” she whispered back. “At that distance the five-mils can penetrate Kevlar, but depends on the rating of his armor. And I’ve never seen a penetration, just read about tests in labs.”

The weak blue light of her flashlight appeared. He saw her outlined in it, the weak light giving her face odd shadows, making her look alien. He spun around, searching the shadows. The room was much larger than he’d suspected, the walls shooting up at least fifteen feet.

“Where are we?”

“Storage L-15. Come on. They know we’re on this level, we have to get out of here. Sooner or later they’ll come to this room.”

She moved briskly towards the rear of the room. Renicks looked around as he followed. The large, square room was filled with crates. The wooden boxes had stenciled lettering on them. It was too dark to read. The crates were stacked on top of each other, forming canyon walls they squeezed between. At the rear of the room she stopped, standing in a narrow corridor formed by two parallel walls of crates.

“Up there — ”

Renicks gasped.

Begley spun, poised and alert. “What?”

“Look.”

He took the flashlight from her and pointed it at one of the crates. Stenciled on the side was

CL-TOP

S/N 9900-RT-88Y-7

ELIRO_TRACK

REF: OWH-00992

Begley crowded next to him, leaning down. “What?”

He shook his head and snapped back to the present. Told her about Eliro, about the file on The Brick. Took the flashlight and turned until he spied one of the crates sitting on the floor, nothing on top of it. “Come on. Let’s see what’s in these things.”

She grabbed his arm. “Jack, we don’t have time. Darmity might come through that door at any time. A team might come through that door. We have to get off this level. Back into the service corridors.”

He shrugged her off. “One minute. We need information. We’re running around in the dark, here. literally.”

He heard her follow him to the crate. He dropped his bag and knelt down with the light, yanking it open and digging through, extracting a pair of scissors from his toiletry bag. Standing up, he worked the scissors into the lid of the crate until it was halfway in, then put his weight on it until the lid lifted up a fraction of an inch. Repeated the operation five, six, seven times until there was a uniform quarter-inch gap all around. Pushing his fingers into the gap, he flexed his hand and slowly forced the lid up, splinters digging into his finger. With a final grunt the lid popped up and he pushed it all the way up, holding it with both hands.

They stared down into it.

“Fuck,” Begley said in a low voice.

Body bags. It was filled with tightly rolled body bags. He’d seen a few in his father’s office, or their occasional trips to the hospital or morgue. They gleamed like black jewels in the weak blue light.

“That’s not encouraging, Begs,” Renicks said softly.

He found the shipping manifest folded up between some of the bags. Squinted down at it.

“Shipped last week,” he whispered. “This is a drop shipment from a Tennessee location. Looks like a lot of similar shipments went out the door to a lot of other locations.” He looked up at Begley. “Why do you ship body bags to a dozen places around the country? All at once?”

Begley stared back at him, chewing her lip. “Body bags. Because you expect bodies.” She stood for a moment, eyes wandering the dark room. “Wait,” she said, kneeling down and peering at the stencil on the crate. She stood up. Pointed. “Put the light there.”

He followed her arm and shone the light on another crate a few feet away.

“Come on,” she said. “Different serial number. Different contents.”

Scooping up his bag, he followed her, handed her the light and worked the scissors again. A minute later they looked down into the crate.

“Well … fuck,” Renicks whispered.

Emergency road signs. A variety of them, describing an immense disaster: Quarantine. Martial Law. Authorized Access Zones. He found another manifest that told a similar story. A huge shipment of emergency materials to various locations around the country. A preparation for something. For what he had no idea, but he didn’t think it took a genius to figure that nothing good required body bags and quarantine signs to handle.

They stood for a moment in silence, contemplating. Renicks admired the design of the signage: They conveyed authority and doom clearly. He was depressed looking at them. Body bags and disaster signs. Whatever they’d been shipped in preparation for, there was no doubt it was expected. Planned. Just like his own adventure had been planned, by someone. Renicks believed coincidence was just a lack of data.

He wondered at how his day kept hitting new bottoms. Then Begley shook herself.

“Come on. We have to move, Jack.”

He nodded and dropped the scissors back into his bag, slinging it over his shoulder and following her back to the rear wall. She took the flashlight from him and played it along the concrete wall in front of them, up high, near the ceiling.

“Where are we going?”

She stopped moving the light and pointed. “There.”

He looked up. Didn’t like what he saw. It was an air duct grate. He did some quick math and judged it to be precisely big enough for someone of his height and weight to get stuck inside.

“You’re kidding.”

Begley shook her head. “Jack, I never kid about air ducts.”

As she leaped up onto a nearby crate and started climbing up the jumble of wooden boxes, he fought a smile and swallowed crazy, inappropriate laughter.

EPUB | MOBI | PDF

I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

12.

Seven minutes before the elevator doors opened, Renicks watched Begley cautiously open a fire door a half-inch, leaning in to press her eyes against the sliver of light. He was still out of breath but tried to hide it, breathing in shallow little gasps. He was honest enough to admit it was vanity. Begley was young, and attractive, and capable. And she’d scampered up the access ladder like she did it every morning for exercise. Which, he thought, was entirely possible. The way she’d led him through the service corridors spoke of a familiarity bordering on contempt.

After a few seconds, she turned back towards him. Nodded, pulling her gun from its holster. He noted it was the first time she had drawn the gun since he’d arrived. It looked like a toy. Like it would weigh nothing. Like it was made of black plastic with some gray bits here and there, a red dot visible on one side. He didn’t know much about guns. Uncle Richie would have said he knew just enough to get into trouble.

She pushed the door open and stepped into the hall, turning in a smooth movement to scan the visible area. She held the gun down by her thigh, finger along the barrel. She stood still for a few seconds, then holstered the gun again and waved him through without looking back.

“This place is huge,” she said. “Chances of running into them on the non-essential floors is pretty low. I saw seven people. Plus the short guy, your driver.”

“Darmity,” he said, a small piece sliding into place in his mind. “Not an agent, huh?”

She shook her head. “Not that I know of. It’s possible he’s from another office. But what I saw of him makes me doubt he’s in the Service at all.”

Renicks filed that away. “So what level is this?”

“Eleven,” she said, turning and walking. “Storage, mostly. A few administrative offices. If you’re in the mood to pick up a few RTE meals, now would be the time.”

“From what I hear, RTEs are made from old boots and tears,” he said. “No thanks.”

She snorted. “We can make for the elevators. If they’re still online, I can lock out changes once we’re in. They won’t be able to stop us from riding all the way up, and they won’t be able to beat us to the top. It might only be a minute or so, but we’d have a lead.”

“Would the elevators be running if the government’s planning to blow us to kingdom come?”

She shrugged. “Sure. If the perimeter upstairs is breached, keeping the elevators locked down won’t do much good; an invader can rain grenades down the shafts and then rappel down in a few seconds. So you might as well leave them online, for convenience.”

He nodded. “And if they think we’re still in the suite, even less reason to shut them down.”

The hallway was an improvement over the service corridors. It was carpeted; a thick brown industrial carpet that had plenty of dark grease stains and tread marks from countless hand trucks. The walls were finished. Everything painted a vanilla color that showed each scrape, divot, and stain the walls had ever endured. The ceiling had been dropped, all the infrastructure hidden behind sagging foam squares running along aluminum tracks.

The silence was almost total. Renicks imagined he could hear a muted sizzling, the impossible sound of silence.

There were no signs on the walls or floor, and the doors had cryptic signs which offered no description of what lay behind them, but Begley moved confidently. Renicks himself was lost after the second junction. Every hall looked the same. All the doors looked the same, and he was willing to bet there were exactly the same number of them along each leg of corridor.

After the fourth turn, the elevator bank came into view. Two sets of doors, a pair of the ubiquitous keypads alongside each. The doors were a dull, scratched-up stainless steel.

Begley held up one hand, and Renicks stopped.

“Let me take a look,” she said, moving forward with one hand on her gun. “If they’re offline we can make for the freight elevator, but that’s less secure because I can’t lock out changes in it.”

Renicks watched her approach the elevators carefully, moving diagonally to hug one wall while she watched the opposite side, giving her a view of one end of the perpendicular corridor while hiding her from the other. She moved quickly. Trained. He found it comforting that she knew what to do. It was all in her posture and her movements: Straight and immediate. Back in the suite there had been moments of hesitation, of confusion. Understandable. But now that they had made decisions and started moving, her body language was tight and controlled. A woman who knew exactly what she was doing. Which made him feel a lot better about the first hundred minutes or so of his administration.

She ducked her head around the other corner, and relaxed. “Okay, let’s see if we’re in business.”

As she walked over to the nearest of the keypads, Renicks thought back to the file he’d discovered on the Brick. ELIRO. The first line was still clear in his mind: dum tre longa tempo nun. It had a rhythm to it, a bounce. He chanted it in his head a few times, convinced he’d seen the words before, or somehow recognized them. Like a song he’d heard once, long ago, the tune still familiar.

Dum tre longa tempo nun. He recited the words. Nothing came of it.

He let it go. He knew the only way to dredge up a memory was to relax. Forget about it. Let the brain do its work. He tested his weight on his ankle. Got a sharp pain in response. Manageable, he thought. If he had to he could even run. His whole foot throbbed. His shoe was tight around the swelling appendage.

He glanced up at Begley. She was tapping a complex series of buttons on the keypad.

He didn’t have any references to work with to analyze the phrase, and it was only six distinct forms anyway. More in the file; it was a brief document but long enough to work with. But he couldn’t remember more than the title and the first six words. Still, plenty you could do with simple thought experiments while waiting for your sole ally to work the elevators. Was it a cipher? If it was a simple substitution for English, the first word could be the. Would the President of the United States use something as old and insecure as the Caesar Cipher or ROT13 to obscure something? A man who had the best cryptographers on the planet at his fingertips. Not likely.

Still, he thought: People did strange things. Out of laziness. Out of ignorance. Or because the document itself simply wasn’t anything more than a curiosity. He might spend hours working on it, only to find he’d decoded a grocery list.

He ruled out a ROT cipher immediately. A Rotation cipher just rotated the alphabet by a certain number of letters. In ROT13, the letter A became N and so on, so the word “the” became “gur”. Even if you altered the number you rotated the alphabet by, he could tell immediately the phrase didn’t work in a simple rotation cipher.

Instant possibilities flashed through his mind. A book cipher. A one-time pad sort of code. He got lost in his own thoughts, his mind crawling through the slim amount of information he had at his disposal. The hallway faded away. The sound of the keypad buttons clicking under Begley’s fingers disappeared. He was in a gray, silent bubble of thought.

The elevator dinged softly. He looked up.

“Oh, fuck,” Begley whispered, stepping back suddenly, her hand going to her gun.

Renicks jerked back to full awareness. Half-crouched in sudden alarm, ready to move. Watching Begley. Following her lead.

The elevator doors split open.

The elevator was empty.

The interior was dull metal plates screwed in place. The floor was tile that looked thick and durable and was a shade of green that made almost every human who looked down at it think of something they had vomited at some point in their life. It was lit by a weak incandescent bulb behind a frosted plastic bubble on the ceiling of the cab.

For a second Begley and Renicks just stood, staring into the empty elevator. Slowly, he straightened up. Started to say something to her. Then he heard a noise behind him. It was a dry, quiet noise. The sound of a shoe dragging slightly on carpet. Before he could react, there was something pushing into the small of his back, and then a familiar voice almost in his ear.

“Hello, asshole.”

PUB | MOBI | PDF