Writing

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.”

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11.

Seven minutes before sending Darmity down to Level Twelve, Director Martin Amesley practiced keeping his face blank.

It was a skill he’d developed as a boy, an awkward boy with thick glasses. Skinny. With a slight stammer. He’d found that reacting to bullies and verbal abuse only invited more depredations. Ignoring it, being unmoved by it, wore them down. It was a subtle skill. Not flashy. But satisfying in its own way. It was a skill that had served him well as he’d served to protect increasingly inferior men and women.

Right now it was a skill he was using on a constant basis when dealing with Frank Darmity.

Darmity tested Amesley’s implacability. His trustworthiness was unimpeachable, of course. The man was a patriot, and had served his country well. Had come to his command with the best possible references. The best possible. He was not a military man, which Amesley could easily forgive as he himself was not comfortable with the military type. Capable, bluff men and women who always seemed at ease. But Darmity was also not Secret Service. He was corporate. A mercenary, Amesley supposed would be the right word. A contractor. With vast experience, of course. But Director Amesley disliked working with anyone he had not trained personally.

He had no choice, when it came to Darmity. Darmity had been added to the team via direct order. Amesley had been practicing his Blank Face ever since.

There had been a hundred small infractions, but the altercation with Renicks on the road was the first major mistake Darmity had made. Amesley was not so much worried about the event in particular. It had resolved satisfactorily, albeit more from Secretary Renicks’ professional attitude than from Darmity’s efforts. What worried Amesley was Darmity’s continued belligerence towards Renicks as a result of it. He seemed to expect some opportunity to exact revenge on Renicks for perceived slights and insults.

Darmity was violent and unpredictable. The other members of the detail were uncomfortable with him, and there had already been altercations. Under normal circumstances he would have chosen to keep Darmity separate from the rest of his team. A weapon under lock and key. Amesley had no doubt that Darmity had a skill set that would come in handy under a variety of circumstances, but he would have preferred to deploy him purposefully rather than have him wandering the complex with a chip on his shoulder.

But the technical team that had been working in the facility, shaping lines of communication and plugging the security holes they could, had exited the complex shortly after Renicks’ arrival. As per plan. Which left him with a short detail of agents with half of them engaged in a difficult breaching operation. He could not afford to keep an effective tool like Darmity in a drawer.

Amesley eyed the security monitor. Sighed heavily. Reached over and picked up a walkie-talkie. Made sure it was set to the encrypted channel. Depressed the TALK button.

“Mr. Darmity,” he said crisply. “Please leave those men to their work and report to me in the Security Office.”

He switched off the walkie-talkie and watched Darmity, standing in the hall outside the Executive Suite, pick up his own unit and say something into it. An excuse, Amesley thought. A reason he should be standing in the hall. Waiting for access to Renicks. He watched Darmity speak into the walkie-talkie, frown and adjust the channel, speak again, then finally turn and walk out of the picture.

The second major mistake Darmity had engineered had been the Hallway Detail. He wasn’t Secret Service. He wasn’t familiar with the protocol. He’d pulled the detail and that had spooked Begley. And now they were cutting magnetic locks and racing against time.

Still, Amesley had no intention of punishing Darmity. Amesley wasn’t sure he would be capable of punishing Darmity. Darmity was short, but muscular. Trained. He’d displayed no empathetic response that Amesley could determine. He recognized authority, but not Amesley’s authority. The Director knew that Darmity had been ordered to follow his instructions, but it was only that order which kept him obedient.

Also: Darmity hated him.

Amesley wasn’t alarmed, or surprised. Darmity, as far as he could tell, hated everyone. He had a high school education from a high school of no consequence. He’d come from a broken home of some sort; Amesley had not been moved to investigate too closely. He’d spent much of the next fifteen years outside the country. A contractor. A mercenary. In the past, he would have been recruited into something. The CIA’s less-savory portfolios, perhaps. In the modern age, an age when the United States of America had been bled dry by a series of inferior Presidents, corrupt cabinet members, increasingly stupid members of congress — in such a debased age he had naturally gone to work for a corporation.

“Sir?”

Amesley blinked behind his thick glasses and turned to look over at one of the groups of Agents in the Security Office. It was a large room, filled with banks of equipment: Computers, monitors, televisions, telephones, massive slabs of buttons and switches. There were only four people in it at present. The agent who had spoken was a young blond man, a doughy, breathless-looking man who had trouble keeping his shirt tails tucked into his pants. He was monitoring the security cameras, watching for anything unusual throughout the complex.

“Yes, Agent Killiam?” Amesley said. Face blank.

“One hour,” Agent Killiam said.

Amesley nodded absently. “Do we have an ETA on the package?”

Killiam hesitated, then came to a decision and shook his head. “No, sir. The Grab Teams all report no contact.”

Amesley nodded again. “You did do advance work, Agent Killiam?”

Killiam paled, but kept his composure. “Sir, all research indicated they would be at the main property. We identified possible alternate locations as well, and have Grab Teams at them all. We’ll get them.”

Amesley said nothing. Even if that were true, there was a worsening situation outside the complex, and he wasn’t sure if a team could make it in time, or if they’d be able to approach if they did. Amesley sighed. There were other ways. There was Frank Darmity. “Thank you.”

Amesley glanced at the monitor again. Watched the sparks flying, melting the scene to white over and over again. He suspected it was going to come to that.

His stomach cramped, and he fought to maintain control. An acidic hand grabbed onto his bowels and twisted them, but he sat silently, staring at the security monitor. Drummed his fingers on the surface of the console in front of him. Didn’t move at all.

“Sir,” a female agent from the other end of the room said crisply.

He turned his head and practiced his blank expression on her. She was a plain woman. Late thirties. Square face. Bad haircut. Her name was Wallace.

“We’ve cut the fifth lock.”

He nodded, swallowing bile. There were a few trailing spasms in his gut, and then he was left with just a pounding heart, sweat on his upper lip. Five locks down, seven to go. Another hour, at least.

He glanced over at the wall of monitors and picked out Darmity, riding the elevator. The man appeared to be talking to himself. Lips moving slightly. If Amesley were pressed to offer a guess he would suggest that Darmity was repeating a mantra of some sort.

He would have preferred to have only his own people involved. He would have preferred a lot of things. Begley, for instance. He would have preferred that she not have appeared unexpectedly at the morning conference call, would have preferred Murray had hesitated three more seconds before crossing a street and not been hit by a speeding car.

None of this registered on Amesley’s face. He sat, silent, completely still, and showed nothing.

“Sir?”

Amesley forced himself to turn slowly. Calmly. It was Wallace again. She had received nothing but high marks on all her reports and reviews. He disliked her anyway. Regretted placing her on the detail. But they’d been short of appropriate people.

“I’ve got a security alert,” she said slowly, studying a monitor in front o her. “It’s … it’s strange.”

Amesley’s guts twitched, but he merely tilted his head. “Yes, Agent Wallace?”

She hesitated another second, then looked up at the Director. “According to this, Secretary Renicks is on the eleventh level. Outside the Executive Suite.”

Amesley squinted at her. Then stood up, smoothing down his tie, and stepping around to stand next to her. He bent down and peered at the monitor. The biorhythmic tracking system had picked up Renicks’ signature. It was unreliable tracking people through the complex, but did often indicate a general location. You could not rely on it to show you in real time where someone was, but eventually it would note what level the DS was located on. Sure enough, it showed him on a lower level.

It was impossible. He straightened up and looked at Wallace. Said nothing. She knew as well as he did that it was impossible. There was no point in saying it. He glanced up as Darmity entered the Security Office.

The short man was wearing a Service-issued ballistic vest and carrying a light machine gun that was not Service-issued. A positively huge hunting knife was strapped to his hip. He’d shed his suit jacket and rolled his sleeves up over the elbow. Amesley imagined he’d done this to show off his musculature, which was, the Director admitted to himself, impressive. Amesley thought it likely that Darmity had been just the sort of kid he himself had feared and despised as a child. A bully.

Amesley glanced back at the monitor for a moment. Made a decision. This was the most important day in American History. In World History. He was not going to risk everything because he lacked flexibility of thought. Or lacked the wherewithal to apply the resources he’d been given, however noxious they were.

His face expressionless, he looked at the short, burly man. “Mr. Darmity,” he said clearly. “Make a sweep of the lower levels, starting with eleven. Make sure they are unpopulated.”

Darmity hesitated a second, annoyance flashing across his face. Then he mastered himself and nodded, turning back for the doors.

“Mr. Darmity!” Amesley said in a tone of voice that was precisely one degree louder and more urgent.

Darmity paused, but did not turn around.

“Remember, if you let your temper get the best of you, it is not me you will have to explain yourself to. Understood?”

Darmity stood there another few seconds. Didn’t turn around. Didn’t say anything. Then stepped out of the Security Office. Amesley let his gaze linger on the empty space that had been Frank Darmity for a moment, then allowed himself a single shrug of the eyebrows to convey endless patience. For his own amusement. It was going to be a very long day, he thought, and comforted himself that at least he expected to be dead by the end of it.

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10.

Twelve minutes before they ran out of things to say, Begley was impatiently picking her way down another concrete corridor, nervously squinting at every sign posted on the walls. Renicks struggled to keep up, limping more noticeably as they progressed. She was willing to grade him a solid B prior to the fall. He didn’t have any training. But he’d remained calm, had thought ahead. Had helped more than he’d hindered. Now he was slowing them down. It maybe wasn’t his fault, but she blamed him anyway.

“Agent Begley,” he said.

She could tell by his voice he had fallen behind, and stopped. “Call me Begs,” she said, turning to look back at him as he caught up. “That’s what my friends call me. And for the foreseeable future, Mr. Renicks, you are my best friend in the whole world.”

“Your only friend,” he corrected, smiling. “And call me Jack. No one does, but I’m trying to start a new trend.”

She couldn’t resist smiling back. She nodded her chin at his foot. “How is it?”

He looked down at it. “Swollen like a balloon and throbbing, but I’ll live. Where are we headed?”

Begley realized he hadn’t been pestering her with questions. Had just followed her lead. Had assumed she knew what she was doing. She liked that. It was a rare personality trait to admit you didn’t know better.

She resumed walking, holding back her pace a bit. “There’s a redundant security office down on this level. Meant to be used when the main one is being refitted, or if it’s damaged in some way. Hasn’t been touched since the last refit twenty years ago. I doubt anyone up there knows it exists.” They haven’t been living in this dungeon for a year like me, she thought. “If it’s still functioning, we should be able to get some idea of what’s going on in here.”

The corridor branched off again, offering three choices. Forward, left, right. She turned left without hesitating. Walked another ten steps, then stopped outside a substantial-looking metal door. The plastic sign read SEC CON SITE D. The letters had once been sharp black, but had faded and chipped. There was a now-familiar unmarked keypad mounted on the wall next to it. She stood for a moment, thinking. The sequence was encrypted on her tablet’s hard drive, but she hesitated to power the tablet on. Even if she prevented it from connecting to the facility’s network its radio might show up on the security matrix.

Renicks waited behind her. Said nothing.

She was surprised at herself; she normally had a good memory for things like this. But she was coming up blank. She had three tries. After three incorrect entries, the keypad would lock up and the door wouldn’t open for twenty-four hours unless the security grid was reset. That would mean an alarm, and the redundant security office wouldn’t be a secret for much longer.

She took a deep breath. Didn’t want to admit to Renicks that she couldn’t remember. Didn’t want to admit to herself that she cared what he thought. She prided herself on being the ultracompetent one in the room, and had always feared moments like this.

She closed her eyes, reached out, and let her fingers work. Muscle memory. The pattern was in her head, she just needed to access it. Seventeen buttons, and when she heard the light ping of success, she opened her eyes and pulled the door open without looking back at Renicks.

The air inside the room was stale and dusty. It wasn’t a large room. The wall on the left as they entered was filled with a bank of instruments and monitor screens, similar to the setup back in the Executive Suite but older, more outdated. There was a thin slab of desk and two large office rolling chairs. Everything was under a sheet of yellowing plastic which had at one time been taped to the floor with blue painter’s tape. The tape had given up long ago and clung to the plastic as it rippled. The plastic and the floor were covered in a thick layer of yellow dust. She decided not to think about what, exactly, formed yellow dust.

There was an old yellow phone mounted on the wall. She snatched it from the wall and placed it against her ear. Heard nothing. She shook her head at Renicks and put the phone back in its cradle.

“Internet?” he asked.

She shrugged, eyes slowly wandering the plastic-covered equipment. “I’m sensing a pattern here. But one way to be sure.”

A gray metal panel on the wall contained the circuit breakers. She pulled it open and shoved the master over to ON. The single bulb in the fixture on the ceiling exploded with a loud pop, and a deep humming noise permeated the air.

“You sure they won’t notice that power-on?”

She wasn’t, but saw no purpose in saying she was reasonably sure it wouldn’t be. Nodded crisply as she tore the plastic sheet away from the console. Leaned in and started turning the monitors on, one by one. LED lights were glowing green. She leaned in as one screen resolved into a black and white command prompt. She typed into the keyboard embedded in the desk. Hit return. Glanced up at the screen again and shook her head. Tried to keep the anxiety out of her voice.

“No gateway,” she said. “Let’s see what kind of signals are getting fed to the screens.”

The monitors all began displaying black and white images as they warmed up. Each was split into four smaller screens, with an overlay of white letters at the top right corner identifying the feed.

Most of the images were eerily still. Empty rooms. Empty corridors. Two of the screens showed motion.

The first showed the corridor outside the Executive Suite. The sparks and flashes of light from the door overwhelmed the screen’s contrast balance. The image would resolve to a glimpse of people gathered around the double doors for a second. Looking like a rugby scrum. Then it would flash to white, all the details lost. In one flash she recognized the agent who had driven Renicks to the complex, standing back a little from three others working the doors.

The second showed another control room. Much larger. Filled with monitors and banks of equipment. Filled with people. She recognized Amesley immediately. Standing at ease. No indication of stress, of being a prisoner. He was part of it, whatever it was. There were four other people in the room. Begley couldn’t be sure, but she thought one of them had been among the workers swarming over the complex, sans uniform. Observe, she thought to herself. When collecting intelligence never discount your own observations. She pushed her eyes around the screen, trying to take in every detail.

She froze. “Oh, shit.”

She felt Renicks sink down into the seat beside her. Appreciated the fact that she’d forgotten he was there for a moment, because he was not screaming, or barking orders, or twitching with some horrible nervous tic. He was blasting calm into the air.

“What is it?”

She pointed at the corner of the screen, where something that appeared to be a suitcase sat on one of the consoles. It was open, the lid standing up at a ninety-degree angle. On the screen it was impossible to see in any detail what was inside.

“That,” she said slowly “is the Portable Nuclear Arsenal Authorization and Deployment Platform. Otherwise known as the Nuclear Football.”

Renicks sucked in air. “Shit,” he spat out. “They can’t launch anything, can they?”

She shook her head. Moved her pointing finger a precise number of inches to the left. “But look at that.”

She was pointing at a console where two women leaned down close to a pair of monitors. A blur of text scrolled down one screen. One of the women appeared to be working the keyboard. One was working something out on a pad of paper.

Renicks leaned forward. “They have the launch codes,” he said slowly. “Those are in the briefcase, right?”

She nodded, slightly impressed. “They are. Although some Presidents have chosen to carry them on their person.”

“But not Grant.”

She shook her head. “Not Grant. Grant was a stickler for tradition. Weird about it, actually. Kind of a mania.”

“So what are they doing?”

She took a deep breath. “If I had to guess, I would say they were recalculating target trajectories.”

There was a quiet moment of dull horror shared between them.

“Can they do that?”

“They’d have to. The Brick contains pre-mapped targets for a number of scenarios. The common ones. The ones the Pentagon has run a million simulations on and come out with a 90%-plus likelihood. Russian aggression. North Korea. Iran and Israel. But they don’t have The Brick, and you can never predict every possibility that might land the President on the run, in the air, in here. So sure you can enter new targets, if you can calculate them correctly. If you have time. It’s not easy.”

Renicks pursed his lips. “What happens when they have the new target data?”

“Nothing, unless you’re there. They can’t do anything unless they have the authorized and validated Acting President physically present. You have to be within a foot or so.”

“So that was the idea. Set up new targets, have Gerry Flanagan launch missiles, somewhere.” He smiled humorlessly. “And now I guess the idea is, cut into the executive suite, take me by force. Physically present suddenly sounds kind of scary.”

Begley took another deep breath. Most people who hadn’t been tortured thought they could withstand it. That they were special. She sometimes felt that way, too, but she knew intellectually that it was bullshit. Renicks knew the score, though, and that made her feel a little better. It was difficult to protect someone who didn’t think they needed it.

She half-stood and leaned over towards some of the equipment. “This monitor over here is designed to scan for frequencies on the complex’s feed. I’m going to see if they’re getting anything from the outside. Police transmissions, military channels. If anyone’s beaming television we can get that too.”

“You mean actually know what’s going on?” Renicks said, leaning back in his chair. “Crazy.”

She smiled. Flicked on the monitor and pushed three buttons on the stack beneath it. Green lights. White noise. She put her hand on the big dial and started turning it, slow, careful. Like she was trying to crack a safe.

A moment later, a picture resolved on the monitor. No sound. It was local news.

They both stared at it.

It was strangely normal. The commentator was a middle-aged man with a terrible haircut and a worse suit. Begley thought he should be fired for the suit alone, but the haircut made it a capital offense. After a moment, they cut away to a long shot of the Capitol Building. The title read BOMBING AT STATE OF THE UNION.

“Fuck,” Renicks said from behind. Then he leaned forward, jabbing his finger under her nose. “Hey! The crawl!”

She shifted her eyes down. At the bottom of the screen was a crawl of words, slowly moving from the right edge of the screen to the left. They both leaned forward, reading.

“Grant’s alive,” Renicks breathed.

Begley nodded, frowning. Reading. The crawl had switched to a report about a possible chemical attack in Virginia. No one knew if it was related or not.

“He’s not even badly injured. Stable condition.” Renicks stood up. “Conscious. Jesus Christ, President Grant’s okay. What the fuck am I still doing here?”

Begley was intently reading the crawl. “Because they’ve somehow kept this complex online. They’ve somehow locked out changes, and you’re still in the system.” She turned to face him. “Normally if the all-clear is signaled, this complex goes offline, and you’re taken out of the system as the chief executive. If that signal is somehow blocked, you stay in. They would have to crawl through every node and remove your credentials. It’ll take days.”

He stopped. “Days.”

“That’s not the worst of it,” she added, pointing to the screen. “See here, where it’s reporting that Bluemont, Virginia and the surrounding area are being evacuated because of a ‘potential chemical attack’, possibly related?”

Renicks nodded. “Bluemont’s a few miles from here.”

Begley nodded. “It’s in the blast radius.”

Renicks started to say something, then stopped and stared at her. “They’re going to bomb this place.”

She shook her head. “They don’t have to. This situation’s been modeled, Mister — Jack. Everything’s been modeled. They pay bright people from Ivy League schools to sit in rooms and come up with hilarious scenarios and to plot likely responses to them. This one’s a classic: The Continuity Program gets compromised, a rogue Acting President attempts to launch missiles. So, the whole complex is wired to blow. Charges buried deep below, designed to make this place come down like a pancake.” She pointed at the screen again. “Just in case the engineers got a little too happy with the TNT, they’re evacuating.”

“Jesus,” Renicks said. Begley thought it was becoming his favorite word. “They’re going to blow us up.”

“They can’t know that you’re not cooperating. They have to assuming you’re part of this.”

He looked at her and smiled. It was a gray, ghostly smile. “I can’t even get my ex-wife to give me my daughters’ cell phone numbers, and I’m supposed to be masterminding this?” He shook his head. “How do we know the people we’re running from haven’t cut those lines as well?”

She shook her head. “No lines to cut. It’s all wireless. Satellite feeds. Encrypted.” She paused. Was it possible they had seized control of the charges? Yes, she thought. For people who had done all this, yes, it was possible. No profit from that vein, though.

“All right. How long?”

She liked that. It made her feel like there was something positive to be done. “Based on evacuation pace and the normal chain of command,” she said slowly, reluctant to tie herself to an estimate that had no basis in clear evidence, “two hours. Maybe less.” She hesitated, then decided to pursue a policy of Full Disclosure with Renicks. “If they either crack the football’s security and gain access, or if you come into contact with it and activate the launcher, they’ll know. In Washington. And they’ll blow this place immediately at that moment.”

He nodded, looked back at the screens. They stood side by side, studying them, silent. There didn’t seem to be anything more to say.

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9.

Fifteen minutes before he sprained his ankle, Renicks stood with Begley in the kitchen, staring down at the floor.

“Here,” she said.

He shrugged. “According to the document, yes.”

She looked down at the tile floor. Back up at him. “Ronald Reagan ordered an escape tunnel installed in the kitchen of the Executive Suite in the Secure Facility.”

He nodded. “Yes.”

She stared at him for a second or two too long. The shriek of the magnetic locks being cut was muted, a low buzz. “You realize this would defeat the purpose of a panic room, right?”

He nodded again. “Are you suggesting a President can’t make fucked-up decisions? He’d be in here with his family, if the worst came.” He pointed back over his shoulder. “He imagines the Russian army or some shit crashing through the front door of this place. Corridor fighting, Marines against … against whatever. Bloody, brutal fighting. The slow retreat, the attrition of forces. Then they’re outside the door. Cutting the maglocks, like right now. One lock every fifteen minutes, gone. Your wife, your kids, hugging your legs, screaming.” He shrugged again. “Hell, I can see why you might think a secret escape tunnel wasn’t such a bad idea.”

“But — ”

He smiled. “You didn’t know about it.”

“What?”

He liked her cocky posture, the jut of her hip, her arm akimbo, her back ramrod straight. “You’re worried about the security risks. But if I read this right, this was installed decades ago via executive order using one-time contractors, but you don’t know a thing about it.” He gestured at the floor. “It’s been here for decades, and this is the first you’ve heard of it. Sometimes, security through obscurity works.”

They stared at each other in silence. He could tell she was fighting the urge to smile.

Without a word, she spun and stepped out of the kitchen. He watched her go, then looked down at the floor again. The big tiles, twenty-four inches by twenty-four inches. Huge. Available by special order, certainly, at any home improvement store, but not normal. He studied the pattern. There was a center tile, if you discounted the bottom cabinets. Perfectly center. They must have cheated a little under the cabinets. Half an inch, maybe. Enough to get a perfectly straight line in the center of the room.

A sound made him turn. Begley strode back into the kitchen, lugging the black plastic toolbox from the office closet. She dropped it on the floor and knelt, popping it open and pulling a flat blue crowbar from it. With a shove she sent the toolbox skidding across the floor, crashing into the base cabinets. She stood up. Looked at him, hefting the crowbar like she’d broken into a few cars in her time. Silently, he pointed at the center tile. She nodded and knelt down, pushing the sharp, thin end of the crowbar into the line that separated the middle tile from the one to its left. Tapped the curled top of the bar with her palm a few times, pushing the blade down into the almost-invisible gap.

Renicks admired her efficient, no-nonsense manner. A lot of people, he thought, would have spent a lot of time talking, arguing. Instead of just trying it and putting the matter to rest.

She took a breath and pushed on the bar, giving it just a little force. Frowned. Cocked her head. Then put her back into it with a grunt, and the tile popped up a half inch or so.

“Damn,” she said in a tight, low voice. “It’s heavy.”

He circled around to the other side and knelt down next to her. Put his hands on the bar over hers. Her skin was cool to the touch, smooth. He eased his weight onto the bar and the tile rose upwards. Beneath it was a square opening, about an inch smaller all around. A damp, cool breeze rushed up from it.

“Can you hold it a second?” he asked.

She considered, studying it, then nodded. “For a second.”

He eased up off the bar, hesitated for a second. When she held the tile up, he moved fast, getting his hands under the lip they’d created and pushing. He tipped it up and over. It crashed down onto its top side, cracking the tile under it. The center tile was made of steel, with a coating on top to make it resemble the rest.

Panting, he knelt on the floor and peered down into a narrow tunnel leading straight down. After a second Begley leaned in close as well, producing a small flashlight. With a click it snapped on a bright bluish light, revealing a smooth metal tube that widened out slightly once you got past the twenty-two by twenty-two opening under the tile, with ladder handholds bolted down one side. It looked just wide enough for a man of average build to climb down. Anyone overfond of cheeseburgers was going to have a hell of a time. Renicks and Begley looked up at each other simultaneously.

“You’re not an I told you so type, are you?” she asked.

He sat back and leaned against the base cabinets. “Normally, I am. But I have to confess I didn’t really believe it myself.”

“Right.” She stood up and tore her jacket off. Her white blouse was crisp and neat. Her holster rode high on her hip. She dropped the jacket on the floor, sat down, and swung her legs over the lip of the hole. She looked at Renicks. “Stay here.”

He started to say something, but she put the small flashlight between her teeth and sank down into the shaft, catching a step with one foot and then disappearing from sight.

“Bossy,” he muttered, and stood up.

He walked into the living room. The sparks were halfway down one side. The noise was, if anything, even louder, and he winced, putting his hands up to his ears. Turning away from the door, he picked up his bag and quickly scooped all of his possessions back into it. Picked up the Kimber and stuffed it into his waistband, feeling foolish. Moving quickly, he went back into the office. He pushed the Brick and the towel into his bag, then went to the closet and retrieved two of the walkie-talkies, pushing them in on top of it.

In the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator and pulled four bottles of water out, adding them to the bag. Then he dropped the bag and stood over the tunnel entrance. He wondered what he would do if she never came back. He tried to imagine an existence without the constant, high-pitched wine of the maglocks being cut and found it impossible.

She emerged a few minutes later, her hair coming loose from its clips. She was pink and sweaty, and sat on the floor with her legs dangling in the shaft.

“Jesus, it’s not even hidden,” she said, breathing hard. “It leads right into a service corridor. A door, marked Access Corridor. Access Corridor, for god’s sake.”

“You know the service tunnels?”

She nodded, looking up at him. “I know every damn inch of this drafty, stinking place. Or thought I did.” She paused, and suddenly reached out, snatching the Kimber from him before he could react. She studied it for a moment, then looked up at him from under her eyebrows. “My goodness, Mr. Secretary.”

Renicks tried to hide his surprise and embarrassment. “It was a gift from my uncle,” was all he could manage to say. He wanted to snatch the gun back, but felt this would undermine his dignity even further. He didn’t know what to do with his hands.

She felt the weight, her eyes on his. “Have you ever fired a gun, Mr. Renicks?”

He smiled. “A few times. On a range.”

She stared up at him for another moment, then handed it up to him. “Keep the safety on and don’t try to shoot anything while you’re moving, okay?”

He took it back and tucked it back under his belt. “Thanks.”

“One minute.” She left the kitchen. Returned a moment later with her tablet, handing it to him silently. He slipped it into his bag. Pulling her jacket towards her, she threaded one arm into the sleeve. Paused, looking at him. “And don’t point it at me under any circumstances,” she said. “Come on. Keep your jacket. It’s cold as hell.”

The descent was claustrophobic. He could barely extend his arms enough to grasp each small rung in the ladder, and his bag slung over his shoulder cramped him even further. The rungs were slippery and his feet kept sliding free. And Begley was right: It turned freezing just a few feet below the lip of the tunnel. He started shivering almost immediately.

“Just how paranoid do you have to be,” he heard her say breathlessly from below, “to install a panic tunnel in your panic room?”

Renicks chuckled. He was breathing hard, and thought if he’d known what his future held he would have started working out long ago. He’d always thought himself in reasonable shape. He was beginning to question that assessment. “Maybe it’s a series of panic rooms and tunnels,” he offered. “Panic rooms all the way down. Eventually we end up back in the Executive Suite.”

The only light sources he had was the diminishing fluorescent glow leaking down from the kitchen and the scattered, weak bluish light leaking up from Begley. The walls of the tunnel were steel plate. The rungs of the narrow ladder were cold to the touch and his hands were going numb from constant contact with them. He wondered why a panic tunnel out of a panic room would lead directly back into the facility, instead of outside. He broke it down in his head as he worked his way down. A way of distracting himself from the sensation of being stuck, his bag wedging against the wall of the shaft, a surge of tight terror filling him every time.

The answer was simple. If the President is in the Executive Suite in the first place, the worst has come. Nuclear war, massive terrorist attack, plague of some sort. Outside would have to be assumed to not be an option. The escape from the Panic Room, created in secret and not even shared with the group of people charged with protecting the President — the Secret Service itself — was meant to be used in the instance of a revolt. A coup. If the President or Acting President found himself under assault from his own people, he would need a way to regain control of the facility. A secret. A surprise attack, from the rear.

Renicks heard a hissing noise and looked down in time to see Begley slide the last few feet of the ladder, just letting the sides of the ladder slide through her hands. She dropped lightly to the floor.

His left foot slipped from the rung below him, and his legs sailed out into the air. He squawked, a barking noise deep in his throat. Held on with one hand, his right arm wedged suddenly between his body and the wall of the shaft. He held on for a second. Then his numb hand slipped free and he was falling.

It was only a dozen feet or so. Somehow he avoided knocking his head against a rung. He slid down the shaft like he’d practiced it, training for the moment, one arm pressed against his side, one arm raised up. He felt the walls disappear and for a second he was aware of open air, and then his feet hit the floor. His left ankle rolled under his weight, pain shot up his leg, and he fell over, cursing. Landed hard on his ass. Leaned forward and grabbed his ankle, wincing.

Begley was there immediately. “Are you okay?”

He nodded. The pain had already receded to a dull throb. “Help me up.”

She put her shoulder under one armpit and lifted as he pushed himself up. Standing with her for support, he tested the foot. Winced again. But was able to stand. He looked at Begley and nodded in response to her unspoken question. She looked down at his shoes. They were good walking shoes. Sturdy. Comfortable. Were dressy enough for emergencies. No ankle support whatsoever.

They were in an actual tunnel now. Bare rock. Not much light. A damp, sour smell in the air. Cold. He pulled his jacket tighter around him and limped after Begley. Ten steps and she opened a door, dim light flooding in. It was a regular-looking door, the frame set roughly into the rock wall. Begley inspected the hallway beyond it for a second and then nodded, stepping through.

He tried to walk normally. His ankle hurt like hell, but he managed to avoid more than a nominal limp. He wondered if it was pride or the simple urge to not hold them back. Tabled it for later examination, when he wasn’t fleeing from unknown forces.

The corridor they emerged into was lit by a single fluorescent bulb that flickered and buzzed. The silent, yellow emergency lights blinked on and off every six feet. It had been finished in a perfunctory, industrial way. Cold concrete floor. Unpainted drywall on the walls. A thick yellow line had been painted on the floor. About forty or fifty years ago, by the look of it. There were other doors every few feet, some unmarked. The ones that were marked weren’t very helpful, as far as he was concerned. They had signs like CORRIDOR A15 or MECH ACCESS 2.

Jargon Shields, literally. Jargon was designed to keep the uninitiated — the outsiders — in the dark. Signs were usually written in ways that conveyed all necessary information to those who knew the jargon, but kept everyone else mystified. It was passive-aggressive, in a way. Looking around, he thought this facility might just be the most passive-aggressive place in the world.

Begley turned to shut the door behind them. “All right,” she said. “We have an advantage, then.”

He nodded. “They think we’re still in there.”

“Right. We’re deep underground, and in order to get out, we have to go up, through the complex. We don’t know anything. We have no idea what we’d be walking into.”

“We know they’re armed. We know they came prepared. We know they want me.”

She was in charge. He could sense it. Whatever equality had existed between them in the Suite, whatever hesitance she’d felt was gone. She was in her element, and he suspected he would be taking orders from her for the foreseeable future. He didn’t mind. He had to admit she knew more than he did, had been trained for this. All he would be able to do was comment sarcastically on the quality of the signage. He was content to let her lead.

Begley nodded. “And that’s the sum of our information. Come on.” She turned right and started walking.

He fell in behind her. The ankle felt weak and stiff, but he could walk on it, for now. Shock. Adrenaline and endorphins. It would swell and start to ache, become tender, if he didn’t stay on it constantly. He remembered his father, teaching him the “hurry cases” when he’d been in the Boy Scouts. Serious Bleeding. Internal Poisoning. Stopped Breathing. Heart Attack.

He particularly remembered heart attack, because the only instruction had been to make sure the victim was comfortable and wait for an ambulance to arrive. So much for first aid.

“Where are we going?”

She didn’t turn around. “To gather intelligence, Mr. President.”

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8.

Five minutes before he saw it, Renicks was walking through every square foot of the suite. Trying to notice everything. Cataloging resources, familiarizing himself with the layout.

He started in the office space, where Begley had wriggled under the main desk with a small toolbox. Working the plates free from the wall, stripping the wiring of insulation. Trying anything that might patch them through to a live connection. It was a good use of her time, since she obviously knew the wiring and how to manipulate it. He left her to it.

The office was easy enough. Aside from the furniture and computer equipment, there was paper in the fax machine and printer, and a few basic office supplies in the desk drawers. A shallow closet in the back of the room also contained a large plastic toolbox and a set of walkie-talkies in a charger, all operational. He wondered if they were on the same frequency as the one he’d seen Begley use earlier.

There was a loud bang behind him, and then a stream of profanity. Without turning to look, he exited the office. Directly across from it was the small kitchen and one of the bathrooms. The kitchen was a claustrophobic square; full-sized oven, fridge, sink. Insufficient cabinetry. A toaster and microwave ate up half the counter space. Unattractive. Greasy white laminate, blond wood trim. The oven’s finish had been scratched and had lines of rust forming a pattern on it. The floor was tiled in huge, twenty-four inch stone tiles, light gray. The tile had been laid without gaps or grout, right up against each other. The huge tiles just made the room feel smaller.

He opened everything. The cabinets contained a variety of dried and canned food: Vegetables, noodles, pasta, beans. Powdered milk. Powdered drinks of all kinds. Canned meat, sausages and SPAM, tuna in foil packets. There was a full set of dented and rusted pots and pans, chipped plates and dull metal cutlery. Everything you would need to prepare horrifying meals of salt and sugar and botulism, he thought.

The oven was empty. He regretted opening it. When he opened the fridge he paused for a moment, staring at dozens of bottles of wine, water, and beer, placed inside with care, using every available inch of space.

He shut the door slowly, thinking that if they hadn’t figured something out in two hours or so, he was coming back to have one hell of a party.

The bathroom was cheap-looking. It was a standard three-piece: Sink, toilet, plastic shower stall. The medicine cabinet was empty. There were two sets of towels and washcloths, white and thin, laundered a million times. He took one of the towels and tucked it under his arm. Towels, he thought, were always massively useful things.

When he stepped back into the narrow hall, he could still hear Begley cursing in the office, even over the keening noise of the locks being cut. Passing through the entry room, he glanced at the sparks flying. Noted they had shifted downward about six inches. One lock down, he assumed.

On the other side of the suite were the two bedrooms and second bathroom.

At first glance, the bedrooms were identical in size and crammed with bunk beds. Six beds in each room. The beds were modular and could be separated and, he assumed, stored elsewhere. He wondered why the default configuration was to assume he would be bunking down with eleven people, why they wouldn’t leave the extra beds somewhere else until needed. The beds were all made up, with sheets and blankets and thin, unhappy pillows. There was nothing else in the bedroom on the right. No dressers, or chests, or decoration of any kind.

The bedroom on the left had a closet. It was shallow and not very practical for storing clothes in the standard way. Which he assumed the designers had realized, since it was filled with automatic weapons. Rifles. Magazines. He didn’t know anything about automatic rifles, and they seemed to glow with a negative black light, shiny and perfect. Maybe never used. He closed the closet door and wondered if he should report his discovery to Begley. Then realized she must know, this was her house. She’d probably been trained on them. Could take them apart, put them back together.

Then he thought they shouldn’t trust anything they found in the suite. They’d brought something to cut through the door with. Maybe they’d thought to empty the magazines, too. Or replace them with blanks.

He glanced at the towel. Considered it. Then shrugged.

The second bathroom was exactly the same as the first, with the addition of an exciting mold smell. He compared towels and decided to keep the one he had.

Back in the office, Begley lay on the floor under the desk, grunting and cursing. She was pulling plates off the wall and yanking wires free. He rolled the big desk chair a few feet away from her and sat down. Pulled the Brick from his pocket. It lit up as he touched it, coming to life.

“Are you always this calm?”

Renicks glanced over at Begley. She had pushed her head out from under the desk at an uncomfortable angle. Glaring at him. He imagined she was used to contorting herself just to glare at people. He reflected that all the women in his life accused him of being too calm.

“This isn’t calm,” he said. “Should I be running around? I don’t know the systems here; you do. So you’re tearing wires out of the wall. I’ve got this,” he held up the Brick, “which only I can access. So I’m looking through it to see if there’s anything here that can help. There must be something in the classified documents of the President that can help.”

She snorted, pulling herself back under the desk. He allowed himself to admire her lower half for a second.

“I’d feel better if you were running around,” she said.

He nodded and returned his attention to the Brick. It was a remarkable device. It was palm-sized and about as thick as a small paperback book. It was all screen. There were no buttons. No obvious power source. All interaction was through the touch-screen.

When he put it down, it went dark. When he picked it up, it came to life automatically. Somehow it knew when he was holding it.

The interface was graphical, the screen filled with tiny icons. There were no applications that he could see. Just documents and folders. Hundreds, thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. There were dozens of folders, most marked with mysterious acronyms or single words he assumed were codenames. He thought of Amesley and the team of people that would normally be at his disposal. People who could explain everything to him. The Brick was just to ensure he had access to the information the Acting President might need. It didn’t clarify anything.

He thumbed his way through the list of folders, ignoring the unsorted documents. He scanned quickly; despite Begley’s assertion that it would take hours to cut through the locks on the entrance, he was impatient and worried. He didn’t think it was likely that Begley would have some brilliant inspiration and connect them to rescuers.

Two folders jumped out at him almost immediately. The first was named ELIRO. The all-caps title caught his eye and he stared at it for a moment. Hesitated because he thought he’d seen the acronym before. He spent a few seconds running the letters around his mind. He had the buzzing sense that their meaning was locked away in his head. That at any moment it would be illuminated. Maybe a memo he’d seen, or a project he’d discussed with the President.

He opened the folder with a tap of his index finger. It expanded to fill the screen. Contained a single text file, also called ELIRO. With a tap he opened the file. The first line was in English:

History will forgive me.

He scanned the rest. The first words in were dum tre longa tempo nun, and it continued from there, nonsense. Or a code.

He closed his eyes for a second and imagined the words. Dum tre longa tempo nun. He’d always enjoyed codes and word games, but these remained meaningless. Thinking that if it was a code there might be a key, so he closed the file and then the folder. With a growing sense of urgency he pushed his eyes past the icon and kept searching, eventually stopping with a start on a folder marked CONT_EX_STE.

Vowels were luxuries. He quickly translated this to continuity executive suit and with a sharp jab of his finger the folder swelled up to take up the entirety of the small screen. It contained a dozen or so subfolders with inscrutable names, and a single unsorted text file called NSDD_E1.

He glanced at Begley’s legs. Tapped the file open. It was a short document, containing just three paragraphs of text in plain English. The first two he skipped quickly. They were legalese. Long sentences citing authority, precedents, and routing procedures.

The third paragraph was only three sentences long. He read it twice, heart pounding. Then he looked up at Begley’s lower half.

“I know how to get out of here.”

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7.

Fifteen minutes before figuring out that they wanted him alive, Renicks was digging through his bag.

Behind him, he could hear Agent Begley having a heated, half-shouted conversation with Director Amesley via the intercom. He listened with half his attention as he searched his bag for the palm-sized Brick Agent Gorshin had given him. He could hear it buzzing.

“Agent Begley,” Amesley’s tinny voice, warped by the small speaker, “this is a direct order: Open the suite’s doors!”

“I’m sorry sir, I must refuse that order,” she repeated, her voice even. “Until I am certain that this facility is secure, my responsibility is to the DS and his safety.”

Amesley started to shout something, but was cut off mid-sentence. He heard Begley moving. She disappeared into the office again. He watched her in his peripheral vision.

The emergency lights clicked on. Clicked off. Begley returned from the office.

“Secretary Renicks,” she said briskly. “Come with me, please.”

“One second.”

He picked up his bag and turned it upside-down, dumping the contents onto the couch. The TV was still spilling snow and white noise into the room. The Brick and gun both bounced onto the cushions. The Brick’s screen was bright. It danced a little each time it buzzed.

Picking up The Brick, he followed Begley into the short corridor that lead to the bedrooms, bathrooms, and office. He was shaking a little. He told himself it was excitement. He found her in the office, typing on the keyboard embedded in the large desk. The desk was placed up against the far wall; behind it were a half dozen large flat screen monitors. Five were blank and dark; the sixth displayed a standard kind of computer desktop with a dock along the bottom and shortcut icons littered everywhere. Instead of a mouse there was a trackball embedded into the desk’s surface. A headset was plugged into a bank of inputs at the back.

Along the other walls were two smaller computer work stations and a small table on which a fax machine and hi-speed laser printer sat, blinking placid and green.

“I don’t have any connections to the facility,” she said as he stepped up behind her. “That’s impossible.”

“That word gets overused. You mean improbable.”

She didn’t turn away from the desk. “This suite is a panic room. It’s meant to be the Alamo if things go very badly wrong — like, an army-at-the-front-door wrong. When the Continuity Program activated this facility and this suite was sealed, all authority and communications should transfer here. So the President or Acting Commander In Chief will have complete control over all networks. The power lines are designed to be redundant and uncuttable. The communication fiber is designed to be redundant and uncuttable.” She tapped a final key, muttered a curse, and turned to look at Renicks. “When I sealed this area, Secretary Renicks, we should have immediately gone live and superseded the control center of the facility.”

“But we’re cut off.”

She nodded. “Somehow. It’s imp — improbable, but somehow I have no tunnel to the outside world from here.”

He looked around the room. Seeing a phone extension mounted to the wall, he stepped to it and picked up the receiver, pushing the TALK button and placing it to his ear. There was no dial tone, and he shook his head.

“Agent Begley,” he said, replacing the phone in its cradle. “Walk me through it.”

She turned and leaned back against the desk, looking down at his shoes. She took a deep breath, her arms crossed over her chest. He liked that. No rushing, no panic. She was panicked, he could tell, but panic was like fear: Everyone experienced it. How you reacted made the difference. Her reaction was to slow down, to think for a second. He was impressed when she looked up at him, her eyes clear, her voice steady. He was trying to decide if she was going to be someone he could rely on. He wasn’t sure, yet. His own heart continued to pound, and his hands were still shaky; he needed to be able to rely on her, because he didn’t know squat about the bunker or the facility or what might be outside the doors.

“I don’t know the details, but the Continuity Program of this facility has been triggered. This facility is online, and you have been elevated from Designated Survivor to Acting Commander in Chief. Protocol states that the four agents outside this suite exchange pass-phrases with the In-Suite — that’s me — and I would grant two of them access to this area. One of them would be carrying the football — the Nuclear Football, the remote launch interface — and you would formally assume control. After that, protocol ends, really. You would be considered the CIC, you would make contact with other entities and departments. Depending on the responses you received, we would proceed from there.”

“But something’s wrong.”

She nodded. He could tell she was thinking this through as she spoke, and that was why he was asking questions, letting her talk, letting her work it out. This was her home field.

“Something’s wrong. The other agents on this detail broke protocol. Director Amesley broke protocol. Something happened at the State of the Union Address, something that triggered the Continuity Program. This program has been in place in its current form since 1963 and has never been triggered before.” She looked around. “That means you are the acting President, Mr. Renicks — ”

“Jack.”

“ — and you should be in complete control. But you’re not.”

He glanced down at The Brick. He remembered Agent Gorshin telling him it had no way to connect to the outside world beyond its activation signal — it wouldn’t be able to access any networks, even if there were some to be found.

Begley stared at him, her eyes steady. He felt her weighing him. She’d known him for an hour, but she had his entire life as sussed out by the best investigator’s in the business at her fingertips. He wondered what kind of impression he’d made.

“All right,” she said in a tone of clipped decision. “When I went to the door earlier to deny Amesley’s request, I saw something. The picture’s pretty grainy, but you get a good view of the whole corridor. Everything looked OK. Amesley looked like he always did. Big glasses, blank face. I don’t know the agents on detail but they looked right. They had the football with them. Except … way down where the hall turns at a right angle towards the elevator. The way we came up. I thought I saw something.”

“Something?”

She frowned. “Movement. It’s hard to make out details on that old screen, but I saw something move. It was as if … ” She looked up at him and shrugged. “As if someone was hiding around the corner. As if someone knew the field of the camera and was purposefully standing in the blind spot.” She looked back up at him. “If I was on the spot I would say it looked very much like a man holding a weapon.”

He thought about that. It felt unreal. Like this was some sort of academic exercise, a spitball session during Paranoid Delusions 101 or something. He was lightheaded and could feel his whole body humming. This is mania, he thought. This is how religious delusions happen. You get worked into a state of delirium with adrenaline and terror, and you start believing things. “Maybe waiting for the door to be opened. Because everything right in front of you looked right.”

She nodded, then suddenly took a deep breath. “Then you have to follow the logic. They’ve triggered the Continuity Program. They’ve broken protocol. You break protocol because it’s the only way to protect your asset, or you break protocol because you’re not protecting your asset. Which it is?”

“Maybe I’m supposed to be dead too.”

“No. If that’s what they wanted, don’t break protocol. I let them in once we exchange pass phrases, they murder us. Or kill you when you walk in the door. They wanted you to be activated as acting CIC. Why?”

Renicks weighed The Brick in his hand. “Like I said, I’m supposed to be someone else. You’re supposed to be someone else. We both get pulled in at the last second, they can’t have expected us. Maybe the people who were supposed to be in here were part of this.”

He looked up and they stared at each other.

“You have every power of the presidency,” Begley said. “They have launch codes and chart books outside.”

“Jesus.”

“You could transmit coded orders to any number of people. Mobilize armies. Scramble fighter squadrons. Order the FBI to detain people. Issue executive orders.”

Renicks pulled one of the workstation chairs over and sat down, his knees almost touching Begley’s. “They want me alive because they want me to do something.”

Begley shrugged. “The system wouldn’t know if the Acting President had a gun to his head.”

“Jesus.”

They sat for a moment in silence. There was such an absence of sound Renicks’ ears began creating white noise, an imaginary sizzling. Renicks held up The Brick.

“The Secret Service Agent in charge of my pickup handed me this. Everything the new Acting President needs to know in one handy phone-sized device.”

Begley smiled thinly. “It used to be six binders of documents and fifty-four CD-ROMs.”

“Progress. I’m going to see if there is anything useful on this. You try and think of any way we can contact the outside world, or at least hook into the bunker’s communication lines.”

She nodded distractedly, tapping her cheek with one finger as she sat. He glanced up. Her profile was fine; he admired it for a second and then sat forward.

“Hey.”

She looked at him without moving her head.

“We’re not supposed to be here, but when we dropped into place, they didn’t cancel anything.”

She didn’t react.

“They must have considered the possible ways everything could go off the tracks, right? Amesley’s the Director of the Secret Service, he must have considered the possibility you’d seal the suite.”

“Probably. Amesley would have known you were being substituted for Flanagan about twenty minutes after the Attorney General died.”

Renicks leaned back in his chair. “If I were him, I’d have thought about how I’m getting in here.”

She considered. “There’s an override code. Only I know it; I set it myself this morning.” She frowned. “If you don’t have that, you’re shit out of luck. You can’t cut those mag locks easily. There are twelve of them, and you have to cut them all to get that door open. He’d need some serious hardware to do that.”

There was another beat of silence, and then a sudden strident, keening noise erupted. They both flinched. Renicks realized he was crouching with his hands curled into fists as the noise penetrated his skull and drilled down. He grit his teeth and forced himself to straighten up as Begley dashed out of the room. One hand on the butt of her still-holstered gun.

He followed at a run, almost crashing into her back in the common room of the suite. She was standing in the midst of the couches, staring at the reinforced steel doors of the entryway. A rain of bright white sparks spewed into the room from the upper left corner of the doorway.

“Cutting the maglocks?” Renicks shouted.

Begley nodded, once, and said nothing.

He watched her for a moment longer. Her facial expression wasn’t hard to decipher: Pissed off was more or less a universal thing.

“How long?”

She looked up at the low popcorn ceiling for a moment. “If we assume they have the best possible tool! A few hours!”

Renicks watched the sparks. He already had a headache from the unrelenting noise. He ticked off the situation: No communication, no way of issuing orders, two handguns between them, and a few hours of time. Not exactly what he’d expected when he woke up this morning, irritated at his fifty-three words.

Begley looked at Renicks, her face an impassive mask. She stepped over to him and leaned in, her smell clean and soapy. “The Acting President has to be in the Secure Facility as long as the emergency status continues,” she whispered fiercely. “If you leave the Secure Facility, you will be logged out of the system and authority will pass to the next link in the Continuity chain.” Stepping back, she took a deep breath. “Secretary Renicks, we have to get you out of this bunker.”

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6.

Twenty minutes before Director Amesley ordered Agent Begley to open the door to the Executive Suite, Renicks stood in front of the television, frozen.

Begley was a whirl of motion, none of it involving him. She disappeared back into the office area. Emerged moments later, made calls on her walkie-talkie. Received no responses. Attacked her tablet computer, hand making sharp, impatient gestures. Disappeared into the office again.

He didn’t know what to do. This was unusual. In his everyday life he was either considered the Expert in the Room by the people around him, or thought of himself as the Expert in the Room privately. Emily had cited this attitude many times as one of his most objectionable personality traits. Most of their late-period arguments had ended with her sarcastic refrain, Well, you know everything, Jack.

He didn’t know everything. He’d had that sudden epiphany thirty seconds before, when the emergency lights started flashing.

Stepping forward, he examined the television, which was still pouring snow into the room with a muted buzz. The only way to combat shock and ignorance was to investigate. He found the recessed panel of buttons along the top of the TV and pushed up on his toes to get a good view of them. Pressed the MENU button. Navigated using the volume and channel buttons until he found the INPUT screen and scrolled through all the choices. None of them resulted in any picture on the screen.

He was still feeling slow and buzzed. Shock, he thought. Endorphins and adrenaline dumped into the bloodstream. An automatic reaction to perceived danger.

Stepping over to the wall, he picked up the phone. There was no dial tone. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even seen a landline, but the amusement he’d felt towards it when speaking on it before had disappeared. He put it back in the cradle. Pulled out his cell phones. Just being thorough; he didn’t expect a signal and wasn’t disappointed.

Begley stormed in and out of the room within a ten-second period. He had no idea if he could offer her any help, and left her alone.

He considered the possibility that he was actually the Acting President of the United States. It was impossible to believe, because he was standing by himself, locked in a place that felt like a pricey hotel room. Ever since receiving the Continuity orientation after his confirmation hearing, he’d occasionally imagined actually becoming the Acting President. In his imagination there had been a whole team of people. He’d actually wondered how he would handle Generals and Admirals, CIA Directors — men and women with vast experience and expertise who would push him one way or another. How he would handle strong personalities who knew much more than he did about every situation. How he would assert himself and avoid being a puppet.

Not once had he imagined he’d be standing in a room by himself, trying to get the fucking television to work.

Renicks shook himself and started moving.

He stayed in the living room for the moment. He sensed he was in Begley’s way — it was not a comforting thought, but he trusted it and decided the best thing to do, at least for the next few minutes, was to let her do her job. He stepped sideways and ran his eyes over the bookcases. The top shelf held the government of the United States in written form: The annotated Constitution, the most recent congressional record, the entire United States Code in gorgeous leather-bound volumes, The Code of Federal Regulations.

The rest of the shelves were filled with DVD-ROMs. The first two replicated the entire first shelf in digital format. He scanned the others: State law codes, Supreme Court transcripts. Encyclopedias. CIA Fact Books going back to the 1960s.

He pushed himself into the small gap between the end of one bookshelf and the wall. Tested the gap between the back of the shelves and the wall. Tried to push the bookshelf. He didn’t expect it to move and it didn’t. He didn’t expect secret passages, hidden niches, a battalion of soldiers hidden in a crawlspace below the floor.

The emergency lights clicked on. Clicked off.

He checked the other bookshelf. It was also firmly attached to the wall. Turning to the coffee table, he examined the decorative glass baubles sitting on top. Weighed them in his hands as potential weapons. Pictured the scene like a panel from a comic book: Acting President hurls paperweights at Captain Socialism, locks himself in bathroom.

Grimacing to stifle a peal of inappropriate, shock-induced laughter, Renicks knelt down and pulled open the small drawer set into the table. It was empty. He shut it and knelt there for a moment.

Agent Begley entered the room again. She was frowning. The way she held her hand up to her face and twisted her mouth to the side made him think she’d had long hair up until recently, and had been in the habit of chewing on it when thinking. Their eyes met for a second. She nodded and put her hand up, miming give me another moment.

He nodded back. Decided Begley was someone whose advice he could take.

They stood there, ten feet apart, for another few seconds. The emergency lights clicked off. Clicked on again. Then the intercom on the front door dinged, and they both jumped a little.

“Agent Begley.” Director Amesley’s voice, tinny and small.

Begley crossed to the door immediately. Leaned in to peer at the tiny screen. Toggled the intercom.

“Director Amesley,” she said.

“Agent Begley, I need access to the Executive Suite. Something’s … happened.”

Renicks frowned. Something’s happened seemed like the least appropriate phrase possible.

Begley hesitated, then turned away and looked back at him for a moment.

“Secretary Renicks,” she said. “Join me in the office for a moment.”

A thrill of excitement shot through him. He hurried after her. She led him into the office and turned to face him.

“First,” she said immediately, with an air of authority he liked, “let’s establish we’re on the same page. As far as we know based on the data available to us, something has happened to trigger the Continuity Program and therefore we must assume you have been elevated to Acting Commander in Chief.”

She stared at him. Her face was impassive. After a second he realized she was waiting for him to say something. He nodded.

“Sure,” he said. He immediately felt foolish. Sure.

She nodded. “My role here is to interpret the security status of your person and your immediate area, apprise you of my assessment, and then await your instructions. Do you understand?”

He nodded again. “I do.”

She started to pace. “I don’t like this,” she said flatly. Sounded irritated. “We have no information. The agents that under no circumstances are ever supposed to leave their post are not in the hall. Right there, protocol states I keep this suite sealed until we have more information.” She stopped. Turned. Looked back at him directly. She had beautiful green eyes. “My recommendation is that we keep the suite sealed for the time being. Not even Director Amesley gets in.”

He studied her face. Forced himself to think for a moment before responding. Behind him, he could hear the muffled, flimsy voice of Amesley through the intercom. “What do you think is happening, Agent Begley?”

She shook her head immediately. “I have no idea. This may be an exercise, for all we know. What’s our data? What did you see on the TV?”

He thought back. “I was only half-watching. I saw motion. I heard a yell. Then a crowd noise, when a lot of people get excited all at once. Then people were moving around Grant. Secret Service, Senators, someone else — I don’t know. Then the screen went blank.”

“We don’t know anything. Except something happened and the Continuity Program was activated. And my team has broken protocol. Dr. Renicks, we profile everything. We simulate everything. We have terabytes of data about every conceivable scenario, so that every agent will at least have some plan of action no matter what happens. I can’t cite a specific simulation, but I can tell you that under the general category of your team fails to follow protocol, every single simulation starts off with sealing the Executive Suite and maintaining control of your asset — that’s you — until you do know what’s going on.”

He thought about it. It made sense. The second the TV had gone to snow all the old rules had been suspended. The protocol was in place to provide new rules when that happened. If the protocol had been ignored, he thought, she was absolutely right to assume all rules were off.

“I agree,” he said. He tried to make it sound firm and resolute.

She nodded and stepped past him. He followed her back into the main living area. The intercom buzzed as they entered, and Director Amesley’s voice sparked into the room.

“Agent Begley, I am ordering you to open these doors immediately.”

Begley took a deep breath. Glanced at Renicks. He gave her a quick nod, and felt like they were in conspiracy together. He liked the idea, being teamed with her.

She toggled the intercom, hesitated a moment, then paused again, leaning forward suddenly to peer intently at the video screen. The intercom open, capturing her breathing. Then she snapped to attention, looking down at her shoes for a second.

She saw something, Renicks thought. Something that bothers her.

Finally she looked back up and leaned forward again. “I’m sorry, Director Amesley,” she said clearly. Slowly. “I am afraid I have to disobey that order.”

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5.

Fifteen minutes before checking the video screen installed above the keypad, Begley sat in one of the overstuffed easy chairs across from the couch, working her way through her Inbox, half-listening to the TV. The usual bloviating from commentators speculating on the State of the Union. She was not politically minded, which made her typical of the Secret Service. Disinterest made it easier to risk your life for whoever had the job that week.

She looked up at Renicks. He was sitting on the couch with his shoes off, talking on the landline phone — there was no cell signal at all once you went underground — while he watched the TV. She tuned in his conversation from time to time without really meaning to.

“I don’t know. A few hours. I brought plenty, but I’m playing hooky. Don’t tell anyone.”

It was strangely cozy. The suite had a sealed feeling, cut off from the world. It always reminded her of her parents’ basement when she’d been a kid. She would sneak down to sit on the musty old couches and watch the ancient television, separate. Sometimes she’d pretend the world had ended and she was living in the basement, and she’d catalog her survival strategy: Water in the boiler. Big bags of dog food piled up. She’d even kept a cache of dolls and books hidden in the basement, in case she ever had to shelter there.

“She is, actually. It’s stressful, being on good behavior. There probably is, but that’s not a good idea.”

She glanced at Renicks again as the fanfare began on the TV. Mister Speaker, The President of the United States! She was surprised by how relaxed he was, compared to some of the previous Designated Survivors she’d had. He wasn’t barking into the landline, going through cell phone withdrawal. He hadn’t yet treated her like a flight attendant or waitress. He didn’t seem filled with self-importance, and not only hadn’t he tried to impress her with all the people he knew on a first-name basis, including, of course, President Grant himself, he had not actually spoken much to her at all.

Turning back to her tablet, she surreptitiously brought up Renicks’ background file. She was already pretty familiar with it. She just hit the highlights. Mother killed in botched robbery at a supermarket when he was eight. Father had been a small town doctor, dead of a heart attack when Renicks was nineteen. Some indication of a small-town scandal indicated by a flurry of footnotes attached to the main report, but she didn’t drill down into them. If she’d been doing the profile she would have flagged him as a possible risk for foreign recruitment: Bright, no close family ties, no clear political beliefs.

Tunneling down some links, she found that an on-the-ball agent had in fact flagged this, but further reports had minimized that concern.

Father’s brother Richard Albert Renicks, a.k.a Richie The Rail, was the only dark spot in the family tree: Ties to organized crime, sixteen arrests, a total of fifteen years served in various state and federal prisons. Thief, mainly, although a person of interest in two homicides. Black Sheep of the family, certainly, but there were clear indications the Secretary had maintained a friendly relationship with his uncle up until the latter’s death in East Jersey State Prison.

Madam Speaker, Vice President Mallory, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans.

She glanced up at the screen in time to see a brief flash of the Vice President. Elizabeth Mallory was a regally tall black woman. She looked fantastic in a sober dark blue dress, her hair up in a businesslike bun. Begley always had the impression that Vice President Mallory would be a terrifying boss.

“Hey sugarbooger! How was school today?”

Begley glanced at The Secretary. Sugarbooger, she thought, smiling slightly. Renicks had the dopey smile of the doting father. She glanced at the door, at the small video screen next to it. The door was locked but not sealed, and could be opened by any authorized key card. That was protocol; you only sealed the suite in the event of imminent threat inside the facility. She couldn’t make out the video screen from where she was. She considered getting up to visually check the hall outside — four agents were on duty at all times by the doors — but decided it could wait a few minutes. She looked back down at her tablet.

Education started getting impressive after his father’s death. Degree in English from Rutgers College. Masters from Johns Hopkins, Cognitive Science with a side program in Education Administration. Doctorate shortly after, his dissertation on the subject of language techniques to aid in absorption and comprehension in children from low-income backgrounds and challenged school systems. The dissertation had been widely published and made a stir in the sorts of circles a 300-page document with that sort of subject matter might actually be read. He’d also published an article about Esperanto’s potential as a universal documentation markup language that had gotten a bit of attention in academic circles. Begley spent a few seconds trying to think of something more boring than Esperanto, and failed.

She glanced at the TV. President Grant, white hair, tan skin, white teeth. She’d forgotten just how unnaturally tan the man was.

Renicks stood up and placed the receiver back in its cradle, pushing his hands into his pockets and standing near the television. She looked at him for a moment, then closed her open apps and put the tablet aside.

“Disappointed you’re not there?”

He smiled a little without looking at her. “Absolutely not in the least.” He turned to look at her. “What about you? Disappointed that you’re here?”

“Disappointed is the wrong word.”

I do not stand before you tonight unaffected by these past few months. I do not deny the challenges this administration, this country has faced. But I do tell you that a change is at hand.

He nodded. “You want to be kicking in doors and hauling in counterfeiters. Babysitting politicians is not what you want to be doing.”

She cocked her head and kept her face blank. No sense in doubling down on being an open book. “No?”

He hesitated a moment, and then ducked his head, pursing his lips. “You’re efficient and very good at your job. You stick to protocol like its a flotation device after you’ve gone overboard. And every time any little detail goes wrong, your first reaction is superficially identical to excitement. I think you wish something would go wrong, so you could have some fun.” He shrugged. “Besides, you use weak modifiers when you describe anything having to do with this bunker or your duties. You use strong modifiers when you talk about anything else.”

She made her smile very bland as she tried to recall the words she’d used when going over everything earlier. He was right, and she didn’t like it, being read so easily. “You’re kind of smug, aren’t you?”

“Smug — or right?”

It should have been irritating, but he said it with such obvious cheer she smiled. “All right,” she said. “I’m bored to death in this tomb. What’s your excuse?”

“Fifty-three words.”

I stand here tonight and tell you, we as a country remain —

They both paused. There was a second of perfect silence from the television, and then shouts of confusion. She turned towards the TV in time to see a glimpse of people moving around the president, and then the TV went to snow with a pop.

For another second, they both stood there.

“Did you see that?” Renicks asked.

She spun away, heart pounding, and crossed to the door. She ran her protocol in her head. Check your perimeter. Contact your upteam. Be sure of your weapon.

She reached across herself and patted the holster snapped to her belt. Didn’t draw the weapon. You only drew a gun when you expected to fire it.

At the front door she pulled her transceiver from her pocket and toggled it as she leaned in to the video screen.

The hallway outside was empty.

There were supposed to be four agents outside at all times. The gray, empty hallway on the screen was all wrong.

“Station One status.”

There was a moment’s white noise, then an unfamiliar voice. “This is Station One. All green, Station Gold.”

She froze for a second. Weighed the possibilities. She had not seen anything explicit on the TV, but there had been a disruption. The TV had lost signal. Something was wrong. And there were no agents outside the suite.

Her transceiver crackled into life again. “Agent Begley, this is Director Amesley. On my way to you. Stand by.”

“Director, what’s going on? Why is the Hallway Detail gone from their posts?”

There was no response. Just the white noise of an open receiver.

She stared down at the tiny walkie-talkie, so small it fit in the palm of her hand. This was a complete deviation from protocol. It was also a direct instruction from her superior. For a second she stood chewing her lip, unsure. Heart pounding. She could not reconcile all green with Director Amesley making a personal visit to the suite.

A single blast of an alarm, a deep angry buzzing, made her jump. Flashing emergency lights came on immediately after, silent and yellow. On the plush chair where she’d left it, her tablet beeped insistently.

“Holy shit,” Renicks whispered.

She turned and looked at Renicks. He was standing right where she’d left him, alert and attentive. Watching her. The Designated Survivor. In her charge. They stared at each other for one, two, three seconds, the only sound the sterile clicking of the emergency lights.

She nodded to herself. Protocol. “Stay back.” Turning back to the door, she reached up and tapped seventeen buttons on the keypad, rapidly. The magnetic locks on the suite’s only entrance slammed into place. She felt their impact through the floor, through her shoes. She took half a step back before catching herself.

Calm down, she thought, furious. You’ve been trained for this.

Except it had never been live. And in her mind, it had never been like this. Protocol broken, nothing proceeding according to the clear path outlined by the Continuity Plan. Which she had memorized. In her mind, in all the exercises, if nothing else the first step of the protocol — making contact with the Hall Detail and securing the Portable Nuclear Arsenal — had always been executed.

Instead, she had seen — what exactly had she seen on the television? A second’s confusion, nothing more. A second’s confusion, then a loss of signal. And then the Executive Suite had come online. Which only happened if the Continuity of Government program had been activated.

Which only happened if every single person in the line of succession above the Designated Survivor was believed to be dead. Which made Secretary Jack Renicks the Acting President of the United States.

Turning around, she tried to look confident and calm. Behind her, Director Amesley toggled the intercom again. Renicks raised an eyebrow.

“Are we okay, Agent Begley?”

She took a breath. Boil it down to basics, she thought. What’s your core mission? To keep him safe. “Until we know what’s going on, Secretary Renicks,” she said slowly, “we have to keep you in this bunker.”

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