that time.
Nana Mama was watching the poor news anchor who was being led off camera; her co-anchor looked like he wanted to follow her. My grandmother muted the TV.
She said, “He was in Rock Creek in a wet suit. Some homeless guys living under the Virginia bridge spotted him trying to swim to the Potomac. Multiple soldiers guarding the Thompson Boat Center opened fire on him with machine guns. They feel sure he’s dead. They’re dredging the … there.”
She unmuted the TV. The feed had shifted to a camera on Virginia Avenue aimed at the Thompson Boat Center. Beyond it, police and Coast Guard boats were plying the Potomac, looking for a body.
“Who cares?” Ali said, and he hugged me fiercely. “The Russians are going to nuke us, aren’t they? Or the Chinese?”
Feeling how terrified he was, I kissed him and hugged him back. “No one wants a war like that. Not even our enemies.”
“Then why did the president shut their lights off?”
“Because they were attacking us in the wake of the assassinations. They were trying to see if we were weakened. President Larkin was showing them we aren’t.”
“I’m scared, Dad,” Ali said.
“We’re going to be okay. No one wants a war like that,” I repeated. “You just have to have faith in—”
“But when we can leave, can we?”
I turned to Bree. “Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea for Nana Mama and the kids to go see my dad in Florida until things settle down.”
“What?” Jannie said. “No, Dad. My spring season’s coming up.”
“How would we get there?” my grandmother asked. “No planes. No trains.”
“We’ll cross these bridges when we—”
My phone buzzed. Ned Mahoney.
“You rested?” he said.
“Barely. You see what’s going on?”
“Yes, which is why they want us back at Andrews ASAP.”
CHAPTER
75
THE RAIN HAD stopped at last, temperatures were rising, and the clouds were breaking up when a Gulfstream jet landed at Joint Base Andrews at 2:15 p.m. on Saturday, February 6.
As the jet taxied toward me and the hangar, I kept looking over my shoulder, back inside, to see hundreds of people trying to do their jobs as best they could. But the strain and worry showed.
Ever since President Larkin’s act of brinkmanship, the media had been going crazy, declaring the country on the verge of all-out war with two superpowers and a rogue regime. Protests were breaking out. People were panicking, and there were reports of widespread food shortages, violence, and looting. We were hearing of clogged highways as people fled the country’s larger cities.
But the threat of the entire Eastern Seaboard being leveled as mushroom clouds rose above it was what hung over everyone at Andrews, including me.
All morning I had tried to stay focused on what I could do: review all the new evidence coming in and look for something that would help us get a break. But then up on the screens, there would be some update on the secretary of defense’s status or a piece on CNN about the proper use of gas masks, and I’d be thrown into a loop of what-if questions that destroyed my concentration.
I could see the same happening to many others working the investigation. On the whole, it felt like we were making little if any progress.
Despite hours of searching, dredging, and diving near the confluence of Rock Creek and the Potomac River, there’d been no sign of the guy in the dry suit that the Virginia National Guardsmen had shot at in the early-morning hours.
Had “the Frogman,” as the media was calling him, been the president’s assassin? Why else would someone be in Rock Creek when the city was in total lockdown, the air temperature was in the thirties, and the water temperature was in the forties at best? Plus, he hadn’t been all that far from where Bree had had him almost cornered inside GW University Hospital.
In my gut, the Frogman was the blond minister who killed the president, shot the defense secretary, killed the pathologist, and skinned a corpse. And we’d lost him.
Mahoney tried to convince me that the cold river water could have sunk the corpse, that the body would surface downriver sooner or later. But I wasn’t so sure.
As the Gulfstream rolled to a stop and was surrounded by armed airmen, an alarm started whooping long and slow somewhere in the distance.
Time seemed to stand still.
Many of the airmen had taken their eyes off the jet and were searching the sky. You could see the fear in their faces. I could feel it