Extinction Machine

Chapter Eight

Secret Service Ops Center

The White House

Sunday, October 20, 3:22 a.m.

Nothing was happening. That’s how Duty Officer Lyle Ames liked it. The ideal day for the Secret Service Presidential Detail was one in which the president did nothing, shook no hands, saw none of the public, and basically stayed indoors, out of sight, and safe.

The press hated days like this.

Ames loved them.

According to the duty log on his desk, nothing much had happened all day. It was slow. Boring.

Perfect.

He sipped coffee from a ceramic mug with the presidential seal on it and flipped the duty log over to the last page. Nothing there, either. Nice.

The office was nearly empty. His agents were at their posts, and Ames’s only company was Regina Smallwood at the ops desk. Smallwood sat in front of a row of computer monitors that displayed real-time feeds of security cameras. Each monitor screen was divided into many smaller windows that displayed telemetric feeds, coded to correspond with the heartbeat of an individual. Green lights pulsed for the president, the first lady, their family, the vice president, and the key members of government who formed the line of succession—the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, secretary of the Senate, all the way down to the secretary of Homeland Security. Most of the green lights pulsed with the slow, rhythmic beating of sleeping hearts. A few were more rapid, indicating that these people were night owls or in different time zones.

The signals were sent by RFID chips—radio frequency identification chips the size of rice grains. Each VIP had one surgically implanted in the fatty tissue under their triceps. Unlike the passive chips used to store medical information, these were true telemetric locators. The chips were late-generation models manufactured by Digital Angel, and as long as GPS tracking satellites circled the earth the chips would locate the wearer and send a continuous feed to establish location and proof of life. It was one of the technologies that allowed agents like Ames to dial down his Maalox consumption.

Ames set down the duty log, stood, stretched, yawned, and took his cup over to the Mr. Coffee to pour some hot into it. As he raised the carafe he heard a bong-bong sound. An alarm from the telemetry board. A soft, unthreatening sound; more of a notification than a crisis shout.

Smallwood snapped her fingers at him. “Got a transponder failure,” she said. “POTUS just went dark.”

“Balls,” growled Ames. He set his cup down and hurried over. “Is it the panel or the transponder?”

“Unknown, but the other signals are strong and steady.” She looked up. “You’d better call it. Gil stayed over tonight.”

Ames was already hitting the speed dial for Gilbert Shannon, the president’s body man.

A sleepy voice answered, “Shannon.”

“Gil, this is Lyle. Are you with the president?”

“No, I’m in my room down the hall.”

“Okay, I need you to go put eyes on the president. Have the agent at the door accompany you in.”

All the sleepiness vanished from Shannon’s voice. “Is there a problem?”

“Probably not, but the boss’s transponder stopped transmitting.”

“Oh, okay. I’ll call you in one minute.”

Ames set down his phone and made a second call to alert the agents outside the president’s bedroom door. That done, he bent over Smallwood’s shoulder to study the telemetry feeds. The small pulsing green light had been replaced by two words in red LED letters: SIGNAL LOST.

Ames did not yet feel panic. There was only a tingle.

“Could have happened at Camp David,” suggested Smallwood.

“Hm?” asked Ames.

“The transponder. The president was all over the place. Basketball, jogging, that softball game at the barbecue. He could have banged his arm when he tried to steal second base in the third inning. Remember, he dove in headfirst? Brierly tagged him pretty hard and I think that was on the upper arm.”

Ames shook his head. “He reached for the base with his left arm.”

“Sure, but he was tagged on his right. The ball could have hit the transponder.”

“Maybe,” said Ames.

“Or, it could have been—”

The phone rang.

Ames snatched it up. “Talk to me.”

It wasn’t Gil Shannon. It was Sam Holly, the senior agent on shift at the residence. His voice was ratcheted tight with tension.

“Sir, we have a situation…”