CHAPTER SIX

December 12

1:40 p.m. Israel Time (6:40 am Eastern Standard Time)

Tel Aviv, Israel

The news was bad.

The young woman sat on the park bench, watching her little boy and girl, twins, play on the swing set. In the near distance was the tan apartment block, sixteen stories high, where the woman lived. There was no one around today, the park mostly empty.

It was unusual for an early afternoon in spring, but not surprising given the circumstances. Most of the country seemed to be inside somewhere, glued to their TV and computer screens.

Last night, Daria Shalit, a nineteen-year-old soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces, had gone missing after a skirmish with Hezbollah terrorists who had made a surprise attack along the northern border. The seven other soldiers in her patrol – all men – had died in the fighting. But not Daria. Daria was just gone.

IDF troops had pursued the terrorists back into Lebanon. Four more Israelis had died in the fighting there. Eleven young men – the cream of Israeli youth – all dead in an hour. But that was not what consumed the country.

The fate of Daria had become an overnight obsession. If the woman closed her eyes, she could see Daria’s pretty face and dark eyes alight, smiling as she clowned around with a machine gun, smiling as she posed with friends in bikinis on a Mediterranean beach, smiling as she received her school diploma. So beautiful and always beaming, as though her future was assured, a promise she was sure to receive.

The woman did close her eyes now and let the tears stream down her cheeks. She put a hand to her face, hoping her children would not see her weep. Her heart was broken for a girl she had never met but somehow knew as well as if Daria were her own sister.

The newspapers were crying out for blood, demanding the complete destruction of the Lebanese people. There were violent arguments in the Knesset through the night, as the government issued threats, demanded the girl’s release, but took no immediate action. A rage was building, ready to explode.

Hours ago, the bombing had begun.

Israeli jets were pounding southern Lebanon, the Hezbollah stronghold, and all the way north to Beirut. Each time the announcements came on TV, the woman’s neighbors in her apartment building erupted in shouts and cheers.

“Kill every one of them!” an old man shouted in something that sounded like triumph, but of course could not be. His gruff voice was clear through the paper thin walls. “Kill every single one!”

The woman took her children outside after that.

Now she sat in the park, silently weeping, letting herself cry, getting it out, all the while her ears tuned carefully to the calls and shouts of her two children. Her children, innocents, would grow to adulthood surrounded by enemies who would gladly see their throats cut and their flesh bled white.

“What are we to do?” the woman whispered. “What are we to do?”

The answer came in the form of a new sound, low and far away at first, mingling with the sounds of her children. Soon it moved closer and louder, then louder still. It was a sound she knew too well.

Air raid sirens.

Her eyes popped open.

Her children had stopped playing. They stared across the playground at her. The sirens were loud now.

LOUD.

“Mama!”

She jumped from the bench and ran toward the children. There was a bomb shelter beneath their building – a quarter of a kilometer away.

“Run!” she screamed. “Run to the building!”

The children didn’t move. She raced to them and gathered them in her arms. Then she ran with them held to her, one in each arm. For a few moments, she didn’t know her own strength. She dashed across the pavement with these two precious packages, both crying now, the sirens around them shrieking louder and louder.

The woman’s breath was harsh in her ears.

The building loomed, growing closer. Everywhere, people who were invisible just moments ago ran toward the building.

Suddenly, yet another sound came – a sound so loud, so high-pitched that the woman thought her eardrums would burst. She looked up and a missile streaked across the sky, coming from the north. It slammed into the upper floors of her building.

The earth beneath her feet shook from the impact. The world seemed to spin around her, even as the top of the building blew apart in a massive explosion, concrete masonry flying through the air. How many people in those rooms? How many dead?

She lost her balance and fell, spilling her two children onto the ground. She crawled on top of them, covering them with her body just before the shockwave came. Then a hail of debris from the explosion rained down, tiny biting pebbles and shards, choking dust, the remains of the old and infirm who could not leave their apartments in time.

The sirens did not stop. The deafening shriek of another missile came, flying just overhead, followed by the blast and rumble as it found its target not far away.

On and on and on raged the sirens.

Another missile shriek began to grow. It whistled in her ears. The skin on her body popped out in gooseflesh. She pulled her children closer, closer. The sound was too loud. It no longer made sense. It was beyond hearing, monstrous beyond all human comprehension – her systems shut down in the face of it.

The woman screamed in tandem with the missile, but she seemed to make no sound at all. She could not look up. She could not move. She felt its shadow above her, blotting out the light of day.

Then a new light took her, a blinding light.

And after that, the darkness.

CHAPTER SEVEN

6:50 a.m. Eastern Standard Time

The White House Residence

Washington, DC

The morning light was streaming through the blinds, but Luke did not want to get up. He lay flat on his back in the big bed, his head propped up on pillows.

Susan lay next to him under the sheets, the President of the United States, her head resting on his chest, her short blonde hair hanging loose against his bare skin. He noticed a few flecks of gray that her stylist had missed. Or perhaps that was on purpose – on a man, a little bit of gray would indicate experience, seriousness, gravitas.

She was breathing deeply.

“Are you awake?” he whispered.

He felt her smile against his body. “Of course I am, silly. I’ve been awake for over an hour.”

“What are you thinking about?” he said.

“What are you thinking about? That’s the important question.”

“Well, I’m worried.”

She pressed herself onto her elbows, turned, and looked at him. As always, he was astonished by her beauty. Her eyes were pale blue, and in her face he could see the woman who had appeared on magazine covers more than twenty years before. She was aging backward, moving in reverse toward that time. He would almost swear to it – in the short time they had been together, she appeared to grow a little bit younger nearly every day.

Her mouth made a half smile and her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Luke Stone is worried? The man who takes down terrorist networks with a wave of his hand? The man who topples despotic rulers and stops mass killers alike, all before breakfast? What could Luke Stone possibly be worried about?”

He shook his head and smiled, despite himself. “Enough of that.”

Truth be told, he was more than worried. Things were getting complicated. He was committed to putting his relationship back together with Gunner. It was going well – better than he could have hoped – but Gunner’s grandparents still had custody of him. Luke was beginning to think that was for the best. A protracted custody battle with Becca’s wealthy and hateful parents – it would be long, drawn-out, and ugly. And what would he win? Luke was still in the spy game. If he moved in with Luke, Gunner would end up spending a lot of time on his own. No guidance, no supervision – it sounded like a lousy arrangement.

Then there was the Susan situation. She was the President of the United States. She had her own family, and technically speaking, she was still married. Her husband, Pierre, knew about Luke, and apparently he was happy for them. But they were keeping this a secret from everyone else.

Who was he kidding? They weren’t keeping anything a secret.

Her close security team knew about him – it was their job to know. And that meant it was already a widespread and growing rumor within the Secret Service. He passed through security to get in here late at night, two, sometimes three nights a week. Or he signed in as a guest in the afternoon, but never signed out again. The people who monitored the video surveillance saw him entering and leaving the Residence, and took note of when he did so. The chef knew he was cooking for two, and the servers who brought the food out were two heavyset older ladies who smiled at him, and bantered with him, and called him “Mr. Luke.”

Susan’s chief-of-staff knew, which meant that Kurt Kimball also probably knew, and God only knew where it went from there.

Every single person who already knew about him had family, friends, and acquaintances. They had favorite early morning breakfast joints, or lunch counters, or bars where they regaled the regulars with tales of life inside the White House.

The reporter’s question yesterday suggested that the rumor had already broken out of the box. They were one leak, one disgruntled staffer’s call to the Washington Post or CNN, from a full-blown, twenty-four/seven media circus.

Luke didn’t want that. He didn’t want Gunner subjected to that glare. He didn’t want the boy in the custody of the Secret Service everywhere he went. He didn’t want the media following him or staking out his school.

Luke also didn’t want the attention for himself. It was better for his work if he could remain in obscurity. He needed the freedom to operate, both for himself and for his team.

And he didn’t want the attention for Susan. He didn’t want it for their relationship. Things were hot and heavy right now, but he couldn’t imagine this thing lasting under constant scrutiny from the media.

It was impossible to raise these issues with her. She was an irrepressible optimist, she was already under the glare of the media anyway, and she was riding high on endorphins. Her answer was always some variation of, “Oh, we’ll work it out.”

“What are you worried about, Mr. Luke?” Susan said now.

“I’m worried…” he began. He shook his head again. “I’m worried that I’m falling in love.”

Her thousand-watt smile lit up the room. “I know,” she said. “Isn’t it great?”

She kissed him deeply, then leapt out of bed like a teenager. He watched her as she padded across the room, nude, to her closet. She still had the body of a teenager.

Almost.

“I want you to meet my daughters,” she said. “They’re coming to town next week to spend Christmas.”

“Terrific,” he said. The thought of it made his stomach do a lazy barrel roll. “Who should we tell them I am?”

“They knew who you are. You’re that superhero. James Bond without the clean shave or the fancy suit. I mean, you rescued Michaela’s life just a few years ago.”

“We were never properly introduced.”

“Still. You’re like an uncle to them.”

Just then, the phone on the bedside table began to ring. It made a funny sound, not so much a ring as a buzz, or a hum. It sounded like a monk with a bad cold chanting in meditation. Also, it lit up in blue on each ring. Luke hated that phone.

“You want me to get it?” he said.

She smiled and shook her head. Now he watched her come back across the room, moving faster this time. For a brief moment, he imagined another world, one where they didn’t have their jobs. Hell, maybe even a world where they were both unemployed. In that world, she could climb right back into bed with him.

She picked up the phone. “Good morning.”

Her face changed as she listened to the voice on the other end of the line. All of the fun went out of it. The light in her eyes faded, and her smile dropped away. She took a deep breath and let out a long exhale.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be down in fifteen minutes.”

She hung up.

“Trouble?” Luke said.

She looked at him, her eyes showing something – a vulnerability perhaps – that the masses never saw on TV.

“When isn’t there trouble?” she said.