SECRETARY OF STATE MARTIN CHO’S MOTORCADE WAS RUNNING BEHIND schedule, as usual. He’d kept the House and Senate Intelligence Committee chairs waiting most of the morning, and now he was almost an hour late for the Saudi ambassador.
“Call the office, tell them we’re on our way,” Cho said to the aide sitting across from him in the short Mercedes limo. Her name was Melissa Brandt. She was a recent Harvard grad and young for the job, but promising. Also maybe a little naïve.
“Mr. Secretary, they’ve been notified by the scheduling office already. I called them—”
“Just do it again, please, Melissa,” he said. “Make sure the ambassador knows we’re thinking of him. That’s important to them. They’re sensitive people. The ambassador has been pampered all his life.”
“Yes, sir,” the aide answered.
Crisis talks had been quietly taking place between the two countries for several days now. With the president indisposed, as he was, it was up to the secretary to put in the face time on this one. So far, it had been a dour affair. The pre-9/11 days of arm-in-arm policy making with the Kingdom seemed like a quaint bit of history now.
As Melissa Brandt pulled up the State Department on her phone, she craned her neck to see outside and check their progress up Constitution Avenue.
“Hi, Don, it’s Missy with the secretary’s office,” she said, still looking out the window. “We should be there any minute. We’re just passing by the, um—”
All at once, the young woman’s pale blue eyes flew open wide.
“Oh my God!” she said. “They’re going to hit us! Secretary Cho, look out!”
Secretary Cho turned just in time to glimpse the grill of a white pickup before it slammed full-speed into the side of their car. A black Lincoln Navigator from the motorcade raced up to ram the intruder, a fraction of a second too late. All three vehicles came to a sudden and violent stop.
The space inside the limo’s backseat seemed to fold in half. Cho felt himself thrown sideways. A searing pain tore through his chest as one of several broken ribs punctured his right lung.
“Mr. Secretary?” The head of Cho’s security detail, bleeding from the forehead, scrambled to turn around from the front seat. “Sir? Can you hear me?”
Cho could hear, but he couldn’t move. The slightest shift sent a shock wave of agony through him, as the panic rose.
Even now, his eyes were on the truck outside the car. The driver was getting out of the cab. He was young—just a boy. In his hand, there was a cylinder of some kind. Silver and red. What was that?
“Sir?” the agent tried again. “Sir, can you hear me?”
Cho’s mouth flapped open and then closed immediately. Air was supposed to fill his lungs, but it didn’t. Words were supposed to come out, but there were none. There was only the thought, screaming through his brain.
Bomb! He’s got a bomb! That boy—
Because the secretary knew enough to have recognized the thing in the boy’s hand just before he turned to run away. It was a detonator.
The blast ripped through all three vehicles when it went off. Drivers in the nearest cars saw a white-hot flash, then a much larger orange fireball, before the whole thing coalesced into a rolling cloud of charcoal gray smoke. Glass gravel peppered the area. Chunks of metal rained down onto the pavement, some of them still in flames.
It was all followed by a much softer shower, of leaves and small branches from the trees lining the avenue, before everything went oddly, eerily still once again.