Читать книгу The Testimony - James Smythe, James Smythe - Страница 42

POTUS shouted over the static, Find out what the fuck this is, so I called Meany in R and D, even as it was still going on. We were in a car headed back toward Andrews, to get on the flight that we had abandoned only hours before, and the driver turned around instinctively, because he knew that we weren’t going anywhere. We’d had some intel from a source that it was – and I stress, intel is rarely accurate, never 100 per cent accurate, and frequently completely wrong, because it’s spun out of gossip and rumour itself, for the most part – but we’d had intel that it was some sort of weapon. I had that on a piece of paper handed to me as I got into the car, and I was expecting a briefing on it on the plane, so I knew next to nothing. Meany’s name was on the report, so I called him as soon as it started. Tell me this isn’t a weapon, I said, and he said, Sir, listen; this sounds like a warm-up. Bear in mind, I’ve got Meany in one ear, the damn static inside my head, so I’m shouting. It’s not warming up, it’s here, now, because I can hear it. Are you measuring this, taking readings, finding out where the fuck it’s coming from? Yeah, but there’s nothing, sir, he said. We’ve got oscilloscopes and digital audio stuff, and nothing’s getting picked up, but we can all hear it. And it’s happened twice now, so that might indicate that it’s warming up, or that the first time was a warm-up. I don’t know.

None of us knew. In the FBI – I came from the FBI, FBI to secret service desk job to politics, like that was a normal route – there’s a rule about serial killers. First time they kill it’s to see how it felt, or because it was an accident. The second kill was because they found something in the first that they liked, and they wanted to see if they could recreate that feeling, that high. It can still be a coincidence, and it’s not quite a pattern.

I heard POTUS on the phone to the First Lady, checking on her and the kids, and then … We know it wasn’t static now, right? It was that garbled, fragmented noise that you get when you drive out of a tunnel with the car radio on, as it becomes clearer, picks up the signal again. It suddenly went from noise to words. My Children, it said, and then faded back into the static as quickly as it came. Our driver, I forget his name, he looked like he was going to hurl. Pull over, I screamed at him, and he did. The agents in the vehicles flanking us ran from their cars, swarmed ours, and I threw open my door. Get him to the White House, I said, and then I saw POTUS, and he looked absolutely terrified. I’d seen this man face down talks about nuclear disarmament, negotiate peace treaties, win an election, for God’s sake, and he always looked calm. That was how he was going to be remembered, we always said during the campaign: the calm President, the cool one, the collected one.

In the FBI, it was one kill for a mistake, two because they liked it. We used to sit in the offices and pray that a third body never turned up, because if it did … Well, then you’ve got a real problem on your hands.