“What’s going on now?” I asked the Secret Service agent. He didn’t look well. There were dark puffs under both his eyes. Something else had happened. I could tell.
“Aiden Cornwall was murdered early this morning. It happened at his house out in McLean. It was Jack and Jill. They called us again. Called it in to us like we’re mission control.” He shook his head in sadness and disbelief. “They killed Aiden’s nine-year-old son, Alex.”
I found myself rocking back on my heels. The news from Jay Grayer didn’t make sense to me; it didn’t track with the Jack and Jill style to this point. Goddamn them! They kept changing the rules. They had to be doing it on purpose.
“I want to go there right now,” I told him. “I need to see the house. I need to be out there, not here.”
“I hear you, but wait a minute, Alex,” he said. “Hold on. Let me tell you the rest of what’s going on. It gets worse.”
“How could it get any worse?” I asked him. “Jesus, Jay.”
“Trust me, it does. Just listen for a minute.”
Agent Grayer continued to talk in a subdued whisper in the White House hallway as we walked together toward the Emergency Command Center, where the others were gathering. He pulled me aside a few paces from the meeting room. His voice was still an urgent wh
isper.
“The President is always awakened at quarter to five by the agent in charge. Happens every morning. This morning, the President dressed and went down to the library, where he reads the early papers as well as an executive summary that’s prepared for him before he rises.”
“What happened this morning?” I asked Jay. I was beginning to perspire. “What happened, Jay?”
He was very thorough and procedural. “At five o’clock the phone in the library rang. It was Jill on the private line. She was calling to talk with the President. She got through to him, and that just isn’t possible.”
My head involuntarily shook back and forth. I agreed with Jay Grayer: this couldn’t be happening. The idea, the concept, of the President as a murder target was a hugely disturbing one. The fact that, so far, we were helpless to stop it was much, much worse.
“I think I understand why the call couldn’t happen, but tell me anyway,” I said. I needed to hear it from him.
“Every single call to the White House goes through a private switchboard. Then the call is monitored by a second operator in White House Communications, which is actually part of our Intelligence Division. Every call except this one. The call completely bypassed the control system. Nobody knows how the hell it happened. But it happened.”
“This phone call that couldn’t have happened—was it recorded?” I asked Grayer.
“Yes, of course it was. It’s already being processed at FBI headquarters and also at Bell Atlantic out in White Oak. Jill used another filtering device to modify her voice, but there might be ways to get around that. We’ve got half the Baby Bell’s high-tech lab on it.”
I shook my head again. I’d heard it, but I couldn’t believe any of this. “What did Jill have to say?”
“She began by identifying herself. She said, ‘Hi, this is Jill speaking.’ I’m sure that got the President’s attention better than his usual cup of joe in the morning. Then she said, ‘Mr. President, are you ready to die?’”
CHAPTER
59
I NEEDED TO SEE the house. I needed to be inside the place where General Cornwall and his son had been murdered. I needed to feel everything about the killers, their modus operandi.
I got my wish. I reached McLean before nine that morning. The December day was very gray and overcast. The Cornwall house looked surreal, stark and cold, as I approached and then entered through the front door. It was cold on the inside, too. Either the Cornwall family was denying that winter was coming or they were saving money on heat.
The double murders had been committed on the second floor. General Aiden Cornwall and his nine-year-old son still lay on their backs in the upstairs hallway.
It was a cold, calculated, very professional killing. The grisly murder scene looked like something from a casebook, maybe even one of my notebooks. It was forensic textbook stuff, almost too much so.
FBI technicians and medical examiners were all over the house. There were probably twenty people inside.
It began raining hard just after I arrived at the house. The cars and TV news trucks that came after me all had their headlights on. It was eerie as hell.
Jeanne Sterling found me in the upstairs hallway. For the first time, the CIA inspector general seemed rattled. The severe, constant pressure was getting to all of us. Some people were after the President of the United States, and they were very good at this. They were extremely brutal as well.
“What’s your gut reaction, Alex?” asked Jeanne.
“My reaction won’t make any of our jobs easier,” I said. “The only truly sustaining pattern I’ve seen is that Jack and Jill really don’t have a pattern. Other than the notes, the poems. There certainly doesn’t seem to be any sexual angle to these two murders. Also, from what I understand, Aiden Cornwall was a conservative, not a liberal like the other victims. That’s a shift that might knock down a whole lot of theories about Jack and Jill.”