"What do you need to know?"
"Do they know where the President is?"
"They do not. Secret Service walkies are jammed."
So the guys had stolen a page from the bad-guy handbook and were screwing with the electronics. Not an EMP but they didn't need one.
What room would the President know well, yet had no regular business in it so that other people wouldn't think of him being there?
There was shooting from inside the White House, and then screaming. The Noodle indicated the shooting came from three different areas, and Cole realized that with three teams, the enemy did not have to know where the President was, they could search. Or simply shoot into every room. As he had told Cecily, he didn't have to know where the President was, he only had to know where the enemy was. But which team mattered most? The one that was closest to getting to the President. And that meant Cole did need to have some idea of where Torrent was.
He made his guess: the family kitchen. Second floor of the residence, northwest corner. The staff would have been evacuated. The President would know it as a place for snacking.
Cole leapt up onto the Truman balcony but did not crash his way into the Yellow Oval. He had been there before and if they anticipated his entry point it would be an excellent killing ground. Instead he crashed backward through the window of the living room. Somebody was in the room next door—the master bedroom—firing heavy-duty ordnance, and some of it started coming through the walls into the living room. Cole's first instinct was to hit the floor, but so was everyone's, and so the shooter would know that and aim low to cover the floor. Cole jumped up instead, effectively bounding over the bullets, and then kicked his way through the door connecting the living room and bedroom directly.
He caught Arty swinging back toward him and took him out with three bullets to the face. Cole was using the assisted aiming routine—he couldn't afford to make a single mistake and it had saved his life once. And the face was the only thing not covered with Kevlar.
No time for regret. No time to think about the fact that it was Arty's gun that Chinma had used to stop the intruders in Calabar. Except that he couldn't stop the thoughts from entering his head.
Jeep's voice. "Two down in the West Wing. The Marines are here, and the ones in the East Wing are pinned down. So it's just the two in the residence that you need to deal with."
"Arty down here," said Cole. "So only one?"
"Unless the East Wing pair break free."
Cole came out of the bedroom into the west sitting hall, and there was a bad sign—the door to the kitchen had been replaced by a good-sized hole. They had already come through here. If the President was in the kitchen, he was dead.
Where else? The Treaty Room? The Lincoln?
Then he whirled back around and rushed into the kitchen.
Mingo was there. Mingo with Arty? They hadn't kept the previous pairing after all.
Or else the two pinned down in the East Wing weren't there at all. Another diversion? Another illusion?
"This isn't your party, Cole," said Mingo. "We tried to keep you out of it."
Cole shot him in the face and he went down. If he stopped and talked, the President would die. And Cole couldn't leave any of them alive behind him.
"Mingo down," said Cole. "Who's in the East Wing?"
"No ID yet," said Jeep.
"Nobody's seen them?"
"Negative."
"Then they aren't there," said Cole. "Staying in one place?"
"Yes."
"Not there, not there, tell them to get over to the residence."
Where now? Maybe he'd been right about the kitchen, wrong about which one. The big kitchen downstairs was an even less likely place for the President to go. This wasn't where he'd head for late-night snacks, this was the kitchen that did the serious cooking for major events.
Cole sailed down the flights of stairs to the ground floor. Too bad the stairway was so far over to the east. He could hear shooting on the ground floor as he went. Then an explosion. He ran down the center hall and saw that the Secret Service headquarters had been grenaded. But Drew was dead on the floor, too—the Secret Service had some kind of serious firepower, because whatever killed him had taken a bite out of his side like a shark, blowing past the Kevlar like it wasn't there.
There was a blood trail heading to the pantry, which was the route into the kitchen. Cole followed it, only to find a dead Secret Service agent, who had apparently staggered in here. Or was he following an uninjured soldier? It had to be Benny. The one whose pistol Mark had used. What would Benny do?