“He’s alive,” Caleb reported. “We took his implant out.”

  Several seconds ticked by. “I see.”

  “I think you just lost your army,” Caleb told the man. “Which means you’ve lost your leverage. Field Commander Warner misspoke when he said we wanted to negotiate. That was the old deal. The new one is this: Apex is done. You step down, and turn yourself in when what’s left of the government comes knocking, which they will soon.”

  “And if I don’t?” Trusk asked coolly.

  “Then the next conversation we have will be in person. And I can promise, you don’t want that.”

  The line went dead.

  Caleb lowered the HUD and handed it back to Warner. “Do you have a communication channel to the other field teams?”

  Warner nodded. “Assuming Trusk doesn’t shut down comms everywhere to keep the secret from spreading.”

  “He’ll be crippled if he does,” Caleb said as he turned to leave the room. “Either way, it’s good for us. Go back to your people. Show them the implant. Someone find Daniels, tell him what happened. See if he knows a way to get a message to the government.”

  Samuels grunted. “Where the heck are you going, then?”

  Caleb paused at the door just long enough to glance over his shoulder. “I’m going to find my wife and daughter. War’s over. Someone else can take it from here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Cheyenne Mountain, CO

  Wednesday August 1st, 3:41 pm MST

  President Margaret Welcher breathed in the scent of fresh coffee. An indulgence, at this point. There was precious little of it left on base, despite her order that a crate of it be set aside for her exclusive use. The instant stuff tasted like garbage. There had to be at least a few perks to being the leader of the free world. Even if that world was a bit in disarray at the moment.

  That would change soon, though. While she doubted that Springfield was going to yield coffee beans, it would provide the kind of foothold that proved she had control of the situation. She sipped her cup and considered how to get more.

  Once the region was stable, she could reach out to Venezuela or Colombia and see how they’d fared. They’d been a mess before all this. In exchange for some military aid, they might be willing to start shipping again. The skies were still dark, but the storms had mostly died down. Shipping vessels and cargo planes should be able to get around soon enough.

  There was a knock at her door.

  “Aaron,” she called, irritated at the interruption of what had been the first private moment she’d had to herself in her own rooms for days, “it’s an act of treason to interrupt the president this early in the morning. If we’re not being attacked by a foreign nation and Cheyenne isn’t under attack, it can wait another ten minutes.”

  The door opened anyway and she sighed as she swiveled her chair around to face her chief of staff.

  Aaron stood to one side of the door as Speaker Diane Payne strode into the room. The woman who’d replaced Welcher when she took the presidency. She looked… smug, for some reason.

  “I’m very sorry, ma’am,” Aaron said. “She… uh, she insisted.”

  Speaker Payne tilted her head a bit to the side. “You can give us the room, Aaron.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Aaron muttered, withdrawing as he closed the door.

  Welcher kept her expression polite. She’d never like Diane Payne. The woman had challenged her for speaker in two elections, lowering herself to everything from hit pieces to promising favors on pet legislation that would never have made it through a House vote, much less the Senate.

  The kind of woman who would say or do anything to take more power, and for nothing more than the sake of having it. “What a pleasure to see you, Madam Speaker,” she said pleasantly, and gestured at the sofa. “Please, have a seat. Care for a cup of coffee? It’s the real stuff.”

  Speaker Payne ignored the question, coming forward to lay the file under her arm in front of Welcher almost delicately, as if it were fragile enough to break if not careful. “I think you should have a look at this. It came in about an hour ago.”

  With a mix of curiosity and apprehension, Welcher set her mug aside, eyeing Payne as she slid the file off her desk and opened it. There was a picture of some small object, about the shape of a long breath mint. She shook her head, scanning the text below it. “Who is ‘Field Commander Warner’? What exactly is this about that it couldn’t wait until…”

  Her eyes halted at the phrase ‘remote assassination protocol’. She re-read the report more carefully. Or, rather, testimony. This Warner person was one of Trusk’s people. There were a number of corroborating reports from people she also didn’t know, all painting a general, horrifying picture that took shape over the course of four pages—and included a request by the former president that the report be taken directly to Congress rather than her office.

  Trusk had been installing kill-switches in Apex members. From the looks of it, all of them. His people had discovered it, and now his security forces were beginning to abandon him. It was as critical a disaster as she could have imagined.

  No security force meant no Springfield. No leverage. Nothing for him to bring to bear for Welcher’s benefit. She’d staked her relationship to him, and his resources, on her bid to impeach Daniels and take his position in the absence of a vice president.

  President Welcher looked up from the file as she closed it carefully. “Well… I didn’t know about any of this,” she said hoarsely. “I’ll have Wolverton assemble a team and bring Trusk in, of course.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Payne said. “He’s already been informed. As have the other surviving members of Congress, and the Senate. Everyone was understandably concerned about your long relationship with Trusk, and what with the recent… nuclear bomb you used on US soil… Well, it was a near unanimous decision to impeach. And remarkably bi-partisan, as well.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen both sides in agreement like that since… well, before I was born. The vote was taken half an hour ago. It’s really narrowed the aisle, actually. The start of what we hope will be a long cooperation.”

  Welcher gave a sharp laugh. “Impeached?” She shoved the file back at the woman. “Not possible, Diane. There were no hearings, you didn’t call witnesses in, what did you say? An hour? I wasn’t questioned, wasn’t tried and convicted, you can’t just—”

  “Emergency measures were drafted,” Speaker Payne said. “Then approved and passed, almost unanimously. The impeachment vote was unanimous, though, just so you know. I think the term that got thrown around the proverbial floor was ‘imminent and demonstrated existential threat to the United States of America’. You had to know this was coming after St. Louis.”

  The door opened again. No knock, this time. Instead, two men entered, both armed. Both with FBI insignia on their jackets.

  “We’re done here,” Payne told them. “You can go ahead.”

  “Go ahead?” Welcher asked, standing from her desk quickly, her body shaking as reality seemed to twist around her. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. She was the President of the United States of America. “Both of you stand down. That’s a direct order.”

  Neither agent even appeared to hear her. Grim faced, they closed on her, one of them with handcuffs already out. Welcher shook with rage, staring first at them, and then at Payne. “You can’t do this,” she rasped. “This is an illegal arrest I—I’ll fight this, and when I’m back in that office I’ll rip your career to shreds, Diane. Do you hear me? I’ll tear you to pieces! You’re making the biggest mistake of your meaningless, small life!”

  One of the agents tugged her arms roughly behind her back, and the cuffs closed around her wrists. “Who’s going to run this country, hm? You?” She spat at the woman, who hadn’t so much as batted an eyelash since the agents entered the room. “It’ll burn without me at the helm, Diane. You watch. Without my leadership this country will implode!”

  “We’ve got our feelers out for President Daniels, actually,” Diane said as Welcher was marched toward the door. “Unsurprisingly, there’s some regret in Congress. After all, Daniels at least had the decency to fall apart instead of turning into a monster. I’ll see you soon, Margaret. There’s a vote tomorrow about whether to convict you of crimes against humanity. We’ll find a place to store you and Trusk together.”

  Margaret Welcher shrieked her rage at the two agents, and at Payne, and even Aaron as she was dragged the rest of the way from her room. “I didn’t do anything you wouldn’t have done,” she howled. “I did what I had to do, Diane! I did what was best for this country!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Apex Headquarters, CO

  Wednesday August 1st, 5:20 pm MST

  One of Alan Trusk’s most useful talents, as he saw it, was a natural intuition for when an investment’s viability to profit began to tank. Knowing when an opportunity was drying up was perhaps more important than spotting which ones were going to pay off in the short or long term. After all, as long as you had money, you could always make more. Once you lost it all, it could be difficult to get it back.

  Apex was an investment that no longer promised to pay the dividends he’d initially expected.

  “Go on up,” he told his wife and the nanny as they reached the stairs to the jet. “I’ll be up in a moment.”

  Their nanny did so without question, one of his sleeping children practically draped over her shoulder. His wife, though, eyed the jet with open distrust. “Is it safe to fly?” she asked, arms folded, her white, fur-lined coat swaying in the breeze. “With the windstorms like they’ve been… I don’t know how I feel about taking the children up there, Alan.”

  He gave her a stiff smile and a kiss on the head, slipping an arm behind her back to nudge her toward the stairs. “The conditions are perfectly safe at the moment,” he assured her. “And we’ve got a live feed in the cockpit from two weather satellites. We’ll be just fine, and we’re not flush with time. You love Dubai, and it’s far enough away from all this that we can all spend more time outside once we arrive.”

  She resisted a little once she took the first step, turning to face him. “Why are we in such a hurry?” she demanded. “What’s happened?”

  “Everything,” he said, waving a hand at the world around them. “Darling, this place has fallen to pieces. We don’t have to be sitting in the middle of it, though. Be grateful we have the privilege of taking a balcony seat, hm?”

  His wife looked past him, to the shuttle that had brought them up to the runway atop the compound, where some of the staff that had been cut off from the rest of the Apex communication network were unloading their hastily packed luggage. She sighed and gave a weary nod before turning coldly to ascend the steps.

  Trusk shook his head in disbelief as Rena approached from the shuttle. “You’d think I was asking her to move to the arctic. Were TARA’s data cores packed in cold storage?”

  “Yes, sir,” Rena agreed. “And backed up to the satellite as well. I’ve got our flight path available if you’d like to take a look?”

  He gave her a sympathetic smile as he realized that he might have been hasty in his orders, failing to be quite specific enough. “I’m afraid it will just be a family trip,” he said as he rested a hand on her shoulder. “But I’d like to see the flight path, yes.”

  Rena blinked, her mouth opening slightly before she seemed to gain control of herself and swiped her screen toward him. His phone gave a soft buzz in his pocket as the file was passed. “Do you… have any immediate instructions for your absence, sir?” she asked, clearly hurt at being left behind.

  It was a reasonable display of emotion, he supposed, but it still irked. “Well, of course. I’ve already transferred nearly all executive controls to your profile. You’re the new acting head of Apex. I thought I mentioned it. Congratulations! A promotion is long overdue. Try not to run it into the ground.”

  Rena’s chest rose and fell a bit more quickly, her nostrils flaring a touch as she pressed her tablet to her chest and hugged it. “Acting head of Apex, sir?” she asked. “I don’t… ah… Thank you, sir. I’m honored. Respectfully, though, I’d like to know what’s caused this sudden change of direction.”

  Trusk had hired Rena for a distinct lack of empathy in her profile. But it was dangerous to go hiring a high-functioning sociopath to be a person’s right hand, as well. She had just enough empathy in her to be loyal, but perhaps too much to stomach the idea of a kill-switch implanted in some twelve and a half thousand people and counting.

  Anyway, she’d find out soon enough, he suspected. Best not to test the extent of her empathy or loyalty until he was over international waters. “You know how it goes,” he told her with a broad smile. “I get bored. Between you and TARA, Apex will practically run itself. There’s a tech mogul in Dubai I’m interested in partnering with on some climate solutions.”

  Rena’s brow furrowed. “And what about Springfield?”

  He brushed the subject out of the air. “We overestimated its value. But they’re open to negotiating a deal. By all means, make contact, let them know you’re in charge, and see what you can work out.”

  The pilot appeared at the top of the stairs. “Flight plan’s loaded up, sir. We’re clear for take-off when you’re ready.”

  “Be up in one second,” Trusk called. He squeezed Rena’s shoulder. “It’s what you’ve always wanted, isn’t it? Head of your own project? I have the utmost faith in you, Miss McAllister. You’ll be phenomenal, I’m sure. It’s in your profile, after all.”

  “Of course, sir.” Rena barely managed to hide her misery. “Have a safe flight.”

  “Thank you.” He turned to hurry up the stairs.

  A minute later, he was settled into the seat by his wife, who’d already put on a sleep mask and drifted off—or otherwise she was upset with him and didn’t want to engage. It hardly mattered. Satellite imagery suggested the Persian Gulf would be far preferable to the US. It had been hit with some storms, and the seismic events there had done some damage, but it was warmer by an average of ten degrees, and the cloud cover was thinner there. As soon as she stepped off the jet, her attitude would improve.

  Still, he was disappointed to leave. There had been so much potential here. So much opportunity, if people could just have a little vision.

  Once the stairs were pulled up and the hatch sealed, the engines came online, roaring and then whistling as the jet lurched forward on the runway and ultimately took off to a shaky start. Once they were past the cloud cover, though, the turbulence eased up, and he was able to look out at the haze of approaching sunset. Something that precious few people would enjoy for some time to come.

  “This is your captain speaking,” the pilot said over the speaker system. “Flight time to Dubai is twenty-one hours, with a refueling stop in Frankfurt, weather permitting. TARA’s monitoring a storm over the Atlantic, and may be able to save us an hour or so once the numbers crunch. Settle in and get some sleep, sir. You’re in good hands.”

  Trusk sighed and stared out the window.

  The next best thing to building a new world order in the US was being able to watch with smug satisfaction from five-star comfort while he watched the country crumble without his stewardship.

  And besides—perhaps Dubai would appreciate his innovation more. He could always re-brand and try again.

  EPILOGUE

  For Elizabeth, the pain of being caught between desperate hope and terrible fear lasted for almost two hours after the-all clear was given. In those two hours, she worked with Mateo, Amelie, and six others to track down the parents and guardians of the children they’d led into hiding during the attack.

  Some were easier to find than others. Many were injured. Others had died in the attack, their children made orphans. With each discovery of a parent either confirmed dead or still missing, Elizabeth held a child while they cried, and wept with them. It was awful, but cathartic in a strange way. None of the children were crying alone. That meant something.

  Those couple of hours were the worst in her life. She swung wildly between the two emotions. Each time a child discovered their parents were gone, she felt the loss of her husband and daughter as if she were looking at their broken bodies. When she was able to deliver a child to their parents—or, in some cases, to the surviving parent—it was like watching Caleb and Lana walk around the corner into sight.

  As much as she wanted to find them and find out one way or another, the children couldn’t wait. They were already traumatized enough, and some of them returned to their families nearly catatonic from shock. It was helpful, in its own way. It kept her distracted. Drew out the work of the moment to stave off the dual promise of loss or relief, putting time between her and the end of anything meaningful in life.

  At least, until Amelie approached her outside the library building in the pre-dawn hours, once things had mostly settled down and the work of stitching Springfield back together was underway. For the community, at any rate. The buildings and infrastructure had to wait until daylight. When Elizabeth saw the older woman coming purposefully toward her, the feelings she’d been trying to hold back came at her hard, twisting and churning in her stomach and chest. Hope and fear, trying to pull her apart.

  “There you are,” Amelie said as she neared. She held up her radio. “Got someone looking for you.”

  Elizabeth accepted the radio and held her breath a moment before speaking into it. “This… this is Elizabeth Machert. Um… over.”

  The second or so between letting go of the button on the side of the little box seemed to drag out forever before her daughter’s voice finally came back. “Mom! Where are you? I’ve been looking all over. I’ve been on the radio for hours, why weren’t you answering?”

  She couldn’t answer right away. Instead, she sank down, almost hugging her knees as she began to sob from relief. All the fear fled, leaving behind something golden and glowing. As much as they’d been through, as many times as Lana had been in danger, Elizabeth had almost always been nearby, and there had never been an army between them.