CHAPTER 14

Washington D.C.
 
Secret Service Agent McCarthy had spent countless hours of his career surveilling the White House lawn and perimeter fence, ready to pounce on anyone who dared to enter. He imagined that his father, and his father’s father before him who had all worn the badge of protecting America’s elected leaders, had spent an equal amount of time on duty watching the grass grow. 

Of course, over generations his family had witnessed the construction of a new guard post here or there, installation of retractable vehicle ramming barriers that could stop semi-trucks, new fences, and countless other upgrades, but the job had remained the same. Watch the grass grow, and make sure nobody steps foot on it. McCarthy wondered what his Grandfather would say about the current unkept state of the White House lawn that grew knee high ragweed.

“Stay here ma’am.” McCarthy told Secretary of Education Mrs. DeVod.

Crossing his fingers and his heart, McCarthy did a silent prayer looking up towards the clear blue sky. He climbed down the steps of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum located on 17th and Pennsylvania Avenue. With his back to the beautiful red brick building that had been standing tall since 1859, he crossed Pennsylvania Ave towards the north lawn of the White House. Stepping onto the sidewalk was a relief because he had expected to have been shot before making it across the road.

Made from a bed sheet and a shower curtain rod, he tensely held a large white flag above his head stenciled with a red, white and blue peace symbol.

Pausing his advancement, Agent McCarthy stood at the north west vehicle gate and waved the flag until shadowy figures could finally be seen through the White House windows. Judging by the flickering lights, he assumed the main generators were still working, but surely, the occupants had to be low on fuel. 

Steadfast, he waited on the sidewalk, watching closely through the black iron fence that had already began to rust. On official duty of the presidential guard, watching the grass grow yet again. But this time, from the opposite side of the lawn and trying to gain entry into the White House.

Cold northern winter wind howled across Lafayette Square park. His ears were the first to numb, then began to ache from frostbite. Then his toes. Then his fingers. This is stupid, he thought shivering. He wasn’t even properly dressed.

It was just like a politician to micromanage details and put him in a suit and tie for a message delivery job. DeVod would not even let him wear his tactical boots. At least he had been allowed to wear his issued wool peacoat, or he would have suffered hypothermia already.

“Screw it.” McCarthy said under his breath. “It’s the freaking apocalypse, and I’m standing out here freezing in slacks and Oxfords and couldn’t outrun an infected for one damn block.”

Resting the white peace flag on his shoulder, he took a few steps to the pedestrian gate. If the White House had power, it was a safe bet that the guard shack did too. He punched in his access code to the metal keypad, and an audible CLICK was heard as the pedestrian gate unlocked. With a simple push, he was in. 

McCarthy casually walked around the guard shack that he was intimately familiar with and went inside. In the past several months his world had been turned upside down. He had witnessed things that should never had been witnessed. Nightmare was the closest relatable word to his new world. When he shut the heavy armor-plated door, that he had shut hundreds of times before, a sense of familiarity washed over him. For a second, he closed his eyes then smelled a faint trace of stale coffee and pine scented cleaning chemicals, that sent him back in time to when the world was right side up.

A cloud of vapor huffed out, as he breathed heavily and reopened his eyes revealing the unfortunate reality. He shook his head in disappointment. 

Tethered to the wall was a black landline phone, he picked up the handset, wiped a layer of dust off it and dialed the lobby number. It rang.

“Who is this?” A nervous voice asked.

“It doesn’t matter. Tell the Secretary of Transportation Mrs. Chan, that Secretary of Education Mrs. DeVod, requests an immediate meeting to discuss terms of a truce. I’ll hold on the line for confirmation.” McCarthy said flatly. 
 
----------BREAK----------
 
For the first time in months, McCarthy stood guard on the White House north portico protecting an asset. Nothing about this meeting was standard procedure. There had been no advance party to make security preparations to the meeting area. In fact, there was no meeting area other than the president’s front door covered porch.

From a PSD, personal security detail, perspective being out in the open, in a city full of infected and wannabe warlords, this was an absolute horrible meeting location and considering what was at stake, the situation couldn’t be much worse. McCarthy stood on the marble steps watching the north lawn, with his back to Mrs. Chan and Mrs. Devod sitting in a pair of two-hundred-year-old chairs that should certainly not be outside.

“I want to apologize for attacking before. The goal wasn’t to do you harm, but to lure out Wolf, the Secretary of Homeland Security.” DeVod spoke calmly.

“Well, your little stunt killed one of my men.” Chan replied harshly. “Was your strategy successful, at least?”

“It was. Wolf will no longer be a problem, for neither of us.” DeVod grinned and noticed her professionally dressed secret service agents shifted their weight slightly at the mention of Wolf. There was no doubt a hint of animosity amongst the ranks that would need to be addressed soon.
​
“So, you have eliminated another pawn in your conquest of power. I can’t wait to hear what you have to offer me.” Chan said, sitting back into the antique high back chair.

Chan knew that she had the upper hand. Short of an assassination attempt on the front porch, Chan possessed the security of the White House fortress. DeVod’s desperation for the oval office was oozing from her arrogant pores. The only possible play DeVod had to remove Chan, was to offer her something extraordinary.

“I can give you the Vice President position. There is no reason that you and I can not work together to rebuild this nation. Rebuild it stronger than before, like a phoenix reborn and rising from the ashes.” DeVod offered, knowing that Chan would refuse the demotion.

“Why would I give you the Presidency of the United States?” Chan asked coldly, ready to conclude the meeting that had no possible favorable outcome.

“You have been occupying this political temple for months. And what actions have you taken?” DeVod accused, sitting forward in her chair. “None! You haven’t done anything to help the survivors out there starving and fighting for their lives!”

“I’ve done more than you know!” Chan glared and raised her voice with anger. “I have international relief aid coming as we speak!”

The comment momentarily stunned DeVod. Chan had established diplomatic relationships for foreign aid. Food, medicine and supplies was something that DeVod could use to jumpstart her plans.

Chan shifted forward in her seat, preparing to stand. “Mrs. DeVod, I am the rightful president and currently the occupant of the Oval Office. Unless you have anything meaningful to discuss…”

“You are only pretending to be the legal president.” DeVod cut her off. “You may be higher on the succession list, but you are not a naturally born American citizen, therefor ineligible to hold the office. On that subject, what country were you born in?”

Chan glared at her. Constitutionally, DeVod was correct. Chan was ineligible to be president, but that was before the apocalypse. Legal power of lawyers and courtrooms had been replaced with power of weapons and the will to use them.

Mrs. Chan had been born in China and had migrated to America with her parents many years ago. Since then, she had used her Ivy League fraternity connections to land a job as a senator’s driver, a congresswomen’s secretary, and a mistress to many. Chan had stealthily imbedded herself into Washington’s circle of the most powerful and influential elite.

Transfer of state’s secrets had been a mission, but to inject covert control measures into Washington D.C. had been her primary goal. Videotaping politicians in compromising situations with drugs, sex slaves, or both was common practice. But after time, Chan had realized that negative leverage was not necessarily needed to influence political votes, favorable tariffs, foreign aid projects, or which corporations would win major federal contracts. An old fashion bribe was the golden key to unlock the magical door of influence.

But bribery in American politics had rules, unlike the old days of secretly handing off envelopes bulging with cash in dark parking garages. Accepting bribes was such a common occurrence in America, that systems had been set into place to avoid anticorruption laws. For a quick one-time favor, a corporate donation would be made to a non-profit organization, to whom the dirty politician was the salaried CEO. If a politician showed long term promise, a close family member would be given an executive level job at a foreign shell company that most likely received American federal grants to begin with.

Influencing politics was her forte, but University facility and Fortune 500 executives were targets as well. A university’s proprietary research reports could be purchased for a fraction of the cost of conducting their own research and development, and then delivered back to China. The Publicity Department, or commonly known as the Propaganda Department, had great social engineering success by paying university faculty to inject communist ideologies into lectures. One brief meeting between Chan and a single professor at a coffee shop, could have influenced multinational trade relations through generations of young impressionable students.

Of course, Chan and the many others like her, only arranged the meetings and made handshake agreements. The actual laundered payment transactions and lucrative executive positions were clandestinely coordinated through the Chinese embassy through a series of dummy-corporation donations or massive Wall Street stock purchases.

Early in Chan’s espionage career the riskiest part of her mission was to artfully, in a non-criminal way, offer the bribe to the targeted politician. After she had established roots into the swamp, the greedy monsters came to her for handouts. Corruption was deep on the political spectrum, and neither political party would shed light on their opponents, because they were all dirty of the same criminal behavior.

And then there was the occasional do-gooder that wanted to go against the system or the hard ass who felt entitled to more and threatened Chan’s family with spying or extradition. She couldn’t figure out which DeVod was, but it didn’t really matter. North America was no longer protected or controlled by the US government, and soon Mrs. Chan would be the official North American territory chancellor to the BRICS empire.

Chan stood up and the pair of guards at the front door came to attention. “Mrs. DeVod, I do believe this meeting is over.”

DeVod slouched in her chair, folded her arms on her lap, and the makeshift peace flag fell over the side of the chair onto the floor with a clank. “I’m sorry Mrs. Chan, I had really hoped that you and I could work together for both of our benefits.”

Chan caught how she put emphasis on ‘both of our benefits’ as many dirty politicians had in the past while seeking payouts not caring where the money was coming from or of the treasonous strings attached. It could be, DeVod had come in strong and was negotiating for a White House position, Chan thought. Perhaps DeVod could be an ally to Chan after all. But she wasn’t getting the Oval Office.
 
----------BREAK----------
 
A Secret Service marksman hidden in the nearby Treasury building had been providing overwatch of the meeting on the norther porch.

His rifle scope’s reticle had been centered on the Secretary of Transportation the entire meeting. If the guards made one wrong move, or if an assassination or kidnapping attempt was made on DeVod, the marksman was ready to put a bullet through the Secretary of Transportation.

When his target had stood suddenly, he watched DeVod’s peace flag fall to the ground, signaling that peaceful talks had failed.

The agent keyed the microphone on his radio, “All teams go! I say again, all teams go!”
 
----------BREAK----------
 
The lights inside the White House flickered sporadically, then dimmed quickly casting the interior in darkness.

“It seems that you have lost electricity Chan.” DeVod said sarcastically, losing all sense of diplomacy and politeness.

One of Chan’s guards reached for the door after it made an audible CLICK. The guard gave it a tug, but it did not budge.

“It’s a Mag-Lock door, Chan.” DeVod said, sitting back into her chair with a sly grin. “In the event of power outages, electromagnetic locks are either fail-safe or fail-secure. The White House is equipped with fail-secure.”

Chan ran over to the door, shoving her guard to the side, and yanked on the unmovable door unsuccessfully.

McCarthy’s team swiftly disarmed the pair of White House guards in the brief distraction and marched them out of sight away from the portico.

“If you don’t know how the doors operate, then you probably don’t know how easy it is to turn off the diesel generators which are conveniently located right outside the 761-foot subterranean structure that connects that big Treasury Building right over there,” DeVod turned in her chair to point lazily across the lawn. “to the White House East Wing.”

A muffled commotion rumbled from inside the colonial fortress then a strobe of flash-bangs and muzzle blasts temporarily lit darkened rooms. One after another, the darkened windows would flash a picture of Secret Service teams of men in black tactical uniforms who knew the building layout better than the architects themselves. The teams advanced from East to West fluidly like an inescapable tidal wave, one room to the next.

Mrs. Chan stood and watched shadows dance inside a dark room right next to the norther front door where she stood in shock. The darkness evaporated with flashes and muffled gunfire that painted the walls red with dead White House guards. Chan cared not for the loss of her staff, but for the loss of her position and future opportunity as Chancellor.
​
With slumped shoulders, and a bowed head of defeat, Chan returned to her chair and sat slowly. “Is the VP position still available?”