Code Word: Paternity, A Presidential Thriller Read Online Free

underground quarters. Ella was near Rick but not touching him. As by unspoken agreement they
gave each other space to process the video
feed, but their hands crossed the gap, left holding right.
    Ella’s face was framed by shoulder-length
black hair that appeared sable at times. She usually offered the world a
friendly but earnest expression; an especially keen observer would sense that
her earnestness was the tip of an iceberg of determination.
    Rick punched off
the parade of horrors and looked at his wife.“How’re you doing, Ella?”
    Her reply surprised him, the words
darting at him like sparks from a fire: “It was murder! Murder! Those men,
women, and children were killed for no reason other than that they happened to
be in Las Vegas
yesterday. They didn’t die in a tsunami or a hurricane or an earthquake. They
were murdered—by people who planned very carefully for a long time and who
rejoiced when it was done. I want to kill the bastards who did this! I want to
kill them personally and very painfully.”
    She
means it, thought Rick,
recalling her stories of childhood amidst the violence and vendettas of Mexico’s drug
wars . Is that where we’re headed now?
Revenge? Will we ignore the rule of law and snarl off into the jungle, mauling
every creature that crosses our path?
    After a moment
he said, “What would you do if you were me?”
    “I think I’d become a remorseless killing
machine. Spend every waking hour pushing the FBI, the CIA, and the military to
find the people who set off that bomb and the people who gave it to them.”
    “Would you hold
both of them equally responsible?”
    “Yes! After all, people hiding in caves
in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen couldn’t have built that bomb
from scratch. Some government gave it to them or failed to ensure it couldn’t
be stolen.”
    Rick looked
sharply at her.
    “Ella, we don’t know that people hiding
in caves did this. For all we know right now it could have been an American
extremist group, using a stolen American nuke. It’s too soon for me to become a
remorseless killing machine! I don’t know who to go after. Yesterday’s NSC
meeting was full of people pounding on the table without a clue what to do,
except threaten. It was all heat and no light. There’s no one to punch in the
nose, yet, and nothing I can do to bring back Las Vegas or the people whose bodies we just
saw!”
    Ella looked thoughtfully at her husband
of twenty-six years. He was optimistic by nature and believed compromise was
always possible, although sometimes painful. Rick had both the instinct and the
ability to defuse conflict, and she had seen him build consensus where none had
seemed possible. Rick’s world-view did not admit of undying hatred. He had
never encountered a purely malevolent human being.
    Ella shivered, because she had
experienced both in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, in the person of drug lord
“Chapo” Guzman. Guzman vowed to kill not only her father, Colonel Dominguez,
but the entire family. Before his own death by assassination, Guzman did indeed
kill her father, after torturing him for a long time.
      She knew the world held some who were
powerful, cruel, fearless, unmoved by reason or suffering, and utterly
unwilling to compromise. Guzman and others like him were evil itself. Facing
such demons, others either did as they were told or accepted a fight to the
death.
    Ella wondered if Rick would be able to
find and harness the visceral force he needed now.
    “Rick, what you said to the country a few
hours ago was carefully reasoned and balanced. It was right for now. But within
a few weeks Americans won’t want a president who speaks in careful nuances. They’ll
want Winston Churchill, or maybe General Patton. You can’t do what you have to
do by your usual balanced, obscenely rational approach!”
      She grabbed his forearm and challenged him,
eyes vivid with outrage: “Rick, you’ve got to do whatever it takes to get the
people who did