Read Online The Last Days by Joel C. Rosenberg - Free Book Online Page A

graveyard.”
    Erin McCoy had no husband, and she didn’t want to die.
    Not here. Not yet.

FIVE
    MacPherson’s head was pounding.
    He hung up the phone and shut his eyes. In a few minutes, Jackie Sanchez of the United States Secret Service would be knocking on his door. She’d move him into the next room where he’d be patched through to the National Security Council via a secure satellite video teleconferencing system. But there were too many questions to answer. Could they mount a rescue operation? Should they ask the Israelis to? Could all this really be the work of one man? Why, then, the gun battle? And were these attacks isolated to the Palestinian territories? Or were they likely to see new terrorist attacks unleashed throughout Israel, and/or against American interests all over the globe?
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    The motorcade was ready.
    Now all they needed was the vice president. Special Agent in Charge Steve Sinclair—head of the VP’s protective detail—was edgy. His orders had been clear. Get Checkmate to the Situation Room quickly and without incident. Most of the principals were already on their way to the White House. The NSC meeting was scheduled to begin in less than ten minutes. Given that the VP was supposed to chair the meeting in the president’s absence, it wouldn’t do to be late. Not tonight.
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    MacPherson simply couldn’t believe it.
    He and Secretary of State Tucker Paine had hardly been kindred spirits. But they’d known one another for more than a decade, and they’d become useful to each other.
    MacPherson couldn’t really remember exactly how they’d met, but he was pretty sure it had been in Denver. A middle-class kid, MacPherson had grown up in Lakewood, Colorado, graduated from Harvard, then joined the navy, went to Top Gun school and headed to Vietnam. When he’d come back to the States, MacPherson moved to Manhattan, made a fortune with Fidelity, then moved back to Denver where he was making quite a name for himself—and an even more impressive fortune—as founder and CEO of Global Strategix, Inc., and the Joshua Fund, two of the premier institutions in the financial services industry.
    Somewhere along the line, he’d met Paine, an old-money gazillionaire whose family seemed to own half of Colorado and wanted to run for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat. Paine wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. He was a bit too moderate for MacPherson’s liking—good on taxes and growth, bad on education and the life issue, horrible on defense and national security issues. But if Hollywood was going to make a movie about a crusty old patrician senator with a penchant for French wine and a good pipe after dinner, Tucker Paine was direct from central casting.
    GOP control of the Senate hung in the balance at the time and it wasn’t a tough call. MacPherson was nothing if not a loyal Republican, and even then he’d had his own political ambitions. He was planning a run for governor and his chief political advisor—Bob Corsetti, now the White House chief of staff—made the case succinctly: to blow through the primaries and win the nomination in a landslide, MacPherson needed to find a way to unite the state’s conservative and moderate factions. It wouldn’t be easy.
    As a pro–flat tax, prolife, former navy fighter pilot, MacPherson could count on strong support from the conservative political base in and around Colorado Springs in the south, Fort Collins in the north, and the more rural congressional districts in the mountains and on the plains near Kansas. But Denver itself, MacPherson’s hometown, would be tougher. Republicans there tended to be wealthier and more moderate, and though his Wall Street successes had helped him build inroads among the country club crowd, Corsetti concluded that if MacPherson strongly backed Tucker Paine, it certainly couldn’t hurt. And it