Read Online The White House: A Flynn Carroll Thriller by Whitley Strieber - Free Book Online

thriller of the kind he could count on: not too much gore, not too many complications, and the outcome never in doubt. Lorna was a student of history. She spent her time with Machiavelli and Churchill, studying power and past conflict to find present insight.
    Flynn crossed the center hall in a few steps, then silently indicated to the Secret Service agent outside that he was going in the president’s door.
    The agent jumped up from his chair and blocked it.
    â€œDon’t do this. Let’s just cooperate for a few minutes. It’s not hard.”
    â€œYou can’t enter that room.”
    â€œAnd if we find him dead in there in the morning, what then?”
    â€œWe can protect our people.”
    Flynn said nothing. He didn’t need to. The agent stepped aside.
    Inside, the insulated windows meant that the only sound was the air-conditioning, a faint hiss. The room was larger than one would expect, with a high ceiling and walls painted blue. There was a desk, spotless, and six TVs built into a large wall unit. The president was a serious sports fan. Officially, he was a golfer. He wanted to appear presidential at all times, and golf was a powerful tradition. But in the case of Bill Greene his handicap was, well, a handicap.
    A second sound joined that of the air conditioner: the president’s steady breathing. He lay on his side, so buried in blankets that only his face was visible.
    Flynn approached the bed. He looked down at Bill, now a grizzled man of fifty-five. He’d been elected, basically, on the strength of two factors: the glasses he’d started wearing, which made him look presidential, and the fact that he had the best grin. Looking back across history, most presidents since FDR had been elected because they had better grins. Roosevelt’s jaunty cigarette-holder smile was hard to beat. Truman had grinned like an undertaker, but his opponent, Thomas Dewey, had the terrifying rictus of a corpse.
    Dubya had grinned like a Weimeraner having a gas attack, but when Gore smiled, you thought “card shark.” Kennedy had outshone Nixon as heaven outshines the Black Hole of Calcutta. Even so, Nixon’s grimace, deadly as it was, had made Hubert Humphrey look like an even shiftier used car salesman. Obama’s smile was devastating, a commercial for teeth. McCain smiled like a shark, Romney like a priest. Thus Obama’s two terms. Ronald Reagan, same deal.
    Right now, Greene’s postcard smile was locked away behind the frank truth of his dry, sunken face. He snored like a rhino. But he was very definitely alive and the room was otherwise empty, so Flynn left him and did the harder part, which was to enter the main bedroom and make sure that Lorna was still undead.
    In college, she’d been a Delta Gamma Epsilon. Their house had been accessible after hours, but you had to be damn careful of the housemother, a perpetually infuriated Junior Leaguer who was far from junior, and who’d years back renounced her vows and laicized from the Sisters of the Holy Sepulcher. Laicized maybe, but Ietta Swiney had remained a Sepulcher at heart. Still, unlike their housemother, though, some of the girls welcomed company in their rooms. Others didn’t. Lorna was one of the others. Worse, she slept so lightly that she always seemed to some degree awake. She’d apparently been on the prowl for a rich boy she could control, and had hit on Bill when she’d seen the difficulty he had outthinking Bevo, the university football team’s mascot, who was known to be unusually dim even for a steer. Bill’s first success in politics was to get elected Bevo Wrangler by the honorary organization that maintained the creature. But Bevo had wrangled him. Seeing this, Lorna had decided that she could not only push Bill into politics, but also control him. And he had the finances to make that work.
    Flynn tried the door between the rooms. It was locked from Lorna’s side. She sure