"It's him," Alicia's voice came back over the intercom in the Oval Office. By now it looked as disheveled as the Situation Room in the basement.
"What?" Hansen said. "The son of a bitch is on the phone again? At this hour?"
"What do you want me to do?" she asked.
"Just a minute." He clicked off the intercom and returned to his other call. "Caroline, I don't know. Just play it by ear and do the best you can. Press Secretaries get paid for giving non-answers. Tell the goddamn Post we have no comment. Try and make a deal. Say you'll give their team an exclusive, deep background, just for them, if they'll hold off another few hours to give us time to sort this out. Tell him we promise not to give the Times anything fit to print until after their deadline tomorrow. The late edition." He paused. "You're probably right, but give it a shot anyway. Look, I've got to go."
He reached over and pushed a second button on the console.
"Yes."
"Mr. President," came the voice, its accent more pronounced now, "I know you think you can recover this facility with an assault, but I want to assure you that any such action would be a very costly mistake."
"The only mistake that's been made so far was made by you. Going there in the first place." Hansen glanced at the listing of his commitments for the next day. Ted would have to cancel all of them. This wasn't how the presidency was supposed to be. Nobody told him he would be spending days on end negotiating with a criminal threatening mass murder.
"Let me put it like this," the voice went on. "If there is an assault, all I have to do is retire to the lower level of the facility and then detonate one of the nuclear devices I now have armed. It's radio-controlled."
"If you want to commit suicide, then go ahead," Hansen said. What kind of bluff was that? he wondered.
"Let me put your mind at ease," came the voice, as measured and secure as it was foreboding. "My revolutionary colleagues and I will be at the main power coil, which is buried at least three hundred feet below the bedrock here. It is a ready-made bomb shelter. Any invading force, however, would be vaporized, along with all the civilians."
"You'd never escape," Hansen shot back. "What's the point?"
"That remains to be seen. But what you have to ask yourself is whether you are prepared to have a nuclear disaster in the Aegean."
On that point, Hansen admitted to himself, the son of a bitch had a point. The political costs, not to mention the economic costs, would be staggering.
"Look," he said, "you're proposing a scenario neither of us wants. It would be irresponsible and immoral. Though I suppose those points don't disturb you very much."
"Let me help your thought processes. You have twenty minutes, starting now. If at the end of that time you can't assure me that the assault has been called off-please don't bother to deny that one is imminent-then what will happen will be on your hands." He paused. "Incidentally, I also will bring Professor Mannheim to the phone then, and you can explain to him why he is about to die. I am putting this line on hold. You now have nineteen minutes and forty seconds." The phone went silent.
Hansen stared at Ed Briggs, sitting bleary-eyed across on the couch, then returned his gaze to the desk, noting the time on the digital clock.