The Brink by James S. Murray

Author:James S. Murray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

In the White House Situation Room, the on-screen transmission from the helmet cam cut to fuzzy gray. Shortly after, it was replaced by a view from a chopper, closing in on Schaffhausen. President Amanda Brogan hardly had time to blink before the feed showed a huge ball of fire roaring into the clear blue sky.

“My God,” somebody uttered behind her.

She stared in disbelief as an explosion ripped open the warehouse’s external structure. It blasted away the walls and flattened the vans outside.

All communications from the ground fell silent.

Orders barked out of the desk speaker, telling the teams by the warehouse entrances to stand by. Nobody replied. Repeated attempts to contact those inside failed, too. The footage had already made it a foregone conclusion as to their fate.

Brogan spun her chair to face her staff. Everyone had crowded around her end of the table to witness this hastily arranged operation. All had watched in horror when the creatures had emerged and butchered the special forces team. The ones guarding the entrances had also stood little chance of surviving the subsequent explosion.

Twelve good people gone.

She knew their deaths were always a possibility, but not like this. Her stomach sank at the utter futility of their deaths. Van Ness set up a trap, for no other reason than to deliver another message to the president.

And the creatures . . .

Any doubts Brogan had had about their existence were long gone. They were beyond anything she’d ever seen. Brutal. Overwhelming. She was terrified.

Vice President Webster sat directly to Brogan’s front. The silver-haired motormouth from New York usually had something to say. Instead, he just stared at the feed showing a plume of black smoke belching from the snowy hills of the Upper Rhine. The other seven staff members looked at the president in expectation, waiting for her first words after witnessing the surreal carnage. Their facial expressions matched her internal emotions. Confusion. Shock. Fury. A sense that they could no longer contain the threat of Albert Van Ness.

No words came. All she could think was that everything Reynolds and Cafferty had previously told her about Van Ness had been true. Before this moment, she had struggled to believe the full extent of their claims. Before this moment, she couldn’t justify the funding to investigate the Foundation for Human Advancement.

Why didn’t I listen?

“Madam President,” Webster eventually said.

“Wait.”

It had all seemed so outrageous, like the stories of Area 51. When President Reynolds purged half his administration after the events in New York, rumors abounded in Washington and the press as to the reason. The Van Ness rumor seemed the least credible, despite Reynolds’ apparent cast-iron belief in the conspiracy. Brogan had thought President Reynolds made the Foundation the scapegoat for some reason, but she never really considered this. What if everything Reynolds believed was actually true?

Then John Reynolds was abducted.

Eleven months of fruitless searching had followed.

Reynolds’ call late last night had confirmed it was the Foundation.

And now, there was no denying the creatures’ existence.

A sense of paranoia rose inside Brogan.

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