The Pod immediately delivered us to my apartment, although time has little meaning here – nanoseconds, minutes, hours all merge into the present.
The vast, luxurious apartment could not have been improved upon by even the very best of Hollywood's set designers. I was so eager to be reunited with Demeter and our beautiful daughter, Persephone, that I was deeply disappointed to find my wonderful apartment, my old home, empty.
A diaphanous curtain gently wafted across an open, full-length window through which I caught glimpses of the lower mountains of the Olympus range in all their magnificent glory.
'Where is the Lady Demeter?' I asked the room.
Demeter's desperate voice answered immediately: 'Darling, that ghastly Priapus has taken Perse. I've gone to rescue her. Come quickly.'
Chapter 3
President Conway Posey finished his tenth lap of the White House’s outdoor swimming pool, and then pulled his massive, flabby frame up the steps at the cabana end of the pool. He snatched a soft towel from his personal valet, the appropriately named John Small, who was waiting patiently with towel and robe at the ready. Posey toweled himself dry, threw the wet towel back at the valet, grabbed the robe from him and struggled into it.
Posey was a big, ungainly man with a mop of untidy fair hair tinged with gray that always seemed to fall over his deeply furrowed brow. His saggy jowls, thick lips, and uneven teeth gave him a bulldog appearance, while his penetrating dark-blue eyes had, over the years, intimidated many an unwary foe.
‘Your breakfast is ready for you in the cabana, sir,’ John Small said. His announcement was greeted by a cursory grunt and a nod. Rarely did the diminutive John Small get a thank you.
The outdoor pool was built by President Gerald Ford in 1975, and the cabana was added to shield the pool from West Wing eyes. An underground passage connected the pool to the White House.
As soon as Posey had finished his eggs benedict – made the way he liked it: a lightly toasted English muffin, crispy bacon, poached egg, and hollandaise sauce, all washed down with freshly squeezed orange juice – he grabbed his cell phone and stabbed in Jake Jefferson’s number. The fact that it might be inconveniently early for his chief of staff didn’t cross the president’s mind.
‘Jake, can you find a fifteen-minute gap in my schedule today for me to have a private chat with the vice president?’ he asked, when Jake eventually picked up.
‘I’ll see if the vice president is available, sir,’ Jake replied trying to stifle a yawn.
‘Oh, she’ll be available – trust me,’ Posey said.
**
Later that morning, the operations room in the FBI’s headquarters in Pennsylvania Avenue was eerily quiet.
A Chinese young woman and an Indian man, prized examples of modern America’s supposed multiculturalism, busily manipulated the computers that controlled the giant curved screens that covered one entire wall of the darkened room. Director Ari Kratos and Special Agent Carl Rutter watched the progress of the Tesla on the screens. The car had eventually been picked up by some CCTV cameras that were still operating in downtown Washington. The Tesla suddenly turned into a side road not covered by CCTV, and then immediately disappeared.
‘And that’s all we have thus far,’ Rutter said.
‘Get a house-to-house going in that street. Someone must have seen something,’ Kratos growled.
‘Already in hand,’ Rutter replied.
‘How old is that?’ Kratos asked, pointing at the screens.
‘Two hours, just over.’
‘Hell! They could be miles away by now.’
There was a knock on the door and a young man nervously poked his curly-haired head into the room.
‘There is a Mr. Phil Benton from EnAg to see you Mr. Rutter,’ he said without coming into the room; meeting with the Director of the FBI was way above his paygrade.
‘I’ll be right there,’ Carl Rutter replied. ‘You might like to sit in on this, sir. Benton is head of security at the Department of Environment and Agriculture.’
Ari Kratos nodded and followed Rutter to an interview room on a lower floor.
A tall, beefy man with wild hair, long sideburns, but otherwise clean-shaven, bushy dark eyebrows, and thick lips introduced himself as Phil Benton. He was man you would want on your side in a fight, Rutter thought.
‘Have you got anything for me?’ Rutter asked after introducing Benton to the director.
‘Nope, not a thing and I am highly embarrassed to admit it,’ Benton replied. ‘The driver and two security guards on duty today, picked up Secretary Dias from his home at the scheduled time of 0730 hours and delivered him safely to his office at 0805. They then retired to the security offices where they would normally remain until the scheduled time to meet with the Secretary and escort him to the White House.’
‘When did the switch take place?’ Kratos asked.
‘We don’t know, sir. All our internal surveillance cameras in the building, including the car park, were compromised from approximately 0800 hours until early afternoon,’ Benton replied.
‘And so were the CCTV cameras in the street outside the building,’ Rutter added.
‘Which means we haven’t a clue what these people look like, who they are, or why they are doing this,’ Kratos muttered to himself.
‘That’s about the size of it, sir,’ Rutter agreed.
‘And the driver and two missing security guards?’
‘No trace, sir. No one can remember seeing them leave the building or the imposters arriving, for that matter,’ Benton said. ‘And the descriptions we have got of them from the staff are not very helpful.’
‘These people are obviously highly organized, technically savvy, well-funded, well-informed and very resourceful,’ Rutter said.
‘Which narrows it down to the Russians, the North Koreans, the Chinese or dissident rich Arabs,’ Kratos said.
‘Are you ignoring private enterprise completely, sir?’ Rutter asked.
‘Without knowing what the Cabinet was going to discuss this morning that was so interesting to the perpetrators, it’s impossible to know for sure. I suppose some large drug cartels could be involved, or oil interests, or weapons manufacturers, or some left-wing loonies with God knows what axe to grind. I’ll see what I can find out, in the meantime, the building must be searched to find the missing security guards. And let me know as soon as you have anything from the street where the Tesla was last seen.’
**
President Conway Posey and Vice President Peta Hopeit, sat shooting the breeze in the West Sitting Hall, part of the president’s less formal family area on the second floor of the White House. They were sitting side-by-side on a sofa with their backs to the lunette window.
‘How is your son?’ Posey asked, out of the blue.
‘He’s fine. Thanks for asking. He is doing Environmental Science at Harvard and loving it…’
‘With a view to?’
‘Entering politics and eventually becoming president of this great country.’
‘Just like his mother, hey?’
Peta smiled, smoothed imaginary creases from her dark-gray pleated skirt but didn’t reply.
‘Is his father happy