In my lap rested the blue vellum portfolio containing the original 1944 Bennett Lineal Charter and the toxicological mass-spectrometry panel from Offutt Air Force Base.
Beside me sat Colonel Aaron Carter, his dress green uniform pristine, his silver eagles catching the amber phosphor of the avionics displays.
Across the conference table sat Vice Admiral David Mercer, Chief of Naval Operations, and United States Attorney Marcus Cooper, Chief Federal Prosecutor for the District of Columbia.
“Look at the subterranean telemetry on monitor two, Clara,” Marcus Cooper said, his gravelly baritone slicing cleanly through the pressurized hum of the environmental scrubbers.
He clicked a mechanical toggle on the ruggedized Panasonic Toughbook terminal:
CLACK.
A high-resolution, four-thousand-pixel satellite LiDAR survey resolved across the dual displays.
The screen illuminated a subterranean topographical scan of the District of Columbia, penetrating one hundred and twenty feet beneath the foundations of One First Street Northeast. Red vector lines pulsed through the pre-Cambrian crystalline schist and reinforced granite bedrock, tracing an unbroken, twenty-foot-wide reinforced concrete-and-titanium artery running from the deep command redoubts beneath the Pentagon straight under the National Mall into the sub-basements of the United States Supreme Court:
