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“Hatchlings,” Murray said. “You get a better look, right about . . . now.”

The video grew shaky as the hatchlings suddenly rushed forward to attack. The shot angled sharply before the first creature reached the troops, probably as the soldier shooting the footage dropped the camera. Murray paused it there. John stared at a tilted close-up of a pyramid-shaped creature with angry, vertical black eyes and tentacles for legs.

Again, total silence.

John Gutierrez had made a career out of sizing people up. That innate skill had taken him from mayor to state senator. It had been key in adding Vanessa to his staff. When he met her, he knew. Her skill and ruthlessness had guided him from state senate into Congress, and now the White House. An amazing feat, considering that John was forty-six years old and the nation’s first Hispanic president. John Gutierrez trusted his eyes, his instincts—and those tools now told him that Murray Longworth wasn’t bulls.h.i.+tting anyone.

This was real.

“What the h.e.l.l are we dealing with, Murray?” John asked. “You’re not going to tell me these are aliens, are you?”

“That’s our best guess, sir,” Murray said. “The technology is way beyond anything we know. We suspect that the hatchlings are a form of biological machine, designed to build the glowing structure.”

John wanted to kill Hutchins. The former president might as well have left a giant, steaming pile of s.h.i.+t on the Oval Office rug. Now the problem rested squarely in John’s lap, and no matter what happened, the public would a.s.sociate this with his presidency, not Hutchins’s.

“Wahjamega,” Donald said. “Wait a minute, that’s where the Osprey helicopter crashed back in December. Eight soldiers died.”

“A cover story,” Murray said. “There was no crash. The eight soldiers died when we attacked and destroyed the gate.”

Donald looked around the room in disbelief, as if he were waiting for Vanessa or John or Tom to say gotcha.

But no one said gotcha.

“Simply amazing,” Vanessa said. She sounded sarcastic, but also quite shaken, and John couldn’t blame her. “The families of these brave men may never know the truth. They died in battle, and we list it as a helicopter crash. How patriotic of us. So what’s happened since then?”

“Dawsey needed serious medical care,” Murray said. “We had him in a VA hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Seems he recovered faster than expected, got access to a computer, hacked into the facility’s database and altered his security status. It’s a bit embarra.s.sing to say, but on January eighth he just walked out.

“The parasites built something in his brain, some kind of mesh structure that lets him track down infected hosts. He found one that had just murdered three people. Dawsey killed the man in self-defense. Before the man died, however, Dawsey discovered the location of another gate, in—”