CHAPTER 2: THE MIDNIGHT STACK ON ONE FIRST STREET
02:18:44 EST.
The White Hawk did not flare its rotors over Joint Base Andrews or request civilian approach clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration.
Cleared directly into Prohibited Airspace P-56 under presidential tactical precedence, it descended vertically through the freezing sleet directly onto the wide, granite plaza of the East Front of the United States Supreme Court.
The sixty-foot composite rotor blades flared in an ear-splitting, one-hundred-and-twenty-decibel roar that flattened the shrubbery along the marble balustrades and blew the frozen slush off the bronze Corinthian lampposts:
SCREEECH-ROAR.
The heavy cabin door slid back on its tracks:
CLANG.
Standing on the rain-slicked marble plaza, surrounded by twenty operators from the United States Marshals Service Special Operations Group (SOG) and the United States Supreme Court Police Tactical Response Team, was Chief Judge Eleanor Mercer.
Eighty-two years old.
The Presiding Judge of the Second Circuit.
Admiral David Mercer’s older sister.
My late mother’s surviving aunt.
She stood five feet eleven inches tall in the howling winter gale, wearing a dark-navy wool judicial overcoat over an un-ironed civilian three-piece suit, her silver hair pulled back into an unyielding architectural bun, her gloved right hand resting over an antique, gold-headed walking cane carved in the likeness of an artillery surveyor’s transit.
