"We were holding the world hostage?" Brady asked.
"We call it diplomacy," Mr. Tim explained. "The capability was emplaced but never utilized."
"Until Greene's allies took out the East Coast," Lana added. "After the War, the government created seven protected sites around the world with only one person at the site knowing what was there and security measures that were beyond anything the Peak had."
"Does he have the others?" Mr. Tim prodded.
"He did. I thought something was wrong when Brady's men stumbled across one of the devices and returned it to the mountain. The device you found was coded as biowarfare, but when I ran it in the system, I found the serials had been switched. One of the Horsemen devices was recoded. It can only be done at the presidential level and was done by one of his staff members."
Brady's gaze was riveted to her.
"Arnie Smith had another one," she continued. "I don't know what happened with him, if he was really crazy or he found something. I looked at the rest of the keypads in the command center. Only three of us had access to them. Greene, Arnie, and me, as the VP's representative on the surface. There were infrastructure keypads and a few of the nuke, bio, electromagnetic, and chem keypads for the East Coast weapons systems. When I ran the serials, I found several of them had been recoded," she continued.
"How many Horsemen does Greene have?" Mr. Tim demanded.
"He'd gathered all twenty at the Peak."
Mr. Tim uttered a choked curse.
"It's okay, sir," Lana said quickly. "I took them all."
Silence followed her words. Mr. Tim was staring at her in surprise, Brady in intense interest.
"You have the Horsemen?" Mr. Tim repeated.
She nodded.
"That information does not leave this room," Mr. Tim said resolutely. "Talk about insanity breaking out if anyone knew …"
"I was going to take them to the Peace Command Center," she said. "I hoped … I don't know what I hoped. That maybe everything would be all right and someone could disable them."
"No one will disable them, even if they could," he said. "Hon, the difference between you and the rest of us is that you see the keypads as a threat. Anyone else with have a grain of ambition would see them as a tool. They'd kill half the planet to obtain the apocalyptic collection you have."