WASHINGTON, D.C. —10 OCTOBER 2013

Special Agent Marcus Ryker was getting noticed by his superiors.

A quick study and always ready to tackle a new assignment with vigor, he’d just been promoted again, and this was the big time: the nation’s capital.

Atlanta had been his first assignment, and there he had helped solve dozens of counterfeit cases —including several significant ones —while learning the ropes of protection work when POTUS or VPOTUS would come to town and during the presidential primaries. From there he was transferred to the Manhattan field office, where he helped guard foreign dignitaries each September as the U.N. General Assembly kicked off its fall session. He did occasional protection work for visits by the president and VP. Most of his time, though, was spent on a task force locating and seizing illegal assets from Russian crime bosses.

Elena had never enjoyed Atlanta, and she’d been claustrophobic in New York. Marcus loved the city’s energy and intensity, not to mention all that he was learning and doing and the respect he was gaining among his peers. But Elena wasn’t a big-city girl, and she refused to become one. She resented the fact that everything was so expensive. The traffic was horrific. The subway tunnels smelled of urine. The schools were an abomination. The only thing she hated more than sending Lars to the public school they’d found in Atlanta was putting him in the one they’d found in Queens.

Lars had just turned seven, and now they’d moved again. No longer was Marcus learning enough Russian to bust mafia goons from “the old country”; now he was on the vice president’s protective detail. They were living in the Eastern Market section of D.C., in a two-bedroom apartment a few blocks southeast of the Capitol. Lars had to go to yet another lousy public school. They simply couldn’t afford a private one.

Marcus was working constantly. They rarely had time to eat dinner as a family at home, much less go out as a family, and Marcus and Elena struggled to find time for dates. The problem wasn’t simply that Marcus loved his job. It was that he was good at it. He wasn’t trying to catch his bosses’ attention, but he was doing it just the same. With every passing year, he was being given more important assignments, each of which kept him busier than the last. No wonder the divorce rate for agents was so high, Elena mused.

Not that she would ever consider such a thing. “Divorce? Never. Murder? Maybe,” she’d recently quipped to Maya Emerson, the wife of their pastor at Lincoln Park Baptist, where Elena and Lars attended church. Marcus did too when he wasn’t on duty.

On Thursday Marcus woke up well before the sun rose and certainly well before Elena. He ran his usual five miles, showered, dressed in a dark-blue suit and red-striped tie, kissed his wife and son on their foreheads, and left their apartment for the White House while it was still dark. When the sun finally peeked over the horizon and the alarm beside their bed went off, Elena padded to the kitchen in her bathrobe and poured herself a cup of the coffee Marcus had brewed for her before he’d left. Then she read the Scriptures for a bit in her favorite chair by the bay windows in the living room while their cat, Miles, curled up on her lap. When the alarm on her phone buzzed, she got Lars up, made him breakfast, and walked him to school.

Lars was struggling to make friends, struggling to fit in. He constantly told them he wanted to move back to Monument, back to his grandparents and all the good memories he’d ever had in his life. Elena didn’t just sympathize. She fully agreed with him. Yet whenever she brought up with Marcus even the possibility of moving back, he bristled and changed the subject.

By noon the vibrant autumn sun blazed across a bright-blue canvas. There was no humidity, and the temperature hovered in the low seventies. Plenty of tourists were in town, but not nearly as many as during the summer when school was out or even in the spring when the cherry blossoms were in full bloom, vivid pink and delicately aromatic, making the trees look like billows of cotton candy. At this time of year, with American children back in class, most visitors to the national landmarks —from the Capitol Building and the National Archives to the varied Smithsonian museums, from memorials of presidents and veterans and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to the White House itself —were from abroad.

With hundreds of people strolling along E Street and down Pennsylvania Avenue, taking selfies and shooting home videos of themselves near “the people’s house,” the young Asian man in his early twenties hardly drew special attention. He wore a New York Yankees baseball cap he’d bought from a street vendor, tan khakis, and a black polo shirt. He had on a light-blue windbreaker and new Nikes and sported a backpack. A DSLR camera dangled around his neck as he meandered through Lafayette Square, drifting slowly toward the north side of the White House, snapping pictures every few steps. He and his six friends —all with Asian features, though some darker than others —could easily have been graduate students or members of a college sports team. But they were neither athletes nor students. Nor were they alone.

At precisely 12:05, the leader —the one in the Yankees cap —glanced at his watch. Then he shouted something in a foreign language and broke into a sprint. He was heading directly for the black wrought-iron fence protecting the North Lawn of the president’s home. The six others were running too, just a few paces behind him. Simultaneously, two other groups of college-age young men —one about forty yards to the right, the other about thirty yards to the left —all began sprinting toward the White House as well.

Uniformed Secret Service officers yelled at them to stop but were immediately shot dead as the young men pulled handguns and fired with deadly accuracy. Others ripped the cameras off their necks and hurled them onto the White House grounds and into the guard stations, where they exploded with horrific force. The grenades hidden inside the cameras were powerful ones. As they detonated and the crackle of gunfire broke the early-afternoon calm, chaos erupted. Secret Service officers were being blown to pieces. Tourists were screaming and running for cover.

In the midst of it all, twenty attackers scaled the fence, jumped onto the grass, and bolted for the North Portico, the closest White House entrance. Snipers on the roof opened fire. They took out five of the men in quick order. Uniformed officers and Marines at the doors opened fire as well. They killed four and severely wounded four more before being killed themselves. But this still left seven able-bodied attackers taking up positions under the North Portico, firing at agents and members of the emergency response team and K-9 units emerging from the West Wing and the Treasury Building. One of the men affixed plastic explosives to the electronically locked north entry door and blew it to smithereens.

Marcus had just finished his shift, standing post outside the VP’s office in the West Wing, and was on his way to Room W-16 —the Service’s White House basement command post, code-named Horsepower —when he heard the gunfire and explosions. Immediately he drew his Sig Sauer P229 automatic pistol. As he did, he received the call on his radio from the watch officer. He was instructed to race back upstairs and assist agents defending the North Portico. He responded at once, bounding up the steps two at a time, and heard a blizzard of situation reports coming in from all sectors.

A car bomb had gone off near the corner of E Street and Seventeenth.

Other agents were reporting machine-gun fire erupting near the fence line along the South Lawn, close to the Treasury Building.

A plane had just entered restricted airspace. It was approaching the White House from the southwest and was not responding to air traffic control commands to divert. Fighter jets were being scrambled out of Andrews, but they were three minutes out.

Marcus headed toward the Entrance Hall, the large vestibule leading to the North Portico. To get there, he had to cross through the State Dining Room, which was being arranged for an event that evening with the Ukrainian prime minister. As he came upon ushers and protocol personnel paralyzed with fear —unsure what to do or where to go —another massive explosion rocked the building. Marcus found himself thrown off his feet by the force of the blast, as was everyone around him. Priceless china, crystal wineglasses, and water goblets smashed to the floor. One of the enormous glass chandeliers came crashing down, shattering into a million pieces.

Marcus checked to make sure everyone was okay. Most were cut and bleeding across the face, neck, and hands. So was he. But they were alive, and to keep them that way, he had to get them moving. He scrambled back to his feet and went to the door as he ordered the staff to run to the southwest stairwell, head to the basement, and take cover in the bowling alley, where they’d be safe.

Once they were in motion, Marcus turned back to the threat at hand. He could feel the adrenaline surging through his system, but it didn’t blur his thinking. He’d been trained to channel it, manage it, control it, and let it create heightened focus in the midst of chaos. He began counting to fifty, a trick he’d learned to slow his breathing and steady his nerves. All stress is self-induced, he reminded himself. It’s in your mind. You don’t need it. Lay it down. Panic is contagious. But so is calm. Stay calm. Do your work. Slow is smooth. Smooth is smart. Smart is straight. Straight is deadly.

Glancing out from behind a pillar, he spotted several young men pouring through the remains of the breached door. All were pulling submachine guns from their backpacks. He had to move now. Pivoting through the doorway, he fired two shots, shifted aim, fired twice more, then shifted again and fired another three shots. In just seconds, he had taken down three assailants. But as he pulled back for cover, the dining room erupted with machine-gun fire. Bullets were flying everywhere, ripping up everything that hadn’t been destroyed by the blast.

Marcus broke right, out of the dining room and into the Red Room. He stopped and fired three times through the open door to the Entrance Hall. He wasn’t sure if he’d hit anyone, but there wasn’t time to check. He ducked behind another pillar to take cover, then radioed the command post with an update on his location and what he was seeing. Then he sprinted through the Blue Room and the Green Room. When he reached the East Room, he paused just before entering and popped out a spent magazine and reloaded. He whispered a quick prayer and burst into the East Room, hoping to outflank the terrorists by coming in behind them. Sure enough, he found two of the terrorists. He also found a group of White House staffers, facedown on the floor, being executed one by one.