Marcus was alone, but he had the element of surprise.

Both terrorists had their backs to him. One held a machine gun and was firing at agents trying to retake the Entrance Hall. The other was wearing a Yankees cap. He held a 9mm pistol and was shooting staff members in the back of the head.

Marcus took aim and fired four rounds in rapid succession. He hit the one in the ball cap in the spine, felling him instantly. He missed the one with the machine gun, though, who now swung around and returned fire. Several of the shots went wild. But two hit Marcus directly in the chest. He was wearing a Kevlar vest, but the impact knocked him off his feet and drove the wind out of him. The terrorist raced toward him, changing out magazines as he approached. Just as he reached Marcus and aimed at his head, the young man’s body was riddled with bullets.

Marcus instinctively covered his hands and face as blood sprayed everywhere. When he finally looked up, a member of CAT —the counterassault team —stood over him. He grabbed Marcus by the hand, pulled him to his feet, and handed him a Heckler & Koch MP5. Marcus nodded his thanks, and the two went hunting.

The firefight that ensued lasted all of nine minutes. That’s what the surveillance video showed, and Marcus would eventually watch it more than a dozen times. In the moment, however, he would have sworn the battle lasted at least forty-five minutes or an hour. Everything seemed to slow. He and the CAT member fired and reloaded, shifted locations, then fired and reloaded again. They kicked away grenades and even lobbed one back. Eventually reinforcements arrived. That’s when the battle turned and finally shut down for good.

By the time the entire episode was complete and the complex had been locked down and fully secured, twenty-two plainclothes agents and uniformed officers of the U.S. Secret Service —plus one CAT member —lay dead. Seventeen more were wounded, twelve seriously. Eleven White House staffers had been murdered, along with six tourists: a Japanese family of four and a retired Jewish couple from Minneapolis.

Nineteen of the twenty terrorists —all from a previously unknown jihadist group from the Philippines —were dead. The twentieth lay in a coma, and doctors at George Washington Memorial Hospital gave him little chance of recovery.

By the grace of God, the president was unhurt. The moment gunshots and explosions began, alarms had sounded throughout the White House complex and his protection detail had immediately moved him down to the bunker known as the PEOC, or Presidential Emergency Operations Center. Simultaneously, the VP had been rushed by his detail through a maze of tunnels underneath the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, then whisked away to a secure, undisclosed location miles away to ensure continuity of government should events at the White House spin even more tragically out of control. The first family had been out of town at the time and were never in danger.

In the days that followed, however, heads rolled throughout the executive branch. The director of the Secret Service was fired. So were his deputy and the shift commander on duty at the White House at the time of the attack. The secretary of Homeland Security was forced to resign, and two inquiries —one by the House Government Oversight Committee, the other by the DHS inspector general —ended up recommending a sweeping reorganization of the Secret Service leadership and its policies and procedures for guarding the White House complex.

Things turned out better for Special Agent Marcus Ryker. After recovering quickly from what turned out to be minor injuries, he and a number of colleagues received both the Medal of Valor and the Distinguished Service Award. These were personally bestowed upon them by the president in a nationally televised ceremony held in, of all places, the East Room of the White House, one week to the day after the attack had unfolded.

Elena and Lars were there, sitting in the center, near the front, in seats chosen by Lars. Sitting with them were Marcus’s mother and two sisters, the entire Garcia family, and Pastor Carter Emerson and his wife, Maya, from Lincoln Park Baptist Church. No one in Washington had been kinder or more helpful to Marcus and Elena in their struggles —and especially to Elena as she battled loneliness and the challenges of raising Lars nearly on her own —than this seventysomething African American couple who had known their own share of hardships in life.

Bill “Sarge” McDermott and his wife also flew in for the ceremony. Pete Hwang and Nick Vinetti and their wives came as well. Bill had retired from the Marines as a full colonel and was now making a mint as an investment banker on Wall Street. Pete was still in the Marines. He’d gone to medical school at the government’s expense and was serving as a staff doctor at the Marine training facility in San Diego. Nick, meanwhile, had retired from the military with full honors, gone to graduate school to study international relations, and then opted to join the Foreign Service. After working a stretch at the State Department, he’d served in various roles at U.S. Embassies throughout the Middle East and Asia. At the moment he was serving as a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tallinn, Estonia.

Having forged their bonds in battle, the four men had made it a point to stay in touch after going their separate ways. They called and emailed fairly often. They got together every Memorial Day weekend to ride Harleys and raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project. It meant the world to Marcus that they’d all drop everything and fly to Washington at their own expense to be there for him. And it hadn’t even been his idea or theirs. It had been Elena’s.

MOSCOW —17 OCTOBER

From his corner suite, Oleg Kraskin watched the ceremony live on RTV.

All week he had been transfixed by the coverage of the attacks in Washington, the ensuing congressional hearings, the firings at the highest levels of the Secret Service, and the DHS investigation. Privately, he wondered how he would handle a similar terrorist attack, should it ever happen in the Kremlin. He’d done his required service in the army, like every other able-bodied male in the country, and he’d been trained in basic emergency procedures, as all his colleagues had been. But he was not a military man. He had never worked for the security services. He had no idea how he would respond in a real crisis.

Snuffing out one cigarette and lighting up another, Oleg tried to assess how the attacks might affect Luganov’s already-chilly relationship with the American president. Oleg, for all his jet-setting in recent years, had never been to Washington. He had never even set foot in the United States. Since he’d come to work for Luganov, others had handled the American portfolio. That had been fine with Oleg. He had far too much on his plate already, and relations with the Americans had always been considered something of a “holy grail” among Luganov’s team —alluring and intriguing, yet forbidding. The stakes were too high, and the margin for error was too thin.

What intrigued Oleg most as he watched the East Room ceremony was the figure of Special Agent Marcus Ryker. His injuries notwithstanding, he was strikingly good-looking, and at first Oleg wondered if he had Russian roots. He had intense, alert blue eyes, a firm jaw, and short blond hair. He wore a trim navy-blue suit, a white oxford shirt, and a solid burgundy tie. There was something rare in Ryker’s face, in his eyes —something honest, something earnest and trustworthy that appealed to Oleg.

The American president read a prepared statement explaining not only each agent’s bravery under fire but his background. Oleg was struck by the fact that he and Ryker had roughly similar stories. They had gotten married within a month of each other. They each had a son. They had each dedicated themselves to government service when they could have been successful in the private sector. They both worked quietly, in the background, out of the glare of the cameras, serving their national leaders with distinction and honor.

Then the phone rang. It was Luganov, and he needed Oleg immediately.