31

THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

President Andrew Hartford Clarke left the Residence at 6:57 a.m. local time.

Surrounded by a beefed-up Secret Service detail, he took a private elevator down to the first floor, headed straight for the West Wing, and entered the Situation Room three minutes later. Every member of the National Security Council stood until the commander in chief took his seat.

It was not a full house.

Vice President Carlos Hernandez was there—at last—sitting directly to Clarke’s right. A retired three-star vice admiral, Hernandez had been one of the highest-ranking Latinos ever to serve in the U.S. Navy before becoming the first Cuban-American elected vice president of the United States. Born in Miami to immigrants from Havana, Hernandez had played a game-changing role in securing Clarke’s presidency, helping the political neophyte win a stunning 49 percent of the Hispanic vote, the most ever for a Republican ticket. Yet for much of the past eighteen months, Hernandez’s contribution in the Clarke administration had been limited at best. Only fifty-seven, he’d already had two heart attacks since taking the VP’s oath of office, then had been forced by his doctors to have a triple-bypass surgery, followed by many months of recovery. Rumor had it that Clarke had actively considered dropping him from the ticket prior to his reelection campaign. But the VP had stuck around and was finally back in the game and supposedly operating at or near full strength.

To Clarke’s left was Margaret “Meg” Whitney, the sixty-one-year-old secretary of state he’d dubbed the Silver Fox. A two-term governor of New Mexico and former U.S. ambassador to the U.K., Whitney was a rising star in the administration, especially with growing speculation in the media that her months of painstaking negotiations and tireless shuttle diplomacy were about to bear fruit in the form of a history-making peace deal between Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Also joining them around the conference table were National Security Advisor Bill McDermott; General James Meyers, the recently appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs; and Richard Stephens, the sixty-six-year-old former senior senator from Arizona and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee who had been tapped by Clarke to serve as his director of Central Intelligence.

Missing were the director of national intelligence and the secretary of Homeland Security, both of whom were out of the country but flying back to Washington at that very hour. Also absent were the secretary of the treasury, the attorney general, and Defense Secretary Cal Foster, who had once served as the supreme allied commander of NATO and was arguably Clarke’s closest friend and most trusted military advisor. The first two were on vacation but had been urgently recalled to D.C. and were currently en route. The last three were spread out across the country on various matters of government business but were also racing back to Washington.

“How in the world could this happen?” an angry Clarke began, flipping open the leather-bound copy of The President’s Daily Brief waiting for him at the head of the table. The PDB was the U.S. intel community’s top secret compilation of the day’s most important matters, produced for the president’s eyes, and those of the NSC, only.

“I’m afraid the answers aren’t in there, Mr. President,” the CIA director began.

“Why not?” the president asked.

“Events simply are moving too rapidly, sir,” Stephens replied. “This morning’s PDB was completed and printed before any of this began.”

Clarke looked up in disbelief, then slammed his copy shut and shoved it aside. “Then tell me what you know.”

Stephens took a deep breath to compose his thoughts. He knew all too well that the Central Intelligence Agency was on thin ice with the president. It had, after all, completely missed both the Kremlin’s near invasion of the Baltics and the subsequent assassination of the Russian president, prime minister, and FSB chief. Langley had also botched two major extraction operations, the first of a high-level mole deep inside the Kremlin, and the second of an almost equally valuable mole operating close to the very top of the regime in North Korea.

True, the Agency had overseen two very significant successes since then. They had thwarted the transfer of five nuclear warheads from the DPRK to the Iranian regime. And they had effectively hunted down and stopped a terrorist cell in Jerusalem that was planning to blow up the American-sponsored peace summit there in December. The president, however, hadn’t given much of the credit to Stephens or his senior team. To the contrary, he’d become enamored of the Agency’s newest clandestine officer, Marcus Johannes Ryker, whom he credited as the mastermind of both operations.

For his part, Stephens could not have seen things more differently. Ryker was no hero. To the contrary, he was a maverick—dangerous, a rogue operator with a growing reputation for scoffing at the rules and ignoring laws and well-established Agency protocols to achieve his objectives. He was not a Langley man. He hadn’t been trained at the Farm. Didn’t know the Agency’s culture. Barely knew any fellow CIA officers, much less had close ties inside the Company.

During the Moscow disaster, everyone in this room—the president included—had believed Ryker was a traitor to the country who should be hunted down and arrested, even taken out by force. How Ryker had flipped the script and rebranded himself a hero not only baffled but infuriated Stephens. Ryker had only been brought into the Agency as part of a secret plea bargain. He was supposed to be keeping quiet and out of the public eye. Instead, he seemed to find himself at the vortex of one dangerous operation after another. So far, each of his crazy moves had broken in his favor. But Stephens knew that any of them could easily have gone the other way and ended in total disaster.

Just as galling to the CIA director was that whatever so-called successes Ryker might have played a part in would never have come to pass without the assistance of hundreds of Agency personnel, financing, and assets. Yet the commander in chief kept giving all the credit to his new pet pupil.

And now this.