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WASHINGTON, D.C.

The confirmation hearings for Taj Deegan got off to a rocky start. Republicans complained about the Democrats convening the judiciary panel just four days before the August recess. This was no emergency, they said. They needed time to vet the candidate. Taj Deegan could be confirmed on a normal timeline, just like every other justice.

They accused the president of trying to rush the proceedings to help win the Anderson case. Though they didn’t have the votes to stop the proceedings, they decided to make a spectacle of it and boycott. Thus, when Taj Deegan sat down to be questioned by the senators, she stared at a number of empty seats on the dais, all behind the name tags of Republicans.

Undeterred, the chairman of the committee made a nice little speech. He claimed that the Republicans knew Taj Deegan was eminently qualified and so, instead of asking questions, “just took their ball and went home.” He excoriated them for playing politics with such an important matter. He asked Taj Deegan if she had an opening statement.

She did, and by the time she was done, there wasn’t a dry eye in the place. She talked about her struggles as a single mom. She assured them of her commitment to law and order. She couldn’t believe that an African American woman like her who had grown up poor would one day be wearing the robe of a justice of the United States Supreme Court.

She told the story of the honor killing case she had prosecuted and how a terrorist had opened fire in the courtroom. Taj was hit but, “by the grace of God,” she had been wearing a bulletproof vest. She always carried a gun in her briefcase. Later, when the coroner performed the autopsy on the shooter, he found one of her bullets in the terrorist’s chest.

“I was hoping your Republican colleagues might be here to hear that part of my story,” she quipped, and the room erupted in laughter.

Having a brush with death changes a person, Taj said. It had her more committed than ever to her family and more thankful to God for the gift of each new day. She cared about the people who brought their cases in front of her, and she would do her best to help the high court live up to its motto: “Equal justice under law.”

When Taj was finished, the chairman sat back, satisfied that there would be a lot of video clips of Justice Deegan’s eloquent remarks on the news that night. And just to be sure there were no lingering doubts, he took the privilege of the chair to ask the first set of questions. Justice Deegan was direct and convincing in her answers.

No, the president had never discussed specific issues with her. In fact, she had not even met the president before being nominated for this position. Justice Deegan insisted that she had as yet formed no opinions on the Anderson case and the issue of state secrets.

The proceedings could have been over by lunch, but the Democrats dragged them out so that nobody could claim they had failed to perform due diligence. By 5 p.m., Taj Deegan was unanimously recommended by the Senate Judiciary Committee for the open seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. The full Senate took up the nomination four days later, on the last day of the July term. The vote split along party lines with only three Republicans joining the Democrats, who put Deegan over the top.

Paige thought it was bad news for the Anderson case. “It’s why the president nominated her in the first place,” Paige said to Wellington.

“You’re just being paranoid,” Wellington told her.

The program was one of John Marcano’s favorite initiatives. The CIA had hired a number of Yemeni doctors to travel around the country and immunize school-age and preschool children. There was no shortage of diseases that required immunizations, and the parents anxiously brought their kids to the doctors in every village. Unknown to the villagers, the doctors were paid handsomely by a “humanitarian organization” that was in turn funded by the CIA. And as part of the immunization process, the doctors collected DNA samples from several million Yemeni children.

Those samples were entered into an enormous CIA database at Langley and cross-referenced against the DNA of known CIA targets. The program, code-named Operation Harvest, had produced more than its share of drone targets in the last two years.

During the same week that Taj Deegan was promising judicial restraint and equal justice to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Operation Harvest yielded another hit. And this time, it was a big one.

In one of the remote villages in the northeast corner of Yemen, doctors had immunized two boys whose DNA suggested they were the sons of Saleet Zafar. Excitedly, Marcano directed as many assets as possible into the area. They would immediately begin creating a matrix of satellite images and drone surveillance footage, using facial recognition technology to find the imam when he went to visit his sons.

He had slipped through their net before. This time, they would bring him into the boat.