WASHINGTON, D.C.
Who came late to dinner with the president? Wendy Upton thought.
Only Peter Rena.
There should be no complication getting here. Drive to the private gate on Fifteenth Street, then straight to the South Portico and leave your car with the attendant. Why was he late?
Fifteen minutes later an aide ushered the fixer into the Old Family Dining Room on the second floor of the Residence. Rena was flushed and perspiring. He made apologies, then whispered something to Randi Brooks, whose expression registered some kind of alarm.
But Wendy Upton couldn’t worry about that. They had an important decision to make. Rena’s continuing personal dramas had to wait.
The secret battery program she had inherited had turned into a mess. From what she could make out, the two people she had trusted to look into the program for her had found nothing good. The scheme seemed insecure. Its director was dead. And now they had threatened one of the country’s most influential investors with deportation.
She had gone along with giving this more time, out of deference to David Traynor’s memory and as a favor to Quentin Phelps. But she worried the program was running off the road. The timing was now bad, too. Since her meeting with Travis Carter and Aggie Tucker at Camp David, the Senate had brought two more of her bills to the floor, both of which passed. But Carter had made it clear there would be no more, not for the time being. He was testing her resolve—as well as her threat that she had more political capital than he did. But she could hardly afford a scandal about misused intelligence and a far-fetched secret plan to invent a new battery. Such a scandal would stall and possibly scuttle the rest of her agenda.
The only time she had had for this meeting was over dinner, which she was holding in the Residence, away from aides and the West Wing’s public schedule. It was a personal dining room, not a ceremonial one, framed by large rectangular windows overlooking the mansion grounds. She had asked four others to join them: Quentin Phelps and Gil Sedaka; along with the FBI director, Owen Webster; and the head of National Intelligence, Sally Holmes, a Traynor appointee.
Now that Rena had finally appeared, they sat down at the table, the time for small talk over. The stewards arrived with salads and she got down to business.
“It’s decision time on this battery program,” she announced. Terms of the evening set. “If there is anything new that I should know, tell me now.”
She had the sense Rena and Brooks had let her down, that they had gotten caught up in the program’s far-flung optimism and lost their objectivity. She wanted them to know there was no more time for negotiation.
Rena spoke first, which was unlike him. “We have learned a good deal in the last seventy-two hours. We still don’t know how Kim Matsuda died. But there is more reason now to suspect she was poisoned, perhaps by the Chinese Ministry of State Security. Proving that may be impossible.”
Upton stared at the FBI director in surprise. Did he know any of this?
“That’s not all,” Rena said. “We now believe we know what Kim discovered before she died: that the Chinese government has infiltrated the battery program through a government-owned venture capital firm backing one of the companies. We believe the Russians may have infiltrated the program as well, through one of the most influential investors in the Valley. His name is Anatol Bremmer. We believe he lives in the United States and pretends to be a Putin critic but secretly works with the Russians.”
“Why would he do that?” the president asked.
“In exchange for a higher price when he sold them his companies ten years ago. And to protect family and friends who are still in Russia,” Rena said.
That was the man who yesterday had called Quentin Phelps, Upton recognized, complaining that Rena and Brooks had threatened him. Upton signaled Phelps with a glance to say nothing. She wanted to hear this out.
“That is why we visited Bremmer yesterday and informed him of our suspicions. We threatened him because we wanted to see how he would react. The same way the FBI might visit someone to apply pressure.”
“But you’re not the FBI,” the Bureau director, Webster, reminded them.
“That’s why it was safer for us to do it. We’re outside consultants who might have gone rogue.”
“A little beyond your brief, don’t you think, Peter?” Upton said.
“No question, Madam President. But if we’d asked you first, you wouldn’t be able to disavow us, if that is what you decide.”
“You have anything to say, Randi?” she asked Brooks.
“There’s something Peter hasn’t mentioned,” Brooks said. “We didn’t know it when we saw Bremmer, but we now believe a company he owns is behind the cyberattacks against Peter. And we believe those attacks were designed to hurt you, Madam President. Bremmer’s motive for this was to do a favor for Michigan Governor Jeff Scott.”
“What?” said Gil Sedaka.
“Scott’s people contracted with one of Bremmer’s companies during the campaign. A firm called Stratica, which specializes in protecting against cyberattacks. But it would also know how to instigate them.”
Upton encouraged Brooks to keep going.
“The first attacks against Peter came during the campaign. But they gained real momentum when you asked us in December to help with the transition. Scott has never forgiven you for joining the Traynor ticket, and the best way to undermine you was to discredit the people you were associated with. We were a perfect target.”
Upton had not expected any of this.
One of FBI director Owen Webster’s considerable political gifts was a rich baritone voice, which he employed in meetings to make his points seem more persuasive. Webster used the marvelous instrument now.
“Madam President, I believe it’s time for the FBI to handle this. From what I can see, these outsiders have turned a secret program into a public disaster.”
Not yet it wasn’t, Upton thought. But it could become one.
“Are these battery companies going to come up with anything?” she asked.
Brooks was probably not qualified to know, but Upton wanted to hear her answer. Upton had already commissioned a separate team of scientists to give her an independent assessment of liquid metal flow batteries. They had confirmed the conclusion of Kim Matsuda’s group: flow batteries were probably the most promising technology for energy storage and they lacked investment. So Upton had decided to explore launching a separate government program to develop them in a classified laboratory in Maryland—just in case Traynor’s start-up program out west had to be shut down. She was also considering using classified budgets to launch three other plans that had been thought promising back in their clandestine climate change gatherings in Colorado during the transition. This had been a Phelps idea, but she was warming to it. Additional programs would make Traynor’s bold battery program seem less random and more planned out. David’s mistake, she was concluding, had not been his boldness. It had been betting all his chips in one go-for-broke pot. Now, if she had to close it, at least she could let the government try several smaller projects in secure classified labs.
Brooks gave her answer. “It’s only been about a hundred days. I wouldn’t expect much progress yet.”
The FBI director clanked a salad fork on his plate.
“But we think these companies are worth sticking with a little while longer,” Randi added. “They were picked for a reason. Of all the companies and labs out there, they have the best chance, the most experience, the best teams. It costs something to start over. You need to appoint someone to replace Kim. Additionally, we would recommend putting Jazz Bhalla of the FBI office in Palo Alto in charge of their security.”
Well played, Upton thought.
The director of National Intelligence asked, “But you said you believe the Chinese and Russians have already infiltrated the program?”
“They were always going to eventually,” Rena answered her. “All you were ever buying with classified money was a head start. If you shut it down, you are telling them the program has failed. Isn’t it worth something for them to worry that they are a success?”
“What do you think the Chinese and Russians know?” she asked.
“That the program exists, and that we’re pouring a lot into it,” Brooks said.
There was another issue Upton had begun worrying more about since this all began—the loose culture of big tech and how it encouraged too high a degree of U.S. technology being replicated overseas. She had asked for and received several briefings on it in the last two weeks.
“What are you thinking?” Phelps asked the president. He was beginning to get to know her.
“Have you ever heard of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?” Upton asked the whole group.
Brooks shook her head.
“It is a form of self-defense. You use your opponent’s force to defeat him. I learned it in the army,” she said. And then she outlined her plan.