4

CAMP DAVID, THURMONT, MARYLAND—9 MAY

“Marcus? Marcus? Hey, buddy, wake up—we’re here.”

He could barely hear Jenny Morris’s voice over the sound of the helicopter rotors. But her quick jab to his ribs got the point across. Marcus Ryker tried to rub the exhaustion out of his bloodshot eyes. Everything in his body and soul wanted to pull the weathered Washington Nationals cap down over his face, turn over, and go back to sleep. But he had a job to do and not much time to do it.

He felt the struts touch down. The side door of the chopper slid open. Daylight surged into the cabin. He could see Jenny tossing their duffel bags out onto the helipad and scrambling after them. Marcus followed her, but a bit slower. His wounds were too fresh, his joints and muscles in too much pain to move as sprightly as his colleague from Langley.

“Agent Morris, welcome to Camp David,” said a Secret Service agent too young to remember Marcus’s time on the force, shaking the woman’s hand. “Agent Ryker, welcome back. And I brought a wheelchair along in case . . .”

Marcus shook the kid’s hand and brushed off the zinger, certain some of the veterans had put him up to it. The agent smiled. Jenny stifled a laugh. Marcus ignored them both. Sure, he’d been beaten within an inch of his life in Lebanon. But there was no way he was going to give these idiots the satisfaction of seeing him wheeled in to see the president of the United States. Grabbing his duffel bag away from the agent, who couldn’t have been more than mid- to late twenties, Marcus hobbled up to Laurel Lodge, where the meeting of the National Security Council was about to begin.

The first twenty minutes were a blur. Mind-numbing chitchat. Updates on matters Marcus considered unimportant and a complete waste of time given the urgency of the hour. Finally it was his turn to address the august body.

Wincing as he rose to his feet, Marcus moved to the podium. He knew that every eye was staring at him, not just because of the scars and burns all over his face, neck, and hands, but because of the gravity of what he had come to say.

He was, after all, about to ask them to kill a man.

Halfway around the world.

On precious little notice.

With very little debate.

And in direct opposition to the recommendation of one of the most respected and valued members of the cabinet, not to mention Marcus’s ostensible boss.

In later conversations with his closest friends, at least those with top secret clearance, Marcus couldn’t recall precisely how he had been introduced to or received by the commander in chief and his war cabinet that humid Saturday morning. Nor could he even remember thanking President Andrew Clarke or the rest of the NSC for all they had done to rescue him and his colleagues from deep behind enemy lines in Lebanon. All he remembered was the immense physical discomfort he was trying to mask from those in the room. And the immense personal revulsion he felt coming from the man who sat directly across from him.

Marcus picked up the remote from the podium and forced himself to focus. The moment was surreal. He had awoken 1,400 miles away in the barracks of a U.S. Navy facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Now, after three turbulence-racked flights—first to Miami, the second to Joint Base Andrews, and then the Marine chopper ride—he found himself in the main wood-paneled conference room on the grounds of the sprawling presidential retreat in the lush Catoctin Mountains of Maryland.

Looking at the distinguished men and women sitting in blue upholstered chairs around the polished oak table, Marcus felt as if he were facing a jury. He had been given a mere fifteen minutes to make the most important case of his lifetime.

In theory, William “Bill” McDermott—the U.S. national security advisor—should have been his closest ally in the room. The two men had known each other for nearly twenty years. Yet reality was more complicated. After finishing at Yale, McDermott had become an officer in the Marines, serving three combat tours in Afghanistan and two in Iraq. That’s where they had met. For several years, McDermott had commanded Marcus’s unit. They had gotten along well enough, but upon returning to civilian life, though they had stayed in touch, they weren’t especially close.

McDermott had gone on to earn an MBA from Wharton, then a master’s in national security studies from Georgetown, after which he made a fortune on Wall Street before reentering government service. Now forty-seven, McDermott had risen to become one of President Clarke’s closest and most trusted aides.

More than five years McDermott’s junior, Marcus had married his high school sweetheart, joined the Secret Service, and worked night and day to earn a spot on the elite White House detail before tragedy struck—the murder of his wife and only child during a convenience store robbery gone bad—sending him into a deep depression that scuttled his career. How Marcus had been dragged back into government service against his will was a story unto itself, though highly classified and not even known to everyone around this table. Yet here he was, one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s most effective, if controversial, operatives. And who had most fiercely opposed his recruitment into the Agency? Bill McDermott. In recent years, the two had reconciled. Yet there lingered within Marcus unspoken seeds of doubt about how much he could truly trust McDermott when the chips were down.

Carlos Hernandez was another one Marcus had a hard time reading. A retired three-star vice admiral, Hernandez had been one of the highest-ranking Latinos ever to serve in the U.S. military. Then Clarke had chosen him as his running mate, and Hernandez had become the first Cuban American ever elected vice president of the United States. Born in Miami to first-generation immigrants from Havana, Hernandez was only fifty-seven. Since taking the oath of office, he had suffered two heart attacks and been forced by his doctors to undergo a triple bypass surgery followed by months of bed rest and rehab. The vice president’s health problems had been all the more shocking since in his younger years in the Navy, he had been an undefeated boxer, a scrappy street fighter from the barrios who never stayed down long and loved to deliver the knockout blow his opponents couldn’t see coming. Now he was back in the ring and pushing hard to make up for lost time. Because of the vice president’s health issues, Marcus had had very little personal interaction with the man. They were strangers, not kindred spirits, and the vice president’s eyes now betrayed no hint of where he was going to come down on this ever-critical vote.

Defense Secretary Cal Foster and General James Meyers, the stoic chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were different stories. Marcus had worked closely with each man and believed he could count on both. Yet that was not necessarily the case with Margaret “Meg” Whitney. The sixty-one-year-old secretary of state was known by her colleagues as the “Silver Fox,” as much because she was a brilliant negotiator and a killer poker player as because she refused to dye her once-auburn hair. A two-term governor of New Mexico and former ambassador to Great Britain, Whitney was a rising star in the administration, especially now that her tireless shuttle diplomacy had concluded the most unexpected deal of the century: the historic peace treaty between Israel and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Marcus had played a back-channel role in initiating the negotiations. He had even served on Whitney’s DSS advance team on several trips, including the one to the Israeli-Lebanese border that had ended in a brutal firefight and his own captivity. Yet he had never spent a great deal of time with the secretary. For all he knew, she blamed him for the missile war that had erupted between Hezbollah and the Israelis, a war that had almost destroyed her shot at the Nobel Prize. Which side she would wind up on when all the dust settled was anyone’s guess.

In the end, however, there was only one person on this jury whose vote really mattered—the president of the United States—and he could go either way.