7

All eyes shifted back to Clarke, who was rubbing his temples.

It was obvious the president was seriously weighing Stephens’s case. What wasn’t clear was which way he was leaning. “Agent Ryker, would you care to respond?” Clarke asked.

This was it. Closing arguments. The burns on Marcus’s chest and the bruises covering his back and torso were distracting him. Though he had no intention of admitting it, the painkillers had finally kicked in and were fogging his thinking. And he found himself struck by how pale the president looked and how much weight the man had lost since the last time they had seen each other. That Clarke’s hair was grayer and the bags under his eyes more pronounced since taking office was no surprise. The accelerated aging process was par for the course for every commander in chief. But this was different. Something wasn’t right, and Marcus felt a genuine pang of worry for him.

Forcing himself to refocus, Marcus took a sip of water and then began to speak. “Yes, it’s personal,” he began. “Should it not be personal to each of us in this room after all the friends and colleagues who have been murdered on the orders of Abu Nakba?”

It had been Jenny on the flight from Miami who had anticipated Stephens’s line of attack. She had suggested he prepare PowerPoint slides for rebuttal, and Marcus, grateful, now used them.

He reminded them of the man who used to sit at this very table, General Barry Evans, the previous national security advisor, as he presented photos of Evans with Clarke, Evans with Hernandez, Evans with the entire NSC team, and then select images of the Kairos-planned suicide bombing at 10 Downing Street in London that had killed the man. None of the photos were macabre, just enough to make the point.

Then Marcus showed them images of a car bombing in downtown Washington, D.C., that had also been ordered by Abu Nakba, the one that had killed Tyler Reed, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow whom Clarke had intended to appoint as a new deputy secretary of state. Every eye in the room was riveted on the screens as Marcus then posted photos of Reed with Clarke, Reed with Secretary Whitney, and Reed with his wife and daughters.

Then came photos of Clarke and Whitney with Janelle Thomas, the deputy secretary of state. This was followed by images of Thomas’s bullet-riddled body on the bloody floor of Lincoln Park Baptist Church, another Kairos attack in downtown D.C.

The list went on, but Marcus felt he had made his point.

“Agent Ryker, we mourn them—all of us do,” Clarke said when the lights came back up. “But the question isn’t whether we want to bring Abu Nakba to justice. The question on the table right now is whether Abu Nakba is in that compound or not.”

“I have no doubt Abu Nakba is in that compound, sir,” Marcus said, looking the president in the eye. “You have the brief. It’s all there. The evidence may be circumstantial, but it is overwhelming. And I would remind you all that the Agency never had photos or phone intercepts of Osama bin Laden in that compound in Abbottabad. But he was there. And your predecessors made the right call sending in U.S. forces to take him down.”

Clarke opened the binder and began to leaf through it.

“That said, Mr. President, I must add one question. Can you imagine the political firestorm that would have resulted if your predecessors had not acted to take out bin Laden—had followed the counsel of the naysayers—and then the nation learned they had just sat on their hands rather than doing everything possible to keep the country safe?”

Marcus returned to his seat, satisfied that he had made the most effective case possible.

But Stephens was ready with his own rebuttal. “Mr. President, before you make a final decision, remember May 7, 1999,” the director of Central Intelligence said, his tone calmer now and more confident.

“What happened on May 7?” Clarke asked.

“That was the day during the war in Serbia that the U.S. bombed a building in Belgrade, certain it was an enemy target, only to discover they had just bombed the Chinese embassy. Three dead. Nearly two dozen wounded. And a crisis with Beijing that rages to this day.”

Marcus tensed.

“And what about April 7, 2003?” Stephens continued. “That was the night an American B-1 bomber dropped a cluster of two-thousand-pound bunker-buster bombs on the Al Sa’ah Restaurant in the Mansour district of Baghdad. Why? Because the men and women sitting around this very table thought that Saddam Hussein and his two sons were there. Except they weren’t. And the bombs missed the target anyway, landing on nearby homes and killing twelve innocent Iraqis instead.”

Stephens paused for effect, then offered one more.

“Then there’s July 6, 2008. Why is that date important? Because that’s the day the White House was convinced it had a group of al Qaeda and Taliban terrorists in their sights in an Afghan town called Haska Meyna. There was precious little time to make a decision. So the president gave the order. And what happened? We ended up bombing a group of civilians heading to a wedding. Forty-seven dead, including thirty-nine women and children. Nine more were wounded. It wasn’t simply a humanitarian tragedy. It was an unmitigated political and public relations disaster.”

Stephens leaned back in his seat.

“Look, I’ve been in this game a long, long time,” he said. “I’ve seen the price of a hasty mistake. And I, for one, don’t ever want to pay that price again. Maybe Ryker’s right. Maybe. But what if he’s wrong? Imagine the global firestorm that will engulf this administration. How will the Saudis react if we kill a bunch of innocent Muslims on the eve of the peace signing on Tuesday? How will the U.N. react? How will the pope react? You think he will still come to the U.S. on his peace tour next month? I cannot even imagine.”

Now Stephens looked directly across the table at Marcus.

“Mr. Ryker, earlier you cited the case of this body deciding to send special forces into Pakistan to take down Osama bin Laden. You’re right, of course—that was a decision based on circumstantial evidence. But you failed to mention that the CIA had been monitoring that house in Abbottabad for months. Following leads. Gathering evidence. Ruling out other scenarios. And pushing detainees at Gitmo hard—very hard, far harder than you’re willing to push—to get every scrap of intel we possibly could before we took such risks. Not you. You’re asking the president to make a split-second decision to send our fighter pilots—the bravest and best-trained men and women in the world—into harm’s way on conjecture, against an unknown target, with unknown occupants, for an unknown outcome. That’s a risky bet with the cards you’re holding, young man. Too risky.”

With all eyes on him, Marcus felt his face and neck flush with anger. The arrogance of this guy was off the charts.

“Mr. President, you know my family history, and you know my service record,” he began, his voice quiet but firm. “I am well aware of the risks you would be putting our pilots in, sir, and I do not believe I’m asking you to act recklessly. I’m following the evidence. Not my whims. Not my passions. But carefully gathered evidence. Evidence that leads to that building in Libya. A massive and sophisticated compound in the middle of nowhere. With cinder block walls twenty feet high. No telephone wires. Not one but two satellite dishes. Towers in all four corners. A steel-reinforced front gate. And a pinging satphone repeatedly called by Abu Nakba’s most trusted advisor. Is that advisor talking? No. I concede he is not. But not because I didn’t push him and push him hard.”

Only then did Marcus turn back to look Stephens in the eye.

“Now, is the director of Central Intelligence really asking whether I followed his explicit orders to torture Hamdi Yaşar? Is he really asking me on the record, in the presence of the National Security Council, whether I obeyed orders that Mr. Stephens issued to me verbally by phone on two separate occasions, and in writing in a classified cable that I received at Gitmo the day that Agent Morris and I arrived—orders that I regard as illegal? Let me be clear, Mr. President: No, I did not.”