Vincent stood up and despondently grabbed his jacket and headed to the daily briefing and no doubt another jibe at his being late from Charles, his boss, the Director of the CIA.
Surprisingly, it wasn’t the case. Vincent joined another heated discussion, which appeared to be a continuation from the previous day’s disaster. All hell had broken out with each agency blaming the other for the mess. From what Vincent could work out, it seemed that a terrorist cell had been identified by the CIA. The CIA had asked the NSA to track all calls and they had then passed back information, which ultimately led the CIA to uncovering a domestic terrorist base in Chicago. The CIA has passed the information to Homeland who had liaised with the FBI and local agencies. From there, everything had fallen apart with various agencies fighting for ownership and initiating surveillance, which ultimately spooked the terrorists and none had been seen for days. They had literally disappeared into the wind.
As the meeting was drawing to a close, a phone call was put through. An extremely pissed off President was put on speakerphone.
“Mr President, you are on speaker with my team,” offered Charles, alerting the President to the other attendees.
“Team of what?” asked the President sarcastically. He was not a happy man.
“Sorry, Sir?” asked Charles surprised.
“I’ve just had Homeland and the FBI in here telling me about the screw up in Chicago, six fucking terrorists escaped under our noses!”
Charles shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He didn’t expect his counterparts to sink so low as to try and blame him for their screw up.
“Mr President, we did everything we could, Sir. We passed on the intelligence as soon as it fell outside of our jurisdiction!”
“I don’t fucking care whose fault it was, Charles,” shouted the President. “You guys cost me billions, fucking countless billions and you can’t catch the guys with their fucking home addresses! We can catch Bin Laden in fucking darkest Pakistan but we can’t catch six guys in fucking Chicago??!!!”
“But we can’t operate on US soil!” argued Vincent, he was fed up with the injustice.
“That’s all I get! We can’t do this, we can’t do that! I’m fed up with it! FBI and Homeland will be contacting you. And don’t worry, I tore them new assholes as well. I want to start hearing what we can do, not what we fucking can’t do! This shit stops now!”
“Of course, Mr President!” replied Charles to a dead line. Charles turned to his team for ideas.
“He’ll be gone in 6 months!” offered the Head of the Intelligence Division. Everybody knew the President had no hope against Governor Brown at the upcoming election
“And so will all of us. He’s ruthless. When he tells you to figure it out, you figure it out or you’re gone!” replied Charles sternly.
“But we can’t operate on US soil, even if we wanted to!” said Vincent. “I’ve got the best operatives in the world, they piss all over what we have domestically but we’re restricted by statute!” argued Vincent, defending his team.
“I know, I know,” replied Charles. He knew there was nothing they had done wrong but unfortunately Homeland and the FBI would be finding anything they could to redirect the blame. “Anyway, to find a solution, we need to look at the process as a whole, so let’s go through exactly what happened,” suggested Charles, handing over to his Head of Intelligence Division
Vincent sat back and listened as the Head of the Intelligence Division detailed the process and paperwork involved in passing information across to other agencies on an ongoing investigation. The list of procedures and checklists was endless. He actually wondered how they ever managed to achieve anything with such a ridiculous amount of bureaucracy and red tape.
After over two hours of discussion and analysis, they came to the conclusion that there was little they could have done differently. The problem wasn’t at their end. The FBI and Homeland had dropped the ball; it was their asses on the line and not the CIA’s. It was their procedure and their ass covering that had alerted the terrorists. Problem solved. At least for everyone at the CIA perhaps but Vincent was thinking of someone outside of the CIA. A thought that might just make save a number of people’s jobs.
As the group stood up to leave, Vincent stayed seated. “Charles, would you mind if I just run something past you?”
“Of course,” replied Charles, herding the others out the room.
Vincent waited until the door closed behind his colleagues and he and Charles were alone.
“What if we had an operative planted so deep domestically that he didn’t even know he was there himself?” he began.
Chapter 79
Yolana excused herself as she heard the raised voices from the adjoining state bedroom. The Governor and Katherine nodded, before Katherine asked, “Is there a restroom in there?”
“Of course,” said Yolana. “Come with me!”
Katherine joined her sister and walked into the state bedroom and found Sean surrounded and Surkov covering him with a gun.
“Don’t panic Katherine,” said Sean, as Katherine entered the bizarre scene, “I’ll get us out of this, somehow.”
Katherine laughed and began talking to the others in Russian, a language she had pretended earlier she didn’t speak. Sean was beginning to think he was losing his mind.
When Yolana seemingly introduced Katherine to the Governor, it took on an even more bizarre twist as they kissed on each cheek and looked at each other as though they had never met before and began conversing rapidly in Russian.
“Will somebody tell me what the fuck is going on here?” said Sean cutting across all of the Russians talking.
Dr Surkov held up his hand to silence everybody.
“You are a very lucky man, Sean Fox. You are witnessing the take over of the world’s two super powers!”
“Sorry?”
“We don’t have time for this,” said Katherine.
Surkov gave her a look that silenced her instantly.
“Each of you in here is only alive thanks to me. All of you, with the exception of Katherine, were delivered at birth by me. Sean is one of you, just as the Governor in there is one of you!” he pointed towards the other room.
“Seriously, I have no idea what the fuck you are talking about,” said Sean.
“I met the visionary Dr Mengele in Auschwitz where he had done groundbreaking work into twins, in particular, identical twins.”
There were so many things fucked up about that statement that Sean didn’t even know where to start.
“We were years ahead of everyone, decades in fact, we were experimenting with invitro fertilization thirty years before the first public test tube baby was announced. You in this room are all test tube babies born before Louise Brown, allegedly the first. That was our work, Dr Mengele and I. The plan was simple and brilliant. We believed that the likelihood of a powerful or famous person bearing a future president far exceeded the likelihood of ordinary people. We had proven that we could produce identical twins at will. So we set up clinics to help certain people have children. A very select few, very select. Your father was a military genius, Alexey’s father was a hero of the country and the first man in space, Rick’s father was a billionaire politician. There was a chance that any of you could have stepped up to become president. There are more, it’s not just you, hundreds but we never knew who would make it and who wouldn’t, so we had to cast the net wide to catch the big fish. Once in position, we replace the twin with our twin, our beliefs, our doctrines, our grand plan becomes a reality. Alexey and Rick have spent their lives following every detail of their twin’s lives. They are the perfect mimics, there is nothing they do differently.”
“Jesus, you did kill the Governor’s wife!” said Sean. “She’s the one person that would have known!”
Surkov nodded. “She would have known. By the time we realized he was the best chance to become President, he had already met his wife. Katherine got as close as she could and became Chief of Staff but never got closer. A very honorable man, the Governor,” Surkov said, looking at the beautiful and captivating Katherine, “Of course, she will marry our Rick and will become the First Lady. Just as Yolana, who knew our Alexey from Grebnevo went on to marry the other Alexey. My two presidents and my two girls by their sides!”