The President took his seat and then so did everyone else, including Reeder, who moved to one of the chairs along the wall. He could feel eyes on him. Some here may have wondered if he was back with the Secret Service. Even so, SS agents invariably waited outside.
Back in the day, even the powerful Senator Blount would have been on the outside. But in this era of increasingly tighter budgets, having in attendance the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense only made sense... and Blount now held that chair.
Last year, the venerable Senator had been instrumental in pushing through a law lowering the minimum age for the presidency to thirty, an obvious attempt to clear a path for a new era of strong young conservatives. The President had supported that, as part of an effort to bridge the right and left, including a peace offering that saw the Senator’s son Nicholas appointed to the cabinet as Secretary of Agriculture. The young Blount’s predecessor had been assassinated last year in the plot to bring down the government, a coup that Reeder and Rogers had helped quash.
Admiral David Canby, the shaved-headed chairman of the Joint Chiefs — a politically savvy, by-the-book Navy man — trained his battleship-gray eyes on Reeder and said, “He doesn’t have clearance to be here.”
“He does now,” Harrison said.
“By whose authority?” Canby asked. Demanded.
“Mine.” The President’s eyes were fixed on the admiral. For a long moment no one said a word, as everyone in the room decided not to further challenge Reeder’s presence.
Vinson, seated at the President’s left hand, gave Canby a patronizing thing that was technically a smile. He said, “Now that we’ve established that the President of the United States is in charge here, could we get down to business and find out what the hell happened to our people?”
Canby gave Vinson a quick glare, but he and everyone else here knew the power the Chief of Staff wielded in this administration. Reeder could see the admiral clenching and unclenching his fists, no doubt wishing he could deck the man. Harrison himself had probably considered doing that a time or two. But the truth was, Vinson made things happen.
The President indicated the screen that swallowed the wall opposite him. “What exactly are we looking at, Admiral?”
“You might say,” Canby said somewhat wryly, “the crime scene.”
The satellite view of scrubby, trampled ground included a handful of bodies, scattered carelessly; no massacre by any means. A few abandoned vehicles, jeeps possibly, some wrecked, and wisping smoke. The Azbekistani resistance, such as it was, had clearly been minimal.
President Harrison swung his attention to the Director of the CIA. With his wreath of white hair and wire-framed glasses, Richard Shaley — despite a grandfatherly look — was every inch the veteran spy, beginning as a field agent in the first Iraqi war. But it was his political skills that made him really dangerous — like J. Edgar Hoover before him, Shaley was said to hold the keys to every DC closet holding a skeleton, and that was a lot of bones.
“The CIA Director and I spoke last night,” Harrison informed the group, “and I frankly was not pleased with what I heard. Director Shaley, have you had an opportunity to learn anything more about our dead people?”
Reeder stiffened — this was the first time anyone had said it out loud, and it was the President doing so: our people are dead.
Everyone at the table turned toward the CIA Director. The collective blankness of their expressions was like a witness considering the options at a suspect lineup. Shaley leaned forward, eyes meeting the President’s. His shrug was a slow-motion affair. “What can I say? A mission went wrong, Mr. President.”
“I was hoping for a little more,” the President said.
“Well, it’s a tragedy, of course.”
Platitudes, Reeder thought. The President’s reaction would not be pretty.
It wasn’t.
His gaze unblinking and accusing, Harrison said to the CIA Director, “You were to find me answers, Dick. What are they? Where are they?”
“Mr. President...”
“Why were our people there in the first place, and against my direct orders, since we knew a Russian attack was imminent! Who in the hell signed off on sending them over there? Was it you, Dick?”
Shaley sat very still for a second. He spoke so softly that some at the table may not have heard, as if he wanted only the man who’d queried him to be privy.
“Mr. President,” he said, “I was not the one to sign the order to send the team in there for what appears to have been a routine assessment of the situation.”
“You made that clear in private. You were to fact-find. You’ve had several hours. Do you know who did?”
“Not for sure yet, Mr. President.”
The President drew in a deep breath and said, “The media knows that four Americans have disappeared, and the commentators are speculating CIA, and even raising the possibility that our people are dead. But the CIA itself doesn’t know who sent its own people into harm’s way? Not acceptable.”
Shaley appeared calm. Maybe he was, Reeder thought. You did not hold a position as powerful as Shaley’s, for as long as he had, by getting rattled during questioning — even if the interrogator was the most powerful man in the free world. And even if those seated around him were among the most powerful figures in government.
All the Director said was, “We’re looking into it, Mr. President.”
“Look faster, look harder. I want an answer by the end of the day — understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
Harrison nodded toward the looming screen. “Well, at least tell me this, Dick. Can we identify any of those bodies as ours?”
Shaley said, “No. But we believe the civilian vehicle barely visible at the edge of those trees... near where we have a glimpse of highway?... was theirs. There were several bodies nearby... specifically, four... that the Russians cleared out with their own minimal casualties. We believe those four to be ours, yes.”
“Then the Russians killed our people?”
“Our best guess is yes, Mr. President.”
Reeder had to give Shaley credit — he wasn’t ducking responsibility.
The President’s expression was placid but his eyes were hard as he again trained his gaze on the CIA CEO. “You’re saying we don’t know that either?”
“Not for certain, Mr. President. There were two factions firing on each other. It’s an active war zone, after all.”
Admiral Canby, leaning forward, said, “Mr. President — it’s painfully clear the Russians killed our people. Director Shaley is correct in his assessment that this was a combat situation, but aside from friendly fire, there was no reason for the Azbekistanis to kill our people. They’re our allies! No, this was an act of war, Mr. President, and should be treated as such.”
Harrison regarded the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “Then you would suggest we go to war, Admiral, before we have all the facts?”
“Sir, how many more facts do we need? Our people, almost certainly dead, were carted off a battlefield by members of an invading army.”
The President’s voice remained calm, resolute. “I want to know why our people were there when they shouldn’t have been, who pulled the trigger on them, and who sent them into an active war zone. When I know those three things, then we’ll act. Not before. In the meantime, we do not attack, we make no definitive statement to the media, and we do whatever it takes not to escalate the situation. Am I clear?”