Marks and Moore were opposite him on a leather sofa, the twin of the one on which he sat. His assistant, Jolene, stood behind, a Bluetooth earplug connecting her to her cell. Sunlight crept in between the thick curtains. Through the slice of visible window could be seen the shadows of the secretary’s National Guard detail. On the low table between them were the remnants of breakfast. Cleo, Hendricks’s gorgeous golden boxer, sat immobile against his leg, mouth slightly open, head slightly cocked, staring at her master’s two guests as if curious about the long silence.
Soraya and Marks exchanged a quick glance, then she cleared her throat. Her large, deep-blue eyes and her prominent nose were the centerpieces of a bold Arabian face the color of cinnamon. She was possessed of a commanding presence that Hendricks found impressive. What he liked best, however, was that she wasn’t girlie—nor was she brittlely masculine like so many females in a male-dominated structure. She was her own person, which he found refreshing as well as curiously comforting. He therefore weighed her words as carefully as he did those of Marks.
“Peter and I want to move on a tip that came through early this morning,” Soraya finally said.
“What sort of tip?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Secretary,” Jolene said, leaning in, “I have Brad Findlay on the line.”
Hendricks’s head whipped around. “Jolene, what did I tell you about interrupting this briefing?”
Jolene took an involuntary step back. “I’m sorry, sir, but seeing as how it’s the head of Homeland Security, I assumed you—”
“Never, ever assume,” he snapped. “Go into the kitchen. You know how to handle Findlay.”
“Yessir.” Cheeks flaming, Jolene beat a hasty retreat out of the room.
Marks and Soraya exchanged glances again.
Soraya cleared her throat. “It’s difficult to say.”
“It’s not what you’d call a normal tip,” Marks said.
Hendricks drew his brows together. “Meaning?” He had completely forgotten Jolene, the call, and his waspish reaction.
“It didn’t originate from any of the usual suspects: disgruntled mullahs, opium warlords, the Russian, Albanian, or Chinese mafias.” Soraya rose and went around the room, touching a bronze sculpture here, the corner of a photo frame there. Cleo watched her with her large, liquid eyes.
Soraya stopped abruptly and, turning, looked at Hendricks. “All these things here are known. This particular tip came from the unknown—”
The secretary’s brow furrowed further. “I don’t understand. Terrorism—”
“Not terrorism,” Soraya said. “At least not as we have defined it so far. This is an individual who reached out to me.”
“Why did he want to turn? What’s his motivation?”
“That was still to be determined.”
“Well, whoever your informant is, get him over here for a debriefing,” Hendricks said. “I don’t much care for mysteries.”
“That would be the protocol, of course,” Marks said. “Unfortunately, he’s dead.”
“Murdered?”
“Hit-and-run,” Marks said.
“The point is we don’t know.” Soraya gripped the back of an upholstered chair. “We want to go to Paris and investigate.”
“Forget him. You have more important matters to see to. Besides, who knows whether he was trustworthy.”
“He had given me some preliminary information on a group known as Severus Domna.”
“Never heard of it, and furthermore the name sounds bogus,” Hendricks said. “I think this contact is playing you.”
Soraya stood her ground. “I don’t share that opinion.”
Hendricks rose and crossed to one of the windows. When he’d first met Soraya Moore, he’d wondered if she was a lesbian. There was something about her—a balance, an openness, a willingness to accept the complexities of people that a lot of hetero women simply couldn’t manage. Then he’d dived deeper into her jacket and discovered that her lover was Amun Chalthoum, head of al Mokhabarat, the Egyptian secret service. In fact, he’d called Chalthoum and had an interesting twenty-minute talk. Danziger had used her affair with Chalthoum as an excuse to fire her from Typhon. That was high on the long list of stupidities perpetrated by M. Errol Danziger since he’d come to CI. Typhon’s invaluable contacts and deep-cover operatives were loyal only to her. The moment Hendricks had named her co-director of Treadstone, every one of them had come with her. So now he had a sense of how unique she was.
“All right,” he said. “Look into it.” Then he turned back to them. “But, Peter, I want you here. Treadstone is still in its infancy and the fact is I envisioned it as an agency with the ability to police and clean up the giant squid of our post–nine-eleven intelligence community. There are now two hundred sixty-three and counting intelligence organs created or reorganized since 2001. And that doesn’t account for the hundreds of private intel firms we’ve seen fit to hire, some of them so beyond our control they’re operating here in the States in the same manner they do in world war zones. Do you realize that at this moment there are eight hundred fifty thousand Americans with top-secret clearance? That’s far too many by a staggeringly exponential number.” He shook his head emphatically. “There’s no way I will allow both my directors in the field at the same time.”
Marks took a step toward him. “But—”
“Peter.” Hendricks smiled. “Soraya has the field experience so she gets this assignment. It’s simple logic.” As they were leaving, he said, “Oh, by the way, I’ve been able to get the Treadstone servers access to all the clandestine services’ databases.”
After they’d gone, Hendricks thought about Samaritan. He had deliberately kept its existence from Peter, knowing that the moment he got wind of it, he’d want to become involved in the security of Indigo Ridge. Despite the president’s clear warning, Hendricks wanted to keep Peter on Treadstone, which was his baby now, a long-held desire that he was not going to relinquish, even for Samaritan. He was taking a risk, he knew that full well. Should any of the others in the Oval Office meeting, especially General Marshall, suspect that he was holding back key personnel for his own use he’d be in an untenable position.
Ah well, he thought, what’s life without risk?
He stepped back to the window. His roses looked bedraggled and forlorn. He glanced impatiently at his watch. Where was that damn rose specialist he’d hired?
It was quiet here, the house removed from the hubbub at the center of the city. Normally, he enjoyed that; it allowed him to think. But this morning was different. He had awoken with the nagging sense that he had missed something. He had already been married and divorced twice when he had met, married, and then buried his beloved Amanda. He had one son, from the second wife, now a marine in military intelligence, deployed in Afghanistan. He should have been worried about him, but the fact was he rarely thought about him. He’d had little to do with raising him; to be truthful, he might have been someone else’s son. Without Amanda, he had no attachments, no sense of family, only place. Like a European, he valued property over cash. In a sense, this house was all he had, all he needed. Why was that? he asked himself. Was something wrong with him? In restaurants, at official functions or the theater, he encountered colleagues with their wives, sometimes with their grown children. He was always alone, even though, from time to time, he had one woman or another on his arm—widows desperate to remain part of the social scene inside the Beltway. They meant nothing to him, these women of a certain age, with tight, poreless faces, breasts pushed up to their carefully sculpted chins, in their long gowns manufactured to impress. Often they wore gloves to hide their age spots.
He was pulled away from his ruminations by the sharp sound of the bell. Opening the front door, he was confronted by a woman in her mid- to late thirties, her hair pulled back from her heart-shaped face in a tomboyish ponytail. She wore round steel-rimmed glasses, denim overalls atop a plaid man’s shirt, frog-green clogs, and a floppy canvas sun hat.