The president, exercising his prerogatives and indulging a habit, showed up a half hour late. He sat, waited while an aide poured his coffee, took a sip, and said, “We all know why we’re here. What are our options?”
Anders noted the use of the plural pronoun. Hamilton wasn’t the president’s problem. He was everyone’s problem. Of course, if things went well, only the president would get the credit. It was good to be the king.
The question hadn’t been directed at anyone in particular. Anders had long ago noted that the president liked to run his meetings like little Rorschach tests. Who would speak up first? Who was bold, who was canny? Anders knew the technique because he liked to employ it himself.
Vernon Jones, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, glanced at the secretary of defense, who nodded his assent. “Mr. President, DEVGRU and Delta are already in position and ready to go. All we need are intel and orders.”
Anders didn’t like Jones, a tall black man with an appealing Southern baritone Anders thought was an unfair advantage — the American equivalent of Oxford British, something that conferred a gravitas the substance of the person’s remarks couldn’t alone achieve. And even beyond his native antipathy, Anders hated the way Jones had framed the issue. He was as much as saying, “Assuming you have the balls, sir, the only question is whether the intel community is worth a damn.”
Everyone turned and looked at Anders. They knew better than to expect anything from the director of National Intelligence, Anders’s nominal superior and, by statute, a required attendee at meetings of the National Security Council. If there was one thing each of these people understood, one thing their shark minds were tuned for, it was where real power lay.
The DNI gave Anders his most serious look, a pantomime of authority. “Well, Ted, what have you got in the region?”
Ah, the you, not the we. Anders didn’t even look at him. “Mr. President, we are focusing all appropriate resources. SIGINT teams are scouring the area. A geomapping team is attempting to precisely locate the spot where the video was filmed. Voice analysis could give us the actual identity of the terrorist in the video.”
The president looked unimpressed. “How long is this going to take?”
“It’s difficult to say, sir. Sometimes we can get a break quickly. Other times—”
“I don’t want to wait. I understand the risks. But you need to understand, James Foley was waterboarded by these animals. Every hour we wait could be another hour they’re torturing Hamilton.”
Anders glanced around, noting the discomfited looks on some of the faces in the room. Describing waterboarding as torture produced a fair amount of doublethink these days.
“Yes, sir. I am personally monitoring—”
“I understand there’s been a tragedy in Istanbul. Your SUSLA was in a car accident.”
Anders didn’t hesitate. “Yes, sir, that is correct.”
How did the president already know that? And how did he even know what a SUSLA was? Then he realized: Jones told him. The man had seen his opportunity and had been quick to exploit it. Of course, Anders had played the same sort of games before being appointed to run NSA. But intel was his fiefdom now, and he knew from experience how rapaciously other players within the Defense Department wanted to encroach on it.
Anders quietly seethed. He’d been trying for years to assemble a file he could use to manage Jones. The problem was, either Jones really was an exceptionally God-fearing man with no indiscretions that might be unearthed, documented, and used against him; or he was exceptionally savvy in the way he conducted those indiscretions. And, naturally, he was also the person who was positioned, and inclined, to make the most trouble.
“Well?” the president said, looking at Anders. “Does this degrade your capabilities in the region?”
This was a difficult question. A no would lead to a question: What the hell does your SUSLA even do, then? But a yes would create an opening for the Pentagon to move in for the kill.
Finessing it, Anders said, “Sir, for a position this vital to the regional war effort, of course we have built-in redundancies. So while Perkins’s loss is indeed tragic, it will not impede our ability to carry out our mission.”
The president nodded as though this was what he’d been expecting. “All right. Keep on it. In the meantime, I’m formally tasking the Pentagon with the development of its own intel regarding Hamilton’s whereabouts and condition. As you’ve noted, redundancy is important. And this is America — we know competition is good.”
Anders nodded crisply, allowing nothing to betray his actual feelings. But this was a bad development. Worse than he had feared.
“We’ll convene again in twenty-four hours,” the president said. “By then, I want us to have the necessary intel, I want us to have a plan, and I want us to be in a position to immediately execute that plan.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Anders saw Jones nod, obviously pleased at how the meeting had gone. The president wanted a rescue; he had made that plain. And the Pentagon brass saw an opportunity to make him happy and more reliant on the military. They’d get him the intel. Even if they had to distort a few things in the process.
Well, Anders could distort a few things, too.
CHAPTER
12
Evie sat in a restroom stall — a different floor, a different part of the building from the one near her office. She didn’t want to see anyone likely to recognize her. She just needed a few minutes alone, a few minutes to compose herself, where no one could be watching.
Everyone was talking about the Hamilton kidnapping. There were rumors of a rescue operation, and it was all hands on deck. If anyone had heard about Perkins and his car accident, it wasn’t being much discussed. Maybe Hamilton had eclipsed that news; maybe no one really knew the SUSLA Turkey or particularly cared. Either way, no one was making the connection. She was the only one who knew anything about that.
Not knew, she corrected herself. Suspected.
Because what did she really know? Yes, it looked like Perkins had been feeding classified information to Hamilton. Yes, she had alerted the director just a day before he died. But car accidents happened. And Hamilton… well, if the reporter had gone to the Syrian border in pursuit of a story, he might have just been unlucky. He’d hardly be the first. And anyway, Hamilton wasn’t dead; he was kidnapped. Why would anyone have engineered something like that?
Not anyone. The director.
She realized she didn’t want to believe any of this was other than coincidence, and that her mind was offering up a kind of doublethink as a shield against unwelcome insights.
But still. Even if the director wanted Hamilton dead, then why wasn’t the journalist just dead? Why engineer a kidnapping?
Because he’s supposed to die. Or was supposed to. Or something. The kidnapping was all intended to obscure what’s really going on.
All right. That was logical, in a manner of speaking. But then… why have Perkins and Hamilton killed? Why not just have them prosecuted? She knew enough about the Espionage Act to know the government had no compunction about invoking it.
Against whistleblowers. It hasn’t been used yet to stop a mainstream journalist from reporting.
So… what then? The director knew, or suspected, that Perkins had turned over to Hamilton something so sensitive that ensuring silence warranted having him killed? She was privy to a tremendous amount of top-secret, sensitive, compartmented information, but she didn’t know anything that would justify murder. There had been leaks before. Whole books written about NSA. God, they’d even survived Snowden. Why would the director risk murder rather than just riding out the revelations the way they’d always been ridden out before?