Marcus shook his head slowly.
“You need to give a verbal answer, Mr. Ryker.”
“No,” he said softly.
“Have you dated anyone in the last several years?”
“No.” He suddenly felt very thirsty.
“Have any women expressed interest in dating you?”
Marcus couldn’t imagine how this was relevant, but he answered anyway. “Yes.”
“But you declined?”
“Yes.”
“During your travels with Senator Dayton, were you ever propositioned by a woman?”
“What?” Marcus snapped.
“Were you?” Morris asked calmly.
“Never,” he replied, then remembered to answer properly. “No.”
“Not in the Baltic states?”
“No.”
“Not in Moscow?”
“No.”
“Were you in any environment, any situation, that could have been construed by you or by others as a honey trap?”
It had taken several questions, but Marcus finally understood her purpose. He was a widower, potentially vulnerable to the efforts of a foreign intelligence agency to seduce him with romantic affections or sexual favors, compromising his credibility as a witness. Marcus was the only person who had met with the Raven. Everyone else in the U.S. national security apparatus was depending on his credibility. So Morris had to ask. Spy agencies had been setting honey traps for needy, vulnerable men from time immemorial, and the head of the CIA’s Moscow station would not have been doing her job if she hadn’t asked every relevant question, no matter how uncomfortable it made her subject.
“No,” he said at last.
68
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D.C.—26 SEPTEMBER
In Washington the day was just beginning, and the president of the United States was fuming.
Andrew Clarke entered the Oval Office at precisely 7 a.m. As a steward brought him coffee, the chief executive pored over every story on the front pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. They were all about Luganov, his surprise trip to Pyongyang, his extraordinary press conference announcing the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and his announcement that he intended to deescalate tensions along the Baltic and Ukrainian borders. In a single day, the Russian leader had completely changed the media narrative about him. No longer was he regarded as a rapidly intensifying threat to global safety and security. Suddenly he was being hailed as a man of peace and a viable recipient of a Nobel Prize.
Disgusted, Clarke tossed the papers aside and informed his secretary that she could send in the guests who were waiting in the lobby of the West Wing for their 7:30 meeting.
The first to enter the Oval was Richard Stephens, the balding, sixty-four-year-old director of the CIA who had previously served as the senior senator from Arizona and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Following him in was Cal Foster, the silver-haired, seventy-one-year-old secretary of defense. A retired four-star general, Foster had served more than three decades in the U.S. Army and nearly five years as the supreme allied commander of NATO. Also joining them was Bill McDermott, recently appointed deputy national security advisor. The last man to enter the room was the White House chief of staff.
Director Stephens began the briefing by giving the president and each participant a black leather-bound notebook embossed in gold lettering with the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency and the words The President’s Daily Briefing. Underneath that was the president’s name. Below that were the words TOP SECRET: Contains Sensitive Material. Inside was an eight-page bullet-point summary of the most urgent and important intelligence information the commander in chief needed to know.
During the previous day’s briefing, Stephens had introduced Clarke to the emergence of a possible high-level mole in Moscow code-named the Raven. He’d given the president an overview of the mole’s allegations and the fifty-three photos of documents the source had passed to an American case officer. No specifics about either figure were given, but plenty of caveats were. Stephens had underscored to the president how raw and unconfirmed this intel was. He’d also drawn the president’s attention to the section of the PDB mentioning the fact that Senator Dayton had met with President Luganov in the Kremlin, promising that more details of the meeting would be forthcoming.
Today they were.
“Mr. President, you’ll find that the last five pages in today’s PDB are a point-by-point account of Senator Dayton’s conversation with President Luganov,” the CIA director explained. “These are the verbatim notes taken by our station chief in Moscow, who met with the senator and his team when they briefed Ambassador Reed. I’d like to go over this with you rather carefully, because we expect the senator to be here by nine, and when he arrives, we want you to be fully versed on what was said in the meeting so we can focus our time with him on drawing some conclusions and seeing if we can come to a bipartisan agreement on where to go from here.”
“Fine,” Clarke said, leafing through the pages as he sat behind the Resolute desk.
“That said, Mr. President,” Stephens continued, “the first two pages of your brief focus on what we’re learning from the Raven and his case officer. Page 3 is a summary of Russian military activity over the last twenty-four hours. With your permission, I’ll cover these. Then I’ve asked Secretary Foster to discuss options.”
“What do we know about the Raven?” asked Clarke. “How close is he to Luganov? And how credible is the material he’s passed on to us?”
“All excellent questions, and I will get to each one in turn,” Stephens replied. “But if you’ll allow me, sir, I want to start with the identity of the figure we described in yesterday’s briefing as our ‘case officer,’ because to a certain degree, our level of confidence in the Raven is predicated on our level of confidence in the one bringing him to us.”
“Very well,” said the president. “Proceed.”
“Thank you, sir. Now, keep in mind that the information we had regarding the Raven was only hours old when I briefed you yesterday. Therefore, I essentially gave you a mere abstract of what we’d received because we believed it could be enormously important. But I did not bring more detail at the time because there had been effectively no time to cross-check any of the information. Today I can tell you much more.”
Clarke nodded and Stephens continued.
“This case officer—the person who made contact with the Raven—is not an actual case officer at all. He’s neither an employee of nor a contractor for the Agency. Nor is he a Foreign Service officer or even an employee of the U.S. government. Not anymore.”
“But he was?”
“He was never with the Agency in any capacity, but yes, he did work for the U.S. government in various capacities over the years.”
“Do you believe he is credible?”
“We do, Mr. President. He served in the U.S. military and received a Purple Heart. Later he worked here at the White House for a time.”
“So who is it?”
“Marcus Ryker.”
“Ryker? You mean the Secret Service agent?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Stephens confirmed.
“The one who lost his wife and son a few years back?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I thought he’d retired. What’s he doing in Moscow, of all places?”
Stephens looked to Bill McDermott.
“I think I can explain that, sir,” the deputy NSA said. “Marcus has known Senator Dayton since he and I both served on the senator’s protection detail on his codel to Afghanistan back in ’04. They have totally different political views, at least on domestic and social issues, but when Dayton decided to go to Europe to raise his profile for a presidential run, he hired Marcus to help him put together a security team. Though Marcus does not support the senator’s presidential run, he agreed out of friendship and, you could say, out of a sense of loyalty to the man.”