WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Jon, I’m so sorry,” said President David Brenneman as he strode into the small breakout room off the Situation Room-officially, the Executive Conference Room-and shut the door. “I’m not sure if it’s any comfort to you at all, but I have some idea what you’re going through.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
“And we don’t know anything yet,” Brenneman added. “We’ve been there before.”
Sadly, that was true. And anguished as he felt, Harper knew that the president was sincere. But it was still ironic hearing the president of the United States speak those words under these circumstances.
The ECR was part of the five-thousand-square-foot White House Situation Room complex occupying half the basement level of the West Wing. Set up by President John F. Kennedy following his dismal strategic attempt to overthrow Castro’s Cuban government, the complex continued to function as a command center for the president and his council of advisors, and as of the 2007 revamp, it was operated by the National Security Council, whose nearly two dozen military and intelligence watch teams perpetually supervised and identified domestic and global emergencies. Each team varyingly consisted of several duty officers, an intel analyst, and a communication assistant, who compiled and submitted the Morning Book-which included the National Intelligence Daily, the State Department’s Morning Summary, and any intelligence or diplomatic reports-to the active national security advisor. The NSA also received the hand-delivered President’s Daily Brief from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and personally updated the president at the beginning of each day and at the end with a Sit Room Note, summarizing reports, graphs, maps, and photos from other agencies and how they were publicly received.
Harper and the president had been waiting for the meeting’s teleconference attendees to be brought online when Brenneman asked Harper to step inside, hitting a switch to opaque the window into the ECR so they could speak in absolute privacy. Now the men stood facing each other, bonded by grief. Two years earlier the second-term president had lost his niece, Lily Durant, to an insurgent group in Darfur. They had ruthlessly wiped out an entire refugee camp, but Lily, who had been doing volunteer relief work with UNICEF, had been their real target. Caught in a surprise raid on the camp, she was raped and murdered in their effort to mislead Brenneman into believing the Sudanese government was culpable.
The twist was that Harper had been among the core advisors to have met with Brenneman at Camp David not long after the early evidence came in, as had his own boss, the director of the CIA, Robert Andrews. Andrews, along with a fellow intelligence advisor and two top members of the cabinet, was even now waiting at a conference table in the ECR, on the other side of the electronically fogged glass panel. Back then, Andrews and Harper had both smelled something amiss in the raw data coming from Africa and had advised Brenneman to be patient. No one wanted to launch a misplaced retaliatory strike. Waiting appealed not only to the commander in chief ’s moderate inclinations but also to his grasp on common sense, which was uncommon in Washington. Their instincts had proven correct, though they could not have known then that the architect of the Darfur incident was one of the president’s handpicked confidants: the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Joel Stralen. He had been determined to set the nation on a course of war with Sudan, killing great numbers of people in the hope of disrupting a nexus of anti-American sentiment, a hatchery for the next generation of terrorists.
Success in that crisis had depended on Harper and Andrews probing beyond the obvious and being willing to gamble on a wild card named Ryan Kealey doing the job. Of course, that had been an overseas situation, a third-world battleground. It was not a major American city, with emotional resonance to the last attack on major American cities.
Now he stood looking at a changed Brenneman in the gloved silence of the room. A month shy of his fifty-eighth birthday, the president had thick gray hair, which had been almost completely brown before his niece’s death had leeched it of color, even as his once youthful face had become permanently lined and careworn, almost seeming to age a full decade overnight. Even the lyrical tone of his once sanguine voice, the narrative tool that had propelled him through college debates at Georgetown, long campaign trails to Congress, and had ultimately carried him through the crowds and into the White House, was stained by years of distress. Harper couldn’t help but notice the toll his friend had paid to pass through these gates, the hell that came with it. Nor would he wish to change places with the hard-lined leader. This time, he knew America had picked the right man for the job. And Harper was determined to give the guy the legroom with which to do it. Only one of them was faced with a personal loss, but both were processing the shock of another homeland assault.
“I appreciate your concern, sir,” Harper said, with deeper gratitude than the president might have realized. “It’s funny. I was talking to her when it happened, telling her I felt bad about missing her big dinner. She was telling me I shouldn’t.” He looked down. “What were we here to talk about, Mr. President? God, it seems so long ago.”
“It was the CIA,” the president said. “The Coyote. It was important.”
Harper nodded, his mouth tense, despising his show of weakness.
“Jon, listen to me,” Brenneman said, sensing Harper’s anger and jumping into the pause. “You have every reason to be excused from the meeting-”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“No, but it may be advisable,” Brenneman said. “There are plenty of good heads here to keep mine straight. I promise you’ll be fully briefed.”
“Sir, I prefer to stay involved. It’s really the best thing I can do in every respect. When the rescue workers have news…” His voice trailed off.
“Of course,” the president replied.
What Harper told Brenneman was the truth. As he’d risen through the Company’s organizational hierarchy, his functions had become increasingly administrative. But intel gathering was his area of special expertise, and it was hardwired so that he could process critical events quickly, accurately, and intuitively through the rapid assembly and cataloguing of information. Personal or professional crises, they were alike in how he dealt with them. In this case the two were sadly inseparable.
“Who’s with us via video linkup?” he asked, wanting to shift the focus of their discussion from himself. The only way he could function was to actually start doing it. To turn his mind toward the tasks that lay right in front of him. “Sandy Mathis insisted he’d be glued to his desk at Quantico this weekend, so I’m assuming he was easy enough to find?”
Brenneman’s twisted expression indicated that Harper’s taut sarcasm had registered loud and clear.
“Sandy was coming online as we stepped in here. But I’ve left overall coordination of our remote participants up to SIOC,” he said.
That was a good call. The president was referring to the FBI’s Strategic Information and Operations Center at the bureau’s Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters. There the data pouring in from the nation’s one hundred independent Joint Terrorism Task Forces was merged into a single shared pool-a common watering hole that could be tapped by the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies. A spin-off, SIOC–I-from which particularly sensitive information was withheld-was for the country’s international allies to draw on. SIOC–I also had access to similarly redacted documents from thirty-two other nations.
Brenneman had kept his eyes on Harper’s face, reading the determination there.
“Okay,” he said finally. “We’d better rejoin everyone before they feel neglected.”
It was a joke, but just barely. People whose job it was to be paranoid found it difficult to keep that out of their own intra- and interdepartmental dealings.