The President Is Missing: A Novel (28 page)

I
return to my communications room, where I find Vice President Katherine Brandt, her eyes cast down, her posture slumped. Before I interrupted our talk, she had said something meaningful to me.

She perks up when she sees me enter the room, her posture stiffening.

“No luck on the virus yet,” I say, sitting down. “Whoever created that thing is playing chess, and we’re playing checkers.”

“Mr. President,”
says Kathy,
“I just offered you my resignation.”

“Yes, I remember,” I say. “This is not the time for that, Kathy. They’ve tried to kill Augie and me twice. And I’m not well, as I just explained to you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I hadn’t realized your condition was acting up again.”

“I didn’t tell anybody. This isn’t a good time for our friends or our enemies to think the president is in poor health.”

She nods her head.

“Listen, Carolyn has been a few floors above you in the White House the whole time. She knows everything. We have it all written up in a document, too. If something had happened to me, Carolyn would have told you everything within minutes. Including my various plans for what to do, depending on how bad this virus is. Including military strikes on Russia, China, North Korea—whoever is behind this virus. Contingency plans for martial law, the suspension of habeas corpus, price controls, rationing of critical goods—the works.”

“But if I am the traitor, Mr. President,”
she says, barely able to spit out that word,
“why would you trust me to stop these people? If I’m in cahoots with them.”

“Kathy, what choice did I have? I can’t just switch you out with somebody new. What was I supposed to do four days ago when I learned about the leak from Nina through my daughter? Demand your resignation? And then what? Think about how long it would take to replace you. A vetting process, the nomination process, approval by both houses. I didn’t have that kind of time. And if you left and there was a vacancy, think who is next in line of succession.”

She doesn’t respond, breaking eye contact. The reference to Speaker Lester Rhodes does not seem to sit well with her.

“More important than that, Kathy—I couldn’t be sure it was you. I couldn’t be sure it was any of you. Sure, I could have fired all six of you, just to make sure I got rid of the leaker. Just to be safe. But then I’m losing essentially my entire national security team when I need them most.”

“You could have polygraphed us,”
she says.

“I could have. That’s what Carolyn wanted. Give all of you lie-detector tests.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why not, sir?”

“The element of surprise,” I say. “The only thing I had going for me was that I knew there was a leaker, but the leaker didn’t know I knew. If I put all of you on a box and asked you whether you leaked information about Dark Ages, I’d show my hand. Whoever was behind this would know that I knew. It was better to play dumb, so to speak.

“So I got to work fixing the problem,” I continue. “I called in the under secretary of defense and had her check, independently, that the revamping of our military systems was being done properly. Just in case Secretary Dayton was the Benedict Arnold. I had General Burke at Central Command verify the same thing overseas, just in case Admiral Sanchez was the traitor.”

“And you were assured things were done properly.”

“Properly enough. We couldn’t completely re-create everything in two weeks by any means, but we’re up and running enough to launch missiles, to deploy air and ground forces. Our training exercises were successful.”

“Does that mean Dayton and Sanchez are crossed off your list? The list is down to four now?”

“What do you think, Kathy? Should they be crossed off?”

She thinks about that a minute.
“If one of them is the traitor, they wouldn’t be so obvious as to sabotage something that was their direct responsibility. They might anonymously leak the code word. They might provide some information to the enemy. But these specific tasks you’ve assigned them—there’s a spotlight directly on them. They can’t screw it up. They’d be exposed. Whoever did this gave it a lot of thought.”

“My thinking exactly,” I say. “So no, they aren’t crossed off the list.”

This is a lot for Kathy to take in, and she understands that as I talk about the traitor, in my mind I could be talking about her. It wouldn’t be easy for anyone to accept. Then again, she isn’t exactly wearing a white hat in all this.

Finally, she says,
“Mr. President, if we get through this—”

“When,” I say. “When we get through this. There’s no ‘if.’ ‘If’ is not an option.”

“When we get through this,”
she says,
“at the appropriate time, I will tender you my resignation to do with what you will. If you can’t trust me, sir, I’m not sure how I can serve you.”

“And then who’s next in line?” I say, returning to that theme.

She blinks a few times, but the answer isn’t exactly a hard one.
“Well, obviously I wouldn’t step down until you secured a replacement—”

“You don’t even want to say his name, do you, Kathy? Your friend Lester Rhodes.”

“I…I don’t think I’d call him my friend, sir.”

“No?”

“I certainly wouldn’t. I—I did happen to run into him this morn—”

“Stop right there,” I say. “You can lie to yourself all you want, Kathy. But do not lie to me.”

Her mouth still works for a moment, searching for something, before she closes it and remains still.

“The first thing I did four days ago, when I learned of the leak,” I say. “The first thing I did. You know what it was?”

She shakes her head but can’t bring herself to speak.

“I had each of you surveilled,” I say.

She brings a hand to her chest.
“You had…me…”

“All six of you,” I say. “FISA warrants. I signed the affidavits myself. Those judges had never seen
that
before. Liz Greenfield at the FBI executed them. Intercepts, eavesdropping, the works.”

“You’ve been…”

“Spare me the indignation. You would have done the same thing. And do
not
sit there and act like you just happened to ‘run into’ Lester Rhodes this morning on your way to breakfast.”

There’s not a lot she can say. She doesn’t have a leg to stand on, given what she did. She looks as if she wants to crawl under a rock and hide right now.

“Focus on the problem,” I say. “Forget politics. Forget the hearing next week. Forget about who might be president a month from now. Our country has a very big problem, and all that matters is solving it.”

She nods, unable to speak.

“If something happens to me, you’re up to bat,” I say. “So get your head out of your ass and be ready.”

She nods again, first slowly, then more adamantly. Her posture straightens, as if she is setting everything else aside, focusing on a new course of action.

“Carolyn’s going to show you the contingency plans. They’re for your eyes only. You’ll stay in the operations center. You won’t be able to communicate with anyone but Carolyn or me. Understood?”

“Yes,”
she says.
“May I say something, sir?”

I sigh. “Yes.”

“Give me a polygraph,”
she says.

I draw back.

“The element of surprise is lost now,”
she says.
“You’ve told me everything. Give me a lie detector and ask me if I leaked ‘Dark Ages.’ Ask me about Lester Rhodes if you want. Ask me anything. But make damn sure to ask me if I have ever, in any way, betrayed our country.”

That one, I must admit, I didn’t see coming.

“Ask me,”
she says,
“and I’ll tell the truth.”

I
t is 11:03 p.m. in Berlin, Germany.

Four things happen at the same time.

One: a woman in a long white coat enters the front door of the high-rise condominium building, multiple shopping bags, like bulky appendages, in hand. She walks straight to the clerk at the front desk. She looks around and spots the camera in the corner of the ornate, spacious lobby. She sets down the bags and smiles at the clerk. He asks for her identification, and she opens her flip wallet, revealing a badge.

“Ich’m ein Polizeioffizier,”
she says, losing her smile.
“Ich brauche Ihre Hilfe jetzt.”

Identifying herself as a cop. Telling him she needs his help right away.

Two: a large orange waste-disposal truck bearing the company name Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe pulls alongside the same building to the east, as the wind off the river Spree swirls around it. When the vehicle comes to a stop, the back door lifts open. Twelve men, members of the KSK, the Kommando Spezialkräfte, Germany’s elite rapid-response special-forces unit, emerge from the truck dressed in tactical gear—vests, helmets, heavy boots—and armed with HK MP5 submachine guns, or riot-control rifles. The nearby door to the condo building pops open automatically, courtesy of the front desk, and they enter the building.

Three: a helicopter, painted white and bearing the name of a local television station, but in fact a KSK stealth helicopter with reduced-noise-operation capability, hovers silently over the top of that same building. Four KSK commandos, likewise dressed in tactical gear, fall from the helicopter, lowering themselves thirty feet down to the rooftop, softly landing and detaching the cords from their belts.

And four: Suliman Cindoruk laughs to himself as he watches his team inside the penthouse suite. His four men—the remaining four members of the Sons of Jihad, besides him. Still recovering from last night’s festivities, stumbling around, half dressed and scraggly, hungover if not still intoxicated. Since they all awakened, some time midday, they have done a grand total of nothing.

Elmurod, his stomach stretching his bright purple T-shirt, drops onto the couch and uses the remote to turn on the TV. Mahmad, wearing a stained undershirt and boxers, his hair standing on end as he sucks down a bottle of water. Hagan, the last one to awaken, in midafternoon, shirtless, wearing sweatpants, munches on grapes from the spread of food left over from last night. Levi, gangly and awkward and wearing only underwear, who assuredly lost his virginity last night, puts his head against a pillow on the couch, wearing an easy smile.

Suli closes his eyes and feels the breeze on his face. Some people complain about the winds coming off the Spree, especially in the evening, but it’s one of the things he enjoys the most. One of the things he will miss the most.

He checks the firearm at his side by force of habit. Something he does almost every hour of the day. Checking the magazine, making sure it is loaded.

Loaded, that is, with a single bullet.

T
hey climb the stairs with the proper tactical approach, securing each staircase with a single soldier—a scout—before the rest of the team proceeds upward. There are blind spots everywhere. Ambush opportunities on each level. Their contact at the front desk has given an all-clear on the stairwells, but he is only as competent as the cameras he monitors.

The team 1 leader is a man named Christoph, eleven years now with the KSK. When the twelve-man team reaches the landing on the penthouse floor, he radios in to the commander. “Team 1 in red position,” he says in German.

“Hold in red position, team 1,”
calls out the commander from his location, in a vehicle down the street.

The commander for this mission is the brigadier general himself, KSK’s leader. That’s a first as far as Christoph’s ever heard—KSK’s highest-ranking officer personally commanding a mission. But then again, this is the first time the brigadier general received a call from the chancellor himself.

The target is Suliman Cindoruk,
Chancellor Richter told the brigadier general.
He must be taken alive. He must be apprehended in a condition that allows him to be immediately interrogated.

Thus the ARWEN in Christoph’s hands, the riot-control weapon containing nonlethal plastic baton rounds, capable of unloading the entire five-round magazine in four seconds. Six of the twelve men have ARWENs to incapacitate their targets. The other six have standard MP5 submachine guns should lethal rounds prove necessary.

“Team 2, status,”
the commander calls out.

Team 2, the four men on the roof:
“Team 2 in red position.”
Two of the KSK soldiers prepared to rappel from the roof onto the balcony below. Two others secure the roof in the event of an escape attempt.

But there won’t be an escape,
Christoph knows.
This guy’s mine.

This will be his bin Laden.

Through his earpiece, the commander:
“Team 3, confirm number and location of targets.”

Team 3 is the stealth helicopter overhead, using high-powered thermal imaging to detect the number of people on the penthouse level.

“Five targets, Commander,”
comes the response.
“Four inside the penthouse, congregated in the front room, and one on the balcony.”

“Five targets, confirmed. Team 1, proceed to yellow position.”

“Team 1, proceeding to yellow position.” Christoph turns back to his men and nods. They raise their weapons.

Christoph slowly turns the latch on the staircase door, then gently but swiftly pulls it open with a rush of adrenaline.

The hallway is empty, quiet.

They proceed slowly, the twelve of them in a crouch, guns raised, measuring each step to minimize footfalls on the carpeted floor, slinking toward the single door on the right. His senses on high alert, Christoph feels the heat and energy of the men behind him, smells the lemon scent off the carpet, hears the heavy breathing behind him and the vague sound of laughter down the hallway.

Eight meters away. Six meters. Performance adrenaline coursing through him. Heartbeat racing. But his balance steady, his confidence high—

Click-click-click
.

His head whips to the left. The sound is subtle but distinct. A tiny square box on the wall, a thermostat—

No, not a thermostat.

“Shit,” he says.