The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  CHAPTER 6

  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.

  The president went to the door and opened it, politely gesturing for Harper to precede him into the next room.

  Its six large flat-panel wall displays
situated around a rectangular conference table, the ECR had been designed to conform with other presidential chambers at sites inside and beyond the capital, including Camp David, Air Force One, and the top secret bunker installations in Mount Weather and elsewhere. The goal being to enhance the commander in chief ’s familiarity with and instant comfort in his surroundings at times of critical deliberation and national emergency.

  The president’s closest advisors on matters of security and intelligence sat in six big black leather chairs around the table. Among them were two members of his cabinet, Secretary of Homeland Security Max Carlson and the newly ratified secretary of state, Jeff Dryfoos, the latter taking the place of the vice president, who was in Asia. Dryfoos was a newbie, having assumed the post after Brynn Fitzgerald’s recent resignation and formal announcement of her presidential bid. Her run had surprised no one less than Brenneman, who’d encouraged her to enter the heated race as his preferred successor.

  Also, there in person as Harper entered were CIA director Andrews and the director of National Intelligence, Shirley Choate. If the full fifteen-member cabinet had convened, they and all other non-cabinet officials except the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have sat in a row of chairs along the wall. With only two executive departmental heads in attendance, there was ample room for everyone at the table.

  Harper took his place next to Andrews, saying nothing, having gotten his preliminaries out of the way before the president pulled him aside. That consisted primarily of learning that no one knew very much about the attack, and even less about the situation in the ballroom.

  There were laptops in front of each seat. As Harper sat, Andrews turned his own monitor toward his colleague.

  Harper recognized the familiar box in the center of the screen. It was from TA, the Company’s Tech Analysis division—findings from the Iridium 11 geosynchronous satellite that scanned the Baltimore to Philadelphia corridor:

  NUMBER: 202-Private

  USER: Harper, Julie

  STATUS: Blocked

  BASELINE: Operational

  Harper drew breath sharply. He had to struggle to keep from showing any emotion when he read the last line. It meant that while Julie’s phone could not be accessed, the number was still online.

  Her phone had not been destroyed. That was the first positive sign he’d had since they were cut off.

  “Thanks,” he whispered to Andrews.

  The director nodded once and turned the monitor back.

  Breathing steadily to calm himself, reminding himself that this was only the faintest positive sign, Harper turned his gaze to the wall monitor opposite him. He saw Mathis waiting quietly behind his desk 100 miles to the east. With his wire spectacles and horseshoe pattern baldness, he looked very much the part of the career administrator, which would accurately describe his résumé.

  As the president took his seat, a voice came over the multidirectional PA in the center of the table. It was one of the watch officers in the next room.

  “Mr. President, we have SIOC online. It will be up on screen four whenever you’re ready.”

  “Thank you.” Brenneman settled into his chair. “Let’s roll.”

  The presidential-seal wallpaper on the indicated video panel vanished and was replaced by the image of a short-haired man in his forties with heavy features and a thick, fleshy neck that looked as if it had been uncomfortably mashed into the starched collar of his button-down shirt. His hands folded on a desktop, his sleeves rolled to just below his elbows, he sat amid computer banks, monitors, and circulating facility personnel. Save for the missing crawl and the time stamp in the lower right corner, it could have been a feed from Fox News.

  “President Brenneman, introducing assistant director of the FBI Joseph Ferrara,” said the watch officer.

  Brenneman looked at the display. “Joe, let’s get right to it. What’s the latest?”

  “Sir, in the last twenty minutes the Maryland state police have gotten an AW139 helicopter into the air over the center,” Ferrara said in his thick voice. “It’s streaming video, including thermal infrared imagery.” The SIOC chief glanced at a laptop. “The feed is being sent to you, File Code CC-A.”

  That was the first feed from the convention center. The group all looked at their laptops. They clicked on the box in the center of the screen to access the image. It showed mostly smoke and chunks of concrete, moving from left to right, with batches of red and yellow shapes scattered throughout.

  The shifting red shapes were people. The stationary yellow shapes were also people—those who were losing heat.

  Dead bodies.

  “Our field units from Baltimore have established a perimeter control and have agents outside the building—”

  “What about the hostage situation?” Andrews asked. “Our I-eleven has intercepted tweets from several sources.”

  “I was getting to that,” Ferrara said with a trace of annoyance. “We’ve seen those in the database, forwarded them to the agent in charge. She tells us that patterns of ongoing gunfire suggest people are being herded and executed.”

  “Jesus,” Secretary Dryfoos said.

  “They have six SWAT teams ready to go in, three from the FBI, two from the Baltimore PD, and one from the state police. They’re organizing now so they don’t shoot each other or innocents, with a T-minus of four minutes.”

  Andrews sighed and Harper knew why. A lot of people could die in that time period. But the team leaders also had to make sure that they had a single protocol for shoot-to-kill, surrender, explosive vests, wounded civilians, and anything else they might encounter.

  Brenneman thanked Ferrara politely, though Harper knew him well enough to know that the president would have liked to hear that units were inside the convention center already and collecting data and video.

  “Is there any surveillance footage?” Harper asked Ferrara.

  “We’ve got a streaming video from emergency vehicles, and we’re just starting to look at data from the convention center’s computers,” Ferrara said. “They have twenty-four discrete cameras, and we’re running the footage backward.”

  That made sense. It would bring up the actionable images first and would leave the forensic images for later.

  “Show us what we’re dealing with,” the president said. “Start with the ballroom and food area.”

  It was the logical choice, the place where a large percentage of high-value targets from D.C. had been gathered. It was also the place where a great deal of yellow had showed up on the thermal imaging.

  “Yes, sir,” Ferrara said and sent over CC-B and C. Each file had images from four separate cameras.

  The president glanced at Harper. “Jon, you don’t need to do this.”

  “It’s okay, sir,” he said. “I may see something.”

  Harper reached for a glass of water as he opened the files on his laptop, his eyes fixed on the carnage.

  The video images were arrayed in two rows of four. Clicking on any panel would give the viewer a full-screen view of that particular video.

  Seven of the videos were virtually static. Even the particulate matter hanging in the air barely moved. Because the cameras were all at an angle, they were looking through more of it than if they were at ground level and facing straight ahead.

  Everyone seemed to react as something moved.

  “Camera eight,” Dryfoos said. “Did you all see that?”

  Most of the others had already clicked and maximized the image. Harper set the water glass aside and leaned closer to the screen.

  There were two people, a male and a female. There were occasional glints of light from the floor, like luminous algae in moving water.

  “There’s glass from the barricade beside them,” Andrews said. “Three separate blast patterns.”

  “They were shot out, not blown out,” Mathis added needlessly.

  It was the first comment from the head of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Bureau. The psychiatrist was a college friend
of the Speaker of the House, an archrival of Brenneman’s. Mathis’s reliance on “cloud profiling”—identifying potential terrorists based on geographical and socioeconomic data rather than on actual affiliations—had taxed his allotment of FBI resources without providing any tangible results. While dismissing him would be easy, getting a replacement through the House would be impossible.

  “Who is in charge of this footage?” Andrews asked.

  “An outfit called Steel Guard Solutions provides building and event security to the center,” Ferrara said. “A couple of rental cops reported a CIA presence in the Pratt Street lobby. These two fit the report.”

  “When was that?” Harper asked, squinting at the image. He was ignoring the backward motion, concentrating on the faces.

  “About fifteen minutes ago—”

  “It can’t be,” Harper said suddenly.

  “What, Jon?” the president asked.

  Harper froze the image, clicked on the drop-down menu, kicked the size up to 150 percent, and hit the auto-enhance button. Most of the smoke seemed to vanish as the contrast in the figures was pumped up.

  He glanced at the time stamp. “Frame 5:28:02,” he said. “Go fifty percent up and enhance.”

  Everyone did as he’d instructed. Dumbstruck, Harper sat hunched in front of the screen, just staring. There was no mistaking the identities of the two people on-screen. The man with the coal-black shock of hair, the tall blond woman with him. Harper knew them as well as anybody in the entire world.

  “Good get, Jon,” Andrews said.

  “Thanks.”

  Neither Ferrara nor Mathis had any idea what they were talking about, but neither man would have admitted his ignorance. Fortunately, Secretary of State Dryfoos asked the question for them.

  “Who are we looking at?”

  “Incredibly,” Harper said, “that’s former Company man Ryan Kealey with CIA psychotherapist Allison Dearborn.”

  Harper clicked back to the backward feed. There were gun flashes from the couple’s position.