by Marc Cameron
“Good morning, Mr. President.” Bailey raised a mug of peppermint tea as if to offer a toast. He canted his head to one side, giving Ryan a narrow eye, probing like a CT scan. “A little extra bounce in your step this morning.”
“Is that so?” Ryan shrugged, trying to keep a straight face as he thought about Cathy. The presidency really was a fishbowl.
Ryan hung a right when he got off the elevator, stepping outside to continue his morning commute past the Rose Garden and along the colonnade to the Oval Office. He looked forward to the minute or two of fresh air and breeze. The Secret Service agent opened the door and stepped aside, posting outside the door.
Ryan’s principal secretary buzzed the intercom the moment he sat down at his desk.
“Good morning, Betty,” he said, waiting a beat. She usually gave him a minute or two to settle in, so something had to be up.
“SAIC Montgomery is here. He’d like a few minutes before your nine o’clock.”
“By all means,” Ryan said, scooting back from the Resolute desk and rising to his feet. Normally people stood when he came into the room, but Gary Montgomery was the Special Agent in Charge of the Secret Service Presidential Protection Division—the hundreds of men and women who kept Ryan and his family safe. If Ryan was going to defer to anyone, it would be Montgomery.
The SAIC of PPD came through the door. He was forty-eight years old, six-three, and built like a linebacker. His dark suit was on the expensive side, cut loose to allow for the SIG Sauer pistol and extra magazines on his belt. No desk-jockey boss, he had to be just as prepared as the most junior post-stander on the protective detail—maybe more so. Montgomery had boxed at the University of Michigan and, apart from any athletic competition involving Ohio State, was generally mild mannered. He possessed what Ryan’s father had called “quiet hands” and moved with the confident demeanor of a person whose abilities had been severely tested and found equal to the task. Competent. Calm. Unflappable.
And he wasn’t smiling.
Ryan motioned to one of the chairs in front of his desk. “Morning, Gary.”
“Good morning, Mr. President,” Montgomery said, remaining on his feet and getting straight to the point. “As you know, Secret Service Protective Intelligence has search-engine alerts set up on you, your family, and key members of your administration.”
“That’s gotta be a load of fun to read,” Ryan said, shaking his head.
Montgomery glanced at his watch, the kind of glance that said he was in no mood for lighthearted banter. “A little over an hour ago, no fewer than seven different websites calling themselves news organizations put up what are essentially four slightly different versions of the exact same—”
Betty buzzed the intercom again. “Sorry to interrupt, Mr. President, but DNI Foley just arrived, along with Secretaries Burgess and Dehart. The attorney general telephoned to say he is on his way.”
The Oval’s west door all but exploded off its hinges as Arnie van Damm burst in. He wore a suit, but his bald head was flushed and sweating, as if he’d just stepped off an exercise bike. It took a lot to rattle him, a savvy political operative.
He shot a hard look at Montgomery. “I assume you are here about—”
“I am,” the agent said.
* * *
—
Jack Ryan leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands on his chest, index fingers pointing at his chin. He was the only one in the room sitting down, and judging from the way everyone else shuffled their feet, that wasn’t about to change anytime soon.
“You all know Gary Montgomery, the agent in charge of my Secret Service detail,” Ryan said. “He was just about to brief me on some information his protective intelligence division has come up with.”
The director of national intelligence looked at Montgomery. “That crap on the Internet?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Montgomery said.
Fiercely loyal, Mary Pat Foley was one of Ryan’s closest confidantes and friends, and, as such, was prone to being a bit of a mother hen. She’d moved up next to his desk as soon as she’d come into the Oval, as if to cover him with her wing. As director of national intelligence, Foley provided an umbrella of communication over the sixteen intelligence agencies of the United States. She’d been a case officer at CIA when Ryan was still an analyst, earning a well-deserved reputation as a crack intelligence operative, unafraid of getting her hands dirty with calculated risks. She gave the Secret Service agent a long look, sighed, and then took a half-step back from the desk, literally yielding the floor.
“Sir,” Montgomery said, picking up the offered baton and running with it. “An hour ago, several quasi-news sites put up a video purported to be of you talking to a small group of supporters in a Washington hotel.”
“Purported?” Ryan mused.
“Yes, sir,” Montgomery continued. “The voice and image sound and look like you, but it’s definitely not you.”
“The Secret Service would be in a position to know,” Ryan said. “What am I purported to be saying?”
“You’re assuring those present that you are saving enough flu vaccine for those in your innermost circle, including the people you are addressing. The video is just a snippet, only twenty-four seconds long, but most of the websites quote unnamed sources that say more damning videos will be released soon.” Montgomery blinked hard, as if he had a bad tooth. “The sites go on to accuse you of turning a blind eye to the flooding in Louisiana and the cholera outbreak there that they—”
Ryan sat up straighter. “I’m going to stop you there, Gary.” He looked at Homeland Security Secretary Dehart. “Cholera outbreak?”
“That’s why I’m here, Mr. President. “Three cases as of five a.m. Central Time.”
Bob Burgess, the secretary of defense, grimaced. “Cholera? I thought we eradicated that in the U.S.?”
“Doesn’t happen often,” Dehart said. “Not since we figured out how to keep our water supply and sewage separate. That said, every major flood or hurricane poses some risk. The area where these cases hit is extremely poor, with a lot of folks still using well water and outhouses.”
Burgess turned up his nose. “Outhouses can’t still be a thing.”
“You’d be surprised,” Dehart said, turning to Ryan. “FEMA personnel out of Baton Rouge are at the hospital now. A CDC team is en route. I’ll have information for you within the hour.”
“But no one has died?” Ryan asked.
“Not yet,” Dehart said, his mouth set in a grim line. “But two of the cases are children. The prognosis isn’t good.”
Ryan closed his eyes. “A cholera outbreak . . .”
“Not an outbreak,” van Damm said, glaring at Montgomery. “Three cases.”
“I used the websites’ language, sir,” Montgomery said.
“Go on,” Ryan said. “What else does the website language say?”
“More accusations,” Montgomery said. “You supposedly have a team of personal assassins to carry out extrajudicial killings pursuant to the Ryan Doctrine. There’s a lot of discussion about what they are calling a ‘callous unwillingness’ to support the students in Iran against their oppressive regime. But the vaccine video is the most problematic, as far as the Secret Service is concerned.”
“You mean the one that is the most likely to make people want to kill me?”
“To put it bluntly,” Montgomery said. “Yes, Mr. President.”
Van Damm slid a tablet computer across the desk. “I’ve got it pulled up if you want to take a look.”
Ryan watched the twenty-four seconds of footage four times. He knew he’d never made such a speech, but even he would have said it was real.
“This video is a clip from an address I gave to a group of public policy students at the University of Maryland a couple of years ago. I’m sure someone’s thrown it up on YouTube.” He slid
the chief of staff back his tablet. “The voice sounds like me, and my lips match the words being said, but as I recall, that particular speech was about European trade.”
“Unfortunately,” Mary Pat said, “it’s getting all too easy to manipulate audio and video. Deepfake, or FakeApp, they call it. There are several types of software that do a believable job. We were playing with this tech several years ago at the Agency. You just need an existing video and some audio files from which to get exemplars. An actor can then sit in front of a camera and microphone and read from a prepared script. The program inputs the mouth movements, facial expressions, and synthesized voice onto the target video. It’s CGI and AI all rolled into one.”
“Should be easy to disprove,” Ryan said. “Since the actual video is on YouTube.”
“That’s the problem,” Foley said. “The real video makes you look good. The doctored one makes you look bad.”
“And you think people will believe the bad,” Ryan said.
“That’s the way it works, sir,” van Damm said. “Stir some bullshit in with the truth and the bullshit floats to the top.” The muscles in his jaw tightened. “The opening bell in New York won’t ring for another hour, but the London Exchange is already in a freefall. Somebody believes it. And Senator Chadwick is helping things along by providing color commentary as events unfold. Her snarky tweets have already been retweeted thousands of times. This whole shit storm has taken on a life of gargantuan proportions.”
DNI Foley made a face like she’d just eaten a whole lemon. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she was behind this. Chadwick, I mean.”
“I doubt even she would stoop this low,” Ryan said.
“Well she’s certainly piling on,” Foley said. “Especially about the Persian Spring.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now?” Ryan asked, looking pained.
“Well, she is,” Foley said. “And so is just about everyone else.”
“All of you have a seat,” he said. “I want to get into that.”
Special Agent Montgomery braced. “Thank you, Mr. President. I’ll be over at the Hoover Building this morning following up on this with a friend at the FBI. Special Agent Langford will be in charge here.”
“Gary,” Ryan said, leaning forward with both elbows on the desk. “And this goes for the rest of you as well. I can see full well that you’ve all got your blood up about these posts and twitters . . . tweets. You’re pissed. Hell, I’m pissed. But I’ll remind you all that when our blood’s up it’s easy to make mistakes, mistakes the American people do not deserve. It goes without saying, but this Internet garbage notwithstanding, neither the FBI nor the Secret Service is my private police force. We can’t go around tossing senators in jail—or throwing them off balconies—just because they say mean things about me.”
He was met with silent stares.
“Understood?”
Murmurs now, but none from the heart.
“Understood,” Montgomery said. “But I do have to protect you, Mr. President. And to do that, I need all the facts. Sometimes protective investigations aren’t necessarily prosecutable . . . because lines get crossed.”
“Watch the lines.” Ryan held up his hands. “But I trust you.”
Montgomery left through the door to the secretaries’ suite, pulling it shut softly behind him.
Ryan called for a coffee service and joined the others in the center of the Oval, taking his customary chair by the fireplace.
“No balconies?” Mary Pat Foley said. There was an unspoken pecking order in the group, and as President Ryan’s oldest friend in the room, she nestled in at the end of the couch nearest him. “You sure about that?”
Ryan turned to Dehart, the newest member of his cabinet. “You’ll have to excuse her, Mark.”
“I’m kidding.” Foley smirked. “But seriously, how do you feel about thumbscrews?”
Ryan gave a wan smile. “Let’s talk about Iran,” he said. “Most of the stuff those websites said about me is bullshit. We all know that. But Senator Chadwick is right about one thing. I do have serious misgivings about this so-called Persian Spring.”
The chief of staff rolled his eyes. “Due respect, sir, but here we go again. The existing regime makes no bones about the fact that they hate us. Throwing U.S. support behind the protesters seems like a no-brainer.”
“I agree with Arnie,” the SecDef said. “But just this one time.”
Ryan tapped a pencil against the knee of his crossed leg. “The trouble with no-brainers,” he said, “is that they make it easy for us to stop using our brains. I’m not a big fan of that.”
“Can’t argue there,” Burgess said. “I’m not saying we should follow blindly, but virtually all of our allies are falling in behind the protesters.”
“That’s a true point, sir,” Foley said.
Ryan shook his head. “There’s something about this Reza Kazem character that rubs me the wrong way. He’s a little too . . . Rasputinesque for my blood. I’d like your people to dig into him a little deeper.”
“Right away,” Foley said. “And speaking of Kazem, the Bureau puts him meeting with a Russian SVR operative in Crystal City four days ago.”
Ryan chewed on the new information. “Which SVR operative?”
“A woman by the name of Elizaveta Bobkova,” Foley said. “She’s registered as an economic attaché, but there’s no doubt she’s Russian intelligence. From what I hear, she’s quite the up-and-comer in the Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki.” Mary Pat Kaminsky Foley’s Russian was flawless—as was her intuition regarding Russian spies. “According to the Bureau counterintel guys, Senator Chadwick’s aide saw the meeting.”
“Was this aide a party to it?”
Foley shook her head. “Just a witness. They said he looked as surprised as they were. He definitely saw it, though, according to the agents. Seems like sloppy tradecraft for an operative of Bobkova’s caliber. Maybe she wanted us to see her.”
“No word from the good senator’s office?” Ryan asked.
Foley shook her head.
“Why am I not surprised.”
“Moscow backs the sitting regime in Tehran,” Dehart said. “Why would one of their intel types sit down with Kazem?”
“Hedging their bets,” SecDef Burgess offered. “A couple of moderate mullahs are making noise about meeting with the protesting students.”
“I know I’m painting with a broad brush here,” Ryan said. “But in my experience, there are no moderate mullahs in Iran. There are hardline mullahs and practical mullahs—who are still hardline but understand realpolitik enough to know that certain concessions have to be made for their regime to survive in the near term.”
“There is another possibility regarding Bobkova,” Mary Pat said. “We see Russia playing nice with Reza Kazem’s group, we’re more likely to jump on the bandwagon. Not sure why they would want us to, but it plays into your hunch that something we don’t know about is going on in the background.”
“That sounds about right,” Ryan said. “Birddog this for me.”
Foley nodded. “Of course.”
“With your permission, Mr. President,” van Damm said, “I’d like to schedule another meeting on this topic tomorrow. Things are very nearly reaching the boiling point in Iran. We need to keep a weather eye.”
“Good idea,” Ryan said. “In the meantime, Mark, you’ll check with your people in Louisiana, and Mary Pat, you’ll get me more on Kazem and this Russian connection. There is something going on here that we aren’t—”
Betty buzzed in for the third time in the past fifteen minutes. “Commander Forrestal is here, Mr. President. He says it’s urgent.”
“Very well,” Ryan said into the intercom.
The deputy national security adviser, United States Navy Commander Robert Forrestal, stepped inside the door and snapped to attention, as h
e always did when he came into the Oval. He’d changed over from his winter blues to his summer white uniform just weeks before. Ryan thought Marine Corps dress was the classiest uniform that there was, but when it came to the Navy, the summer whites looked especially sharp.
“Good morning, Robby,” Ryan said. “And you too, Scott.”
The secretary of state, Scott Adler, stepped in behind Commander Forrestal. “I’m guessing you’re both here about the situation with the video?”
The two men looked at each other as if surprised by the question. They both nodded.
“Arnie showed me,” Ryan said. “I’m sure the networks have already picked it up.”
“CNN has it,” Adler said.
Forrestal spoke next. “We have personnel in Garoua, in the northern part of the country, as well as air assets in Agadez, Niger. They are aware of the situation and—”
Ryan frowned, throwing his hand up. “I think we’re talking at cross-purposes here. Start over as if I don’t know anything about this. Because I sure as hell do not.”
“Cameroon, Mr. President,” Forrestal said. “President Njaya’s troops have surrounded our embassy in Yaounde.”
“Surrounded?” Arnie van Damm put a hand on top of his bald head. “What the hell do you mean, surrounded?”
Adler gave an exhausted shrug. “Encircled, Arnie. Swarmed. Bum-rushed.” He looked at Ryan. Any briefing in the Oval was meant for the President, not the chief of staff. “They were attacked, sir. No casualties reported, but we believe a Cameroonian general has taken refuge with his family in the chancery.”