The President Is Missing(113)

“I know. I asked her to wait. I wanted to talk to you first.”

“All right, sir.”

She walks in and takes a seat in one of the chairs opposite the couch.

“You did it, Carrie,” I say. “You’re the one who solved it.”

“You did this, Mr. President, not me.”

Well, that’s the way this works. The buck stops with the president both ways, for better or worse. If my team scores a victory, it’s the president who gets the credit. But we both know who figured out the keyword.

I blow out air, my nerves still jangled.

“I screwed up, Carrie,” I say. “Picking Kathy Brandt for a running mate.”

She doesn’t rush to disagree. “The politics made sense, sir.”

“That’s why I did it. For political reasons. I shouldn’t have.”

Again, she doesn’t fight me.

“I should have picked a running mate based on merit. And I think we both know who I would have picked if it were based on merit. The smartest person I’ve ever met. The most disciplined. The most talented.”

Her face blushes. Always deflecting the credit, the attention.

“Instead I gave you the toughest job in Washington. The most thankless.”

She waves me off, uncomfortable with the praise, her blush deepening. “It’s an honor to serve you, Mr. President, in whatever capacity you decide.”

I take one last sip, a healthy gulp, of the bourbon remaining in my glass and set down the tumbler.

“May I ask, sir—what are you going to do with the vice president?”

“What do you think I should do with her?”

She kicks that around, her head bobbing from side to side.

“For the good of the country,” she says, “I wouldn’t prosecute her. I’d find a quiet way out. I’d demand her resignation, let her make some excuse, and I wouldn’t tell anybody what she did. I’d close the whole thing quietly. Right now, the American people are hearing that a talented national security team, at your direction, saved us from a massive disaster. No one’s talking about a traitor or betrayal. It’s a positive story, a cautionary tale, but with a happy ending. We should keep it that way.”

I’ve considered that. “The thing is,” I say, “before I do that, I want to know why.”

“Why she did it, sir?”

“She wasn’t bribed. She wasn’t being extorted. She didn’t want to destroy our country. It wasn’t even her idea. It was Nina’s and Augie’s idea.”

“How do we know that for certain?” she asks.

“Oh, right,” I say. “You don’t know about the phone.”

“The phone, sir?”

“Yeah, in the chaos of it all at the end, the FBI unlocked the second phone they found in Nina’s van. They unearthed a bunch of text messages. Texts exchanged between Nina and our Benedict Arnold.”

“Oh, God,” she says. “No, I didn’t know.”

I wave my hand. “Nina and Augie got caught up in something bigger than they ever intended it to be. When they realized the massive devastation they were about to unleash, they split away from Suliman. They sent us the peekaboo to wake us up to the problem and then came here to make a deal: if we get amnesty from the Georgian republic for Nina, she disarms the virus.

“Our traitor—our Benedict Arnold? She was just the intermediary. She’s just the one they contacted. This wasn’t some plot she cooked up. She was trying to persuade Nina to surrender to an American embassy. She was asking Nina how to disable the virus.”

“But she didn’t tell the rest of us,” says Carolyn.

“Right. I think, from what I’ve read, she felt like the longer she communicated with Nina and didn’t tell anyone else, the deeper a hole she dug. So she wanted to be left out of the direct line of communication. She gave Nina the code word ‘Dark Ages’ so Nina could get in touch with me directly—through Lilly—and I’d take her seriously.”

“That…makes some amount of sense, I suppose,” Carolyn offers.

“But that’s the thing—it doesn’t make sense,” I say. “Because the moment Nina communicates ‘Dark Ages’ to me, I know that I have a Judas in my inner circle. She has to know I’ll move heaven and earth to find the traitor. She was one of eight suspects.”

Carolyn nods, thinking it over.

“Why would she do that, Carrie? Why would she invite that kind of suspicion? Kathy Brandt is a lot of things, but she ain’t dumb.”

Carolyn opens her hands. “Sometimes…smart people do dumb things?”

Truer words were never spoken.

“Let me show you something,” I say.

I reach for a folder bearing the insignia FBI. I had Liz Greenfield print out two copies of the transcript of the text messages. I hand Carolyn the transcript of the first three days—last Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, the first days that I read.

“Read those,” I say, “and tell me how ‘dumb’ our traitor is.”





Chapter

116



You’re right.” Carolyn’s chin rises, having read all three days’ worth of transcripts. “This wasn’t something she cooked up on her own. But…this can’t be all the transcripts. This ends on Sunday, with her promising to give Nina the code word.”