The President Is Missing(20)

He taps the same word again, confirming once more.

Then, in a “down” column on the crossword puzzle, he writes: Y O U H A V E I D

I have it, she writes. She adds, If it rains, meet at 9?

He writes, I T W O N T

She seethes, but she will say nothing and do nothing but wait.

Y E S A T N I N E, he writes in a lower horizontal column.

He gets up before the waiter can take his order, leaving the crossword puzzle on the counter next to her. She slides it over and opens the newspaper more fully, as if interested in one of the articles. The map and the newspaper will be destroyed and discarded in separate trash bins.

She is already looking forward to leaving tonight. She has little doubt that she will perform her task. The only thing she can’t control is the weather.

She has never prayed in her life, but if she did, she would pray for no rain.





Chapter

10



It is 1:30 p.m. in the Situation Room, cool and soundproof and windowless.

“Montejo’s going to declare martial law throughout Honduras tomorrow,” says Brendan Mohan, my national security adviser. “He’s already imprisoned most of his political rivals, but he’ll step that up. There’s a food shortage, so he’ll probably institute price controls to keep the people calm for a few more days until he’s in complete control. By our estimate, the Patriotas have an army two hundred thousand strong next door in Managua, awaiting word. If he doesn’t step down—”

“He won’t,” says Vice President Kathy Brandt.

Mohan, a former general, does not appreciate the interruption but understands the chain of command. He shrugs his thick shoulders and turns in her direction.

“I agree, Madam Vice President, he won’t. But he may not be able to hold the military. If he doesn’t, he’ll be overthrown. If he does, by our estimate, Honduras will be in civil war within a month.”

I turn to Erica Beatty, the CIA director, a bookish, soft-spoken woman with dark, raccoonish eyes and cropped gray hair. She is a spook through and through, a lifer at the CIA. She was recruited out of college by the Agency and became a clandestine officer stationed in West Germany in the 1980s. In 1987, she was abducted by the Stasi—East Germany’s state security service—which claimed that she had been caught on their side of the Berlin Wall with a fake passport and architectural drawings of GDR headquarters. She was interrogated and held for nearly a month before the Stasi released her. Stasi’s records, made public after the fall of the wall and the reunification of Germany, showed that she was brutally tortured but gave up no information.

Her days as a clandestine officer over, she moved up the ranks and became one of our nation’s foremost experts on Russia, advising the Joint Chiefs and heading the CIA’s Central Eurasia Division, which oversaw intelligence operations in the former Soviet satellites and Warsaw Pact countries, and finally serving on the Senior Intelligence Service. She was my campaign’s top adviser on Russia. She rarely speaks unless spoken to, but when you wind her up, she can tell you more about President Dmitry Chernokev than Chernokev himself probably could.

“What do you think, Erica?” I ask.

“Montejo’s playing right into Chernokev’s hands,” she says. “Chernokev has wanted an inroad into Central America since he took office. This is his best chance to date. Montejo’s turning fascist, giving the Patriotas credibility, making them look like freedom fighters and not Russian puppets. He is playing precisely the role that Chernokev scripted for him. Montejo is a coward and a moron.”

“But he’s our cowardly moron,” Kathy says.

Kathy’s right. We can’t let the Russian-backed Patriotas, Chernokev’s puppets, into that region. We could declare any overthrow of President Montejo a coup d’état and cut off all American aid, but how would that help our interests? That would just turn the Honduran government even more strongly against us, and Russia would be happy to gain a foothold in Central America.

“Do I have any good options here?” I ask.

Nobody can think of one.

“Let’s do Saudi Arabia next,” I say. “What the hell happened?”

Erica Beatty handles this one. “The Saudis have arrested several dozen people in what they say was a plot to assassinate King Saad ibn Saud. They apparently recovered weapons and explosives. It never got as far as an attempt on his life, but the Saudis are saying they were in the ‘final stages’ of putting it together when the Mabahith executed its raids and mass arrests.”

Saad ibn Saud is only thirty-five years old, the youngest son of the former king. Only a year ago, his father reshuffled his leadership and surprised a lot of people by naming Saad the crown prince—next in line to the throne. It made a lot of people in the royal family unhappy. And within three months of his elevation, his father died, and Saad ibn Saud became Saudi Arabia’s youngest king.

It’s been a rocky road for him so far. He’s overcompensated by using his internal state police, the Mabahith, to crack down on dissidents, and one night several months ago he executed more than a dozen of them. I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much I could do. I need him in that region. His country is our closest ally. And without a stable Saudi Arabia, our influence is compromised.

“Who’s behind it, Erica? Iran? Yemen? Was it in-house?”