The President Is Missing(53)

“Your best guess?” I say. But I’m relatively sure I know the answer. The tactical spread of chatter, the communication of clandestine information that in fact was intended all along to be overheard by intelligence intercepts. Counterespionage at its most devious, tradecraft at its finest. It bears the mark of one country over all others.

David Guralnick, the director of Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations—Mossad—takes a deep breath. For dramatic measure, the screen cuts in and out before his face becomes clear again.

“Our best guess is Russia,” he says.





Chapter

40



I click off the transmission with the director of Mossad and gather my thoughts before I talk to Augie. There are many ways to play this, but I have no time for subtlety.

Saturday, David said. Ninety minutes away.

I push myself out of the chair and turn for the door when a wave of vertigo strikes me, like someone is playing spin the bottle with my internal compass. I grab hold of the desk for balance and measure my breaths. I reach into my pocket for my pills. I need my pills.

But my pills are gone. There are no more in my pocket, and the rest were left behind in the bag, in the sedan in the stadium parking lot.

“Damn it.” I dial Carolyn on my phone. “Carrie, I need more steroids. I don’t have any more at the White House, and I lost the bottle I had. Call Dr. Lane. Maybe she has some ex—”

“I’ll make it happen, Mr. President.”

“Great.” I click off and leave the soundproofed office, walking carefully down the hall toward the rec room, near the staircase. Augie is sitting on the couch, looking to all appearances like an ordinary scraggly teenager lounging in front of the television.

But he’s neither a teenager nor ordinary.

The mounted television he’s watching is set to cable news, coverage of the assassination attempt on King Saad ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and the growing unrest in Honduras.

“Augie,” I say. “Stand up.”

He does what I ask, facing me.

“Who attacked us?” I ask.

He pushes his hair out of his face, shrugs. “I do not know.”

“Do better than that. Let’s start with who sent you. You said you no longer see eye to eye with Suliman Cindoruk and the Sons of Jihad.”

“Yes, that is true. I do not.”

“So who sent you?”

“Nobody sent us. We came of our own will.”

“Why?”

“Is it not obvious?”

I grab a fistful of his shirt. “Augie, a lot of people died tonight. Including someone you cared about and two Secret Service agents I cared about, men who left young families behind. So start answering my—”

“We came to stop it,” he says, breaking free of my grip.

“To stop Dark Ages? But—why?”

He shakes his head, hiccups a bitter chuckle. “Do you mean, what do I stand to gain? What is…in it for me?”

“That’s what I mean,” I say. “You didn’t want to tell me before. Tell me now. What does a kid from Donetsk want from the United States?”

Augie draws back, surprised for only a moment. Not that surprised at all, really. “That did not take long.”

“Are you part of the pro-Russian camp or the pro-Ukraine camp? They have lots of both in Donetsk, last I checked.”

“Yes? And when was the last time you checked, Mr. President?” His face changing color, fuming. “When it suited your purposes, that’s when. This,” he says, shaking his finger at me, “this is the difference between you and me. I want nothing from you, that’s what I want. I want…to not destroy a nation full of millions of people. Is that not enough?”

Is it that simple? That Augie and his partner were simply trying to do the right thing? These days, it’s never your first instinct to believe that.

I’m not sure I do now, either. I don’t know what to believe.

“But you created Dark Ages,” I say.

He shakes his head. “Suli, Nina, and I created it. But Nina was the real inspiration, the driving force. Without her, we never could have created it. I helped with the coding and particularly with the implementation.”

“Nina? That’s her real name?”

“Yes.”

“They created it, and you infiltrated our systems.”

“More or less, yes.”

“And you can stop it?”

He shrugs. “This I do not know.”

“What?” I grab him by the shoulder, as if shaking him will produce a different answer. “You said you could, Augie. You said that before.”

“I did, yes.” He nods, looks at me with shiny eyes. “Nina was alive before.”

I release him, walk over to the wall, and pound my fist against it. It’s always one step forward, two steps back.

I take a deep breath. What Augie’s saying makes sense. Nina was the superstar. That’s why she was the sniper’s first target. From a practical standpoint, it would have made more sense to shoot Augie first, because he was mobile, and then go for Nina, who was seated in a parked car. Nina was clearly the highest priority.

“I will do my best to help,” he says.

“Okay, well, who attacked us?” I ask for the second time. “Can you at least help me with that?”