The President Is Missing(87)

“What you are saying, yes.” He nods. He seems to be calming down now. “I do not mean to portray either of us as innocents. Nina knew the destructive nature of her virus, obviously. But she had no idea how far and wide it was going to be distributed. She did not know it was going to be spread throughout the United States to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of people. And I…” He looks away. “Suli told me it was an advanced form of spyware I was disseminating. That he would sell it to the highest bidder to finance our other jobs.” He shrugs. “When we realized what we had done, we could not sit idly by.”

“So Nina came here to stop the virus,” I say. “In exchange for my help getting her amnesty.”

He nods again. “We hoped you would agree. But we couldn’t predict your response. The Sons of Jihad has been responsible for the deaths of Americans in the past. And the United States is hardly what we would consider an ally. So she insisted on meeting you first, alone.”

“To see how I would respond.”

“To see if you would let her leave the White House. As opposed to arresting her, torturing her, whatever else you might do.”

That sounds right. It felt like a test at the time.

“I objected to her going to the White House alone,” he says. “But she would not be deterred. By the time we met in the States, she clearly had a plan in mind.”

“Wait.” I touch his arm. “By the time you met in the States? What does that mean? You weren’t together all along?”

“Oh, no,” he says. “No, no. The day we sent the peekaboo to your Pentagon server?”

Saturday, April 28. I’ll never forget when I first heard about it. I was in Brussels, on the first leg of my European trip. I got the call in the presidential suite. I’d never heard my defense secretary so rattled.

“That was the day Nina and I left Suliman in Algeria. We split up, though. We thought it was safer that way. She came to the United States through Canada. I came through Mexico. Our plan was to meet on Wednesday in Baltimore, Maryland.”

“Wednesday—this past Wednesday? Three days ago?”

“Yes. Wednesday, at noon, by the statue of Edgar Allan Poe at the University of Baltimore. Close enough to Washington but not too close, a logical place for people of our age to fit in and a fixed point we both could find.”

“And that’s when Nina told you the plan.”

“Yes. By then she was certain she had a plan in place. She would visit the White House on Friday night, alone, to test your reaction. Then you would meet me at the baseball stadium—another test, to see if you would even appear. And if you did, I would make my own judgment as to whether we could trust you. When you appeared at the stadium, I knew you had passed Nina’s test.”

“And then I passed yours.”

“Yes,” he says. “If nothing else, the fact that I pulled a gun on the president of the United States and nobody immediately shot me or arrested me—I knew you believed us and would work with us.”

I shake my head. “And then you contacted Nina?”

“I texted her. She was waiting for my signal to pull up to the stadium in her van.”

How close we came, right there.

Augie lets out a noise that sounds like laughter. “That was supposed to be the moment,” he says, looking ruefully off in the distance. “We would have all been together. I would have located the virus, you would have contacted the Georgian government, and she would have stopped the virus.”

Instead someone stopped Nina.

“I will get back to work, Mr. President.” He pushes himself off the couch. “I am sorry for my momentary—”

I push him back down. “We’re not done, Augie,” I say. “I want to know about Nina’s source. I want to know about the traitor in the White House.”





Chapter

76



I remain hovering over Augie, all but shining a bright light in his face. “You said by the time you met Nina in Baltimore three days ago, she was committed to a plan.”

He nods.

“Why? What happened between the time you split up in Algeria and the time you met in Baltimore? What did she do? Where did she go?”

“This I do not know.”

“That doesn’t wash, Augie.”

“I’m sorry? Wash?”

I lean in farther still, nearly nose to nose with him. “That doesn’t ring true to me. You two loved each other. You trusted each other. You needed each other.”

“What we needed was to keep our information separate,” he insists. “For our own protection. She could not know how to locate the virus, and I could not know how to disarm it. This way we both remained of value to you.”

“What did she tell you about her source?”

“I have answered this question more than once—”

“Answer it again.” I grab his shoulder. “And remember that the lives of hundreds of millions of people—”

“She did not tell me!” he spits, full of emotion, a high pitch to his voice. “She told me I would need to know the code word ‘Dark Ages,’ and I asked her how she could possibly know this, and she said it did not matter how, that it was better I did not know, that we were both safer that way.”