The President Is Missing(89)

I turn to Alex and make the request. The Marines will get them over to us in no time. “Is five hundred enough?” I ask.

Casey smirks. “We don’t have five hundred ways to stop this thing. We’ve thought of just about everything we know already.”

“Augie’s not a help?”

“Oh, he’s brilliant,” says Devin. “The way he buried this thing inside the computer? I’ve never seen anything like it. But when it comes to actually disabling it? It’s not his specialty.”

I look at my watch. “It’s four o’clock, people. Start getting creative.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Anything else you need from me?”

Casey says, “Any chance you can capture Suliman and bring him here?”

I pat her on the arm but don’t answer.

We’re working on it, I do not say.





Chapter

79



I return to my communications room, where I find Vice President Katherine Brandt, her eyes cast down, her posture slumped. Before I interrupted our talk, she had said something meaningful to me.

She perks up when she sees me enter the room, her posture stiffening.

“No luck on the virus yet,” I say, sitting down. “Whoever created that thing is playing chess, and we’re playing checkers.”

“Mr. President,” says Kathy, “I just offered you my resignation.”

“Yes, I remember,” I say. “This is not the time for that, Kathy. They’ve tried to kill Augie and me twice. And I’m not well, as I just explained to you.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I hadn’t realized your condition was acting up again.”

“I didn’t tell anybody. This isn’t a good time for our friends or our enemies to think the president is in poor health.”

She nods her head.

“Listen, Carolyn has been a few floors above you in the White House the whole time. She knows everything. We have it all written up in a document, too. If something had happened to me, Carolyn would have told you everything within minutes. Including my various plans for what to do, depending on how bad this virus is. Including military strikes on Russia, China, North Korea—whoever is behind this virus. Contingency plans for martial law, the suspension of habeas corpus, price controls, rationing of critical goods—the works.”

“But if I am the traitor, Mr. President,” she says, barely able to spit out that word, “why would you trust me to stop these people? If I’m in cahoots with them.”

“Kathy, what choice did I have? I can’t just switch you out with somebody new. What was I supposed to do four days ago when I learned about the leak from Nina through my daughter? Demand your resignation? And then what? Think about how long it would take to replace you. A vetting process, the nomination process, approval by both houses. I didn’t have that kind of time. And if you left and there was a vacancy, think who is next in line of succession.”

She doesn’t respond, breaking eye contact. The reference to Speaker Lester Rhodes does not seem to sit well with her.

“More important than that, Kathy—I couldn’t be sure it was you. I couldn’t be sure it was any of you. Sure, I could have fired all six of you, just to make sure I got rid of the leaker. Just to be safe. But then I’m losing essentially my entire national security team when I need them most.”

“You could have polygraphed us,” she says.

“I could have. That’s what Carolyn wanted. Give all of you lie-detector tests.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Why not, sir?”

“The element of surprise,” I say. “The only thing I had going for me was that I knew there was a leaker, but the leaker didn’t know I knew. If I put all of you on a box and asked you whether you leaked information about Dark Ages, I’d show my hand. Whoever was behind this would know that I knew. It was better to play dumb, so to speak.

“So I got to work fixing the problem,” I continue. “I called in the under secretary of defense and had her check, independently, that the revamping of our military systems was being done properly. Just in case Secretary Dayton was the Benedict Arnold. I had General Burke at Central Command verify the same thing overseas, just in case Admiral Sanchez was the traitor.”

“And you were assured things were done properly.”

“Properly enough. We couldn’t completely re-create everything in two weeks by any means, but we’re up and running enough to launch missiles, to deploy air and ground forces. Our training exercises were successful.”

“Does that mean Dayton and Sanchez are crossed off your list? The list is down to four now?”

“What do you think, Kathy? Should they be crossed off?”

She thinks about that a minute. “If one of them is the traitor, they wouldn’t be so obvious as to sabotage something that was their direct responsibility. They might anonymously leak the code word. They might provide some information to the enemy. But these specific tasks you’ve assigned them—there’s a spotlight directly on them. They can’t screw it up. They’d be exposed. Whoever did this gave it a lot of thought.”

“My thinking exactly,” I say. “So no, they aren’t crossed off the list.”