Tom Clancy - Command Authority

“No shit.” Ryan sighed. “Sorry, Arnie. You are doing what you have to do. But we’ll deal with it head-on. It’s the only way.”

Jack walked back with Cathy into the Oval Office, and they spent a few minutes with the children, letting them know that everything was fine. Cathy explained that a visitor had become sick, and they needed to clean up the places he visited very carefully, but there was nothing at all to worry about.

Kyle was sold on the explanation as soon as he learned his father would let him sleep on the couch in his office. Katie was old enough and clever enough to raise her eyebrows in doubt, but Cathy managed to convince her that they were safe after a little more frank explanation.

Within minutes Cathy was seated at the desk in the Oval Office, getting in touch with doctors on the case at George Washington, probing for details about Golovko’s condition that could not be relayed by Van Damm, who might have been one hell of a chief of staff, but he was clearly no doctor. She then woke up colleagues at Johns Hopkins, experts in nuclear medicine and radiation sickness, obtained their confidentiality, and asked them for their take on the situation.

Ryan let his wife take charge; he knew he was lucky to have her expertise on hand in the first moments of this crisis so he could focus on what he needed to do. He headed over to Arnie’s office and they concentrated on the political fallout, which, he was afraid, would be every bit as radioactive. The two of them called in the national security team, asking them to get in as soon as possible. The West Wing was all but closed for the evening, but they ordered coffee to be sent to the Cabinet Room in advance of the middle-of-the-night meeting.

Jack headed into the dimly lit Cabinet Room, and Cathy met him there moments later. They sat down at the long table. “What did you hear from GW?” he asked.

Cathy said, “He’s bad, Jack. They suspect a high dose of polonium-210.”

“Why didn’t they know this immediately?”

“The hospital didn’t check for it when he came in. It’s so rare, it’s just not part of any normal toxicology screening.”

“And how radioactive is he?”

Cathy sighed. Passing on bad news was an unfortunate part of her job; she had a lot of experience with it. There were times when a little sugarcoating was necessary. But this was Jack; she knew he’d want the facts as cut-and-dried as she could possibly make them. She said, “Let me explain it this way. If he is not cremated, after he dies, his bones will be hissing with radioactivity for more than a decade.”

“Unbelievable.”

“By mass, polonium-210 is a quarter of a million times more deadly than cyanide. A portion the size of a grain of salt, if ingested, is more than enough to kill a full-sized man.”

“I thought we had radiation detectors in the White House?”

“Polonium emits alpha particles. They don’t show up as well on radiation detectors. That’s also why it is easy to smuggle into the country.”

“Terrific,” Jack mumbled. “But you are certain you are okay?”

“Yes. The effects are dose-dependent, and I didn’t get any dose to speak of. You touched Golovko yourself, when you shook his hand. They will test us, but as long as we didn’t ingest the poison, we are fine.”

“How the hell do you know more about this than I do?”

Cathy answered with a shrug. “I’m around radiation every day, Jack. You learn to take it seriously. But you also learn to live with it.”

“Sergey’s really going to die?”

Cathy nodded grimly. “I don’t know how much he was poisoned with, but the amount will only determine how long he suffers. For his sake, I hope whoever did this gave him a large dose. I’d guess he has no more than a couple of days. I’m so sorry. I know he was your friend.”

“Yeah. We go back a long way.”

The national security team met in the Cabinet Room at one a.m. Mary Pat Foley was there, as were the heads of NSA, CIA, and Homeland Security, as well as the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Attorney General Dan Murray stood outside the Oval Office conferring with his senior staff both in person and over the phone, and he stepped in with the others only as the meeting was getting started.

Jay Canfield, director of the CIA, set the agenda with his opening comment: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m just going to go right out and say it. If anyone in this room doubts for a second that the Kremlin is responsible for this, they are hopelessly naive. You have to understand, this material is very uncommon. Only about one hundred grams are produced worldwide each year. Production is highly controlled and storage is highly regulated. We know where our polonium is.”

President Ryan said, “You don’t have to sell me on the concept that this was an assassination attempt by the Kremlin.”

“Mr. President. I’m sorry. I know he is your friend. But this was no assassination attempt . It was an assassination. Sergey Golovko is not dead yet. But it’s just a matter of time.”

Jack nodded soberly.

Mary Pat Foley spoke from her seat on Ryan’s left. “Golovko was a thorn in Valeri Volodin’s side. Of course Volodin killed him. The question is, can we prove it?”

AG Murray said, “We’ll have to do some more testing, but the chemical properties will lead us back to a specific nuclear reactor. I’m going to venture to guess that reactor will be somewhere in Russia.”

Scott Adler asked, “If this is so easily traceable, why didn’t they just kill him some other way?”

Mary Pat Foley took this one. “For the same reason they didn’t kill him in London. Look, I see this as payback for Estonia. They kill the President’s friend and they blame us at the same time.”

Adler didn’t buy that line of thinking. “But we will be able to prove the Russians did this.”

Now Ryan reentered the conversation. “Prove it to whom? A board of scientists? The average person in Russia or even in the West, for that matter, isn’t going to believe our assertions that we can prove the Kremlin did this, nor are they going to read some third-party scientific study that corroborates the claim.”

Mary Pat said, “They will say we did it to frame them.”

Adler shook his head. “That is ridiculous.”

Ryan rubbed his tired eyes. “I’d bet seventy, seventy-five percent of his domestic population will believe Volodin. We’ve seen this over and over in the past year—he’s playing to his own room. Russia, and all the other countries in that part of the world, are under the effects of Russian-dominated informational space. Russian TV, which is more or less state-controlled, like the old days, is broadcast all over the region. Russia has a massive leg up on us as far as giving their perspective on any issue. The outside world to the majority of people in the former Soviet Union is the enemy, even for those who are no big fans of the Kremlin.”

Ryan said, “The head of SVR, and the former head of SVR, both targeted the same day. Something big is happening, and it is the job of everyone here to find out what it is.”

The meeting broke up a few minutes later, but Dan Murray, Arnie Van Damm, and Mary Pat Foley remained behind. Ryan said, “Dan, while you get started on your investigation, I am going to talk to Sergey myself.”

Murray replied, “I looked into getting a statement out of him already. You can’t talk to him now. He’s in ICU and is being treated. Even if they could wake him, he is on medication to where he could do little more than stare at you.”

Jack was undeterred. “It’s in the interests of U.S. national security that he is made coherent enough to communicate. Talk to his doctors, make it happen. I hate to do this to him, but trust me, he would understand. He knows the importance of information in a crisis, and both of our nations are at risk.”