William Tyree - Line of Succession

Carver found himself suddenly out of breath. “You want me to resign?”

“What I want is what the President wants.”

“What exactly is it that the President wants? Does he want me in the Secret Service? The DIA? What ?”

Speers sighed. He opened his desk drawer, pulled out a purple lollipop, and offered it to Carver, who refused the candy.

The intercom buzzed. Speers pressed the button and grunted into it. A pleasant voice chirped back on the other side. “Meagan O’Keefe from NSA is here to see you.”

“Send her in.”

O’Keefe entered, wearing a navy suit that flattered her bust. She looked as bewildered as Carver felt. He stood, reached for her hand and shook it firmly. “Blake Carver, CIA.”

“Meagan O’Keefe. NSA.”

The Chief of Staff did not stand. He smiled and motioned for O’Keefe to sit in the remaining chair. He opened the second folder on his desk and presented it to her. The form on top contained her letter of resignation from the National Security Agency. She let out a small gasp.

“There, there,” Speers said. “Neither of you should be upset. This is a kind of promotion.”

“A kind of promotion or an actual promotion?” O’Keefe said.

“Well, you’ll work for me, which means the White House. But not officially. Officially speaking, you’ll be on your own.”

Now Speers scratched his overgrown beard and peered at Lieutenant Flynn through the observation glass. “The investigation was supposed to focus on Ulysses,” Speers said.

He referred to Ulysses USA, a private security contractor that, by the DOD’s own estimates, now made up a full third of the U.S. military presence around the world. Ulysses had been founded by a former Blackwater exec during the second Iraq war. In addition to the Department of Defense, Ulysses counted several multinational corporations as clients. Ulysses USA stock — its ticker symbol was UUSA — was trading at $119 per share.

But Ulysses had become a problem for the President. The company had slowly earned a nasty rep as indiscriminate mercenaries that killed not only for U.S. interests, but for those of the company’s shareholders.

“The investigation is focusing on Ulysses,” Carver insisted. “Lieutenant Flynn here’s been double-dipping.”

Speers turned. “Explain.”

“In addition to his government salary, the Lieutenant received three payments from Ulysses via various fronts in the past eight months. All deposited to accounts in the Caymans.”

“Start from the top. How’d you even find this guy?”

O’Keefe slipped on her black wire-framed glasses and leaned against a metal tool cabinet. “We started working up personas on likely arms smugglers several weeks ago. We decided to look for any government employees between a G-5 and a G-12 that had paid cash for new luxury vehicles in the past year. We got four thousand matches. We filtered those results by military personnel. That dropped it to about a thousand suspects. Then we narrowed it to those with access to specific weaponry that had been reported missing or stolen in the past year. There were just two matches.”

Speers smiled at the ex-NSA cryptographer. “I knew we hired you for a reason.”

“But wait,” Carver quipped, “You still haven’t heard the punch line.”

“Three days ago,” O’Keefe went on, “Private Matt Doheny died in an explosion about 20 miles from Fort Bragg, where Lieutenant Flynn had significant access to military weaponry. It’s listed as a suicide, but here’s something that wasn’t in the DOD report: Doheny was transporting twenty Stinger missiles.”

Speers rolled his eyes. “That’s all been documented. The Stingers were resupplies for the Indonesia campaign. Maybe you geniuses never thought of this, but our Army can’t kill bad guys unless grunts like Private Doheny haul weapons from point A to point B.”

Carver cut in: “Without filing a standard transport authorization form? In the middle of the night? The Lieutenant here sent Private Doheny off-base in a Humvee loaded with Stingers, and he made damn sure they never got to our units in Indonesia.”

“Prove it.”

O’Keefe picked up a transcript of a voicemail dated three days earlier and handed it to Speers. “That’s the transcription of the voicemail Doheny left his ex-girlfriend that night,” O’Keefe explained.

She gave Speers a moment to process the transcript, which mentioned Lieutenant Flynn by name. Then she handed him the forensics report. “I had forensics go over the blast area again and again. No trace of any of the unique composites used in a Stinger missile.”

“Meaning the Stingers are still out there somewhere,” Carver added.

Speers looked through the glass at Lieutenant Flynn. “So you’re telling me Lieutenant Flynn has been selling arms to Ulysses?”

O’Keefe shook her head. “We’re saying the Lieutenant directed an unauthorized weapons transport. We have no hard evidence that he was preparing to sell them.”

“Yet,” Carver added.

“Stay out of this,” Speers said. He turned back to O’Keefe. “What are the chances that Flynn’s buyer isn’t Ulysses? Could he be planning to use the weapons?”

O’Keefe bit her bottom lip. She wasn’t used to having bureaucrats breathing down her neck before she had even analyzed all the data. “We don’t know his intentions yet.”

Speers’ imagination was already running wild. This brought up an entirely new set of issues. “Could you shoot down a commercial airliner with one of those Stingers?”

“Why stop at one?” Carver cut in. “They’re missing twenty from Fort Bragg alone.”

The Chief’s eyebrows furrowed with worry. “What now?” Speers had made no secret of the fact that he was unqualified to direct this investigation, a point he himself had made repeatedly in several self-deprecating conversations with President Hatch. But the unpopular President had enemies right in his own cabinet, and many more in the Pentagon. It came down to a matter of trust, and there was no one the President trusted more than Speers. The investigation was his, whether he liked it or not.

Carver sat down and folded his hands. What he was about to suggest was the real reason he’d woken Speers up. “Look,” he said, “maybe at NSA you’d continue to build a case for weeks or months on end. But at the Company, we’d assume that the clock was ticking on something big, and we’d pull out all the stops.”

“You mean torture,” Speers said with disgust.

“Not technically,” Carver said, referring to the Supreme Court’s rather loose definitions of the myriad ways to inflict suffering on a human being. Although President Hatch had scored a victory for the left by putting a stop to water boarding, there was still a lot of wiggle room in the Court’s interpretation of prisoners’ rights.

“I can’t support it.”

“Imagine that a week from now, one of those Stingers is used against an airliner,” Carver said. “Two hundred people die, including children. Would you be able to forgive yourself for not doing everything in your power to stop it?”

Speers crunched the lollipop with his back molars and pulled out the stick. “You’ve made your point.”

“So?”

“I won’t rule it out. But first I’d like the satisfaction of talking to Lieutenant Flynn.”

“You?” Carver said.

“Yes.”

“You can’t risk the exposure. If he recognizes your voice…”

“He won’t.”

Carver wasn’t the only experienced interrogator in the room. Before joining then-Governor Hatch’s staff as General Counsel, Speers had worked as a district attorney. He grew famous in Virginia after his line of questioning prompted a key mob witness to urinate in his pants in federal court.