Andrew Britton - The Operative

“Sir, your concern is not unfounded,” Andrews replied with a half smile.

Brenneman picked up the phone.

“Mr. Meyers,” the president said, “get me commissioner Lee Strand. I’ll hold.”

“Yes, sir,” his special assistant replied.

“Thank you.” The president looked at the others in the room. “I want us to get ahead of this damn thing. Kealey’s got the only option on the table. Andrea, we know how this plays if it works. If it doesn’t…?”

“If it doesn’t, Ryan Kealey’s not a lone-wolf operator anymore,” the press secretary replied. “This call puts the go-ahead on your shoulders, sir. There will be questions from both sides of the aisle about why you didn’t put massive force in the field to find a pair of missing nuclear weapons, as Director Cluzot suggested.”

“My uncle Bernard once drove a hay truck off the road because there was a yellow jacket in the cab,” the president said. “If he’d been surrounded by horses or sheep, he’d’ve just stopped and waited for them to move on.”

“The herds wouldn’t have been looking for him,” Cluzot pointed out.

“Neither was the hornet,” the president said. “Point is, it was on him before he could react.”

Commissioner Strand got on the line. Brenneman did not put the call on speaker.

“Good morning, Mr. President.”

“How are things up there, Commissioner Strand?”

“Calm for the moment, sir. You’ve probably heard we got a shooter. We’re not sure he’s working alone.”

“We’ve reached that same conclusion,” the president said.

“Mr. President, forgive me, but we’ve been hearing disturbing rumors about missing nuclear weapons.”

“They appear to be true,” the president replied. “We have two men on the ground who we believe are on the trail of a pair of highly classified projectiles with nuclear explosives. We need to get one of those people in the air. Can you lend us Twenty-Three?”

“Will this protect my city?”

“We believe the action has a good chance of doing that,” the president said.

“Is there anything you can share with us, sir? Was the deceased FBI agent a part of the sniper’s support system?”

Brenneman did not look at the others. He turned his chair, glanced out at the Rose Garden. “We believe she was framed by the individual who is behind this. We also believe he is in possession of the weapons.”

“Where and when do you need Twenty-Three, sir?”

“The heliport on West Thirtieth Street. Our man is on his way.”

“Name?”

“Ryan Kealey. K-e-a-l-e-y.”

“Any special expertise, sir?”

“Yes,” the president said. “He wants to see this bastard dead.”

“Those are the kind of credentials I admire, sir. The chopper will be there.”

“One more thing, Commissioner.” The president looked at his notepad. “Our second man, Reed Bishop, is on his way to One West Street.”

“Around the corner from the killing yesterday.”

“Yes. If you get any nine-one-ones from a research lab at that location, you would do well to delay responding.”

“That’s against our policy, of course. But we are spread thin,” Strand replied.

“Thanks to the individuals we’re pursuing,” the president said. “I’ll be in touch.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The president hung up, then swiveled back to look at the faces of the other four people in the room. His press secretary looked the grimmest. “Andrea?”

“You are personally very far out on a limb, sir,” Stempel pointed out.

The president’s eyes shifted to Cluzot. “Chuck?”

“The comment about nine-one-one… if it ever got out…”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Stempel said.

“If that happens,” the president replied thoughtfully, “it will pour gas on the debate about the rights of suspected terrorists, and I’ll have the Justice Department on my back for a few months for some violation of equal protection statutes. You know what? I’ll take my chances. I want to stop trailing these bastards. I want to get ahead of them.”

“I like it,” Andrews said. “I like it a lot.”

“That’s the good thing about being a lame duck,” Brenneman said. “Sometimes you get to do what you think is the right thing for its own sake.”

“Besides, Commissioner Strand has his eye on my job,” the Homeland Security director said. “He won’t tell tales out of school.”

“Amen. If it works, he’ll take credit for it,” Andrews said.

The president chuckled. It broke the tension slightly.

Stempel shut her laptop. “It’s ten past eleven. I’ve got to tell the press when I’m going to talk to them. How does one o’clock sound, Mr. President?”

“I have a feeling this will be over by then,” he said.

“This part of it,” Cluzot said.

Except for Andrews, the others looked at him. The CIA director was nodding in agreement.

“What do you mean?” the president asked.

“Let’s assume-only for the sake of this discussion-that the two nukes are the finale of this wave of terror,” Cluzot said. “Someone, some group, put them into play. Someone got to my people and turned at least one of them. If Kealey is right, someone was watching him and Bishop. In short, someone has access to our playbook-or enough of it to cobble together a response.”

It was an unpleasant thought. They had all been so focused on current events that they hadn’t given any consideration to the befores and afters.

“Mr. President, I think we should continue to keep our thoughts in this room,” Andrews said. “If we start putting together DSTs, we may do exactly what we’re trying to prevent, which is continue to give the party or parties access.”

Data strike teams were the new first wave of defense against potential terror threats. Each group had one: CIA, FBI, NSA, and the military intelligence branches. They took raw intel gathered by HUMINT and ELINT resources, saw if the pieces fit. If two or more went together, that DI-data image-was fed to the other intel units to see if they had any pieces that belonged there. It was an efficient coordination of resources grouped under the Homeland Security tent.

“Everyone in agreement?” the president asked.

That was his way of indicating he backed the play. Otherwise he would have said, “Thoughts?” Anyone without a strong dissenting opinion and the facts to back it was likely to get smacked down in the first moments of debate.

The president called Meyers, told him they were going back downstairs.

“I want a live feed from the NYPD Counterterrorism Division, and I want streaming updates from the Baltimore Convention Center,” the president said. “Something may turn up there that can help us in New York.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And see if you can put us inside the NYPD chopper Twenty-Three,” he added. “Audio is fine if that’s all we can get.”

“On it, sir,” Meyers replied.

The president rose, followed by the others.

“Fifteen-minute break. Then we’re back in the hole,” the president said.

He turned once more, opened the doors to the Rose Garden, stepped onto the patio to take in the daylight and the clean, non-ventilated air while he still could. Press Secretary Stempel stuck her head out.

“How are you doing, sir?” she asked.

“All right,” he said. “I was just thinking… I read an anecdote-I honestly can’t remember where-about the British Admiralty hunting for the Bismarck during World War II. The men and women in charge of the operation were down in their bombproof bunker in London for days, receiving data and plotting strategy with this big, table-sized map, moving wooden planes and boats around as updates came in. When they finally crippled the battleship and sent her to the bottom of the sea, the Admiralty’s chief of operations looked at the clock and said he was going upstairs for a proper dinner. He got outside and saw that it was eight in the morning, not evening.” The president squinted into the sunlight. “I pray to God, Andrea, that we are not down there long enough to lose track of time.”