CHAPTER TWO

10:15 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time

The Situation Room

The White House, Washington, DC

“It seems that it was a poorly designed mission,” an aide said. “The issue here is plausible deniability.”

David Barrett, nearly six feet, six inches tall, stared down at the man. The aide was blond with thinning hair, a touch overweight, in a suit that was too big at the shoulders and too small around the midsection. The man’s name was Jepsum. It was an unfortunate name for an unfortunate man. Barrett didn’t like men who were shorter than six feet, and he didn’t like men who didn’t keep themselves in shape.

Barrett and Jepsum moved quickly through the hallways of the West Wing, toward the elevator that would take them down to the Situation Room.

“Yes?” Barrett said, growing impatient. “Plausible deniability?”

Jepsum shook his head. “Right. We don’t have any.”

A phalanx of people strode with Barrett, ahead of him, behind him, all around him—aides, interns, Secret Service men, staff of various kinds. Once again, and as always, he had no idea who half these people were. They were a tangled mass of humanity, zooming along, and he stood a head taller than nearly all of them. The shortest of them could be a different species from him altogether.

Short people frustrated Barrett to no end, and more so every day. David Barrett, the president of the United States, had come back to work too soon.

Only six weeks had passed since his daughter Elizabeth was kidnapped by terrorists and then recovered by American commandos in one of the most daring covert operations in recent memory. He’d had a breakdown during the crisis. He had stopped functioning in his role, and who could blame him? Afterward, he had been wrung out, exhausted, and so relieved Elizabeth was safe that he didn’t have the words to fully express it.

The entire mob moved into the elevator, packing themselves inside like sardines into a can. Two Secret Service men had entered the elevator with them. They were tall men, one black and one white. The heads of Barrett and his protectors loomed over everyone else in the car like statues on Easter Island.

Jepsum was still looking up at him, his eyes so earnest he almost seemed like a baby seal. “…and their embassy won’t even acknowledge our communications. After the fiasco at the United Nations last month, I don’t think we can anticipate much cooperation.”

Barrett couldn’t follow Jepsum, but whatever he was saying, it lacked forcefulness. Didn’t the president have stronger men than this at his disposal?

Everyone was talking at once. Before Elizabeth was kidnapped, Barrett would often go on one of his legendary tirades just to get people to shut up. But now? He just allowed the whole mess of them to ramble, the noise from the chattering coming to him like a form of nonsensical music. He let it wash over him.

Barrett had been back on the job for five weeks already, and the time had passed in a blur. He had fired his chief of staff, Lawrence Keller, in the aftermath of the kidnapping. Keller was another short stack—five foot ten at best—and Barrett had come to suspect that Keller was disloyal to him. He had no evidence of this, and couldn’t even quite remember why he believed it, but he thought it best to get rid of Keller anyway.

Except now, Barrett was without Keller’s smooth gray calm and ruthless efficiency. With Keller gone, Barrett felt unmoored, at loose ends, unable to make sense of the onslaught of crises and mini-disasters and just plain information he was bombarded with on a daily basis.

David Barrett was beginning to think he was having another breakdown. He had trouble sleeping. Trouble? He could barely sleep at all. Sometimes, when he was alone, he would start hyperventilating. A few times, late at night, he had found himself locked in his private bathroom, silently weeping.

He thought he might like to enter therapy, but when you were president of the United States, engaging with a shrink was not an option. If the newspapers got hold of it, and the cable talk shows… he didn’t want to think about that.

It would be the end, to put it mildly.

The elevator opened into the egg-shaped Situation Room. It was modern, like the flight deck of a TV spaceship. It was designed for maximum use of space—large screens embedded in the walls every couple of feet, and a giant projection screen on the far wall at the end of the table.

Except for Barrett’s own seat, every plush leather seat at the table was already occupied—overweight men in suits, thin and ramrod-straight military men in uniform. A tall man in a dress uniform stood at the far head of the table.

Height. It was reassuring somehow. David Barrett was tall, and for most of his life he had been supremely confident. This man preparing to run the meeting would also be confident. In fact, he exuded confidence, and command. This man, this four-star general…

Richard Stark.

Barrett remembered that he didn’t care much for Richard Stark. But right now, he didn’t care much for anyone. And Stark worked at the Pentagon. Maybe the general could shed some light on this latest mysterious setback.

“Settle down,” Stark said, as the crowd the elevator had just expelled moved toward their seats.

“People! Settle down. The president is here.”

The room went quiet. A few people continued to murmur, but even that died out quickly.

David Barrett sat down in his high-backed chair.

“Okay, Richard,” he said. “Never mind the preliminaries. Never mind the history lesson. We’ve heard it all before. Just tell me what in God’s name is going on.”

Stark slipped a pair of black reading glasses onto his face and looked down at the sheets of paper in his hand. He took a deep breath and sighed.

On screens around the room, a body of water appeared.

“What you’re seeing on the screens is the Black Sea,” the general said. “As far as we can tell, about two hours ago, a small, three-man submersible owned by an American company called Poseidon Research was operating deep below the surface, in international waters more than one hundred miles southeast of the Crimean resort of Yalta. It appears to have been intercepted and seized by elements of the Russian Navy. The stated mission of the sub was to find and mark the location of an ancient Greek trading vessel believed to have gone down in those waters nearly twenty-five hundred years ago.”

President Barrett stared at the general. He took a breath. That didn’t seem bad at all. What was all the hubbub about?

A civilian submarine was doing archaeological exploration in international waters. The Russians were rebuilding their strength after a disastrous fifteen years or so, and they wanted the Black Sea to be their own private lake again. So they got irritated and overstepped. All right. Lodge a complaint with the embassy and get the scientists back. Maybe even get the sub back, too. It was all a misunderstanding.

“Forgive me, General, but this sounds like something for the diplomats to work out. I appreciate being kept informed of developments like this, but it seems like it’s going to be easy to skip the crisis on this one. Can’t we just have the ambassador—”

“Sir,” Stark said. “I’m afraid it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

It instantly annoyed Barrett that Stark would interrupt him in front of a room full of people. “Okay,” he said. “But this better be good.”

Stark shook his head and sighed again. “Mr. President, Poseidon Research International is a company funded and run by the Central Intelligence Agency. It’s a front operation. The submersible in question, Nereus, was masquerading as a civilian research vessel. In fact, it was on a classified mission under the aegis of both the CIA Special Operations Group and the Joint Special Operations Command. The three men captured include a civilian with high-level security clearances, a CIA special agent, and a Navy SEAL.”

For the first time in more than a month, David Barrett felt an old familiar sensation rising within him. Anger. It was a feeling he enjoyed. They sent a submarine on a spy mission in the Black Sea? Barrett didn’t need the map on the screen to know the geopolitics involved.

“Richard, pardon my French, but what in the hell were we doing with a spy submarine in the Black Sea? Do we want to have a war with the Russians? The Black Sea is their backyard.”

“Sir, with all respect intended, those are international waters open to navigation, and we intend to keep them that way.”

Barrett shook his head. Of course we did. “What was the sub doing there?”

The general coughed. “It was on a mission to tap into Russian communications cables at the bottom of the Black Sea. As you know, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians lease the old Soviet naval port at Sebastopol from the Ukrainians. That port was the mainstay of the Soviet fleet in the region, and serves the same purpose for the Russian Navy. As you can imagine, the arrangement is an awkward one.

“Russian telephone lines and computer-based communications cables run across Ukrainian territory in Crimea to the border with Russia. Meanwhile, tensions have been rising between Russia and Georgia, just to the south of there. We are concerned a war could break out, if not now, then in the near future.

“Georgia is very friendly with us, and we’d like for both them and Ukraine to join the NATO alliance one day. Until they do join NATO, they are vulnerable to a Russian attack. Recently, the Russians laid communications cables along the sea floor from Sebastopol to Sochi, completely circumventing the cables that run across Crimea.

“The mission of the Nereus was to find the location of those cables, and if possible, tap into them. If the Russians decide to attack Georgia, the fleet at Sebastopol is going to know in advance. We’re going to want to know that, too.”

Stark paused.

“And the mission was a total failure,” David Barrett said.

General Stark didn’t fight it.

“Yes, sir. It was.”

Barrett had to give him credit for that. A lot of times, these guys came in here and tried to spin shit into gold right in front of his eyes. Well, Barrett wasn’t having it anymore, and Stark got a couple of points for not even trying.

“Unfortunately, sir, the failure of the mission is not really the major issue we’re facing. The issue we need to deal with at this time is that the Russians have not acknowledged they’ve taken the sub. They also refuse to respond to our inquiries as to its whereabouts, or to the conditions faced by the men who were on board. At the moment, we’re not even sure if those men are alive or dead.”

“Do we know for a fact that they took the sub?”

Stark nodded. “Yes, we do. The sub is outfitted with a radio locator beacon, which has been turned off. But it is also outfitted with a tiny computer chip that broadcasts its location to the satellite global positioning system. The chip only works when the sub is at the surface. The Russians appear not to have detected it yet. It’s embedded deep within the mechanical systems. They will have to take the entire sub apart, or destroy it, to render the chip inoperable. In the meantime, we know they’ve raised the sub to the surface, and have taken it to a small port several miles south of Sochi, near the border with the former Soviet state of Georgia.”

“And the men?” Barrett said.

Stark half nodded and half shrugged. “We believe they’re with the ship.”

“No one knows this mission took place?”

“Just us, and them,” Stark said. “Our best guess is there may have been a recent intelligence leak among the mission participants, or within the agencies involved. We hate to think that, but Poseidon Research has operated out in the open for two decades, and there has never been any indication that its security was breached before.”

An odd thought occurred to David Barrett then.

What’s the problem?

It was a secret mission. The newspapers didn’t know anything about it. And the men involved well knew the risks they were taking. The CIA knew the risks. The Pentagon brass knew the risks. On some level, they must have known how foolish it was. Certainly, no one had asked the president of the United States for permission to carry out the mission. He was only hearing about it after disaster had struck.

That was one of his least favorite aspects of dealing with the so-called intelligence community. They tended to tell you things after it was already too late to do anything about them.

For an instant, he felt like an angry dad who has just learned his teenage son was arrested for vandalism by the local town cops. Let the kid rot in jail for the night. I’ll pick him up in the morning.

“Can we leave them there?” he said.

Stark raised an eyebrow. “Sir?”

Barrett looked around the room. All eyes were on him. He was acutely sensitive to the two dozen pairs of eyes. Young eyes in the back rows, wizened eyes with crow’s feet around the table, owlish eyes behind glasses. But the eyes, which normally showed such deference, now seemed to look at him with something else. That something might be confusion, and it might be the beginning of…

Pity?

“Can we leave them there, and quietly negotiate their release? That’s what I’m asking. Even if it takes some time? Even if it takes a month? Six months? It seems like negotiations would be one way to avoid yet another incident.”

“Sir,” the general said. “I’m afraid we can’t do that. The incident has already happened.”

“Right,” Barrett said.

And just like that, he snapped. It was quiet, like a twig snap. But he’d had enough. The man had contradicted him one time too many. Did he even realize who he was speaking to? Barrett pointed at the general with a long finger.

“The horse is already out of the barn. Is that what you’re telling me? Something has to be done! You and your shadow puppets made a stupid play, out on the edge all by yourselves, and now you want the official, popularly elected government to bail you out of your mess. Again.”

Barrett shook his head. “I’m sick of it, General. How does that sound to you? I can’t stand it anymore. All right? My instinct here is to leave those men with the Russians.”

David Barrett scanned the eyes in the room again. Many of them were looking away now, at the table in front of them, at General Stark, at shiny reports bound with plastic ring binders. Anywhere but at their president. It was as if he had made a particularly ripe-smelling boo-boo in his pants. It was if they knew something he didn’t know.

Stark instantly confirmed the truth of that.

“Mr. President, I wasn’t going to bring this up, but you leave me no choice. One of the men on that crew has had access to intelligence of the most sensitive nature. He has been an integral part of covert operations on three continents for more than a decade. He has encyclopedic knowledge of American spy networks inside Russia and China for starters, not to mention Morocco and Egypt, as well as Brazil, Colombia, and Bolivia. In a few cases, he established those networks himself.”

Stark paused. The room was dead quiet.

“If the Russians torture this man during interrogation, the lives of dozens of people, many of them important intelligence assets, may as well be forfeit. Worse than that, the information those people have access to will in turn become transparent to our opponents, leading to even more deaths. Extensive networks, which we’ve spent years building, could be rolled up in a short period of time.”

Barrett stared at Stark. The gall of these people was breathtaking.

“What was that man doing in the field, General?” Acid dripped from every word.

“As I indicated, sir, Poseidon Research International had been operating for decades under no obvious suspicion. The man was hiding in plain sight.”

“Hiding…” Barrett said slowly. “In plain sight.”

“That’s what it’s called, sir. Yes.”

Barrett said nothing in response. He just stared. And Stark finally seemed to realize that his explanations were not nearly good enough.

“Sir, and again this is with all respect due, I had nothing to do with the planning or execution of this mission. I didn’t know anything about it until this morning. I’m not part of Joint Special Operations Command, nor am I employed by the Central Intelligence Agency. I do, however, have complete faith in the judgment of the men and women who do…”

Barrett waved his hands over his head, as if to say STOP.

“What are our options, General?”

“Sir, we have only one option. We need to rescue those men. As fast as we can, if possible before interrogations begin. We need to scuttle that sub as well, and that’s crucial. But this one individual… we need to either rescue him, or eliminate him. As long as he’s alive and in Russian hands, we have a potential disaster unfolding.”

It was a moment before David Barrett spoke again. The general wanted to rescue the men, which suggested a secret mission. But the reason they were captured in the first place was a security breach. There’s been a security breach, so let’s plan more secret missions? It was circular thinking at its finest. But Barrett hardly felt the need to point that out. Hopefully, it was clear to even the numbest imbecile in this room.

An idea occurred to him then. There was going to be a new mission, and he was going to assign it, but not to the CIA or the Pentagon. They were the ones who had brought this problem about in the first place, and he could hardly trust them to resolve it. It would be stepping on toes to give the job to someone else, but it was clear that they had brought this on themselves.

He smiled inwardly. As painful as this situation was, it also presented him with an opportunity. He had the chance here to seize some of his power back. It was time to take the CIA and the Pentagon, the NSA, the DIA, all of these well-established spy agencies, out of the game.

Knowing what he was about to do made David Barrett feel like the boss again, for the first time in a long while.

“I agree,” he said. “The men should be rescued, and as quickly as possible. And I know exactly how we’re going to do it.”