White

by Christopher Whitcomb

Genres: Historical Fiction; Mystery

Synopsis

Islamic and Christian fundamentalists unleash a well-coordinated series of attacks all across the American heartland. Stolen radioactive material, a high-level spy, a mysterious break into top-secret data-encryption technology, twisting plots and spiraling conspiracies are all linked with fast-paced, cinematic crosscutting. In this thriller, FBI agent Jeremy Waller returns, as does tough-as-nails Elizabeth Beechum, now vice president, and the enigmatic billionaire Jordan Mitchell.

Release date: December 2, 2008

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 400

Sample

PROLOGUE

The first casualty of war is truth.

— Rudyard Kipling

Sunday, 13 February

06:27 GMT

Jayawijaya Highlands, Indonesia

JEREMY WALLER STARED down the length of his high-powered rifle to where a brilliantly colored butterfly had alighted on its barrel. The creature fluttered its wings as a thin breeze drifted over the sniper’s shoulder, slowly parting the bamboo shoots and elephant grass around him. Beads of sweat slipped down the ridge of his painted nose and fell silently into the furrow between his thumb and forefinger. Odd smells danced in his nostrils—the conflicting odors of broad-weave burlap, triple-canopy jungle, and something dead out there among the shadows.

“Milon’s swallowtail.”

It was a woman’s voice, a sound Jeremy had never heard in a situation like this. Delta Force, now known officially as Combat Applications Group, referred to her as GI Jane, but sparingly and only out of sarcasm. Military SpecOps teams claimed to have no female members, though both the army and navy kept a small number for “military operations other than war.” Now that the CIA had joined the game with Special Activities Division personnel, you needed a program to know all the players.

“Graphium milon,” she continued, “a beautiful tropical fauna distinguished by a yellowish tuft of hair on the left dorsal hind wing. Probably a male with all that ventral red, though it’s tough to tell with this species.” Her pearl-white teeth shined from behind thick camouflage greasepaint, which she had applied in jagged green and black stripes.

Jeremy wiped sweat out of his eyes. Raindrops the size of snow peas began to fall among the broad-leaved plants around them.

“Goddamned rain,” he said out loud. It fogged up his scope, obscured the target, and made Jeremy’s now rancid ghillie suit stick to his skin. The garment of hemp, canvas, and local vegetation crawled with insects and had begun to torture him with a chronic and pervasive itch.

“Do all you FBI guys bitch this much?” Jane asked.

Jeremy, a six-year veteran special agent with a little more than a year on the Bureau’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, saw no point in responding. They were partners in an operation that hinged on anonymity; he had no interest in becoming her friend.

TEN THOUSAND MILES east, two men and a woman waited in a dim corporate boardroom lined with claro walnut and silver filigree wall sconces. Three flat-screen televisions flickered with grainy images, then flashed to high-resolution pictures, clear as cable news.

“We have GPS signatures here, here, here, and here,” one of the men said. He stood to the right of the monitors and pointed an infrared laser at the center screen. Red dots popped up at the four compass points around a jungle clearing.

“Where exactly is here?” another man asked. Dressed in a bespoke chalk-stripe suit and John Lobb shoes polished to an oxblood patina, the obvious leader of the group sat near the end of a huge table.

“Central Indonesia,” the briefer responded. “The Irian Jaya province—a remote and isolated patch of primeval rain forest that is well protected by sympathetic indigenous populations. The nearest town is a Yani tribal village called Telambela.”

“Telambela? That’s a hell of a place for something like this to start, isn’t it?” the man in the four-thousand-dollar shoes asked.

“A better place for it to end,” a woman in a dated yet still elegant business suit of cashmere and silk answered. Tall and refined, she paced back and forth in front of leaded glass windows that reached all the way to the ceiling fifteen feet overhead. New York at night stretched out before her.

“Let’s hope so,” the briefer agreed. His voice sounded hollow, like that of a soldier consigned to a hopeless battle. Recent intelligence suggested that the strongest wave of terror in U.S. history could begin within days. If they failed to intercede in this godforsaken stretch of Third World wilderness, the ramifications would spread to places the best minds at CIA and the FBI had never even imagined.

“I GOT THAT sentry with the Galil coming around the bunkhouse. Call him Banjo Man.”

Jeremy spoke softly and used his left hand to dial an NMARSAT phone that technicians at the FBI’s Electronic Research Facility had fitted with a specially modified FASCINATOR secure voice module. A second sentry, whom they’d already nicknamed Castro, stood smoking a double corona just outside one of the huts.

“What time you got?” he asked.

The rain, which began to fall in earnest now, had crept inside his supposedly waterproof watch, rendering it useless.

“Thirteen forty,” the woman said. Without waiting for Jeremy’s reply, her voice turned low and guttural. A strange combination of clicking sounds and grunts filled the sodden air around them, foreign words that seemed to originate in the back of her throat and pass up through her nose.

A response came from somewhere behind where they lay at the base of a steep mountain slope. “Click hung ctock ctock oum aup,” a huskier voice said.

“Quit that shit and speak English,” Jeremy whispered. He craned his neck, searching for the Yani tribesman nestled in the tangle behind them. The tiny man with the penis gourd, rattan nose rings, and a string of babirusa teeth around his neck had guided them into position and then secreted himself back within an environment only a native could love.

“Be careful what you say,” Jane responded. “These people are very intuitive and perceptive of tone. You know, his ancestors were headhunters.”

“Yeah, I think I saw them once at the circus.” Jeremy’s tone left little need for intuition. “You tell him to stay where we can see him. I don’t trust that little bastard.”

GI Jane said nothing for a moment, then, “He says the messenger will come out of the north just before dark. Onset of evening nautical twilight is 07:37 Zulu, which means we have two hours. You want to rotate off your scope for a while?”

Jeremy shifted behind the butt of his sniper rifle. It had taken his team three days to walk into position from a helicopter insertion near a river village. A CIA case officer had met them there and introduced the eight-member task force to this tribesman, whose name Jeremy didn’t even try to pronounce. GI Jane, a former Special Forces intelligence officer now assigned to the CIA, served as translator.

Why the U.S. government would train anyone to speak some arcane Indonesian dialect had never really dawned on Jeremy. Then again, he had spent enough time in the intelligence community to know that nothing ever really made sense. In the universe of secrets, you just accepted what you were told and moved on toward the objective. Unless you had a need to know, information usually ended up being little more than a liability.

“I’m staying right here,” Jeremy said. He had no intention of rotating off his rifle until the “messenger”—local slang for an Indonesian bomb master named Ali Fallal Mahar—walked into the hut complex in front of them. Mahar had distinguished himself in eleven terror attacks against East Asian targets within the past year. More than 340 people had died at his hands, 37 of them Americans.

Jeremy knew that the messenger was due into the compound sometime before dark. He meant to be there when Mahar arrived . . . with a special greeting.

“WHERE ARE THE shooters?” The man in the John Lobb shoes rose from his chair and walked to the far end of the table. He ignored the multimedia screens for a moment as he thumbed through the news clip folio his press advisors assembled three times each day.

“Just inside the tree line,” his briefer advised. The chief of staff—a rigid former marine named Trask—pointed toward the jungle, east of a clearing approximately one acre square. Five crude huts rose haphazardly from the banks of a slow-running creek. A satellite communications dish rested on a flat-topped teak log just outside the largest of the shacks. Satellite imagery showed a small red generator, several jerricans, assorted cardboard boxes, and clothes hanging from a line between two sago trees. There were no women or children, but a pack of mangy dogs rummaged through a burn pile trying to sniff out lunch among the trash.

“Waller is positioned here,” Trask continued. He drew a concentric circle just east of the hut complex, then pointed to the south. “The Dev Group sniper is here.”

“How many altogether?” the man in charge asked.

“Eight. We have three green assaulters, two blue assaulters, one blue sniper, and Waller.” All three knew green referred to army assets; blue to navy.

“What about the Agency woman?”

“Yes, of course . . . the translator. She’s cross-trained like the others, but her background is academic. If it comes right down to it, she’ll fight, but that’s not her primary MOS.”

The man in the John Lobb shoes closed the press clippings file and laid it on the massive conference table. He turned toward the screen.

“What if we don’t get him here? What if something goes wrong? Tell me about the contingency plans.”

The woman stopped her compulsive pacing and stood beside the window.

“We’ve poured millions of dollars and countless man-hours into cultivating the contacts that put us here in the first place,” she said in a well-educated South Carolina lilt. The distinguished-looking woman—perhaps the best known face in America at the time—crossed her arms and stared out into a city she had never learned to like.

“This is a one-time opportunity,” she said. “If we don’t intercept this operation here, there won’t be any need for a contingency plan.”

“SO SINCE WHEN is the FBI working insurgency ops with military units in Third World countries?” GI Jane asked. She had turned her attention away from the hut complex and seemed transfixed with the Milon’s swallowtail on Jeremy’s rifle barrel. “I mean, you guys are all about following the rules, not breaking them, right?”

“The rules have changed,” Jeremy said, without elaborating. He wiped dripping rain from the brow of his ghillie hat and scanned the scene in front of him, trying to visualize just what this operation would look like if and when it finally went down. According to the five-paragraph warning order, Mahar was due into this isolated camp sometime before dark. Earlier efforts to capture or kill the terror chief had failed because of poor intelligence and corrupt Indonesian officials, but a new source had emerged. Code-named Parsifal, this Jemaah Islamiya insider had already compromised four of Mahar’s associates, driving the terror group’s remaining leadership into the jungle.

“You ever killed anyone?” GI Jane asked.

Jeremy shifted positions as the jungle pulsed around them. Ranked among the world’s most impenetrable environments, it struck him as a land of shadows, ghosts, and misery. Without its mazelike network of tribal footpaths, this place might have forever remained civilization’s last link to the Stone Age.

“I thought you CIA types already knew everything,” Jeremy responded. “Don’t you have some kind of dossier on me or something?”

She laughed out loud.

“Don’t flatter yourself. Terrorists, despots, and radio talk show hosts are all we have time for,” she said. “Besides, aren’t you Feebies the ones with all the files? Or did they get pushed off into some West Virginia closet with all of J. Edgar’s evening wear?”

Jeremy tried not to smile.

“Closets? You mean like the one Saddam used to hide all those weapons of mass destruction you said he had before the war?”

She stopped smiling.

“Cheap shot. What we sent up to the White House and what the politicians told the world were two totally different things, and you know . . .”

“Wait . . . ,” Jeremy interrupted. “What the hell is that? Check the northwest trailhead.”

The HRT sniper leaned into the reticle of his sniper scope, intent on something very unusual. GI Jane adjusted her spotting scope, trying to follow.

“Shit . . .” was all she said.

THEY APPEARED ON the flat-screen televisions like black dots in a field of green: a handful of bodies moving out of the jungle and stopping at the edge of the clearing.

“Who the hell are they?” the man in the John Lobb shoes asked.

A commercial satellite cruising 127 miles above Indonesia had just passed the apex of its arc, shooting video at a very steep angle. Despite the high resolution and excellent stream feed, no one in the conference room could see much except for the tops of their heads.

“I count six walkers,” Trask said, stopping a moment as another emerged from the jungle. “Check that . . . seven.”

“There’s only one civilian I know of who has the connections and the desire to find a godforsaken hole in the jungle like that,” his boss added. “It’s gotta be Mahar.”

“And the others?” the woman asked. “The intelligence said he’d be alone.”

“Intelligence?” Trask huffed. “Even the best report is just one man’s opinion—usually some tenured bureaucrat who hasn’t seen field time since Christ was a corporal.”

The three of them stared at the screen for a long moment, waiting for some kind of response from the fire team hiding in the surrounding jungle. Whether this was Mahar or not, the operators sent in to get him would surely react with force. This special ops team included some of the most capable soldiers on earth, and they had eyes on target.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” the leader said.

The others nodded. Despite technological advances in space-based imagery, there would never be any substitute for good men on the ground.

“YOU GONNA CALL this new guy into the CP?” GI Jane asked.

Jeremy shook his head. “I’m kind of busy right now,” he whispered, fingering the trigger of his rifle and scouring the area through the reticle of his sniper scope.

At the north end of the clearing stood a Yani guide just like their own, sporting a hand-carved bow and prehistoric-looking body markings. He moved ahead of six taller men, then signaled to Banjo Man, who maintained his position near the bunkhouse.

“Sierra One to TOC,” Jane spoke softly into the telephone receiver. “We have seven, repeat seven new players entering from the black/ green corner, copy?”

They waited a moment for the mission planner at a tactical operations center in Bangkok to acknowledge the update. From Bangkok, these essential elements of intelligence, or EEI, would pass all the way back to a Secure Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at the FBI/CIA Joint Terrorist Threat Integration Center in Arlington, Virginia. Any word of a command-initiated assault would get relayed from there to NMARSAT units at each of the three ground cells. This communications plan seemed clumsy and time consuming, but the foreboding jungle terrain had rendered conventional options useless.

Jeremy stared through his rifle scope.

“I thought your headhunter guy said this wasn’t going down until . . .”

Midsentence, he realized there was no more time for discussion. The targets had started to move quickly from the jungle toward the huts. The task force, which consisted of just five assaulters, would lose tactical advantage if Mahar and his buddies made it inside.

“Buckle up,” Jeremy whispered. “This is going down now.”

“DAMMIT, THIS CHANGES everything,” the woman said, focusing on the television screens.

“It’s all right,” Trask reassured her. “They can handle it.”

Mission organizers had foreseen virtually every variable, from airborne medevac contingencies to visual triggers designed to compensate for on-site communications problems. No matter how many people showed up in that compound, rules of engagement allowed for immediate, unannounced use of deadly force the moment Mahar’s capture looked tenuous.

“I don’t care if there are fifty of them as long as we get Mahar,” the leader growled. “He’s the only one we really care about.”

Neither of the others responded. They had seen enough of the war on terror to understand that no one bad guy ever shouldered all the blame.

“YOU GOT BANJOMAN,” Jane said.

Jeremy knew the plan. He would take the gunman standing next to the bunkhouse. A Navy SEAL just inside the southern tree line would take Castro, the only other visible sentry. Once the two men were down, five task-force assaulters would step out of the jungle and demand Mahar’s surrender. If the terrorist made any movement—any movement at all—Jeremy and his counterpart at the other side of the clearing would eliminate “targets of opportunity.”

“What do we do if they get back into the jungle?” GI Jane asked.

“They’re not getting back into the jungle,” Jeremy answered, trying not to shake his head. If only Fritz Lottspeich, his regular HRT partner, had been there to help. He knew nothing about Indonesian butterflies or esoteric tribal dialects, but the man sure as hell could hunt.

Pffft!

Jeremy squeezed the trigger of his Accuracy International AW-SP rifle, a 7.62 x 51mm caliber death stick that fired subsonic rounds and limited muzzle blast to just sixty decibels. Although the weapon’s accuracy was limited to 100 yards, anyone standing outside the suffocating vegetation around Jeremy’s sniper hide would hear nothing at all.

“Sentries down,” GI Jane observed.

Even before the two bodies hit the ground, a team of five assaulters from the Army’s Combat Applications Group and the Navy’s Surface Warfare Development Group emerged from the jungle, assault rifles at the ready. They looked like alien life-forms morphing out of the foliage, so odd and imposing in their camouflage that Mahar and his posse barely thought to flinch.

Pop, pop, pop . . .

An MP-5 erupted. The dogs dropped.

Jeremy held his crosshairs on the bridge of Mahar’s nose, just in case, but there was no need to shoot. The Yani tribesman disappeared into the jungle, little more than a spirit fading into scattered light. Mahar and his colleagues lifted their hands over their heads. A clean surrender.

“THAT’S IT,” TRASK said, back inside the walnut-paneled office. He had moved away from the screens and now stood near a normal-looking multiplex phone. “Two sentries dead. Six players in custody. Mahar is one of them.”

This simply confirmed what they had just seen, of course. Now that the surveillance satellite had passed its apex, faces and clothing were becoming easier to distinguish.

“God almighty!” the woman suddenly exclaimed. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”

The others nodded silently. Mahar was easy to spot. FBI, CIA, and Interpol photographs had made his face familiar even to casual cable news watchers. The two men beside him looked familiar, too: Ramsi al-kir Amuri, Jemaah Islamiya’s widely feared political leader, and Adnan al Shukrijuma, Mahar’s chief assassin.

But the other three looked altogether different. They wore blue jeans, sweat-stained T-shirts, and ball caps. The patch above one visor read “Bass Pro Shops.”

“WHO THE HELL is that?” Jeremy asked, turning from his scope to his partner. But she was already gone. Jeremy just lay there and watched as the short, muscular woman burst out of the jungle and ran across the clearing toward the six newest prisoners in the U.S. government’s war on terror.

“I hope you’re better at questions than you are at answers,” Jeremy said to no one in particular. He watched as the colorful butterfly flapped its wings and drifted off the tip of his barrel in jagged, staccato-stroke flight.

AS IF ON cue, the newly elected vice president of the United States, Elizabeth Beechum, turned toward Jordan Mitchell, the country’s wealthiest and best-known industrialist. It had been more than a year since the two first met in hostile discussions before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Unlikely allies, the two had forged an alliance of sorts, a “new century” partnership of will that reached beyond politics or traditional boundaries of business and government.

“I see it, but I don’t believe it,” Mitchell said. Intelligence reports had suggested nothing like what appeared before him on the high-resolution monitor. “How can that be?”

Beechum shook her head. Everything they had worked so hard to achieve was supposed to end here in this isolated jungle. Now that had changed.

“Damned if I know,” she growled. “But those three on the right sure as hell look like Americans.”

I

Monday, 14 February

12:02 GMT

Situation Room, The White House

“ALL RIGHT, LET’S get moving. Matthew?”

Newly elected president David Ray Venable waved his hand to quiet a room that seemed to quiver with shock and nervous energy. He stood behind his chair at the midpoint of a broad mahogany table. To his immediate left sat National Security Advisor Matthew Havelock, a former University of Pennsylvania history professor who looked down his nose through Dollar Store reading glasses at a sky-blue briefing package. Havelock folded his hands around a tumbler of slowly melting ice, trying to keep it from rattling.

“You’ve seen the morning papers, I presume, Mr. President. I think we . . .”

“Seen the papers? Is this what I hired a national security advisor to tell me? Of course I’ve seen the morning papers!”

The Washington Post, New York Times, and several others lay neatly stacked in front of him. Headlines trumpeted the story.

BOMBERS STRIKE AT THE HEARTLAND, one proclaimed; TERROR RAVAGES HOMELAND, screamed another. USA Today perhaps said it best: NATION’S WORST FEARS A REALITY.

Just before 10:00 P.M. eastern time—nine hours earlier—terrorists had struck three targets: a popular Buckhead nightspot in Atlanta, Disneyland in Anaheim, and the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.

Virtually every channel in broadcast news had preempted regular programming to go wall-to-wall with on-scene coverage. Local, state, and federal emergency response crews were working frantically to deal with massive casualties. Organizations from the Red Cross to small-town fire department auxiliaries and church-based volunteer groups were streaming in to help.

Washington had awakened as well, trying to bring three years of terror response planning into action. Unfortunately, the nation’s capital—the seat of virtually every federal agency from the Department of Homeland Security and FBI to intelligence gatherers like the NSA and DIA—had been paralyzed by the worst winter storm in three decades. For a city that closed its doors at the lightest dusting, this crisis could not have come at a more difficult time. The only people moving around inside the beltway had four-wheel drives or skis.

“Reports are still sketchy, sir,” Havelock said, “but based on what we know, this is the most serious attack anywhere in the world since 9/ 11.”

Venable, the former Democratic governor of Connecticut, shook his head in disbelief. He had sworn his oath to the nation’s highest office just three weeks earlier. It appeared that his so-called honeymoon had come to a crashing halt.

“Here’s what we know,” a voice interjected. It belonged to FBI director Richard Alred, a former judge, accomplished trial lawyer, and, at forty-three, the youngest Bureau head since J. Edgar Hoover. Like his pug-nosed predecessor, Alred never missed an opportunity to exercise his authority, regardless of audience, jurisdiction, or protocol.

“Experts from our Bomb Data Center at Quantico have determined that the I.E.D.s were similar in construction and sophisticated,” he said. “Well planned. They hit all three sites—thousands of miles apart—within eight seconds of each other.”

Venable crossed his arms and considered the FBI chief. The man wore close-cropped hair and a properly tailored suit over an athletic build. He spoke with remnants of a Boston accent, but the clean-cut delivery was bred of military heritage and enough time in the private sector to understand imperative. Though Alred came as a holdover from the previous administration, Venable suspected that this man would serve him well.

“I.E.D.s?” the president asked. “What are I.E.D.s?”

“Improvised explosive devices, sir: Czech-made Semtex—a particular batch with additives used in the manufacture of land mines. This special compound was exported to an Indonesian factory in 1997 and is the same chemical composition found in the 2003 Marriott bombing in Jakarta. Our investigators also found evidence of unusual e-cell timers and residue of methyl nitrate, ammonium nitrate, and fuel oil—the compound Timothy McVeigh used in Oklahoma City.”

“You think this was homegrown?”

“Not at all, sir. ANFO is one of the most common explosives out there, and these attacks bear all the hallmarks of Muslim extremists. They used truck bombs with remote detonators and planned the primary strikes to inflict maximum casualties. Once emergency crews and television cameras showed up, they set off tertiary explosives for even more devastating effects. These were well planned, expertly executed military operations.”

“Press reports indicate they may have used ambulances,” Havelock added. He still looked shaken but saw no point in letting Alred—who wasn’t even officially part of the National Security Council—monopolize discussion. “Is that true? Did these animals turn vehicles of mercy into bombs?”

“It appears so,” Alred said without turning his eyes from the president. “Up to thirty percent of the casualties are believed to be police, fire, and EMS personnel. I don’t have to tell you what kind of impact this might have on responses to any future attacks.”

Voices grumbled among more than a dozen people who had crowded into the living-room-sized space located one floor below the Oval Office. Most of the president’s newly appointed National Security Council staff had been called in for this emergency session.

To the president’s right sat his chief of staff, Andrea Chase, followed by the secretary of defense; secretary of state; attorney general; the heads of CIA, Treasury, FBI, and Department of Homeland Security; the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff; the president’s economic advisor; the U.S. representative to the United Nations; the council’s national coordinator for infrastructure protection and counterterrorism.

“Future attacks.” Venable huffed. “For God’s sake, I thought we were done with nonsense like this.” He placed both hands on the shoulders of his high-backed chair and shook his head. “You said Muslim extremists. Do we know that for sure?”

“We’ve received three separate claims of responsibility by a new group that calls itself Ansar ins Allah,” Alred offered. “All came in the form of videotapes delivered via courier to local television stations in the affected markets. This is the same sort of delivery technique we’ve seen after attacks in Mombasa, Riyadh, and Jakarta. Standard rhetoric, suicide-ritual indicators, plenty of proprietary specifics.”

CIA director Milton Vick cleared his throat. “The Agency has obtained all three tapes,” he said, striving not to get upstaged by his FBI counterpart. “FIDUL is cross-referencing voiceprints and language patterns through Dominant Chronicle databases and . . .”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa . . .” The president stopped him. “The what is what?”

Vick, a short, plump former Congressman and ambassador to Chile had read this information from a piece of paper. He looked completely lost to deeper explanation.

“FIDUL is our Federal Intelligent Documents Understanding Laboratory,” Alred explained “They work with groups like CENDI and NAIC in support of an interagency working group of STIs from Commerce, Energy, NASA, the National Library of Medicine, the DoD, and Interior. Dominant Chronicle is a joint DIA-FBI document analysis center.”

The president shrugged and shook his head, bewildered by the endless list of agencies and acronyms. Explanations just added to his confusion.

“Bottom line,” Vick said. “We don’t have solid visual identification due to facial obfuscation, but our top analysts believe the claims of responsibility are credible.”

“Quite frankly, Mr. President, Ansar ins Allah represents what we have most feared about the terror threat facing this country,” Alred said. “A cell of al Qaeda sympathizers who haven’t shown up on any radar screen. Small. Rogue. Violent. We really don’t have a lot to go on.”

“Don’t have a lot to go on.”

Venable spoke in a small voice, the falsely endearing rattle predators use to lure their prey. These were the nation’s top intelligence and law enforcement officials, and they knew little more than what Venable had seen on cable news. For a man just three weeks in the Oval Office, that didn’t seem possible.

“Did you say you don’t have a lot to go on?”

Shoulders started to tighten around the room.

“Well, you sure as hell better come up with something! Thirteen hours from now, I’ve got to walk out in front of two hundred eighty million Americans and convince them that we’re still the land of the free and the home of the brave. I’m going to need a little help here.”

The president leered at his cast of experts. They ranged from political appointees to career professionals. None of them had ever presided over a disaster like this.

“We inherited this mess from a Republican administration,” Andrea Chase pointed out. “They can hardly hold you responsible after just three weeks in offi