The President Is Missing: A Novel Read online

  “Give us privacy, Jay. I wouldn’t want you and Eric to get burned by any fireworks.”

  This time the agent chuckles appropriately. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Never hurts to be careful. Secret Service agents are subject to subpoena just like anyone else. So are the Capitol Police guarding the Speaker. Everyone would tell the same story under oath now, if it ever came to that. It was all a coincidence. The Speaker just happened to jog by while the vice president was waiting for the café to open.

  The two agents in the front seat leave the limousine. The smell of sweat and body odor sweeps into the car as Lester Rhodes pops into the back, next to Katherine. “Madam Vice President, just wanted to say hello!”

  The door closes behind him. Just the two of them inside the car.

  Lester doesn’t look great in running gear. He needs to lose three or four inches in the midsection, and someone should have told him to wear longer running shorts. At least he’s wearing a hat—slate blue, with US CAPITOL POLICE in red stenciling—so she doesn’t have to look at that dopey perfectly sharp part he makes in his silver hair.

  He lifts his hat and wipes his forehead with a sweatband. This idiot is wearing a sweatband.

  Correction. He’s no idiot. He’s a ruthless tactician who orchestrated the takeover of the House, who knows his members better than they know themselves, who plays a long political game, who never forgets anyone who crosses him, however slight the insult or disrespect, who moves the pieces of the chessboard only after careful deliberation.

  He turns to her, his lethal blue eyes reduced to a squint. “Kathy.”

  “Lester. Be brief.”

  “I have the votes in the House,” he says. “The House is wrapped up like a bow. Is that brief enough?”

  One of the things she has learned over the years is the art of not responding too quickly. It buys you time and makes you seem more deliberative.

  “Don’t act so uninterested, Kathy. If you weren’t interested, we wouldn’t be here right now.”

  She allows his point. “What about the Senate?” she asks.

  His shoulders rise. “You’re the president of the Senate, not me.”

  She smirks. “But your party controls it.”

  “You get twelve on your side, I guarantee my fifty-five will vote to convict.”

  The vice president adjusts in her seat to face him squarely. “And why are you telling me this, Mr. Speaker?”

  “Because I don’t have to pull this trigger.” He sits back in the seat, settles in. “I don’t have to impeach him. I could just let him twist in the wind, wounded and ineffective. He’s dead in the water, Kathy. He won’t be reelected. I’ll own him for the next two years. So why would I impeach him and watch the Senate remove him from office and give the voters a fresh face like you to run against?”

  That possibility had occurred to her—that the president was of more use to Lester Rhodes wounded than gone. “Because you’ll be immortalized in your party for removing a president, that’s why,” she says.

  “Maybe so.” He seems to relish that thought. “But there are more important things.”

  “There’s something more important to you than being Speaker for life?”

  Lester helps himself to a bottle of water in the side compartment, screws off the top, takes a big swallow, then smacks his lips with satisfaction. “One thing is more important, yes,” he says.

  She opens her hands. “Do tell.”

  A wide smile crosses his face, then disappears.

  “It’s something President Duncan would never do,” he says. “But President Brandt, in her infinite wisdom, might.”

  Chapter

  55

  There’s going to be a vacancy on the Court,” says Lester.

  “Oh?” She hadn’t heard that. You never know with these justices, most of whom stay in their seats until they’re well into their eighties. “Who?”

  He turns and looks at her, his eyes narrowing, a poker face. Deciding, she thinks. Deciding whether to tell me.

  “Whitman got some very bad news from his doctor a week ago,” he says.

  “Justice Whitman is…”

  “It was bad news,” he says. “Voluntarily or otherwise, he won’t make it through this presidential term. He’s being urged to step down right now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she says.

  “Are you?” A wry smile creeps across his face. “Anyway, do you know what hasn’t happened in a long time? There’s been no midwesterner on the Supreme Court since John Paul Stevens. Nobody from a federal court like…oh, like the Seventh Circuit. The heartland.”

  The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. If memory serves her, that court covers federal cases from Illinois, Wisconsin…

  …and Indiana, Lester’s home state.

  Of course.

  “Who, Lester?”

  “The former attorney general of Indiana,” he says. “Female. Moderate. Well respected. Got nearly unanimous approval from the Senate four years ago for the appeals court, including your vote. Good and young—forty-three years old—so that’s good legacy building. She could sit on the court for thirty years. She’s from my side of the aisle, but she’ll vote your way on the issues your people seem to care about.”

  The vice president’s mouth drops open. She leans into him.

  “Jesus, Lester,” she says. “You want me to put your daughter on the Supreme Court?”

  She tries to remember what she knows about Lester’s daughter. Married with a few kids. Harvard undergrad, Harvard law. She worked in Washington, moved back home to Indiana, and ran for attorney general as a moderate counterweight to her father’s fire-and-brimstone politics. Everyone assumed the next step was the governorship, but then she went wonky and took an appointment to the federal appeals court.

  And yes, then Senator Katherine Brandt voted yes on her nomination to the appeals court. The report on her was that she was nothing like her father—if anything she veered in the other direction, party affiliation notwithstanding. Smart and sensible.

  Lester frames a newspaper headline with his hands. “Bipartisan, bipartisan, bipartisan,” he says. “A new day after the gridlock of the Duncan administration. She’ll be confirmed easily. I can guarantee the senators on my side, and your side will be happy. She’s pro-choice, Kathy, which seems to be all your people care about.”

  It…might not be so crazy.

  “You’ll start your presidency with a big win. Hell, you play this right, Kathy, you could serve nearly ten years in office.”

  The vice president looks out the window. She remembers that rush when she first announced, when she was the favorite, when she could see it, feel it, taste it.

  “Otherwise,” says Lester, “you won’t serve one day. I’ll keep Duncan in office, he’ll get crushed in the reelection, and you’ll be at a dead end.”

  He’s probably right about the next election. She wouldn’t be at a dead end, as he’s saying, but it would be an uphill battle to run four years later as a former vice president who lost a reelection bid.

  “And you’re okay,” she says, “with my serving two and a half terms as president?”

  The Speaker of the House slides toward the door, reaches for the handle. “What the hell do I care who the president is?”

  She shakes her head, bemused but not particularly surprised.

  “You gotta get those twelve votes in the Senate, though,” he says, wagging a finger.

  “And I suppose you have an idea how I would do that.”

  Speaker Rhodes moves his hand off the door handle. “As a matter of fact, Madam Vice President, I do.”

  Chapter

  56

  The assembled dignitaries eat a light breakfast of bagels and fruit and coffee in the eat-in kitchen overlooking the backyard and woods as I update them on where we are so far. I’ve just received an update on Los Angeles, where Homeland Security and FEMA, under DHS’s umbrella, are working with the city and the
state of California on the delivery of clean water. There have always been contingency plans for the suspension or failure of water-purification plants, so in the short term, while there will be a sense of urgency to get the plant up and running again, with any luck it will never bloom into a full-scale crisis. I won’t send my Imminent Threat Response Team out there, but we’re sending everyone else we have.

  I may be wrong about LA. It may not be a decoy. It might be ground zero for whatever is coming. If that’s true, I’ve made an enormous mistake. But without more to go on, I am not letting go of my team. They’re currently in the basement with Augie and the cybersecurity experts from Israel and Germany, working in concert with the rest of our team, stationed at the Pentagon.

  Chancellor Juergen Richter sits with his one aide, a fair-haired young man named Dieter Kohl, the head of Germany’s BND, its international intelligence service. Prime Minister Noya Baram brought her chief of staff, a stout, formal, older man who once served as a general in the Israeli army.

  We’re trying to keep this meeting a secret, which means we had to keep it small. One leader and one aide each, plus their technical gurus. This isn’t 1942, when FDR and Churchill met secretly at a spot just off the Intracoastal Waterway, in southern Florida, for a series of war conferences. They ate at a great restaurant called Cap’s Place and sent the owner letters of appreciation, which are now the treasures of an eatery otherwise known for its seafood, Key lime pie, and 1940s atmosphere.

  Nowadays, with an emboldened and ravenous press, the Internet and social media, all eyes on world leaders day and night, it is exceptionally difficult for any of us to move about incognito. The only thing in our favor is security: given terrorism threats these days, we are able to keep the specifics of our travel plans under wraps.

  Noya Baram is attending a conference tomorrow in Manhattan and said she was using Saturday to visit family in the United States. Considering she has a daughter who lives in Boston, a brother outside Chicago, and a grandchild completing her freshman year at Columbia, her alibi is plausible. Whether it will hold up is another story.

  Chancellor Richter used his wife’s cancer as a cover, moving up a scheduled trip to Sloan Kettering to yesterday, Friday. Their stated plan is to spend the weekend in New York City with friends.

  “Excuse me,” I say to the group gathered in the cabin’s living room as my phone buzzes. “I have to take this call. It’s—it’s one of those days.”

  I wish I had an aide with me, too, but I need Carolyn at the White House, and there isn’t anybody else I can trust.

  I move onto the deck overlooking the woods. The Secret Service is taking the lead, but there is a small contingent of German and Israeli agents in the yard and spread out around the property.

  “Mr. President,” says Liz Greenfield. “The girl, Nina. Her fingerprints came back. Her name is Nina Shinkuba. We don’t have much of a dossier on her, but we think she was born almost twenty-six years ago in the Abkhazia region of the republic of Georgia.”

  “The separatist territory,” I say. “The disputed territory.” The Russians backed Abkhazia’s claim of autonomy from Georgia. The 2008 war between Russia and Georgia was fought over it, at least ostensibly.

  “Yes, sir. Nina Shinkuba was suspected by the Georgian government of bombing a train station on the Georgian side of the disputed border in 2008. There was a series of attacks on both sides of the border before the war broke out between Abkhazia and Georgia.”

  Which became the war between Russia and Georgia.

  “She was a separatist?”

  “Apparently. The republic of Georgia calls her a terrorist.”

  “So that would put her in the category of anti-Western,” I say. “Would it also make her pro-Russian?”

  “The Russians were with them. The Russians and Abkhazians fought on the same side of that war. It’s a logical inference.”

  But not an automatic one.

  “Should we reach out to the Georgians to see what else we can learn about her?”

  “Hold that thought,” I say. “I want to ask someone else first.”

  Chapter

  57

  I only knew her as Nina,” says Augie, haggard from his work in the basement, rubbing his eyes as we stand together in the cabin’s living room.

  “No last name. That didn’t strike you as odd? You fell in love with a woman and you didn’t know her last name?”

  He lets out a sigh. “I knew she had a past she was escaping. I did not know the details. I did not care.”

  I watch him, but he doesn’t say more, doesn’t seem to be struggling to explain himself any more than that.

  “She was an Abkhazian separatist,” I say. “They worked with the Russians.”

  “So you have said. If she was…sympathetic to Russia, it was never something she shared with me. You have always known, Mr. President, that the Sons of Jihad attacked Western institutions. We oppose the influence of the West in southeastern Europe. Of course, this is consistent with the Russian agenda. But this does not mean that we work for the Russians. My understanding is that, yes, Suliman has accepted money from the Russians in the past, but he no longer needs their money.”

  “He sells his services to the highest bidder,” I say.

  “He does whatever he wants. Not always for money. He answers to no man but himself.”

  That’s how our intelligence has understood it, too.

  “That’s how Nina was injured,” I say. “That shrapnel in her head. She said a missile struck close to a church. It was the Georgians. It must have been.”

  Augie’s eyes trail away, looking off into the distance, filling with tears. “Does it really matter?” he whispers.

  “It matters if she was working with the Russians, Augie. If I can figure out who’s behind this, I have more options at my disposal.”

  Augie nods, still looking off in the distance. “Threats. Deterrence. Mr. President,” he says, “if we cannot stop this virus, your threats will be empty. Your attempts at deterrence will mean nothing.”

  But the virus hasn’t hit yet. We are still the most powerful country in the world.

  Maybe it’s time I reminded Russia of that fact.

  Augie returns to the basement. I pull out my phone and dial Carolyn.

  “Carrie,” I say, “are the Joint Chiefs in the Situation Room?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll be on in two minutes,” I say.

  Chapter

  58

  Mr. President,” says Chancellor Richter with his usual regal formality, as he shoots the French cuffs on his shirt. “I require no convincing of the Russians’ involvement in this attack. As you know, Germany has experienced several such incidents in our recent past. The Bundestag affair, the CDU headquarters. We are still experiencing the effects today.”

  He’s referring to the 2015 hacking into the servers of the German Bundestag, the lower house of the federal legislature. The hackers scooped up e-mails and loads of sensitive information before the Germans finally detected it and patched it up. Leaks of that information continue to spill out on the Internet, strategic drip by strategic drip, to this day.

  And the headquarters of Germany’s Christian Democratic Union party—Chancellor Richter’s party—was hacked as well, involving the theft of many documents containing sensitive and sometimes blunt exchanges on topics of political strategy, campaign coordination, and key issues.

  Both these attacks have been attributed to a group of cyberterrorist hackers known as APT28, or Fancy Bear, affiliated with the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service.

  “We are aware of approximately seventy-five attempted cyberterrorist incidents since Bundestag and the CDU,” says Richter’s aide, Dieter Kohl, Germany’s top foreign intelligence officer. “I speak of phishing expeditions into the servers belonging to federal and local governments and various political parties, all of them hostile to the Kremlin. I speak of incidents involving government institutions, industry, lab
or unions, think tanks. All of them,” he says, “attributed to Fancy Bear.”

  “Much of the information they have…” Chancellor Richter turns to his colleague, searching for the right word. “Exfiltrated, yes. Much of the information they have exfiltrated has not yet been leaked. We are expecting, as the election season approaches, to be seeing it. So, Mr. President, I can say to you that Germany requires no convincing on the question of whether the Russians are involved.”

  “But this is different,” says Prime Minister Noya Baram. “If I am right about the virus you detected on the Pentagon server, there were no…bread crumbs, I believe you’d say.”

  “Correct,” I say. “This time the hackers didn’t leave behind any trace. No fingerprints. No bread crumbs. It just showed up out of nowhere and disappeared without a trace.”

  “And that is not the only difference,” she continues. “Your concern, Jonny, is not the theft of information. Your concern is the stability of your infrastructure.”

  “It’s both,” I say, “but you’re correct, Noya. I’m worried that they’re attacking our systems. The place where the virus showed up, when it winked at us before disappearing—it’s part of our operational infrastructure. They aren’t stealing e-mails. They’re compromising our systems.”

  “And I am told,” says Chancellor Richter, “that if anyone can do it, it is the Sons of Jihad. Our people”—he looks at his foreign intelligence chief, who nods—“they tell us the SOJ is the best in the world. One would think that we could find people just as competent. But what we are learning is no, in fact there are very few elite cyberterrorists and just as few, if not fewer, elite cyberdefense experts. In our country, we have formed a new cybercommand, but we are having trouble filling the positions. We have maybe a dozen, more or less, who would qualify as good enough to defend against the most able cyberterrorists.”

  “It’s like anything else,” I say. “Sports, the arts, academia. There are some people at the very top of the pyramid who are simply more skilled than everyone else. Israel has many of them on the defense side. Israel has the best cyberdefense systems in the world.” I nod to Noya, who accepts the compliment without objection; it is a source of pride for the Israelis.