The President Is Missing: A Novel Read online

  I shake my head. At least I wasn’t the only one.

  “Kathy, your resignation is not accepted. Now get back to work.”

  Chapter

  122

  Bach sways as she listens to the Saint Matthew Passion. She has no music or headphones—they have been confiscated—only her memories of the complementing choruses, the soprano solo with which she used to sing along. She imagines herself in the church in the eighteenth century, hearing it for the first time.

  She is interrupted when the door to her cell opens.

  The man who walks in is young, with sandy hair, dressed informally in a button-down shirt and jeans. He brings in a chair with him, places it near her bed, and sits down.

  Bach sits up, back against the wall, feet dangling down. The chains remain around her wrists.

  “My name is Randy,” he says. “I’m the guy who asks nicely. There are others who won’t.”

  “I am…familiar with the tactic,” she says.

  “And you’re…Catharina.”

  She isn’t sure how they figured out her identity—probably the DNA sample they took. Maybe facial-recognition software, though she doubts it.

  “That is your name, right? Catharina Dorothea Ninkovic. Catharina Dorothea—that was Johann Sebastian’s first daughter, right?”

  She doesn’t respond. She picks up the paper cup and drinks the last of the water she’s been given.

  “Let me ask you a question, Catharina. Do you think we’ll go easy on you because you’re pregnant?”

  She shifts in her bed, a sheet of unforgiving steel.

  “You tried to assassinate a president,” he says.

  Her eyes narrow. “If I had wanted to assassinate a president,” she says, “he would be assassinated.”

  Randy holds most of the cards here, and he enjoys it. He nods along, almost amused. “There are a lot of other countries that would like to have a conversation with you,” he says. “Some of them don’t have such a progressive view of human rights. Maybe we’ll transfer you to one of them. They can always send you back later—if there’s anything left of you to send back. How does that sound, Bach? You wanna roll the dice with the Ugandans? How about Nicaragua? The Jordanians are pretty hyped up to speak with you. They seem to think you put a bullet between the eyes of their security chief last year.”

  She waits until he’s finished. Then she waits longer still.

  “I will tell you whatever you want to know,” she says. “I have only a single demand.”

  “You think you’re in a position to demand anything?”

  “Whatever your name is—”

  “Randy.”

  “—you should be asking me what it is I want.”

  He sits back in his chair. “Okay, Catharina. What do you want?”

  “I know that I will remain in custody for the remainder of my life. I am under no…illusions about this.”

  “That’s a good start.”

  “I want my baby born healthy. I want her born in America, and I want her adopted by my brother.”

  “Your brother,” says Randy.

  He appeared from behind the house next door as she stood near the rubble of their home, as she touched the face of her beaten, slashed, dead mother tied to the tree.

  “Is it true?” he said as he approached, his face tear-streaked, his body shivering. He took one look at her, at the rifle she held, at the sidearm tucked in her pants. “It is true, isn’t it? You killed them. You killed those soldiers!”

  “I killed the soldiers who killed Papa.”

  “And now they killed Mama!” he cried. “How could you do that?”

  “I didn’t…I’m sorry…I—” She started toward him, her older brother, but he backed away, as if repelled.

  “No,” he said. “Do not come near me. Ever. Ever!”

  He turned and ran. He was faster. She chased after him, begging him to come back, calling out his name, but he disappeared.

  She never saw him again.

  For a time, she thought he hadn’t survived. But then she learned that the orphanage was able to transfer him out of Sarajevo. Boys had it easier than girls.

  So many times she wanted to visit him. To speak to him. To hold him. She had to settle for listening to him.

  “Wilhelm Friedemann Herzog,” says Randy. “A violinist living in Vienna. Took his adoptive Austrian family’s last name but kept his given first and middle names. He was named after Johann Sebastian’s first son. I’m sensing a pattern.”

  She stares at him, in no particular hurry herself.

  “Okay, you want your brother, Wilhelm, to adopt your kid.”

  “And I want to transfer all my financial assets to him. And I want a lawyer who will draw up and approve all the necessary documents.”

  “Uh-huh. You think your brother’s going to want your kid?”

  She feels her eyes moisten at the question, one she has asked herself many times. This will be a jolt for Wil, no doubt. But he is a good man. Her child will be Wil’s blood, and Wil would not blame his infant niece for the sins of her mother. The fifteen million dollars will ensure that Delilah, and her new family, will be financially secure, too.

  But most important, Delilah will never be alone.

  Randy shakes his head. “See, the problem here is that you’re talking to me as if you have leverage—”

  “I can give you information on dozens of international incidents over the last decade. Assassinations of numerous public officials. I can tell you who hired me for each job. I will assist your investigations. I will testify before whatever tribunals. I will do all this as long as my child is born in America and adopted by my brother. I will tell you about every job I’ve ever carried out.”

  Randy is still playing his role as the man with the upper hand, but she can see a change in his expression.

  “Including this job,” she says.

  Chapter

  123

  I walk through the east door of the Oval Office into the Rose Garden, Augie alongside me. It’s muggy outside at this late hour, a threat of rain in the air.

  Rachel and I used to stroll through the garden every night after dinner. It was on one of those strolls that she told me that the cancer had returned.

  “I’m not sure I ever properly thanked you,” I tell him.

  “No need,” he says.

  “What are you going to do now, Augie?”

  His shoulders rise. “This I do not know. We—Nina and I—we talked of nothing but returning to Sukhumi.”

  That word again. That word is trending, as they say, on the Internet right now. I will see that word in my nightmares.

  “The thing that is funny,” he says, “is that we knew our plan might be unsuccessful. We knew Suliman would send someone after us. We didn’t know what you would do. There were so many…”

  “Variables.”

  “Yes, variables. And yet we always spoke as if it was going to happen. She talked of the home she wanted to purchase, a half mile from her parents, not far from the sea. She talked of the names she would give our children someday.”

  I hear the emotion in his voice. His eyes shine with tears.

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “You could stay here,” I say. “Work for us.”

  His mouth twists. “I have no…immigration status. I’ve not…”

  I stop and turn to him. “I might be able to help out with that part,” I say. “I know a few people.”

  He smiles. “Yes, of course, but—”

  “Augie, I can’t let this happen again. We got lucky this time. We need more than luck going forward. We need to be far more prepared than we were. I need people like you. I need you.”

  He looks away, out over the garden, the roses and daffodils and hyacinths. Rachel knew every kind of flower in this garden by name. I only know them as beautiful. More beautiful, right now, than ever.

  “America,” he says, as if considering it. “I did rather enjoy the baseball contest.”

 
It’s the first real laugh I’ve had in a very long time. “Baseball game,” I say.

  Sunday

  Chapter

  124

  Your Highness,” I say into the phone to King Saad ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia as I sit at my desk in the Oval Office. I raise a mug of coffee to my lips. I don’t ordinarily drink coffee in the afternoon, but after two hours of sleep and the Friday and Saturday we just had, ordinary is long gone.

  “Mr. President,” he says. “It seems as if you’ve had an eventful few days.”

  “As have you. How are you doing?”

  “I suppose an American would say that I escaped by the skin of my teeth. But in my case, it is almost literally true. I am fortunate that the plot was uncovered before they could carry out an attempt on my life. I am blessed. Order has been restored in our kingdom.”

  “Ordinarily,” I say, “I would have called you directly after hearing of the plot. Under the circumstances—”

  “There is no need to explain, Mr. President. I fully understand. You’ve been briefed, I take it, about my reason for calling.”

  “My CIA director told me, yes.”

  “Yes. As you know, Mr. President, the Saudi royal family is a large and diverse one.”

  That’s an understatement. The House of Saud numbers in the thousands and has many branches. Most family members have little or no influence and simply receive fat checks from oil revenue. But even among the core group of leaders, numbering somewhere around two thousand, there are branches and hierarchies. And, as there is in any family and any political hierarchy, there is plenty of resentment and jealousy. When Saab ibn Saud jumped over a lot of heads to become the next king, there was more than enough of both to fuel and fund the scheme that brought us all to the edge of disaster.

  “The members who attempted the coup have been…discontented with my rule.”

  “Congratulations, Your Majesty, for your massive understatement and for catching the conspirators.”

  “It is to my great embarrassment that such plans were able to blossom and flourish without my knowledge. Right under my nose, as you would say, and I was unaware of it. It was a lapse in our intelligence that, I can assure you, will be corrected.”

  I know the feeling of missing something that’s right under your nose. “What exactly was their plan? What did they want?”

  “A return to a different time,” he says. “A world without a dominant America and thus a dominant Israel. They wanted to rule the Saudi kingdom and rule the Middle East. Their intent, as I understand it, was not to destroy America so much as weaken it to the point where it was no longer a superpower. A return to different times, as I said. Regional dominance. No global superpower.”

  “We’d have so many of our own problems that we wouldn’t bother with the Middle East—that was the thinking?”

  “However unrealistic, yes. This is an accurate description of their motives.”

  I’m not sure how unrealistic it was. It almost happened. I keep thinking the unthinkable—what would have happened had Nina not installed the stopper, the keyword to disable the virus? Or, for that matter, if she hadn’t given us the peekaboo to tip us off in advance? What if there hadn’t been a Nina and an Augie? We would never have known it was coming. Dark Ages would have become a reality. We would have been crippled.

  Crippled, not killed. But crippled would have been enough, from their perspective. We would have been far too concerned with our troubles at home to worry much about the rest of the world.

  They didn’t want to destroy us. They didn’t want to wipe us off the face of the earth. They just wanted to knock us down enough to force our withdrawal from their part of the world.

  “We have been successful in our interrogation of the subjects,” says the king.

  The Saudis permit a little more leeway in their “interrogation” techniques than we do. “They’re talking?”

  “Of course,” he says, as if it were obvious. “And naturally we will make all this information available to you.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “In summary, Mr. President, the members of this splinter group in the royal family paid the terrorist organization, the Sons of Jihad, a tremendous sum of money to destroy the American infrastructure. This included, apparently, hiring an assassin to eliminate members of the Sons of Jihad who had defected from the group.”

  “Yes. We have the assassin in custody.”

  “And is she cooperating with the investigation?”

  “Yes,” I say. “We’ve reached an understanding with her.”

  “Then you may know what I am going to say next.”

  “Perhaps so, Your Highness. But I’d like to hear it from you anyway.”

  Chapter

  125

  Have a seat,” I say inside the Roosevelt Room. Ordinarily we’d do this in the Oval Office. But I’m not having this conversation in the Oval Office.

  He unbuttons his suit jacket and takes a seat. I sit at the head of the table.

  “Needless to say, Mr. President, we were elated with the results from yesterday. And we were grateful that we could be a small part of your success.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ambassador.”

  “Andrei, please.”

  Andrei Ivanenko looks like he could play someone’s grandfather in a cereal commercial—the crown of his head bald and spotted, wispy white hair along the sides, an overall frumpy appearance.

  The look works well for him. Because beneath that harmless-seeming exterior is a career spy, a product of Russia’s charm school and one of the elites in the former KGB, shipped off later in life to the diplomatic arena and sent here as ambassador to the United States.

  “You could have been an even bigger part of our success,” I say, “if you’d warned us about this computer virus in advance.”

  “In…advance?” He opens his hands. “I do not understand.”

  “Russia knew, Andrei. You knew what those Saudi royals were up to. You wanted the same thing they wanted. Not to destroy us per se but to diminish us to the point where we no longer had influence. We would no longer be a check on your ambitions. While we were licking our wounds, you could reconstruct the Soviet empire.”

  “Mr. President,” he says, almost like a southern drawl, thick with incredulity. This man could look you in the eye and tell you that the world is flat, the sun rises in the west, and the moon is made of blue cheese, and he’d probably pass a polygraph test while doing so.

  “The Saudi royals gave you up,” I say.

  “People who are desperate, Mr. President,” he says without missing a beat, “will say just about—”

  “The assassin you hired tells us the same thing,” I say. “The consistencies in their stories are…well, they’re too similar to be false. We tracked the money, too—the money that Russia transferred to the mercenaries—the Ratnici. And to Bach.”

  “Ratnici?” he says. “Bach?”

  “Funny,” I say, “how Bach and the mercenaries waited until the Russian delegation left before attacking our cabin.”

  “This is…this is not credible, this accusation.”

  I nod, even give him a cold smile. “You used cutouts, of course. Russia’s not stupid. You have plausible deniability. But not with me.”

  From everything the Saudis in custody told us, we figured out that Suliman shopped them the idea, and they paid richly for his services. The Russians didn’t start this. But they knew about it. The Saudis were terrified of moving their own money, so they reached out to Russian intermediaries, realizing that Russia would want to bring the United States to its knees as much as they did. Besides moving the money, Russia provided the mercenaries and the assassin, Bach.

  I stand up. “Andrei, it’s time for you to leave.”

  He shakes his head as he gets to his feet. “Mr. President, as soon as I return to the embassy, I will be in touch with President Chernokev, and I am confi—”

  “You’ll be having that conversation in person, Andrei.”
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  He freezes.

  “You’re expelled,” I say. “I’m putting you on a plane to Moscow right now. The rest of the embassy has until sundown to clear out.”

  His mouth drops open. It’s the first sign of sweat on the man. “You are…closing the Russian embassy in the United States? Severing diplomatic—”

  “That’s just the start,” I say. “When you see the package of sanctions we have planned, you’re going to rue the day you cut that deal with those Saudi dissidents. Oh, and those antimissile defense systems Latvia and Lithuania have requested? The ones you’ve asked us not to sell them? Don’t worry, Andrei, we won’t sell them.”

  He swallows hard, his expression relenting. “Well, at least, Mr. Pres—”

  “We’re going to hand them out free of charge,” I say.

  “I…Mr. President, I must…I cannot…”

  I step close to him, so close that a whisper is all it takes. But I keep my voice up, regardless.

  “Tell Chernokev he’s lucky we stopped that virus before it did any damage,” I say. “Or Russia would be at war with NATO. And Russia would lose.”

  “Do not ever test me again, Andrei,” I say. “Oh, and stay out of our elections. After I speak tomorrow, you’ll have all you can handle to keep rigging your own. Now get the hell out of my country.”

  Chapter

  126

  JoAnn steps into the Oval Office, where I sit with Sam Haber, going over Homeland Security’s after-action report, its assessment of the fallout from the Suliman virus.

  “Mr. President, the Speaker of the House is on the phone.”

  I look at Sam, then at JoAnn. “Not now,” I say.

  “He’s canceling the select committee hearing tomorrow, sir. He’s requesting that you address the joint session of Congress tomorrow night.”

  Not surprising. Lester Rhodes, publicly, has sure changed his tune since we stopped this virus.