Blink of an Eye

by William S. Cohen

  “That’s all right. I just wanted to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  She pointed toward the array of television screens. “Take a look at GNN.”

  Falcone hit a button and, on the small screen of the small set near his desk, came the handsome, square-jawed face of Senator Mark Stanfield of Texas, who was being touted by commentators as the most likely candidate to oppose President Oxley. National conventions had yet to be held, but an Oxley versus Stanfield presidential race seemed almost certain.

  Stanfield’s message was simple: By running for a second term, Oxley was putting the nation on the road to tyranny while also losing the war on terror. Stanfield was calling for a party platform that was little more than his campaign slogan: “Bring Back America.”

  Stanfield was leaning forward in a chair on his campaign bus. A rural roadside was streaming past the window behind him. “I’ll say again. He was well aware that he was rejecting advice from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Urgent military advice.”

  “Let’s get this straight, Senator,” the GNN interviewer said. “What exactly happened? What’s so important about the DEFCON order?”

  Falcone hit another button to record the interview. He motioned to Dabrowski. “Sit down, Anna.” She chose a chair next to Falcone’s desk, and he was pleased to see that she was not sitting on the edge of her seat.

  “Let me put it this way, Frank,” Stanfield said. “DEFCON is the thermometer of our armed forces. It’s the thermometer that shows the level of alert that is needed at any given moment. You’re a general or an admiral—or a colonel or a commander—and you look at the DEFCON and you know how dangerous the world looks to your theater commander. DEFCON Five? Nothing dangerous is happening. DEFCON Four? Just keep your eyes open, buddy. DEFCON Three? Well, suddenly you realize that something may be up. You don’t know what it is. But you do know about the terror attack on the Elkton. And you wonder, Are we next? What’s happening? You get all your guys and gals at the ready.

  “And then, about ten minutes later, you get a new temperature reading. It’s DEFCON Four again. You don’t know why. Well, I know why. The President overruled the Joint Chiefs. That’s why.”

  A small screen opened on the lower left of the screen, with the underline PRESIDENT ARRIVES IN DALLAS.

  “Thank you, Senator,” the GNN correspondent said hastily. “We’re about to switch to Dallas, where—”

  “There’s one more thing, Frank. But I hesitate—”

  “Only have a moment, Senator.”

  “Well, I wasn’t going to mention this. But when I attempted to call the President about the Elkton, he … he hung up on me.”

  “That son of a bitch!” Falcone exclaimed, hitting the mute button on the remote. As a shampoo ad appeared on the silent screen, he looked across his desk to Anna and began speaking rapidly.

  “Tell Hawk I want everything there is to know about DEFCONs. Tell him I want all the classified material boiled out of a short memo that can be used by the President. I need it in fifteen minutes. Also, put someone in touch with Air Force One and tell them I want—immediately—a classified time line on the DEFCON messages. Have someone else call Kane’s office and get a SecDef classified time line. DEFCON orders are supposed to come through him. Keep the queries separate and secret from each source. I have a hunch the two time lines won’t agree.”

  Kane was George Kane, a former Ohio congressman who had been chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Trusted and knowledgeable about the ways of the Pentagon, he had been the first cabinet member selected by Oxley. Hawk was Marine Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Hawkins, military aide to the National Security Council.

  Falcone knew that Anna had trouble being the thirty-two-year-old boss of a Marine light colonel, but Hawk, a chain-of-command man on a star-destined career path, had no such trouble. Falcone trusted Hawk, probably more than any other military officer he had met on this job. Certainly more than Wilkinson, who played a complex game.

  “Between you and me, Anna, I figure that Wilkinson, or someone on his staff, set a new speed record for leaking to Stanfield.”

  “Mice play around when they don’t smell the cat,”

  “Another proverb from your Aunt Eva?”

  “Yes,” Dabrowski replied, with a smile that instantly lightened Falcone’s mood.

  “I’m taking a short walk on the grounds, Anna,” he said. “Until I get back, you’re in charge of the world.”

  5

  WHEN FALCONE took the job, he assumed that his little world, the National Security Council, would be concerned only with aiding the President on strategic issues: war and peace, nuclear proliferation, keeping the Middle East from blowing up. But day after day, despite his efforts at managing the NSC and herding the government’s countless agencies toward some kind of unified direction, he found himself bogged down by domestic issues that were knitted into foreign issues. DEFCON. Dallas. Stanfield.

  The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Falcone left his office to wend his way out onto the West Wing colonnade and walk briskly along the South Lawn, a Secret Service agent a few steps behind.

  You can never be alone around here, he thought. And you never get much time to just think. Let us review. Why an attack in Iraq when we were finally getting the hell out? Well, why anything? Start with Osama bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian exile, now thankfully dead, his ass part of the Pacific. He launched a sneak attack on America, knocking down the twin Trade Towers in New York and ripping a gigantic hole in the Pentagon. This act of terrorism was met with a vigorous military response against terrorist strongholds in Afghanistan. Then, Iraq.

  The price tag for the decision to invade and then occupy a country had drained the U.S. treasury of a trillion dollars. And add Afghanistan and it looks like we’re heading for the two-trillion-dollar mark today, Goodbye Day.

  But bad as that was, Falcone couldn’t let it go: We were making a big mistake pulling everyone out. Iraq couldn’t handle the security yet. The hit on the Elkton was proof of that. The Iranians are still messing in the sandbox, the Saudis are backing the Sunnis, the Iraqi government doesn’t know how to govern.

  And there’s that knitting, that crazy pattern. A dollar spent here winds up somewhere else. Where does the U.S. economy end and the global economy begin?

  The masters of the universe who put our economy into a nosedive weren’t global. They’re as American as the Stock Exchange bell. And those brilliant financial wizards who answer the bell like Pavlov’s dogs have only one loyalty—to the god of greed. They pedaled “securitized assets,” credit default swaps, collateralized debt obligations, and other exotic financial instruments that no one understood but all were desperate to invest in or acquire. It was one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated, one that nearly brought the global financial system to its knees.

  Everyone had to pay for the crimes except the people who committed them.… Well, at least our esteemed secretary of state, William Bloom, can’t be blamed. Wealthy as hell, smart as hell. He’s not a master of the universe. He’s the master of the knowledge world. He knew when to make deals in China, when to put some money into obscure startups like Facebook. Good guy, great mind. But Goodbye Day was not one of his better ideas.…

  The thought of Goodbye Day pulled Falcone back to today, back to his job.

  *

  WHEN President Blake Oxley had asked Falcone to serve his administration, it wasn’t the first time. After Oxley’s stunning upset victory, in a private conversation the President-elect had asked Falcone to serve as his secretary of state. But when Ray Quinlan and other campaign strategists discovered what Oxley had proposed, they strenuously objected. Falcone had done nothing to deserve such an honor, they argued. He had sat on the sidelines during the campaign.

  “Christ, he didn’t even contribute to your campaign,” Quinlan said (or at least that’s what one of Quinlan’s many enemies told Falcone, quoting the Quinlan remarks). “So he’s a war hero. So fucking
what? You’re going to reward him with the plum job in your administration? What about the people who paid their dues? The ones who put everything on the line for you? Just what signal does that send if—no, when—you run for reelection?”

  Oxley did not know about a Falcone-Quinlan feud that went back to Falcone’s Senate days when, as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, he had stripped Quinlan, one of the committee staffers, of his Top Secret clearance for letting a lobbyist, who was also a girlfriend, see classified documents so she could impress her Brazilian client.

  The rise and fall of the Falcone nomination had been tightly held. The media assumption was that Oxley’s first choice was William Bloom, former chairman of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was also a major contributor to the campaign, Quinlan’s basic requirement for the job. Philip Dake, the Washington Post’s star reporter, wrote, in profile of Bloom, “He was an immensely wealthy self-made man who had a résumé that had earned him a right to be considered on the basis of his ability.”

  Bloom, the grandson of Russian immigrants, worked his way through Yale, made Phi Beta Kappa, and went on, with a full scholarship, to earn an MBA from Harvard Business School. He liked learning languages, adding Mandarin to French and Spanish. He and two other Harvard graduates formed a small company that introduced information technology to stock trading. He bought out his partners, joined the vanguard of American businessmen who discovered China, and made his first billion. A short stint as a vice president of Goldman Sachs convinced him to keep his own company privately held.

  As a globe-trotting apostle of the knowledge industry, he had met heads of state, served for a time as the long-distance, de facto finance minister to two developing countries, and was renowned at the Council on Foreign Relations as a man who gathered his own facts in travels to trouble spots. Fortune estimated his personal wealth to be $14 billion.

  Bloom and Oxley had been at Harvard at the same time but hardly knew each other. Drawing from that slight connection, Oxley sought him out and got the first of what would be many sizeable contributions. When Oxley nominated Bloom, he called him the smartest and best-qualified secretary of state since Thomas Jefferson.

  Then, meekly, Oxley went back to Falcone. “What about national security advisor? It’s not State, but still, you’d be in the White House, with me on virtually every decision.…” Left unsaid was that Falcone would serve as a kind of stand-in for a frequently traveling secretary of state.

  Falcone had declined. “I’m not going to compete with America’s new Thomas Jefferson,” he had said. National security advisor? Nice title, he thought, but a staffer’s job, and, despite the lofty title, a mere presidential aide. After being a United States senator? No thanks.…

  That was before his longtime friend, Admiral Mike Ryan, suffered a massive heart attack while playing tennis and died on his way to Georgetown University Hospital. Oxley was in trouble. He needed a replacement for Ryan immediately, someone who could command the respect of the prima donnas on Capitol Hill and secure support for the President’s promise to pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan … to cope with a resurgent Russia and China’s ambitions for a blue-water navy. Falcone couldn’t refuse. Not this time.

  Quinlan again had resisted, had even sniffed around for opposition to Falcone on Capitol Hill. News about that had got back to Falcone, too. When he was making up his mind about taking the advisor job, he knew that he was on Quinlan’s permanent enemies list. But coolly looking at the political and personal algebra of the appointment, he decided that Quinlan, as chief of staff, would mostly be concerned with domestic issues and the President’s image. To give Quinlan some credit, he had been staying out of Falcone’s territory. He knows, Falcone thought, that there aren’t many campaign donors in the places where I have to operate.

  The sound of an airliner, on approach to Reagan National Airport, entered his mind. September 11, 2001.

  Anyone who was in Washington that morning possessed unforgettable moments that came back at unexpected times. You remember hearing it on the radio as you drove to work. Or on the Metro as bits of news passed through the crowded car. Or someone running into your office or your cubicle and saying that something had happened in New York. A Tower hit. Then the second Tower. And then …

  Falcone was being driven to an appointment in Virginia. The car was on the Whitehurst Freeway, parallel to the Potomac River, about to cross the Key Bridge. Then nothing was moving. He was listening to the radio, envisioning what others were seeing on television. He heard a plane, flying low. He craned to look up. In an instant, he heard a dull explosion, muted, like a clap of distant thunder. He looked out the window and saw, across the river, the thick black smoke coiling up from the Pentagon.…

  Now he hurried back across the lawn to the colonnade. My job is about an attack on a U.S. ship, not DEFCONs and Stanfield. And my job is serving the President.

  At his desk, he ordered what they still called a red-phone call to the presidential limousine heading for the Dallas Convention Center.

  Quinlan answered. But, when Falcone said, “Give me the President,” Quinlan, sensitive to political voice tones, did not say a word and handed the phone to Oxley.

  “Mr. President, I’m e-mailing to your comm officer five hundred words on what we know about the Elkton. The press will demand more. But it’s all we have. We have absolutely no knowledge of the possible Iranian connection that GNN reported. Repeat: no knowledge. Be prepared for questions about DEFCONs. Just say, as commander-in-chief you had to override Secretary Kane’s DEFCON decision because you needed all the information you could get—and that had to transcend any remote danger to Air Force One. I’ll also be e-mailing Stephanie a briefing paper on DEFCON that will have enough to hold off her friends in the press.”

  “Good, Sean, good. I’ve cut down my speech to a quick ‘Howdy, partners,’ and I’ll do a fast turnaround. Meet me at Andrews.”

  “Right, Mr. President. I’ve set up the Principals Meeting for ten o’clock. Goodbye.”

  “Yeah. Goodbye. Well, it’s Goodbye Day, isn’t it?”

  6

  GEORGE WILLIAM Parker stepped out of the front door of the brick house on East Capitol Street and took down the American flag that flapped on a brass pole jutting out from a bracket above the door. He folded the flag until only a triangular blue field of stars was visible. Then he stood for a moment on the wrought-iron landing, his gaze sweeping the street in both directions. The fools are gone, he said to himself.

  Moths darted around the lights flanking the front door. A siren grew fainter and the jingle of an ice-cream truck grew louder. Capitol Hill, Parker thought. Killers and kids, muggings and Good Humor, Congress and … what? So many thoughts ended in questions these days. Parker ran his right hand through his close-cropped white hair as if to wipe away his errant thoughts. He must concentrate on the briefing.

  Parker wore a white shirt, sleeves neatly rolled up, and sharply creased khaki slacks. His laced brown shoes were freshly shined. Anyone wise to the sights of Washington would assume him to be a retired military officer. As Time once said of him, he was “every inch the modern Army general: tall, slim, weathered face, eyes with that thousand-yard stare of remembered combat.”

  Two weeks before, a photo of the house had been splashed across the front page of the Washington Post, along with a photo of Parker, his face a mask of controlled outrage. Over the story, headlined “The House of The Brethren,” was the byline of Philip Dake, not only the Post’s reportorial star but also the chief investigative reporter. “In the shadow of the Capitol,” Dake wrote, “is a house that is more than a house. It is a religious edifice, according to District of Columbia records, and, as such, is exempt from D.C. property taxes. The small brick house, at 201 East Capitol Street Southeast, is owned by The Brethren of the Covenant of Jesus, a religious sect with extraordinary political connections. It does not resemble a church, it does not have a congregation or a pastor, and it does not open its
door to worshippers who are not members of The Brethren.

  “In this seemingly holy place, politicians and power brokers study the Bible and give each other spiritual advice, calling themselves ‘leaders led by God.’ Here, some also have slept with their mistresses, played high-stakes poker, and established agendas for the Far Right.” He went on to depict the house as a lair for religious zealots determined to put America on the path to Christian governance.

  Dake only vaguely described past events at the house. He did not connect any specific incident to the present-day occupants: Parker and two congressmen. All three, Dake wrote, were members of The Brethren, as was one of the frequent visitors to the house: Senator Mark Stanfield of Texas, “who is the likely candidate to run against President Blake Oxley in this year’s election campaign.”

  The article was a typical Dake creation. He hinted at much more than he reported, leaving his subjects worrying about what he might reveal in future articles or in one of his bestselling books.

  Senator Stanfield declined to comment, but Parker did. “This house,” he said, “is a spiritual resting place, where we warriors for Jesus can find refuge from the chaos of official Washington.” Asked whether The Brethren was a Christian religion, he replied, “We believe in a covenant of Jesus. It was known originally only by the initiates of early Christianity and is a revelation direct from Jesus.”

  Parker refused to tell what the covenant proclaimed, saying that he, like all Brethren, “kept the covenant in my heart and not on my tongue.” But Dake reported that the secret theology of The Brethren centered on Armageddon, the biblical prophecy that foresees the end of the world in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. Dake noted that 59 percent of Americans say they believe in the coming battle of Armageddon.

  Dake traced the history of the house back more than a decade, during the administration of President Eric Hollendale. “Clayton Skillings, Hollendale’s chief of staff, lived for a time in the house,” Dake wrote. “He was said to have allowed Senator Joshua Stock to use the house during trysts with the senator’s girlfriend. Stock, accused of allegedly spying for Israel, later was the victim of a bizarre, videotaped murder that became one of Washington’s most notorious homicide cases.”