Oath of Honor

by Matthew Betley

  No one spoke as the president paused. The ramification was clear, but he stated it for the record.

  “Whoever and whatever is behind all of this has unparalleled resources and influence. To pull such strings in such high places in multiple foreign governments? Well, it’s incredibly frightening, to be blunt,” he said.

  “As for the UN, I could walk in and play a video for the General Assembly showing the Chinese unit launching the attack in Sudan, and they still wouldn’t believe it. The organization has become so corrupt, I often wonder why we let its headquarters remain here.”

  His frank speech had their rapt attention.

  I can’t imagine what this man must deal with on a daily basis, Logan thought. It’s got to be easier dealing with killers and crocodiles than politicians and world leaders.

  “Here’s the crux of the issue, the hard reality we have to face as of this moment: we’re at war with a nameless enemy, a secret organization that has the funding and connections to make the types of moves First-World powers make. The first blows have landed—the frame-up for Sudan, the diversionary attack at the MGM Grand set up to look like Islamic terrorists, and the attack on American Elemental.”

  “Sir, do you have any idea why the attack on American Elemental?” Logan suddenly asked. All the other attacks, as horrible as they were, made sense to him, but the reason for the one at the rare earth elements facility still eluded him.

  “Unfortunately, we think we do,” Jake said, and added, “which makes it that much harder to swallow.” He paused. “Like the attack in Sudan, this was an operation with the reverse motive—an attack on our homeland intended to frame the Chinese. We think the fact that knocking out that facility would put the US at the mercy of the Chinese government for rare earth elements was a secondary consideration. The bottom line—someone’s trying to pit us against China.”

  “Jesus,” Logan said in a hushed voice. “Two large superpowers duking it out would definitely go a long way in destabilizing not just global security but the global economy as well.”

  “I know,” the president said. His voice hardened, tinged with anger, and they glimpsed the attack pilot he’d once been. “But that’s not going to happen, not if we have anything to say about it. As of right now, we start fighting back, and I want each of you to lead the fight for me.”

  They were stunned. The most powerful man in the free world had just asked for their help. He leaned back and let the weight of the request sink in.

  Logan was the first to respond. “What do you need, sir?”

  The president smiled, seemingly not surprised it was Logan who had spoken first. “Each of you in this room—and only you, unless you choose to recruit others—will be the most closely guarded secret of my administration, a task force beholden only to me, but with the full resources of the Justice Department, the Intelligence Community, and even the military, if you need it. I’m calling it Ares, after the Greek god of war.” His speech pattern changed again, his conviction clear with each syllable. “Because that’s exactly what we are—at war.”

  The truth of his words sank in around the room. There was no doubt among anyone at the table—the president was all-in.

  “Sir, this conspiracy could go back to at least the end of the previous administration and God knows how much further than that,” Logan said. “Have you considered that whatever this organization is could have been behind the Cain Frost ordeal?”

  “Like you, we think it probably was, which is why we haven’t been able to track down the sons of bitches who blew him up in this town. They’re ghosts,” the president said. “And that has to change. We have to go on the offensive, no matter where, no matter what it takes. We have to draw them out of the shadows. The fate of our democracy, as well as possibly the future of the rest of the world, could hinge on our very actions.”

  Under any other circumstance, the last statement would have sounded clichéd. Instead, after the events of the previous weeks, it was terrifying.

  “So let me be clear. Your president is asking you directly for your help. No one will ever know about this, God willing, and even if they do, I don’t care. I want you to do whatever you have to do to uncover who’s behind all of this. Do not be bound by convention or law or even your own recognition of moral laws. I’m not sure we have that luxury anymore,” he said.

  “Mr. President, just so I’m clear,” John asked bravely, “are you giving us a blank check with all resources at our disposal to hunt down the perpetrators that attacked our country?” It almost sounds too good to be true, he thought. There has to be some kind of catch.

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing, Mr. Quick,” the president said. “And I’ll do you one better. There’s a presidential pardon with each of your names on it already signed by me and witnessed by both Jake and Sheldon here. So unless you commit some kind of act of genocide, I’ve got your back.”

  Now I understand why people would follow this man anywhere. He has conviction and charisma, an amazing combination if there ever was one, Logan thought. He believed every word the president had just spoken. He’d known men like this before in the military. To say it was rare for a politician was like calling the pope slightly religious.

  “So what do you say?” the president asked directly. “Will you help me?”

  “Absolutely, sir,” Logan said without hesitation. He’d made his decision minutes ago. “It’d be an honor.”

  The rest of the group followed suit almost as quickly.

  “Good, because your work begins tomorrow. Celebrate your friend’s life today and begin fresh then. We may see each other from time to time, but due to the sensitivity of this venture, I’ll be mostly dealing directly with Jake and Sheldon.” The president smiled slightly and added, “Don’t be offended if I don’t check in every day. I’m a little busy with that whole running-the-country thing.”

  And a sense of humor to boot? Logan thought. Will wonders never cease?

  “Unless anyone has any questions, Jake and Sheldon will provide you with everything—and I do mean everything—you need,” the president said, and prepared to stand.

  “Sir, I do have one question,” Logan said, looking around the room. “Something’s been bothering me. You’ve got us, the directors of the FBI and CIA, but for something like this, wouldn’t you have your national security advisor on the team?”

  A swift sea change washed over the president, and the smile was replaced by a scowl of disgust.

  “Mr. West, you are a very smart man, much smarter than my national security advisor,” the president said. “Jake can fill you in on the details. Unless there’s something else, I need to catch a helo and an airplane for a five-day G8 summit in Greece. I’m going to try and repair some of the damage that’s been done to us. It’s why we had to do this now.”

  The entire room stood as the president stepped to the door and reached for the handle. He turned around to face them one last time before grasping the gold knob.

  “Thank you, and good luck.”

  He opened the door and disappeared as dramatically as he’d arrived, an imposing presence whose absence was immediately felt.

  For a moment, they looked at one another, and even the two directors felt the heavy burden of the task they’d just accepted. It was a humbling proposition that carried enormous consequences should they fail.

  “For the first time in my life, I may be speechless,” John said.

  “You’re talking right now,” Amira noted, and smiled at him, pale-blue eyes glittering.

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t count because I have nothing funny to say,” John said.

  Logan replayed the president’s last comment in his mind, but there was something else he needed to address first.

  “What about Henry Cho?” Logan asked both Jake and Sheldon, referring to the young Chinese operative who now rested comfortably in a secured medical facility in Langley. The replantation surgery of his severed finger had occurred near the twenty-four-hour mark, the m
aximum amount of time allowable before the digit was no longer viable. He’d been lucky, and the doctors gave him an eighty percent chance of recovering most of his original strength and range of motion.

  The two directors exchanged a glance, and then Sheldon said, “We haven’t decided on what to do with him. His government doesn’t know we have him, and based on our interrogation so far, it looks like he really didn’t know that there was another organization calling the shots.”

  “I thought that might be the case,” John said. “Can we talk to him?”

  “It can be arranged,” Sheldon said.

  “Good. I think I might have an idea on how to handle him,” John replied.

  “Does it involve more lost limbs?” Logan asked with a straight face.

  “Not this time around,” John said. “And it wasn’t a whole limb, just a finger, and his little one,” he added wryly.

  “Uh-huh,” Logan said, and turned his attention to Jake. “Now that that’s settled, what did the president mean by me being smarter than his national security advisor?” Logan asked.

  Jake nodded and said, “There’s something we need to tell you, and it also happens to be our first order of business.”

  Thinking the appearance of the president would be the most shocking development of the day was perhaps their biggest mistake.

  CHAPTER 58

  Jonathan Sommers stepped into the foyer of his renovated three-story brownstone on Dumbarton Street in Georgetown. He was exhausted. The endless hours in the White House—as productive as they were for his cause—were a relentless grind. It was the endgame that made the last four years worth the risk to his life and liberty. A new world order was coming, and he intended to be part of its foundation.

  At thirty-eight years of age, he was the youngest of the president’s senior advisors or cabinet members, but he held one of the most trustworthy positions in the entire executive branch of government. With boyish charm and a quick wit, he’d insinuated himself into a position of power few could comprehend. The fact that he was working arduously to undermine all of it didn’t faze him in the slightest.

  A top graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School with a doctoral degree in international relations with a focus on national security, he understood the harsh realities of the new global power structure. Countries could no longer operate in vacuums. The twenty-four-hour news cycle and the advent of social media had shut the door on that archaic way of doing business forever.

  His career had been launched into the stratosphere with the rise of the Iraqi insurgency. The White House had recruited him from his prestigious position at one of America’s elite think tanks to advise the president on global matters as senior leaders at the Pentagon focused on Iraq. His charge from the last president had been simple—Don’t drop the ball on the rest of the world. He hadn’t, but what the previous president hadn’t known was that he’d been juggling many balls since his last semester at Harvard.

  On a Tuesday evening at a local pub in Harvard Square as he sat poring over a paper from one of his many talented—although slightly disillusioned—graduate students, he’d been suddenly joined by a mild-mannered man in his midforties. He wore wire glasses and perfectly tailored clothes that blended in with the intellectual elitists at Harvard. He spoke crisp and perfectly enunciated English, but Jonathan had somehow detected that the man was not a native-born American.

  Just as Jonathan was known as the American, he referred to the spectacled man as the Recruiter, even to this day.

  The man told a tale straight out of a spy movie: he represented an organization whose ultimate goal was the salvation of the planet, not from global warming or theoretical dangers, but from economic and political slavery and its current masters. Jonathan had scoffed at the proposition, nearly laughed, in fact. The man hadn’t been offended. Instead, he’d responded by reciting all of Jonathan’s personal information, professional accomplishments, and a psychological profile that described and explained his own ambitions more concisely than he could have.

  An hour later, when Jonathan had stopped laughing, the reality lay bare before him on the pub table—the possibility of a brave new world. He’d made his decision right there, and he’d had no regrets since, even through the betrayals which he’d coordinated and executed.

  Beep-beep-beep.

  He closed the front door and entered the code on his alarm panel, the lingering smell of the fire from the night before greeting him warmly.

  Home sweet home, for now . . .

  He flipped on the lights in the hallway and walked into the kitchen, placing his cell phone on the granite-covered island.

  “Welcome home, Mr. Sommers,” a voice said from the dark living room beyond the kitchen.

  Fear gripped him, and he whirled on his heels to move toward the hallway, where a loaded 9mm Beretta was stored in a console table.

  John Quick stepped into the hallway from the front-room library and said, “You looking for this?” He held up the pistol in one black, leather-gloved hand. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

  Lights turned on in the living room, and Jonathan turned around to see two men he recognized, one standing in each corner. He immediately knew that his life as a double agent was over.

  Despite his rapidly racing heartbeat, he tried to regain his composure. He knew the type of men these were. There was no point in begging.

  “Mr. Matthews, I’d ask if you’d like a drink, but I don’t think you’re here on a social call, and I know Mr. West doesn’t drink anymore,” Jonathan said.

  “Put your hands on the counter while I search you.” John pushed the national security advisor roughly from behind. “If you make any kind of stupid, dumb-ass move, I’m going to happily kill you. Do you understand, you traitorous sonofabitch?”

  The sense of empowerment he’d felt as he’d walked inside was replaced by a desolate feeling of defeat.

  “I do,” Jonathan said, and spoke no more as his pockets were searched and he was patted down for weapons.

  Logan and Cole entered the kitchen, and Logan stood directly in front of him.

  Jonathan had read the man’s Marine Corps record, as well as the psychological profile the FBI had conducted on him after the events with Cain Frost. As the man studied him, Jonathan felt like he was being scrutinized by some kind of cold-blooded creature. It’s those eyes, he thought, and felt a chill pass through him.

  “You almost got away scot-free,” Logan said with steadied nonchalance. “We’ve known all along—as you well know, since you’re it—that there was a traitor in our government, but we couldn’t figure out who. Someone tipped Cain off at the Haditha Dam, and only very senior folks back here and us—since we were there—knew about the plan to trap him. I’m betting that guy was you. Am I right?”

  Jonathan didn’t say a word. He figured silence was his best option.

  “Colin Davies gave you up,” Logan said.

  How? Jonathan thought. I ensured that his hard drive was destroyed. There was no evidence of our communications.

  “Mr. Davies—even though he believed you—created a file that he kept on a Google cloud server under a false identity. He outlined the three meetings you had, as well as the two cell phone conversations. We’ve got you dead to rights, asshole.”

  Jonathan remained silent.

  “You know what really pisses me off?” John said quietly. “Until we found that file, we all thought that Colin Davies was a traitor who’d stolen the ONERING to sell to the Russians. But that was your intent, wasn’t it?” John’s voice was full of cold rage from his position behind Sommers. “That file made it clear you duped him into stealing it, making him believe he was actually helping by testing it before it was ready for prime time. That man died in my arms, looking me in the eyes as he did. I promised him I’d personally find out who did this to him, and guess what, motherfucker? I did. You will pay for what you did to him and countless others.”

  “But before that, you’re going to tell us everything you
know about the real organization you’ve been working for all these years,” Logan said, stone-faced. “We know it had to be you that somehow activated the Russian team for the Alaska op.”

  Jonathan didn’t reply.

  “I thought so,” Logan said. “Don’t worry. We’ll get it all from you. Trust me. Oh, in case you didn’t know it, I’m big into the whole ‘Silence is consent’ thing. I just want you to be aware now for what’s coming later.”

  True panic smashed into Jonathan’s consciousness for the first time. A tight ball in the pit of his stomach threatened to incapacitate him. What are they going to do to me?

  “So here’s how this is going to work. We’re taking you out of here to a secure location. No one—and I mean no one—is going to wonder where you are. We’ve taken care of that,” Logan said definitively.

  “The president’s expecting me for the morning brief in six hours,” Jonathan said, a last-ditch attempt at bravery.

  John laughed from behind him, and Cole and Logan exchanged amused looks.

  “Who do you think sent us, Mr. Sommers?” Logan said.

  The finality sank in to every fiber of his being, and Jonathan Sommers hung his head.

  “Look at me.”

  No response.

  “I said look at me.”

  Jonathan lifted his eyes, terrified at what he’d see.

  “Good,” Logan snarled at him, the blazing contempt and merciless loathing apparent on his face and in his words. “You deserve to feel that way for the rest of your miserable life, as short as that may be.”

  “Huh?” Jonathan said, barely coherent, the fear finally paralyzing him as he processed Logan’s last words. The brilliant academic and traitor had been reduced to unintelligible phrases.