“To test this possibility, DARPA—the Advanced Research Projects Agency at that time—came up with an idea. What if the U.S. military found a handful of high achievers, altered their backgrounds, and gave them a mission: to get elected. It would be an offline project, of course—something almost no one knew anything about.”
“They did this?” Mitchell asked.
“Twelve people.” Hoch nodded. “The best and brightest the army could find. They called it Civil Defense Scenario Four: Project Megiddo. It was run out of a Special Forces unit within the Fourth Psychological Operations Group. Very small footprint. Total autonomy. Very black.”
Hoch looked around again. No one had spoken aloud about this in almost twenty years.
“The army took these twelve soldiers and for two years sculpted them into the best possible political candidates. Education, charm school, distinguished military record—all backstopped, of course, with the full resources of the Department of Defense.”
“And sent them out to get elected?”
“Yes. Discharged them back to their hometowns. Dogcatcher, mayor, state assembly, U.S. Congress: their only mission was to rise as high as possible through the political system.”
“So, what happened?”
“We don’t know.”
“What?” Mitchell asked. “How do you not know?”
“For one thing, the project was compartmented and diffused. There are no records. For another, the project was run by a colonel named Ellis who has apparently retired. Project Megiddo and anything we know about it went with this colonel when he left.”
Mitchell leaned back in his chair. If America allowed business to function like government, the whole country would be bankrupt and behind bars.
“How does an Islamic holy warrior at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, know more about Project Megiddo than the CIA?” Mitchell whispered.
“We’re not sure he does.” Hoch shrugged. “But the similarities between his Jafar al Tayar plot and our Megiddo project are too close to ignore. The only way to find out is to go back after this project and see what happened to those twelve candidates.”
“Which means this Colonel Ellis is still around and that you know where to find him, I assume?”
“Yes.” Hoch nodded. “The problem is selecting the right person to send after him.”
Mitchell thought for a moment. He could see in Hoch’s eyes that the CIA boss had already come up with a name.
“Waller?” Mitchell asked.
Hoch finished his coffee and signaled for the check.
“We have very little time to spare. Our analysts predict that the next wave of attacks could start at any time.”
“How?” Mitchell asked. “Putting Waller on a plane to some Third World hellhole for a few days is one thing. Sending him undercover for an operation like this is quite another. We can’t tell the FBI what’s involved here, and they’ll never let him go without full disclosure.”
“They will if the right person makes the request,” Hoch said. He pulled cash out of his pocket to pay the check.
“Beechum,” Mitchell confirmed.
“This is a time of national emergency,” Hoch said. “I would imagine that the vice president of the United States has special authority, wouldn’t you?”
“She’d better.” Mitchell smiled. “That’s why we put her there.”
DAVID RAY VENABLE hadn’t lived in the White House long enough to take its history for granted. Each room he wandered through carried the indelible stains of American conflict—the Red Room’s fireplace where Harry Truman had contemplated the nuclear attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the library where John F. Kennedy prayed for strength during the Cuban missile crisis, the bedroom windows through which Lincoln saw Arlington Cemetery filling with the corpses of a nation falling upon itself.
And now it was his—this house, this country, this sacred trust. He settled in the Green Room, where a couch and two wing chairs offered ample comfort. The black velvet rope used to close it off to tourists still blocked the door.
“Is this private enough for you, Elizabeth?” he asked. It had been his only choice since the vice president had decided to make her stand. Had he decided to fight inside the Oval Office, the impact on his staff could have been devastating.
“Lose the suits,” she said. Beechum meant no insult to the Secret Service agents who had followed both her and the president’s every move since the first bomb exploded in Atlanta. But this was bound to get nasty, and her daddy had always told her not to quarrel in front of the help.
“Please,” the president said. He nodded toward the shift commander and motioned him away with his hand. “Close the door and give us a minute, will you?”
The agent, a veteran of two previous administrations, thought for a moment, then backed out of earshot. This was the Secret Service, after all; sometimes what you didn’t see was just as important as what you did.
“You need me here, David,” Beechum said when they were alone. “Don’t try to turn this into something it isn’t. I’ll stay completely out of sight. I’ll banish myself to the goddamned Situation Room if it makes you happy, but this is a brand-new staff you’ve brought to Washington and they have never been through anything like this. I have.”
Venable saw no upside in arguing that point. Beechum had served as chair of the Senate intelligence committee before, during, and after the 9/ 11 attacks. Few people in Washington had better sources, connections, or reputation.
“It’s not that I don’t value your experience,” the president fired back. “It’s just that we need to protect the government should something else happen. Like Havelock said, we will have full communications with . . . with wherever the hell it is they are taking you.”
“Maryland,” she informed him. “They call it Site Seven.”
“Site Seven? I guess that sounds like something the military would come up with, doesn’t it?”
The name seemed to distract this commander in chief, who had served one tour late in the Vietnam War. He quickly regained his train of thought.
“I guess there are a helluva lot of names I’ll be learning the next couple of days.”
“Not if you don’t get some sleep. David, this is the first thing they teach you in crisis management training. I’ve heard it so many times: leaders get caught up in the adrenaline of the initial event, then feel they have to stay involved. The longer you stay up, the harder it is to break away. Sleep deprivation leads to faulty decision making, and that leads to . . .”
“Don’t preach to me, Elizabeth. I’ve fought in combat, and I’ve overseen states of emergency during two terms as governor. I feel fine.”
“Flash floods and a windstorm,” she reminded him. “We’re talking about thousands of lives lost in six states. We’re talking about an economy that will curl up and die if we don’t . . .”
“Enough.” He waved at her. “I get your point.”
“All right, then, let me run a hypothetical by you.” Beechum reached a hand to the bridge of her nose and began to rub. She was already beginning to feel the fatigue and she’d had a good night’s sleep. “Let’s say this is the first stage of a much larger terror plot. Let’s say our intelligence shows an imminent threat to critical infrastructure including energy, ground transportation, financial markets . . . even the Internet.”
“A hypothetical?” he asked. “Or do you have information I haven’t seen yet?”
“Let’s say that we have reason to believe that Islamic terrorists have forged inroads with a group of Americans. Non-Islamic Americans. People who look just like you and me.”
“This is no hypothetical, is it?” he asked. “I need to know, Elizabeth. Like it or not, I’m still your boss.”
“That arrest I told you about earlier. Mahar’s capture in Indonesia?”
The president nodded.
“He wasn’t alone.”
Now he stared.
“He had three Americans with him. Three Christian Americans.”
�
��How? Why? Have we interrogated them?”
Beechum walked over toward the windows, which looked out over Pennsylvania Avenue. Snow obscured everything beyond the driveway.
“What I’m about to tell you is not written in any intelligence briefing. It falls within no particular security classification. In fact, it doesn’t really exist at all. You—even with all your power as president—will never be able to penetrate the mechanism that uncovered it. It is a black program authorized by the past administration to work outside the parameters of bureaucracy.”
“What are you telling me? You have started some supersecret agency to fight terrorism?” He sounded incredulous and slightly angry. “I won’t have that in my administration, Elizabeth, I’ll tell you that right now. Everything we do will be aboveboard and open to congressional oversight. I will not stand for . . .”
“Do you want to know about the Christians or don’t you?” she asked. Beechum didn’t sound the least bit impressed with his threats.
Venable crossed his arms and waited.
“The FBI has tied a Saudi charity working inside the United States to a group of white supremacists in Idaho. There have been numerous financial transactions, some of them fairly sizable. Alred says his Terrorist Financial Tracking Group has drawn clear lines of collusion directly to senior members of the Saudi royal family.”
“The Saudis?” Venable exhaled a breath of resignation. “We’ve always worried about them, haven’t we? I mean, from what I’ve read the past few years, they seem to turn up every time someone mentions terror.”
“That’s correct,” Beechum agreed. “Saudi interests have invested more than one and a half trillion dollars through our financial institutions. They are one of our most important Arab allies in the Middle East. They have large and prominent communities in most of our largest cities. And yet, all our intelligence suggests they remain a critical threat.”
“What about Borders Atlantic?” he asked. “Jordan Mitchell sold the Quantis system to the Saudis before he even launched it in his own country. That, despite the fact that your own committee identified it as one of the greatest threats to the intelligence community in decades.”
This all made sense to him now. The gears in his Yale-educated mind began to turn in earnest.
“We don’t know of any ties at this point, but yes, that certainly is a concern,” Beechum answered. Lying to the president of the United States should have bothered her, but it didn’t. Matters of national security seldom truly hinged on politicians. In her universe of secrets, only those with a clear sense of mission had a need to know.
“This goes all the way back to 9/ 11, I suppose?”
“Yes. The Saudis supplied fifteen of the nineteen hijackers, with clear financial support of causes ranging from al Qaeda to pro-Palestinian groups. Now we have significant evidence that they are backing a whole new type of threat inside the U.S.”
“Who?” Venable asked. “Why work with a Christian group? What would either have to gain from something like this?”
“We don’t know that yet,” Beechum lied again. It would all make sense to him in the end.
“Oh, I get it.” Venable nodded, a look of cynicism wrinkling his forehead. “This is your trump card. You are part of this little group that I can’t know about, and you need to stay here in order to trade your shady little secrets. That’s why you don’t want me to stick you out there in that site . . . whatever it is.”
“Site Seven.” She turned back toward the windows. “And they’re not dirty little secrets. They’re the difference between freedom and the end of America as we know it, David. You need me here. You need me more than you can possibly know.”
VI
Tuesday, 15 February
18:19 GMT
Camp Peary, Williamsburg, Virginia
ELM COTTAGE SAT at the edge of a five-acre clearing. A one-lane road led up to it, through a forest of loblolly pines and sycamore trees. Deer roamed freely, undisturbed by anything more dangerous than an occasional jogger. Dozens of species of birds enjoyed sanctuary in the wetlands preserves. If not for the occasional sounds of screeching tires and gunfire, this magic hideaway would have seemed an almost poetic idyll.
GI Jane arrived at the isolated cottage among the scattered flurries of a storm that forecasters saw slowly drifting north. A Gulfstream G-V had just dropped her off at the facility’s airstrip, a single runway in the middle of a vast 10,000-acre Department of Defense installation known since World War II as “the Farm.”
She had spent lots of time here over the past decade, first as a young CIA case officer learning tradecraft and then as a journeyman operative honing her trade. It had been several years already since she attended the facility’s lengthy “elicitation” in-service—Agency jargon for interrogation school. But that had all been academic. This was the first time she’d come back to the Farm for anything real.
What a place, she thought, peering out through the smoked glass windows of a black Yukon as it pulled up to the cottage. There was a swingset, an above-ground pool, a satellite dish, and children’s toys, all quietly gathering snow in the yard. It appeared to be just another two-story vinyl-sided home with a gambrel roof on a pretty country lot.
Except for the razor wire and security cameras, of course. Elm Cottage was surrounded with a ten-foot chain-link fence and a shoulder of concertina wire that someone had strung little white Christmas lights through, lending the whole snow-frosted scene a demented sort of Yuletide cheer.
“This shouldn’t take long,” GI Jane said. Two heavily armed guards sat in the front seat but said nothing. The driver nodded and shifted into park.
The CIA interrogation expert opened her door and passed another guard at the gate as she walked through the snow; she kicked off her boots after entering through a nicely ordered mudroom.
“How do you do, ma’am,” a guard greeted her inside. He saw no point in checking her ID. If she had gotten this far, she had to have passed someone’s scrutiny.
“Where is he?” she asked. The guard led her through a well-used kitchen, into a dining room. A very tired, very frightened-looking man sat at a nicely polished Chippendale table topped with brass candlestick holders and a dark blue Koran. The holy book had a paperback cover and was inscribed at the bottom: Property of the U.S. Government.
“I’m Jane,” she said in English, offering a smile and the first name that fell into her head. That business in the jungle had stuck with her. “You are?”
“Ashar,” the man said. He sounded hoarse. Empty. Bandages covered his arms, neck, and part of his face.
“Ashar. Of course.”
Jane opened one of the little wheel books she had made a habit of carrying and turned to a dog-eared page.
“I trust you are comfortable here?” she asked.
The man stared at her. Since his arrest, he had endured a true nightmare. Kept in a constantly and brightly illuminated room with no windows, he was drugged to sleep, then drugged awake. They made him watch bizarre pornographic movies, forced him to endure music played backward at high volume. They questioned him for hours, beating his naked body, spraying him with water. They froze him in a walk-in meat cooler, then made him sweat in a room hot as a sauna. They had fed him nothing but bread laced with something that inspired dire physical cravings, headaches, and vomiting; he thought it might be nicotine.
“Look at me,” he said. Ashar thought the answer must be obvious. “Nothing is comfortable. They treat me very badly. These burns are very painful. They don’t even change my bandages.”
“Yes, well . . .” GI Jane leaned forward on her elbows and spoke in a clear, resolute voice. “I can’t help what someone else has done to you, but I’m not here to cause you any pain.”
Ashar tried not to look scared, but someone had flown him a long way from Los Angeles. This woman looked harmless enough, but he did not believe her for a moment.
JORDAN MITCHELL’S OFFICE, like his management style, struck his immediate cir
cle as anachronistic but true. From the expansive weapons collection displayed on every available wall to the antique rugs, dark hardwood paneling, and richly upholstered furniture, Mitchell’s space spoke of old-world heritage. Bolder decorators periodically upgraded the building’s public areas, but no one dared change a thing about his office. Mitchell’s taste, like his business acumen, was not open to discussion.
“The FBI has found some interesting eccentricities in the original bomb designs,” Trask said. Though the former marine’s title read chief of staff, he enjoyed power and access beyond anyone else in the company.
“Really. What did they find?” Mitchell asked. The CEO sat at his desk, glancing through a Helmut Lange retrospective his publisher had sent over as a courtesy. Mitchell’s business hardbacks had three times proven him their biggest seller, after all; the occasional coffee-table book seemed a small but welcome gesture.
“Signature,” Trask said. He had served as an artillery officer in the first Gulf War and understood plenty about the report in his hands. “The materials were commonly available, but every improvised explosive device is a three-stage mechanism: detonator, initiator, accelerant. Both the detonator and the initiator stood out.”
Most executives mistook Mitchell’s efficiency as disinterest. The most common mistake, Trask had discovered, was that midlevel managers would skim over important details, infuriating the boss. Mitchell wanted information—all of it.
“Go on,” Mitchell said. He lay the book on his desk and stood.
“They used what are called ‘e-cell’ timers, a device that was developed by U.S. Special Forces for Third World insurgents. The initiator is called ‘shock tube,’ a lead sulfinate powder inside a flexible plastic conduit. When the e-cell is triggered, it transfers a pyrotechnic spark to a blasting cap. The whole process is mechanical, so radio interference won’t cause premature detonation. It is reliable, easy to assemble, and cheap.”
“These people had military training,” Mitchell assumed. “Were they U.S. military themselves? Or were they trained by our military?”
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