"Jesus!", I heard somebody murmur. Freeh stood up from the table and slowly left, the look of a broken man on his face.
I looked over and saw his shocked Deputy Director. I crooked a finger at him and then pointed at the chair Freeh had just left. "Congratulations, you are the interim Director. From now on, when we have a meeting about what happened yesterday, I will expect your Executive whatever to be on hand, and I expect him to have a lot more answers than what I just heard. Are we agreed on that?"
"Uh, yes, sir."
I turned back to the Deputy Director of the Secret Service. "Mister Basham, from now on, you and this fellow Barnhart..."
"Barnwell, sir."
I gave him a dour look at the interruption. "Do I look like I care? Barnwell! You and he are joined at the hip. I want you two working so closely on this that you can finish each other's sentences! If you get an itch, I want him to scratch it! This afternoon I am going over to the Pentagon to see what happened there. Afterwards I want the two of you to see me here, and I am expecting a heck of a lot more info than I just got. Understood?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Thank you. You are excused. I want you to go find him and get this sucker cranking!" Basham left with a lively step and a look of determination. After he left I pulled a second blank sheet from my pad. "Our next contestant is the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration."
"ME?!", came from a few feet down the table to my right. "What did I do!?"
"Ah, there you are, Ms. Garvey." I slid a blank piece of stationery down the table. "Ms. Garvey, it's not what you did, but what you didn't do. Your agency is supposed to regulate the airlines, and instead they regulate your agency. Now, while I will admit that you didn't create this situation, you did nothing to change it, either. We might not know what happened, but airplane security falls under the regulations of your agency. I can guarantee that in your files will be a list of proposals that could have stopped this but were never implemented. So, sign away."
Jane Garvey was furious, but she signed a resignation and stormed out. Her replacement sat down in her place and I looked at him. "Your job will be to find that list of fixes and get them going. If you need political cover, I'll give it to you. If you need an Executive Order ordering things to be done, I'll give it to you. I will support you on this, but no plane lifts off until we are sure that this won't happen again, and we need those planes flying as soon as possible. Understood?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Good! Now, get out of here and get to work. I'll talk to you sometime tomorrow night, by which time I expect a list of concrete proposals and a timetable to implement them."
"Yes, sir!", He took off. I hadn't even caught his name.
"Next!" I pulled out another blank sheet, and slid it across the table to Paul Wolfowitz, who was sitting across from me. He simply stared at me. "Paul, for the last six months, other experts and I have been warning about the dangers of terrorism and you have been telling me how we weren't in any danger, and how the real problem was Iraq! You fired the experts you didn't like, but you couldn't fire me. Even today you are still trying to sell the idea that this was caused by Iraq. Sorry! No sale! You know the drill by now. Sign it and date it!"
"Damn you! You can't do this! President Bush will have you impeached!", yelled Cheney.
I turned to my left, where Dick was sitting. "Dick, we went through this earlier, remember? I can do it, and I just did. If we find the President, he can hire any of these people back that he wants. In the meantime, they are gone."
Wolfowitz looked at his patron, but he either didn't pick up on Cheney backing down, or didn't care. "You go to hell, Buckman! You're not the President! I don't have to take this shit!"
Around the table you could hear people gasping. I hadn't quite expected that response, but I certainly knew how to handle it. I caught the eye of a Secret Service agent and said, "We're going to need a team in here, right now, if you please."
"Yes, sir!" He began speaking into his sleeve mike and moved to stand behind Wolfowitz.
"What the hell do you think you are doing, Buckman!?", Wolfowitz demanded.
I reached over and took back the piece of stationery. I wrote, 'Paul Wolfowitz has been terminated from the employment of the United States of America, effective immediately. Carl Buckman, Acting President, United States of America, September 12, 2001.'
By the time I was finished, four additional agents were standing behind the ex-CIA director. I looked up at them and said, "Mr. Wolfowitz is no longer in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, or any other agency of this government. After you escort him from the room you are to search him and remove any identification or other items not of a personal nature. Then he is to be taken directly to his home. I want two of you to head over to Langley and inform the guards at the gate that Mr. Wolfowitz is no longer an employee and is no longer to be permitted on the premises. If there are any questions, they can call the White House. Is that understood?"
"Damn you!", yelled Wolfowitz, who tried to stand up.
On doing so, two agents grabbed him by the shoulders, one on each side, and held him in place. I pointed towards the door, and he was led outside. Some of the faces in the room looked shocked, but I noticed Colin Powell had a slight smile, and Paul O'Neill didn't look unhappy, either.
One of the shocked faces was Wolfowitz' deputy. I pointed at him and motioned to fill the now vacant seat. He moved into position and I gave the newcomer a hard look. "Tomorrow morning I am flying to New York City. I will expect to be able to tell people with a straight face that we are working hard to figure out who exactly did this to us, so that we can return the favor. I am expecting you to have information for me that is truthful and unbiased. If you are smart, you will have somebody very senior and very serious to help those other two figure things out. They are to become the Three Amigos. If you need to open the vaults, do it. Do you understand me, or do I need to repeat the process we just witnessed?"
"I understand, sir."
I pulled out a fourth piece of blank paper, and stared at it for a second, and then put it back in my folder. I felt a sense of relief in the room; there had been enough drama. I made a half turn in my chair towards Cheney, but then kept turning my head towards Scooter Libby, sitting behind him. "Scooter, I really thought hard about this, but I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt. However, if you ever again tell anybody that I'm not the real President and that I am not to be kept in the loop and can't be told classified information I will hang you out to dry in the noonday sun! In the meantime, you are to start doing your damn job and not running around trying to game the system and cooking the books on the data with the CIA!"
Cheney looked like he was about to explode, but kept quiet. If he had said anything, I planned to pull out a sheet of paper and hand it to him, but he behaved himself. The rest of the meeting was about what we would need to do in the future for security. I also gave people a plan for my coming schedule, including a joint meeting with the Congressional leaders Friday morning with the entire Cabinet.