Ryan took another bite of eggs Benedict, wishing he had longer to savor it. “We’re always on the brink of something when it comes to Nikita Yermilov,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not discounting your intelligence product. These guys have been studying the way we wage war for the last couple of decades — and figuring out how to counter it. We’ve got to start looking at things differently. The next war will likely be on ground we don’t yet even comprehend at this point. Cyber… AI… who knows what.”
“No argument there,” Foley said. “Both Yermilov and Zhao are running more and more active measures against the West every day. The bad old days with a hell of a lot more technology. The Bureau arrested two Chinese illegals in Queens last week — brothers living under the assumed identities of two children who died in the late seventies.”
Ryan gave a contemplative nod. “I read that brief. Your people are following a couple more, if I’m not mistaken.”
“We are,” Foley said. “A joint team of Bureau and Agency folk.” She pretended to wipe her brow with the back of her hand. “You don’t know how hard it was to get that one put together. Sadly, there are still a few bastions of blinkered thought in the puzzle palaces of our intelligence community. The directors of both agencies were fine with the task force—”
“They better be.” Ryan cut her off. He’d appointed them both.
Mary Pat raised her hand. “They’re on board, Jack, but a couple of old-dog senior executives were guarding their turf like the last bone in the yard. Deanne Staples at the Bureau and Simon Cross at CIA.”
“Did you mentor them?”
“Right out the door,” Foley said. “I am so far past that shit, pardon my French. Gave them each a nice send-off and a pretty plaque thanking them for their service. Yermilov and Zhao both want to end us, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a couple of dinosaurs bent on marking their territory keep us from catching him at his game.”
Ryan chuckled. “Good for you.”
“Sorry, Jack,” Foley said. “It’s not your problem. I just needed to vent. Anyway, the task force has teams on seven suspected illegals at the moment, two here in D.C., one in Manhattan, and a married couple in Colorado Springs who run a diner outside Cheyenne Mountain.” She chuckled. “Most are Russian, but the two in Colorado are Chinese.”
“Do we know who’s running them?”
Foley took a sip of coffee. “Nothing definitive,” she said. “A couple of sources say there is significant infighting among a couple of high-ranking military brass in Beijing. We do have a source close to General Song, a one-star who runs war-gaming scenarios who says he could be ripe to turn. He’d have a treasure trove of data at his fingertips if they want the scenarios to be realistic. We’re playing it slow or we run the risk of burning that source.”
Ryan didn’t ask for specifics about the sources. Both he and Foley had been at this game long enough that neither made a habit of discussing details about intelligence officers or their assets’ meeting schedules unless it was absolutely necessary. Ryan trusted his staff — but people leaked, sometimes on purpose, more often accidentally. Loose lips really had sunk a fair number of ships — and gotten more than a few outed agents shot. As the saying went, Trust in God, but tether your camel at night.
“Anyway, we’ll keep a close watch on the general.” Foley used the tip of her index finger to doodle on the tablecloth. “The situation with all these illegals reminds me of life before you took this stodgy desk job.”
“I’ve always had a stodgy desk job,” Ryan said.
“Yeah,” Foley said, “but you could get up and come play with the rest of us there for a while.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny…”
Foley put both hands on the tablecloth and leaned forward. “Don’t you miss the field?”
“Not one damned bit,” Ryan lied.
Foley sat back, obviously seeing through him. “It’s safer to be a chess player than a chess piece,” she said. “But it’s not nearly as much fun. Anyway, you’re up on your briefing books. Yermilov wants Ukraine and Zhao wants us out of the South China Sea—”
The door from the Sitting Hall opened and Ryan’s chief of staff blew in, gripping his cell phone like it was a sword. He was the only bald guy Ryan knew who could look like he had bedhead. The single Windsor knot of his polyester tie hung at half-mast. He wore no jacket and the top button of his blue striped Eddie Bauer shirt gaped open. The sleeves were rolled to just below his elbows.
He held up the phone as he dragged a chair back from the table with his free hand. “Instagram photo looks great,” he said, not exactly smiling, but looking pleased.
“I see you slept in your clothes again,” Ryan said.
Arnie van Damm waved off the comment. “Yeah, yeah, a guy keeps the wheels oiled, he’s bound to get into a little grease.”
Ryan motioned to his uneaten Benedict. “I can have Josey bring in another set of silverware.”
“I’ve already eaten,” van Damm said. “Did I hear you talking about Russia when I came in? Because that’s what I came to see you about, among other things.”
Van Damm had been chief of staff to three presidents — the man behind the curtain, the chamberlain who whispered in the shogun’s ear. He’d been there from the beginning of the Ryan presidency, when Jack was literally picking himself up from the rubble. Politics, not blood, flowed in his veins. It was no easy task playing ringmaster to the White House circus, and harder still to cajole whoever was sitting behind the Resolute desk into playing politics. He had a knack for knowing when a whispered suggestion would do — or when he needed a chair and a whip. Arnie saw sides of things that Ryan did not, and vice versa. He was a good guy to have in the room, even if he did look like he’d just crawled out of a laundry hamper.
Van Damm absentmindedly dragged Ryan’s plate in front of him as he sat down. Ryan called Josey to bring in silverware and more coffee, which she did immediately. She looked horrified to see the chief of staff preparing to chow down on the rest of the President’s breakfast.
“I’d be happy to make you a fresh plate, Mr. van Damm,” she said.
“That’s okay,” Arnie said, popping the yolk of the second egg. “I’m not really hungry.” Ryan smiled inwardly as his friend began to eat, one arm on the table, wrapped around the plate like that of a prisoner afraid another inmate might try and steal his tater tots. Admittedly rough around the edges, Arnie van Damm was one of the most viscerally intelligent men Ryan had ever come across.
The chief of staff looked up at Ryan. “Senator Chadwick is killing us on our position in the Baltics.”
“Not news,” Ryan said. “At least not new news.”
Michelle Chadwick, the senior senator from Arizona and chairman of the influential Ways and Means Committee, rarely wasted a chance to bash Ryan and his administration for any manner of what she considered to be misadventures. Lately, it was Ryan’s push to increase security in the Baltic nations. She’d swallowed the Russian line that any security buildup would precipitate aggression from the Kremlin instead of preventing it. But she didn’t know Yermilov like Ryan did.