Too many in the American intelligence establishment had a Western, modern, secular mind-set. They saw the world almost exclusively through political and economic lenses. But that obviously wasn’t enough.
Bennett didn’t quite know what to make of Jack Mitchell. He had the title. He had the corner office and the résumé to go with it. On paper, he was a president’s dream candidate for CIA director. But in Bennett’s estimation he possessed neither the intellectual nor spiritual bandwidth for the task that lay ahead.
On 9/11, when Al-Qaeda had hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Jack Mitchell had been running the CIA’s NAMESTAN desk, covering all of North Africa, the Middle East, and the “stans” (Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the former Soviet Central Asian republics). He’d been the director of Central Intelligence when Saddam and Al-Nakbah had launched Operation Last Jihad. And incredibly, he was still the DCI despite a Fascist coup in Moscow that was rapidly developing into the worst foreign-policy crisis in years.
Why hadn’t Jack Mitchell seen any of these attacks coming?
Why hadn’t he connected the dots?
How in the world had he been promoted to the agency’s top slot?
And how had he remained?
Bennett knew the president’s relationship with Mitchell went back years, and the president was nothing if not loyal to his friends. But so what?
Mitchell wasn’t a bad man. He simply did not understand the enemy he was sworn to defeat.
The failure to anticipate the attacks of the past several years wasn’t so much a failure of intelligence as it was a failure of imagination.
To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil was to risk being blindsided by it.
And to put it bluntly, Mitchell had been blindsided, time and time again.
Now the stakes were higher than ever. Evil was regrouping. Something else was coming, something catastrophic. Bennett had no idea what. He just knew Jack Mitchell was not the man to ask.
Eli Mordechai was not a man accustomed to fear.
But it was fear he now felt. Doron’s reply had finally arrived, and Mordechai’s hand trembled as he clicked open the e-mail and began to read it.
“Eli — you are as sharp as ever, my friend, which is why I so value your counsel. But forgive my diplomatic jargon. I did not mean to be so cryptic. I was simply referring to the new government of Gogolov. ‘Gog,’ in Mossadspeak. Do let me know as soon as you are ready to meet. I fear storm clouds are building on the horizon, and I could use a good weatherman. DD.”
So there it was.
GOG.
Mordechai shuddered. The prime minister didn’t have any idea what he was really saying. David Doron knew only what everyone knew: that Russia had a new dictator — a former intelligence officer with a violent past, an expansionist ideology, close ties to Iran, and ten thousand nuclear warheads at his disposal. That was bad enough.
But there was something else. Something Mordechai knew that few others did. Something that rattled him to his core.
Was it really true? Could he prove it? And even if he could, who would listen?
25
Bennett was exhausted.
Up since 4 a.m. and in the office since six, his eyes were bloodshot, and his medication was wearing off.
“Jon, it’s late; go home.”
Bennett looked up from a stack of classified State Department and CIA cable traffic to find Indira Rajiv standing in the doorway of his West Wing office.
“Hey, Raj, what’s up?”
“You are. You want to get me fired? The president gave me strict orders to make sure you don’t overdo it. If he finds out you’re still here, he’ll kill me.”
Bennett highly doubted Rajiv’s job was in any jeopardy. She was a rising star, a Langley prodigy. The American-born daughter of immigrants from India, Rajiv had been recruited into the CIA by McCoy while both were at Wharton getting their MBAs. She’d gone on to earn two doctorates, as welclass="underline" one in Islamic history from Princeton University, the other in Persian history from Oxford, both paid for by the U.S. government.
Now, at the tender young age of thirty-six, she had already worked her way up to director of the NAMESTAN desk. She was fluent in Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu, the language of Pakistan (though, ironically, she spoke none of India’s hundreds of dialects), and within the U.S. intelligence community, Rajiv was rapidly becoming known as one of their leading experts on radical Islam.
And if that weren’t enough, though she dressed modestly in Western fashions and rarely wore makeup, she was a head turner — large brown eyes, pale mocha skin, and wavy jet-black hair that touched just below her shoulders.
“I’ll be fine,” Bennett muttered and went back to his work. He had no time for small talk, and if Indira Rajiv couldn’t help him find his fiancée, he wanted nothing to do with her.
Rajiv didn’t take the hint. She came over, sat down across from him, and asked, “Any news about Erin?”
Bennett looked up, annoyed. Was that pity in her eyes? It made his stomach turn. He’d had enough of everyone stopping him in the halls, asking him the latest word on McCoy. The only thing worse than not having an answer—any answer — about her whereabouts, much less her condition, was having to acknowledge that fact twenty or thirty times a day.
“No, not yet,” he said, looking back at the cables spread across his cluttered desk.
Dozens of intelligence and military officials were engaged in the hunt for Erin McCoy, but they were looking for a needle in a haystack while the barn was on fire. If Rajiv was so smart, why wasn’t she more help? What was she doing at the White House at almost eleven o’clock on a weeknight anyway?
“You hear about Gogolov?” Rajiv asked.
“No, what?” said Bennett, his mood suddenly changing.
“Costello has a source that says he’s holding a press conference tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“There’s a rumor going around that Gogolov wants to address the U.N. General Assembly next week.”
“Is it true?”
“I’ve got different sources from Ken, but I’m hearing the same thing.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Bennett. “The president will never give him a visa.”
“Maybe he should,” Rajiv countered. “The FBI could put him in cuffs the minute he touches down at JFK.”
“Right, and have his minions back in Moscow launch Armageddon?”
“Actually, I hear Gogolov may already have a majority of the General Assembly wired up.”
“To do what?”
“To pass a resolution calling on the president to let Gogolov have his day in court, in the spirit of world peace, as it were.”
World peace? Gogolov? How could anyone keep a straight face using those three words in the same sentence? But the world wasn’t laughing.
Bennett’s phone rang, startling them both.
His car was ready. He thanked Rajiv, said good night, and put his papers in his safe. Then he turned off the lights in his office and headed out to West Executive Avenue to meet his driver. Maybe Rajiv was an asset after all.
Ten minutes later Bennett was home.
He said good night to the DSS agents stationed outside his door and entered his town house. He lived on a shady street in Georgetown, about three blocks from the university campus where he had studied as an undergrad. Locking the door behind him, he threw his keys on the shelf, hung up his suit coat in the front closet, and flipped on the news.