President Clendennen was a short, pudgy, pale-skinned fifty-two-year-old Alabaman who kept his tiny ears hidden under a full head of silver hair.

Charles M. Montvale came through the door. He was a tall, elegantly tailored sixty-two-year-old whose silver mane was every bit as luxurious as the President's, but did not do much to conceal his ears.

Montvale's ears were the delight of the nation's political cartoonists. They seemed to be so very appropriate for a man who-after a long career of government service in which he had served as a deputy secretary of State, the secretary of the Treasury, and amba.s.sador to the European Union-was now the United States director of National Intelligence.

The DNI was caricatured at least once a week-and sometimes more often-with his oversize ears pointed in the direction of Moscow or Teheran or Capitol Hill.

"Good morning, Mr. President," Montvale said.

"Can I offer you something, Charles?" the President asked, his Alabama drawl p.r.o.nounced. "Have you had your breakfast?"

"Yes, thank you, sir, I have. Hours ago."

"Coffee, then?"

"Please."

The President's foot pressed a b.u.t.ton under the desk.

"Would you bring us some coffee, please?"

He motioned for Montvale to take a seat on a couch facing a coffee table, and when Montvale had done so, Clendennen rose from behind his desk and walked to an armchair on the other side of the coffee table and sat down.

The coffee was delivered immediately by a steward under the watchful eye of the President's secretary.

"Thank you," the President said. "We can pour ourselves. And now, please, no calls, no messages, no interruptions."

"Yes, Mr. President."

"From anyone," the President added.

Montvale picked up the silver coffeepot, and said, "You take your coffee ... ?"

"Black, thank you, Charles," the President said.

Montvale poured coffee for both.

The President sipped his, and then said, "You know what I have been thinking lately? When I've had time to think of anything?"

"No, sir."

"Harry Truman didn't know of the atomic bomb-Roosevelt never told him-until the day after Roosevelt died. General Groves walked in here-into this office-ran everybody out, and then told Truman that we had the atomic bomb. That we had two of them."

"I've heard that story, Mr. President," Montvale said.

"We had a somewhat similar circ.u.mstance here. The first I heard of the strike in the Congo was after it happened. When we already were at DefConOne."

Montvale didn't reply.

Clendennen went on: "And he never told me about this secret organization he had running. I heard about that only after he'd died. Secretary of State Natalie Cohen came in here, and said, 'Mr. President, there's something I think you should know.' That was the first I'd ever heard of the a.n.a.lysis Operations Organization. They almost got us into a war, and I was never even told it existed."

Montvale sipped his coffee, then said, "It was called the 'Office of Organizational a.n.a.lysis,' Mr. President. And it no longer exists."

"I wonder if I can believe that," the President said. "I wonder how soon someone else is going to come through that door and say, 'Mr. President, there's something you should know. ...'"

"I think that's highly unlikely, Mr. President, and I can a.s.sure you that the Office of Organizational a.n.a.lysis is gone. I was there when the President killed it."

"Maybe he should have sent a couple of squadrons of fighter-bombers, the way he did to the Congo, to destroy everything in a twenty-square-mile area, and to h.e.l.l with collateral damage," the President said.

"Mr. President, I understand how you feel, even if I would have been inside the area of collateral damage."

"Tell me about Operations a.n.a.lysis, Charles, and about you being there when our late President killed it."

"He set up the Office of Organizational a.n.a.lysis in a Presidential Finding, Mr. President, when the deputy chief of mission in our emba.s.sy in Argentina was murdered."

"And put a lowly lieutenant colonel in charge?"

"At the time, Carlos Castillo was a major, Mr. President."

"And you and Natalie Cohen went along with this?"

"The Presidential Finding was issued over our objections, sir. And at the time, Natalie was the national security advisor, not secretary of State."

"Where did he find this Major Castillo? What is he, an Italian, a Mexican? Cuban? What?"

"A Texican, sir. His family has been in Texas since before the Alamo. He's a West Pointer-"

"I seem to recall that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who almost got us into a war in Nicaragua, was an Annapolis graduate," the President interrupted. "What do they do at those service academies, Charles, have a required course, How to Start a War One-Oh-One?"

Montvale didn't respond directly. Instead, he said, "Castillo came to the President's attention over that stolen airliner. You remember that, Mr. President?"

"Vaguely."

"Well. An airliner, a Boeing 727, that had been sitting for a year in an airport in Luanda, Angola, suddenly disappeared. We-the intelligence community-were having a hard time finding it. Those things take time, something the President didn't always understand. And as you know, sir, the President was very close to the then-secretary of Homeland Security, Matt Hall. He talked to him about this, and either he or the secretary thought it would be a good idea to send someone to see which intelligence agency had learned what, and when they had learned it.

"Hall told the President that he had just the man for the a.s.signment, Major Castillo, who was just back from Afghanistan, and working for him as an interpreter /aide."

"And?"

"To cut a long story short, Mr. President, Major Castillo not only located the missing aircraft but managed to steal it back from those who had stolen it, and flew it to MacDill Air Force Base-Central Command-in Tampa."

"I heard a little, very little, about that," the President said.

"The President decided, and I think he was right, that the less that came out about that incident, the better."

"And make sure to keep Clendennen out of the loop, right?" the President said, more than a little bitterly.

Montvale didn't respond directly. Instead, he said, "The people who stole the airplane planned to crash it into the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. We would not have let that happen, but if the story had gotten out, the President believed there would have been panic."

President Clendennen considered that a moment, and then asked, "So where does the Finding fit in all this?"

"The wife of one of our diplomats in Argentina. The deputy chief of mission, J. Winslow Masterson-'Jack the Stack'?"

"I know who he was, Charles. Not only was he the basketball player who got himself run over by a beer truck, for which he collected a very large bundle, but he was the son of Winslow Masterson, who is arguably the richest black guy-scratch black-the richest guy in Mississippi. And they even-surprise, surprise-told me that Winslow's son had been killed."

"Yes, sir. First they kidnapped his wife. The minute the President heard about that, he sent Major Castillo down there. What Castillo was supposed to do was keep an eye on the investigation, and report directly to the President.

"By the time Castillo got to Buenos Aires, Masterson had eluded the State Department security people who had been guarding him, and gone to meet the kidnappers. They killed him in front of his wife, then doped her up and left her with the body."

"What was that all about?"

"We didn't know it at the time, but it was connected with the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal. Mrs. Masterson's brother was not only involved, but had stolen money from the thieves. They thought she would know where he was-she didn't; there was enormous friction between her husband and her brother-and they told her unless she told them where he was, they would kill her children."

"You didn't know this at the time?"

"No, sir. But when the President learned that Masterson had gotten away from his State Department guards, and had been a.s.sa.s.sinated, he went ballistic-"

"He had a slight tendency to do that, didn't he?" the President said sarcastically.

"-and got on the phone to the amba.s.sador and told him that Castillo was now in charge of getting Mrs. Masterson and the children safely out of Argentina."

"And?"

"Which he did. The President send a Globemaster down there to bring Masterson's body and his family home. And when the plane got to the air base in Biloxi, Air Force One was sitting there waiting for it. And so was the Presidential Finding. The President had found that the national interest required the establishment of a clandestine unit to be known as the Office of Organizational a.n.a.lysis, which was charged with locating and terminating those responsible for the a.s.sa.s.sination of J. Winslow Masterson. Major Carlos Castillo was named chief." He paused. "That's how it started, Mr. President."

"'Terminating' is that nice little euphemism for murder, right?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, that explains, wouldn't you agree, Charles, why the President didn't feel I had to know about this? He knew I wouldn't stand for it. There's nothing in the Const.i.tution that gives the President the authority to order the killing of anybody."

Montvale thought: Well, he knew you wouldn't like it. But there is nothing you could have done about it if you had known, short of giving yourself the floor in the Senate and committing political suicide by betraying the man who had chosen you to be his Vice President. Well, he knew you wouldn't like it. But there is nothing you could have done about it if you had known, short of giving yourself the floor in the Senate and committing political suicide by betraying the man who had chosen you to be his Vice President.

Being morally outraged is one thing.

Doing something about it at great cost to yourself is something else.

And if the story had come out, there's a h.e.l.l of a lot of people who would have been delighted that the President had ordered the execution of the people who had murdered Jack the Stack in front of his wife. And even more who would have agreed that the murder of any American diplomat called for action, not complaints to the United Nations.

The only reason Clendennen said that is to cover his a.s.s in case the story of OOA gets out.

"I never knew a thing about it. When DNI Montvale told me the story, after I had become President-he had been forbidden to tell me before-I was outraged! Ask Montvale just how outraged I was!"

"The security was very tight, Mr. President," Montvale said. "The access list, the people authorized to know about OOA, was not only very short, but extraordinarily tightly controlled."

"What does that mean?"

"There were only two people who could clear others for access to OOA information, Mr. President. Major Castillo and the President himself. I was made privy to it, of course, but I was forbidden to share what knowledge I had with anyone else-not even my deputy or my secretary-no matter how many Top Secret security clearances they had."

"That isn't surprising when you think about it, is it, Charles? When you are ordering murder, the fewer people who know about it, the better."

Montvale didn't reply.

"Just how many bodies did this Major Castillo leave scattered all over the world, Charles?" the President asked.

"I really don't know, Mr. President," Montvale said. "He reported only to the President."

"And now that there's a new President, don't you think it's time somebody asked him? Where is he?"

"I don't know, Mr. President."

"You're the DNI," the President snapped. "Shouldn't you know a little detail like that?"

"Mr. President, will you indulge me for a moment? I think it would be useful for you to know what happened vis-a-vis the Congo."

"I think a lot of people would find it useful to know what happened vis-a-vis the Congo."

"On Christmas Eve, Mr. President, there were several a.s.sa.s.sinations and attempted a.s.sa.s.sinations all over the world-"

"By Major Castillo? On Christmas Eve? Unbelievable!"

"No, sir. Directed against people with a connection to Lieutenant Colonel-by then he had been promoted-Castillo. A newspaper reporter in Germany, for one. An Argentine gendarmeria gendarmeria officer, for another. A Secret Service agent on the vice presidential detail-" officer, for another. A Secret Service agent on the vice presidential detail-"

"Which one?" the President again interrupted.

"His name is John M. Britton, if memory serves, Mr. President."

"Black guy," the former Vice President recalled. "Smart as h.e.l.l. Funny, too. I liked him. I wondered what happened to him."

"Well, sir, immediately after the attempt on his life, he was of course taken off your protection detail."

"Why?"

"Sir, if someone was trying to kill Special Agent Britton and he was guarding you, standing beside you ..."

The President stopped him with a gesture. He had the picture.

"What was Jack Britton's connection to Castillo?"

"Britton was a Philadelphia Police Department detective, working undercover in the Counterterrorism Bureau, when Castillo was running down the Philadelphia connection to the stolen airliner. Castillo recruited him for OOA."

"Then how did he wind up in the Secret Service on my protection detail?"

"I believe you know Supervisory Special Agent Tom McGuire, Mr. President?"

"He used to run the President's protection detail? Yeah, sure I know Tom. Don't tell me he has a connection with Castillo."

"The President a.s.signed McGuire to OOA to act as liaison between the Secret Service and Castillo. He was impressed with Britton, and when Britton was no longer needed by Castillo and couldn't return to Philadelphia-his ident.i.ty was now known to the terrorist community-McGuire recruited him for your protection detail."