Chamberlain paused, then averted his eyes before replying: “Maybe…maybe I see some of the ‘play it safe’ attitude that I had at TGE in her sometimes, the attitude that ruined my corporate career. Maybe I’m still angry at myself for my indecisiveness and lack of courage, and I take it out on others that I perceive as being the same.”
“You have nothing to prove here, Robert,” the President said, getting to his feet, walking around the desk, and putting a hand on his National Security Adviser’s shoulder. “You have been a tough, courageous, no-nonsense, and dedicated adviser and confidant to me and this administration since the first day you set foot in the White House. TransGlobal Energy’s and the corporate world’s loss is my gain.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. That means a lot.”
The President stepped back and seated himself at his desk again, signaling the end of the brotherly role and the resumption of the chief executive role. “You have nothing to prove, Robert—which means take the damned chip off your shoulder and start being a member of the team rather than the ideological taskmaster,” he said sternly. “You are an important man in my personal and professional life, but you are just one of many important persons around here. Start thinking of ways to build bridges instead of walls; stop torpedoing the other staff members in this office. I expect you to share your ideas with the others before you present them to me and get as much of the conflicts ironed out so we don’t waste a lot of time in bickering and confusion when you walk in here looking for a decision. Are we clear on this?”
“Yes, sir,” Chamberlain responded. The President looked down at the edited speech, signaling an end to their conversation. “Thank you, Mr. President,” Chamberlain muttered, and walked out.
I serve at the pleasure of the President, Chamberlain reminded himself as he headed back to his office to get ready for the visit to Andrews Air Force Base—and right now, the President wasn’t too pleased with him.
Facility H-18, Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland
A short time later
“With all due respect to the Brazilians, I think they should get their heads out of their asses and try a little harder,” Special Agent Kelsey D. DeLaine said into her secure cell phone. She kept an eye on the partially open warehouse door for any sign of activity, but so far nothing was happening. Inside the empty building there were only a few Air Force Security Forces guards and one lone guy in camouflage battle dress uniform standing near a high- tech-looking Humvee. His hair was a little long, he was skinny and white-skinned, and he had horn-rimmed glasses strapped to his head with a black elastic band. If he was a military guy, he was definitely the geekiest-looking one she had ever seen. “There’s an attack on a TransGlobal facility in Brazil on the same day, almost the same hour, as the attack in Houston, and no one sees a connection?”
“Kel, there have been a total of nineteen attacks against TransGlobal or affiliated companies in South America in the past year,” her associate, Special Agent Ramiro “Rudy” Cortez, Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on the other end of the connection. “All of them involved small dams and power-generating plants, and all used only homemade explosives. Strictly small-time. I’m not sure there’s a connection.”
“Rudy, we can’t start to piece it together until we get more information from our ‘friends’ in the Policia Militar do Estado, but they seem to be dragging their feet on our requests,” DeLaine said impatiently. She had long brown hair, but it was put up now off her collar, which irritated and aggravated her to no end—she hated the feel of cold air on the back of her neck. Her black Reebok power-walking shoes were in her bureau car outside, and after standing in heels for the past twenty minutes she wished she’d brought them along. She shifted the Glock 29 pistol on her right hip for the umpteenth time, trying to find a comfortable position for the compact weapon, and wished that the bureau would reinstate the option for agents to carry their weapon in a purse in nonhostile environments.
“They’re doing the best they can, Kel,” Cortez said. “Their country is as big as ours but nowhere near as connected. We only made the request yesterday. My, we’re cranky this morning, aren’t we?”
“The eight A.M. meeting hasn’t happened yet, the place is empty, no one but some grungy-looking army gopher is here, and my feet are killing me. What do we know about this Brazilian group, GAMMA?”
“Brazilian environmental and human rights activist organization. Targets multinational petroleum and energy-producing corporations in general but appears to be going after TransGlobal Energy Corporation assets more and more in particular.”
“I want to know every detail possible about GAMMA,” Kelsey said. “If the PME won’t give the information to the FBI office in Rio de Janeiro, we should send a request to the CIA Americas desk for support. And we should start pulling data on Brazilian nuclear material and weapons research programs. Brazil could be a source for bomb-making materials, if not the actual weapons themselves.”
“As long as you’re asking for the impossible, why don’t you get me a sleepover with Jennifer Lopez?” Cortez quipped. “Kel, we’ve got every agent in our office pulling sixteen-hour days since the Houston attack. Everyone is concentrating on how a backpack nuke got into the U.S. undetected. No one is looking at Brazilian ecoterrorist groups yet—we’re looking at the more credible perps, like al Qaeda, missing Russian tactical nuclear weapons, the Chinese…”
“Then get a clerk or records officer to check—it’s all computer work,” Kelsey said. “They can pass the info to you and I’ll brief the chief and get the extra manpower if we need it. But we’re just doing surveillance—it’s not fieldwork, not yet.”
“Kelsey, you’ve already pressed every clerk, records person, secretary, janitor, and doorman into doing research for us,” her partner said. “You’ve even gotten clerks in other agencies doing work for us, which I’m sure is a breach of security. At the very least you’re going to owe a lot of lunches.”
“Ramiro…”
“Uh oh, the ethnic first name—discussion must be over,” Rudy said. “Okay, I’ll get on it. Any idea what your meeting is about, and why they scheduled it for an empty building at Andrews?”
“This is not just a ‘building,’ Rudy—the Redskins could play here if they laid down some artificial turf and put up goalposts,” Kelsey said. “I have no idea. I’m hoping they’re going to fly in a witness that’ll break the Houston bombing wide open for us, but I’m not that lucky.”
“Probably has to do with that memo you sent to the director a few months back,” Cortez surmised. “Didn’t you mention something about nuclear weapons then?”
“I talked about a memo I wrote based on reports from our London and Warsaw offices about Russian tactical battlefield nuclear warheads being converted to ‘backpack’ weapons,” Kelsey said. “It was a collection of reports from our bureaus and from European sources spanning three years and three continents, and I had no concrete conclusions—I thought my office should start an analysis and try to come up with some definite links. I thought the report got circular-filed.”
“Obviously after Houston, folks noticed.”
Just then she noticed the warehouse door opening, and several security officers taking positions inside and out. “I should find out soon—someone’s arriving. Talk to you later.”
“Break a leg.”
Kelsey closed her phone, then straightened her shoulders as three dark stretch limousines approached. The warehouse doors closed, with guards both inside and out. The limos pulled over to Kelsey…and she was at first surprised, then shocked, at the figures that stepped out of those cars: the director of the FBI, JeffreyF. Lemke, from the first; Secretary of Homeland Security, Donna Calhoun, from the second; and the President’s National Security Adviser, Robert Chamberlain, from the third.
“Kelsey, good to see you again,” Director Lemke said, holding out his hand. She shook hands. Although she worked at FBI headquarters in Washington, she’d attended just a few meetings with the director and maybe said six words to him in two and a half years. Jeffrey Lemke was a former FBI agent turned federal prosecutor and politician, first as a state attorney general and then as a two-term congressman from Oklahoma before being appointed FBI director. Kelsey liked him and thought he was an effective director, although he looked and spoke more like a politician than an FBI agent—which was probably a good thing.
Lemke turned and motioned beside him. “Secretary Calhoun, I’d like to introduce Special Agent Kelsey DeLaine, deputy director of our intelligence office in Washington and one of our best analysts. Agent DeLaine, Secretary of Homeland Security Calhoun.”
“Nice to see you again, Madam Secretary,” Kelsey said. “We met about two months ago when I briefed you and your staff on my report on backpack nuclear devices.” The pain on Donna Calhoun’s face, which Kelsey remembered seeing in a press conference on TV just last night and was obviously still with her, deepened to a look
