The President Is Missing: A Novel (17 page)

W
hen I finish with Acting Director Greenfield, Carolyn tells me my next call is ready.

A moment later, after some fuzz and screen garble, the image of a man, thick-necked and deadly serious, with a manicured beard and bald head, comes onto the screen. The bags underneath his eyes are a testament not to his age but to the week he’s had.

“Mr.…President,”
he says. His English is perfect, his foreign accent almost imperceptible.

“David, good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you as well, Mr. President. Given the events of the last few hours, that statement is more than a mere pleasantry.”

True enough. “The woman is dead, David. Did you know that?”

“It is what we assumed.”

“But the man is with me,” I say. “He calls himself Augie.”

“He told you his name is Augie?”

“He did. Is that the truth? Did you get a shot of his face?”

After I received the ticket to the Nationals game from Nina, I called David and told him where I’d be sitting in the left-field stands. He had to scramble, but his team got tickets to the game and positioned themselves so they could get an image of Augie’s face that they could run through facial-recognition software.

“We were able to get a reliable image, yes, in spite of the baseball cap he wore. We believe that the person sitting next to you at the baseball game is Augustas Koslenko. Born in 1996 in Sloviansk, in the Donetsk province, in eastern Ukraine.”

“Donetsk? That’s interesting.”

“We thought so as well. His mother is Lithuanian. His father is Ukrainian, a laborer in a machine factory. No political affiliation or activism that we know of.”

“What about Augie himself?”

“He left Ukraine in middle school. He was a mathematics prodigy, a genius. He attended boarding school in eastern Turkey on a scholarship. We believe—we assume that this is where he met Suliman Cindoruk. Before then, we know of nothing he did or said in the way of activism of any kind.”

“But he’s the real article, you’re saying. He was part of the Sons of Jihad.”

“Yes, Mr. President. But I am not confident I would use the past tense.”

I’m not, either. I’m not confident of anything when it comes to Augie. I don’t know what he wants or why he’s doing this. Now, at least, I know he gave me his real name, but if he’s as smart as we think he is, he probably figured I’d learn his identity anyway. And if his whole basis for legitimacy is that he was affiliated with the Sons of Jihad, he’d
want
me to know his name, he’d want me to confirm that fact. So I’m no further than I was before with Augie.

“He said he had a falling-out with the SOJ.”

“He said. You’ve obviously considered the possibility that he is still in their employ? That he is doing their bidding?”

I shrug. “Sure, of course, but—to what end? He could have killed me at the stadium.”

“True.”

“And somebody wants him dead.”

“Apparently so. Or they want you to believe that, Mr. President.”

“Well, David—if that’s a fake, it’s a pretty damn good fake. I don’t know how much your people saw outside the stadium, and I assume you didn’t see anything on the bridge. They weren’t pretending. We could have easily died either time.”

“I do not doubt what you are saying, Mr. President. I only offer the thought that you should remain open to other possibilities. In my experience, these individuals are brilliant tacticians. We must constantly reassess our position and thinking.”

It’s a good reminder.

“Tell me what you’re hearing out there,” I say.

David is quiet for a moment, measuring his words.
“We are hearing talk of America being brought to its knees. We are hearing doomsday prophecies. The end of days. We often hear such things in generic chatter from the jihadists, of course—that the Great Satan’s day will come, the time is near—but…”

“But what?”

“But we have never heard a firm date placed on such things. And what we are hearing now is that it will happen tomorrow. Saturday, they are saying.”

I take a breath. Saturday is less than two hours away.

“Who’s behind this, David?” I ask.

“We cannot know for sure, Mr. President. Suliman Cindoruk answers to no official state actor, as you know. We are hearing a multitude of suspects. The usual suspects, I suppose you would say. ISIS. North Korea. China. My country. Even your country—they say the event will be propaganda, a self-created crisis to justify military retaliation, typical conspiracy-theory nonsense.”

“Your best guess?” I say. But I’m relatively sure I know the answer. The tactical spread of chatter, the communication of clandestine information that in fact was intended all along to be overheard by intelligence intercepts. Counterespionage at its most devious, tradecraft at its finest. It bears the mark of one country over all others.

David Guralnick, the director of Israel’s Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations—Mossad—takes a deep breath. For dramatic measure, the screen cuts in and out before his face becomes clear again.

“Our best guess is Russia,”
he says.

I
click off the transmission with the director of Mossad and gather my thoughts before I talk to Augie. There are many ways to play this, but I have no time for subtlety.

Saturday, David said. Ninety minutes away.

I push myself out of the chair and turn for the door when a wave of vertigo strikes me, like someone is playing spin the bottle with my internal compass. I grab hold of the desk for balance and measure my breaths. I reach into my pocket for my pills. I need my pills.

But my pills are gone. There are no more in my pocket, and the rest were left behind in the bag, in the sedan in the stadium parking lot.

“Damn it.” I dial Carolyn on my phone. “Carrie, I need more steroids. I don’t have any more at the White House, and I lost the bottle I had. Call Dr. Lane. Maybe she has some ex—”

“I’ll make it happen, Mr. President.”

“Great.” I click off and leave the soundproofed office, walking carefully down the hall toward the rec room, near the staircase. Augie is sitting on the couch, looking to all appearances like an ordinary scraggly teenager lounging in front of the television.

But he’s neither a teenager nor ordinary.

The mounted television he’s watching is set to cable news, coverage of the assassination attempt on King Saad ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia and the growing unrest in Honduras.

“Augie,” I say. “Stand up.”

He does what I ask, facing me.

“Who attacked us?” I ask.

He pushes his hair out of his face, shrugs. “I do not know.”

“Do better than that. Let’s start with who sent you. You said you no longer see eye to eye with Suliman Cindoruk and the Sons of Jihad.”

“Yes, that is true. I do not.”

“So who sent you?”

“Nobody sent us. We came of our own will.”

“Why?”

“Is it not obvious?”

I grab a fistful of his shirt. “Augie, a lot of people died tonight. Including someone you cared about and two Secret Service agents
I
cared about, men who left young families behind. So start answering my—”

“We came to stop it,” he says, breaking free of my grip.

“To stop Dark Ages? But—why?”

He shakes his head, hiccups a bitter chuckle. “Do you mean, what do I stand to gain? What is…in it for me?”

“That’s what I mean,” I say. “You didn’t want to tell me before. Tell me now. What does a kid from Donetsk want from the United States?”

Augie draws back, surprised for only a moment. Not that surprised at all, really. “That did not take long.”

“Are you part of the pro-Russian camp or the pro-Ukraine camp? They have lots of both in Donetsk, last I checked.”

“Yes? And when was the last time you checked, Mr. President?” His face changing color, fuming. “When it suited your purposes, that’s when. This,” he says, shaking his finger at me, “this is the difference between you and me. I want nothing from you, that’s what I want. I want…to not destroy a nation full of millions of people. Is that not enough?”

Is it that simple? That Augie and his partner were simply trying to do the right thing? These days, it’s never your first instinct to believe that.

I’m not sure I do now, either. I don’t know what to believe.

“But you created Dark Ages,” I say.

He shakes his head. “Suli, Nina, and I created it. But Nina was the real inspiration, the driving force. Without her, we never could have created it. I helped with the coding and particularly with the implementation.”

“Nina? That’s her real name?”

“Yes.”

“They created it, and you infiltrated our systems.”

“More or less, yes.”

“And you can stop it?”

He shrugs. “This I do not know.”

“What?” I grab him by the shoulder, as if shaking him will produce a different answer. “You said you could, Augie. You said that before.”

“I did, yes.” He nods, looks at me with shiny eyes. “Nina was alive before.”

I release him, walk over to the wall, and pound my fist against it. It’s always one step forward, two steps back.

I take a deep breath. What Augie’s saying makes sense. Nina was the superstar. That’s why she was the sniper’s first target. From a practical standpoint, it would have made more sense to shoot Augie first, because he was mobile, and then go for Nina, who was seated in a parked car. Nina was clearly the highest priority.

“I will do my best to help,” he says.

“Okay, well, who attacked us?” I ask for the second time. “Can you at least help me with that?”

“Mr. President,” he says, “the Sons of Jihad is not a…democracy. This kind of information Suli would not have shared with me. I can only tell you two things. One, obviously, is that Suli knows that Nina and I broke away from him, and he clearly tracked us somehow to the United States.”

“Obviously,” I say.

“And the second thing,” he says, “is that as far as I am aware, Suli’s capabilities are limited to computers. He is formidable. He can do considerable damage, as you well know. But he does not have at his disposal trained mercenaries.”

I put my hand against the wall. “Meaning…”

“Meaning he is working with someone else,” says Augie. “A nation-state, some country that wishes to bring the United States to its knees.”

“And one that compromised someone in my inner circle,” I add.

O
kay, Augie, next question,” I say. “What does Suliman want? He must want something. Or they—whoever’s working with him. What do they want?”

Augie cocks his head. “Why do you say this?”

“Why do I say that? Well, why else would they have shown us the virus in advance?” I put out my hand. “Augie, two weeks ago, a virus suddenly popped up on our systems inside the Pentagon. It appeared, then it disappeared. You know this. You said it to me yourself at the baseball stadium. It suddenly appeared and then just as suddenly disappeared”—I snap my fingers—“like that.”

“A peekaboo.”

“A peekaboo, yes, that’s what my experts called it. A peekaboo. Without any warning, without triggering any of our state-of-the-art security alerts, suddenly this virus flashed all over our internal Defense Department systems then disappeared just as quickly, without a trace. That’s how this whole thing started. We called it Dark Ages and formed a task force. Our best cyberspecialists have been working around the clock trying to find it, trying to stop it, but they can’t.”

Augie nods. “And it terrifies you.”

“Of course it does.”

“Because it infiltrated your system without any warning and evaporated into thin air just as quickly. You realize that it might come back again, or it might never have left. And you have no idea what it’s capable of doing to your systems.”

“All those things, yes,” I say. “But there was a reason for this sneak preview, this peekaboo. If whoever did this simply wanted to take down our systems, they would’ve just done it. They wouldn’t have
warned
us first. You only warn someone first if you want something, if you’re going to make a ransom demand.”

“Ransomware,” he says. “Yes, I understand your reasoning. When you saw the warning, you expected it to be followed by a demand of some kind.”

“Right.”

“Ah, so this—this is why you made that phone call to Suli.” Augie nods. “To ask him what his demand was.”

“Yes. He was trying to get my attention. So I let him know he did. I wanted to hear his demand without directly asking him for it, without intimating that the United States would give in to blackmail.”

“But he did not give you a demand.”

“No, he didn’t,” I say. “He played coy. He seemed…at a loss for words. Like he hadn’t expected my call. Oh, he made disparaging comments about my country, the usual type of stuff—but no demand. No acknowledgment of the peekaboo. So all I could do was threaten him. I told him that if his virus hurt our country, I’d come after him with every resource I could muster.”

“It must have seemed like…an odd conversation.”

“It was,” I said in agreement. “My tech people were certain this was the work of the SOJ. And they said the peekaboo was no glitch; it was intentional. So where was the ransom demand? Why would he go to the trouble of the peekaboo without demanding anything?”

Augie nods. “And then Nina came along. You thought she was going to deliver the ransom demand.”

“I did. You or Nina. So?” I throw up my hands, exasperation getting the better of me. “Where the hell is the goddamn ransom demand?”

Augie draws a deep breath. “There is not going to be a ransom demand,” he says.

“There’s—why not? Then why’d they send the warning?”

“Mr. President, the Sons of Jihad did not send that peekaboo,” he says. “And whoever may be sponsoring the Sons of Jihad did not send it, either.”

I stare at him. It takes me a moment. Eventually I get there.

“You sent it,” I say.

“Nina and I, yes. To warn you,” he says. “So you could start preparing mitigation protocols. And so that when Nina and I contacted you, you would take us seriously. Suliman knew nothing of this. The last thing he would ever do is give you an early warning of this virus.”

I work this over. Augie and Nina sent the early warning to us two weeks ago. And then, more than a week later, Nina found Lilly in Paris and whispered the magic words to her.

They came to warn me. To help me.

That’s the good news.

The bad news? That means that Suliman Cindoruk and the foreign agent who is behind him never wanted the United States to know about it in advance.

They aren’t going to ask for something. They aren’t seeking a change in our foreign policy. They don’t want prisoners released. They don’t want money.

They aren’t going to demand a ransom at all.

They’re just going to detonate the virus.

They want to destroy us.