The President Is Missing: A Novel (38 page)

H
ave a seat,” I say inside the Roosevelt Room. Ordinarily we’d do this in the Oval Office. But I’m not having this conversation in the Oval Office.

He unbuttons his suit jacket and takes a seat. I sit at the head of the table.

“Needless to say, Mr. President, we were elated with the results from yesterday. And we were grateful that we could be a small part of your success.”

“Yes, Mr. Ambassador.”

“Andrei, please.”

Andrei Ivanenko looks like he could play someone’s grandfather in a cereal commercial—the crown of his head bald and spotted, wispy white hair along the sides, an overall frumpy appearance.

The look works well for him. Because beneath that harmless-seeming exterior is a career spy, a product of Russia’s charm school and one of the elites in the former KGB, shipped off later in life to the diplomatic arena and sent here as ambassador to the United States.

“You could have been an even bigger part of our success,” I say, “if you’d warned us about this computer virus in advance.”

“In…advance?” He opens his hands. “I do not understand.”

“Russia knew, Andrei. You knew what those Saudi royals were up to. You wanted the same thing they wanted. Not to destroy us per se but to diminish us to the point where we no longer had influence. We would no longer be a check on your ambitions. While we were licking our wounds, you could reconstruct the Soviet empire.”

“Mr. President,” he says, almost like a southern drawl, thick with incredulity. This man could look you in the eye and tell you that the world is flat, the sun rises in the west, and the moon is made of blue cheese, and he’d probably pass a polygraph test while doing so.

“The Saudi royals gave you up,” I say.

“People who are desperate, Mr. President,” he says without missing a beat, “will say just about—”

“The assassin you hired tells us the same thing,” I say. “The consistencies in their stories are…well, they’re too similar to be false. We tracked the money, too—the money that Russia transferred to the mercenaries—the Ratnici. And to Bach.”

“Ratnici?” he says. “Bach?”

“Funny,” I say, “how Bach and the mercenaries waited until the Russian delegation left before attacking our cabin.”

“This is…this is not credible, this accusation.”

I nod, even give him a cold smile. “You used cutouts, of course. Russia’s not stupid. You have plausible deniability. But not with me.”

From everything the Saudis in custody told us, we figured out that Suliman shopped them the idea, and they paid richly for his services. The Russians didn’t start this. But they knew about it. The Saudis were terrified of moving their own money, so they reached out to Russian intermediaries, realizing that Russia would want to bring the United States to its knees as much as they did. Besides moving the money, Russia provided the mercenaries and the assassin, Bach.

I stand up. “Andrei, it’s time for you to leave.”

He shakes his head as he gets to his feet. “Mr. President, as soon as I return to the embassy, I will be in touch with President Chernokev, and I am confi—”

“You’ll be having that conversation in person, Andrei.”

He freezes.

“You’re expelled,” I say. “I’m putting you on a plane to Moscow right now. The rest of the embassy has until sundown to clear out.”

His mouth drops open. It’s the first sign of sweat on the man. “You are…closing the Russian embassy in the United States? Severing diplomatic—”

“That’s just the start,” I say. “When you see the package of sanctions we have planned, you’re going to rue the day you cut that deal with those Saudi dissidents. Oh, and those antimissile defense systems Latvia and Lithuania have requested? The ones you’ve asked us not to sell them? Don’t worry, Andrei, we won’t sell them.”

He swallows hard, his expression relenting. “Well, at least, Mr. Pres—”

“We’re going to hand them out free of charge,” I say.

“I…Mr. President, I must…I cannot…”

I step close to him, so close that a whisper is all it takes. But I keep my voice up, regardless.

“Tell Chernokev he’s lucky we stopped that virus before it did any damage,” I say. “Or Russia would be at war with NATO. And Russia would lose.”

“Do not ever test me again, Andrei,” I say. “Oh, and stay out of our elections. After I speak tomorrow, you’ll have all you can handle to keep rigging your own. Now get the hell out of my country.”

J
oAnn steps into the Oval Office, where I sit with Sam Haber, going over Homeland Security’s after-action report, its assessment of the fallout from the Suliman virus.

“Mr. President, the Speaker of the House is on the phone.”

I look at Sam, then at JoAnn. “Not now,” I say.

“He’s canceling the select committee hearing tomorrow, sir. He’s requesting that you address the joint session of Congress tomorrow night.”

Not surprising. Lester Rhodes, publicly, has sure changed his tune since we stopped this virus.

“Tell him I wouldn’t miss it for the world,” I say.

M
r. Speaker,” says the sergeant at arms, “the president of the United States!”

Members of the House and Senate are on their feet as I enter the House chamber with my escort delegation. I’ve always enjoyed the chance to address a joint session of Congress. As I walk down the aisle, I enjoy the pageantry and the political small talk even more than usual. A week ago, this is the last place I would have expected to be tonight. And the last people whose hands I’d be expecting to shake are the very two whose hands I grasp at the podium, Vice President Brandt and Speaker Rhodes.

I stand before Congress, my teleprompter ready, and take a moment to drink it all in. The opportunity I have now. The good fortune of our nation.

We did it,
I think to myself.
And if we can do this, there’s nothing we can’t do.

M
adam Vice President, Mr. Speaker, members of Congress, my fellow Americans:

Last night a dedicated team of American public servants, with the help of two close allies and one brave noncitizen, foiled the most dangerous cyberattack ever launched against the United States or any nation.

If fully successful, it would have crippled our military, erased all our financial records and backups, destroyed our electrical grid and transmission networks, broken our water and water-purification systems, disabled our cell phones, and more. The attack’s likely consequences would have included massive loss of life, damage to the health of millions of Americans of every age, an economic crash greater than the Depression, and violent anarchy in the streets of communities large and small throughout our country. The effects would have reverberated across the world. The wreckage would have taken years to repair, and our economic, political, and military standing would have needed a decade or more to recover.

We now know that the person who organized and triggered this attack was Suliman Cindoruk, a Turkish terrorist but not a religious man, who did it for a staggering sum of money and apparently for the thrill of hurting the United States. The money was provided by a relatively small number of very wealthy Saudi princes who have no influence with their current government. They intended to use America’s absence from the world scene to overthrow the Saudi king, expropriate the wealth of his branch of the royal family and its supporters, reconcile with Iran and Syria, and establish a modern technocratic caliphate using science and technology to raise the standing of the Muslim world to heights not seen in a thousand years.

Sadly, there is also another villain in the tale: Russia. On Saturday, I invited the Russian president, the German chancellor, and the Israeli prime minister to a base of operations I set up not far from here in rural Virginia because of their proven capabilities in cybersecurity—and, in Russia’s case, in cyberattacks. The latter two came and were supportive and helpful. Every American owes Germany and Israel a debt of gratitude.

The Russian president did not come but sent the prime minister to act sympathetic. We now know what they had already done to support the attack and why. First, they knew all about it well in advance and refused to tell us, even when I asked. Then, to help the Saudi princes keep their identities secret, they handled the fund transfers Suliman required to pay for the plot and even hired mercenaries and an assassin to support it. They wanted to use our weakness not to finish us off with nuclear weapons but to cripple us so badly that they would be free to increase their stranglehold on their neighbors and assert their power and influence in every other region of the world. As he was leaving Saturday night, I told the prime minister what we suspected and assured him that there would be an appropriate response. Yesterday I took step 1, expelling the Russian ambassador and all Russian employees of its embassy in the United States. This is step 2—making sure the whole world knows they are the world’s worst bagmen.

The Saudis have been fully briefed on the plan. They are dealing with their traitors.

And Suliman, religious or not, has gone to meet his Maker.

Saturday, none of this was certain. For in the final frantic hours, when we were racing the clock, our headquarters was attacked by well-trained professional killers, the third such attack since I left the White House to work on this. Many of the assailants were killed, but so were two brave Secret Service agents who died to save my life and to save our country when both were in peril. They are heroes.

Another person was also killed, a remarkable young woman who was the brains behind the cyberbomb but who, along with her partner, a young man who loved her very much, decided she couldn’t go through with it. They escaped from Suliman’s operation and took unusual steps to warn us about and help prevent the attack while doing their best to survive Suliman’s wrath and long reach. Only the young man survived. If they hadn’t found their humanity in time, the outcome we applaud today would likely have been very different.

In a clever, roundabout way, the woman made the first contact with us, gave us enough information about the plan for us to take it seriously, and made it clear that only she and her partner could stop it. In return, they wanted to be free of prosecution and to be returned safely to her homeland.

Her partner, who was highly suspicious of our government, made his way here separately, then contacted us to say that the two of them would only deal with me and demanded that I meet him, completely alone, in a highly public place.

That is why your president went missing.

Given the stakes, I decided I had to take the risky, very nearly fatal step of going to that meeting in disguise, alone. I still believe it was the right decision, but I pray that no future crisis will force another president to do anything like it again.

A lot has happened in the last couple of days. We will release more details as we can. There are still loose ends to be tied up and security concerns to consider.

While I was gone, the press went into overdrive, and for good reason—where was I? Why was I off the grid? What was I doing? Earlier, I had agreed, against the advice of my advisers, to appear before a special committee of the House that had been set up to decide whether to start impeachment proceedings against me.

In the vacuum I left, there was a firestorm of speculation. Friendly media outlets suggested I went off the grid because I was dying of my well-known blood disease or having a breakdown from job stress, declining popularity, and the still raw wound of my wife’s death. Less friendly outlets jumped immediately to darker thoughts: I was on the run, with lots of money in secret accounts, having betrayed my country to the world’s most notorious terrorist and the country most committed to corrupting our democracy.

In fairness, I invited that response by not telling anyone but my former chief of staff what I was doing and why. I didn’t even tell Vice President Brandt, who would have succeeded me had I died last night.

I didn’t tell the congressional leaders because I didn’t trust them to keep it secret. If the story had broken, it would have caused a national panic and undermined our efforts to stop the attack. Even worse, we suspected a traitor among the small circle of people who were aware that an attack of some kind was looming. Besides my former chief of staff and me, only seven other people, including Vice President Brandt, could have known about it. We hadn’t figured out who it was by the time I had to go, so I left even the vice president in the dark.

After I left, the Speaker contacted her to say that he had the votes to impeach me in the House but needed a few more votes from our side to get the two-thirds necessary to convict me in the Senate. He asked her to help get those votes, saying he didn’t care if she became president because engineering my removal would give him control of the House and the national legislative agenda for a long time.

To her everlasting credit, the vice president refused to go along.

I say this not to reopen my long-standing feud with the Speaker but to clear the air so we can make a new beginning.
We should have been fighting
this threat together,
across party lines.

Our democracy cannot survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment. Today it’s “us versus them” in America. Politics is little more than blood sport. As a result, our willingness to believe the worst about everyone outside our own bubble is growing, and our ability to solve problems and seize opportunities is shrinking.

We have to do better. We have honest differences. We need vigorous debates. Healthy skepticism is good. It saves us from being too naive or too cynical. But it is impossible to preserve democracy when the well of trust runs completely dry.

The freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the checks and balances in our Constitution were designed to prevent the self-inflicted wounds we face today. But as our long history reveals, those written words must be applied by people charged with giving life to them in each new era. That’s how African Americans moved from being slaves to being equal under the law and how they set off on the long journey to be equal in fact, a journey we know is not over. The same story can be told of women’s rights, workers’ rights, immigrants’ rights, the rights of the disabled, the struggle to define and protect religious liberty, and to guarantee equality to people without regard to their sexual orientation or gender identity.

These have been hard-fought battles, waged on uncertain, shifting terrain. Each advance has sparked a strong reaction from those whose interests and beliefs are threatened.

Today the changes are happening so fast, in an environment so covered in a blizzard of information and misinformation, that our very identities are being challenged.

What does it mean to be an American today? It’s a question that will answer itself if we get back to what’s brought us this far: widening the circle of opportunity, deepening the meaning of freedom, and strengthening bonds of community. Shrinking the definition of
them
and expanding the definition of
us
. Leaving no one behind, left out, looked down on.

We must get back to that mission. And do it with both energy and humility, knowing that our time is fleeting and our power is not an end in itself but a means to achieve more noble and necessary ends.

The American dream works when our common humanity matters more than our interesting differences and when together they create endless possibilities.

That’s an America worth fighting—even dying—for. And, more important, it’s an America worth living and working for.

I did not betray our country and my sworn duty to protect and defend it when I went missing to battle what we came to call Dark Ages for the same reason that I didn’t betray it when I was being tortured as a prisoner of war in Iraq. I didn’t because I couldn’t. I love my country too much, and I want the United States to be free and prosperous, peaceful and secure, and constantly improving for all generations to come.

I say this not to boast. I believe most of you, were you in my place, would have done the same thing. I hope that’s enough trust for us to make a new beginning.

My fellow Americans, we just dodged the biggest bullet we’ve faced since World War II. America’s been given a second chance. We musn’t blow it. And we can only make the most of it together.

I believe we should start by reforming and protecting our elections. Everyone eligible to vote should be able to do so without unnecessary inconvenience, fear of being purged from voting rolls, or concern that machines that can be hacked in five or six minutes won’t count their votes correctly. And wherever possible, state and national legislative districts should be drawn by nonpartisan bodies to more fully represent the diversity of opinion and interests that is one of the greatest assets of our nation.

Think about how different it would be if we reached beyond our base to represent a broader spectrum of opinions and interests. We’d learn to listen to one another more and defame one another less. That would help build the trust necessary to find more common ground. On that foundation, we could bring small-town and rural America, people in depressed urban areas, and Native American communities into the modern economy: with affordable broadband and lead-free water for all our families; more clean power with jobs more evenly spread across America; a tax code that rewards investment in left-behind areas, allowing corporate executives and big investors to help everyone, not just themselves.

We could have real immigration reform, with better border security but without closing our borders to those who come here searching for safety or for a better future for themselves and their families. Our native-born birthrate is barely at replacement levels. We need the Dreamers and the workers, the professionals and the entrepreneurs who form new businesses at twice the national average.

We could have serious training and support programs for police and community leaders to prevent wrongful civilian deaths, increase police officer safety, and reduce crime. And gun safety laws that keep guns away from those who shouldn’t have them, reduce the almost inconceivable number of mass killings, and still protect the right to own guns for hunting, sport shooting, and self-defense.

We could have a real climate-change debate. Who has the best ideas for reducing the threat most quickly while creating the most new businesses and good jobs? With the coming advances in automation and artificial intelligence, we will need many more of them.

We could do so much more to stem the opioid crisis, to destigmatize it, to educate the extremely high number of people who still don’t know they can kill themselves, and to make sure every American is within driving distance of affordable, effective treatment.

And we could reorder our defense spending to reflect the enormous and constantly evolving threat of cyberattacks so that our defenses are second to none and we have the standing to persuade other nations to work with us to reduce the dangers everywhere before we face another apocalypse. The next time, we won’t be so lucky as to have two alienated young geniuses riding to our rescue.

Think how much more rewarding it would be if we all came to work every day asking, “Who can we help today and how can we do it?” instead of “Who can I hurt and how much coverage can I get for it?”

Our founders left us an eternal charge: to form a more perfect union. And they left us a government sturdy enough to preserve our liberties and flexible enough to meet the challenges of each new age. Those two gifts have brought us a mighty long way. We must stop taking them for granted, even putting them at risk, for fleeting advantage. Before last night, most of our wounds, including falling behind in cyberdefense, were self-inflicted.

Thank God we still face a future full of possibilities, not the grim duty to claw our way out of ruin.