As visually impressive as the operations center was—even to a veteran like Mary Pat—she knew the real triumph of the place was an intangible that would be lost on the casual observer: cooperation. For decades the albatross around the U.S. intelligence community’s neck was at best a crippling lack of cross-pollination and at worst overt internecine warfare, most notably between the two agencies tasked with keeping the country safe from terrorist attacks. But as the TV pundits and Beltway pols had pointed out ad nauseam, the events of 9/11 had changed everything, including how the U.S. intelligence community went about the business of keeping America safe. For Mary Pat and many intelligence professionals, 9/11 hadn’t been so much a surprise as it had been a sad confirmation of what they’d long suspected: The U.S. government hadn’t been taking seriously enough the threat of terrorism, and not just in the few years leading up to 9/11 but perhaps as far back as the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, when the Taliban and the mujahideen—then convenient but ideologically incompatible allies—had shown what determined but woefully outnumbered and outgunned fighters could accomplish against one of only two superpowers on the planet. For many—the Foleys and Jack Ryan included—the war in Afghanistan had been a preview of sorts, a movie they feared would be played out against the West once the mujahideen had finished with the Soviets. Effective as the CIA’s alliance with the mujahideen had been, the relationship had been tenuous at best, always overshadowed by the chasm between Western culture and sharia law, by radical Islamic fundamentalism and Christianity. The question, born from the Arabic proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” became “How soon would the friendship end?” For Mary Pat the answer had been simple: the moment the last Soviet soldier left Afghan soil. And depending on who was writing the history, she had been either dead-on right or nearly so. Either way, by the mid- to late ’80s the Taliban, the mujahideen, and eventually the Emir’s URC had turned their scornful and now battle-tested eyes toward the West.
What’s done is done, Mary Pat thought, looking over the balcony railing at the operations center. Whatever tragedy it had taken to get them here, the U.S. intelligence community was more on its game than it had been since the early days of the Cold War, and the NCTC was owed a lion’s share of the credit. Staffed as it was by analysts from virtually every branch of the intelligence world who sat side by side seven days a week twenty-four hours a day, cooperation was now the rule rather than the exception.
She made her way down the stairs and through the rows of workstations, nodding at colleagues as she went, until she reached the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Waiting for her inside were two men and a woman: her boss and the director of the NCTC, Ben Margolin; the Chief of Operations, Janet Cummings; and John Turnbull, the head of Acre Station, the joint task force dedicated to tracking down, capturing, or killing the Emir and the leadership of the URC. The frown on Turnbull’s face told Mary Pat all was not rosy at Acre Station.
“Am I late?” Mary Pat asked, and took a seat. Beyond the glass wall, the staff of the operations center silently went about its business. Like virtually every conference room at Liberty Crossing, the Counterterrorism Center was an EM tank—isolated from virtually all electromagnetic emissions, both inbound and outbound, save encrypted data streams.
“No, we’re early,” Margolin said. “The package is on its way down.”
“And?”
“We missed him,” Turnbull grumbled.
“Was he ever there?”
“Hard to say.” This from Operations Chief Janet Cummings. “We’ve got product from the raid, but how good we don’t know. Somebody was there—probably a higher-up—but beyond that ...”
“Nine dead,” Turnbull said.
“Prisoners?”
“Started with two, but during the exfil the team was am-bushed and they lost one; lost the second when their LZ took an RPG. Lost some Rangers, too.”
“Ah, shit.”
Ah shit, indeed, Mary Pat thought. The Rangers would, of course, be mourning the loss of one of their own, but these guys were the best of the best; consequently, they took the hazards simply as part of the job. They were consummate professionals, but whereas their civilian counterparts might know how to unclog a drain or rewire a house or build a skyscraper, Rangers specialized in something completely different: killing bad guys.
“The team leader”—Cummings paused to check her file—“Sergeant Driscoll, was wounded,