discounted the tuition enough to allow Reginald to enroll with the children of means; the Pynes wanted the best for their only son.
Reginald would watch his friend’s mothers zip off to play tennis after dropping their kids at school, the fathers having left in chauffeured vehicles for the commute into Manhattan well before dawn. There they managed the hedge funds and banks of Wall Street, which provided the money that gave them the power to look down their noses at the likes of the Pynes. Reginald’s family didn’t belong to the exclusive clubs reserved for the top echelon of society, nor did they summer in the Hamptons or on the Cape. None of this went unnoticed by young Reginald. Years later, his success would certainly surprise the kids from his old Greenwich prep school, half of whom were probably addicted to Xanax and whose kids were almost certainly destroying their lungs with watermelon-flavored toxic smoke. They’d be asking him for favors soon enough. All he needed to do was bide his time. His patience had finally paid off when the previous sitting president was forced to resign over what became known as the Capstone Scandal, the testing of an experimental PTSD drug on active-duty SEALs without their knowledge.
Overnight, Roger Grimes was president and Reginald Pyne was his most trusted advisor. Thrust into the most overwhelming job in government, Grimes relied heavily on those around him. As chief of staff, Pyne wielded a tremendous amount of power. It was the opportunity he’d waited for his entire life. This morning, he was meeting with the CIA director and her senior staff for a highly classified briefing in the secure White House Situation Room. Ordinarily, such a meeting would be attended by members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the director of national intelligence, as well as representatives of the various agencies that made up the U.S. intelligence community. That was the “old way,” as the staff called it. “Pyne’s way” was different.
Under the new regime, the only people in the room would be Pyne, the CIA director, Janice Motley, and Victor Rodriguez, her head of Paramilitary Operations. Even with all of the security clearances involved, the White House and cabinet leaked like sieves. The chief of staff could not risk word getting to the president over, under, or around him. If you wanted the president, you had to go through Reginald Pyne. All the clubs he wasn’t invited to growing up now held the door open for him. He’d finally found the elusive power he sought. He was somebody.
The CIA executives were ushered into the secure White House Situation Room, a low-ceilinged conference room dominated by a large table that ran its length. Identical black leather chairs surrounded the table and Motley and Rodriguez chose two near the head while they waited for the chief of staff to enter. The number of empty seats made the room seem bigger than it was, the inner sanctum of the world’s last remaining superpower.
Janice Motley was a deadly combination of intelligence and toughness. An African-American woman in her mid-fifties, she was a relative newcomer to the Agency but had a long background as a staff attorney for the Senate Intelligence Committee. She had been appointed by the previous president to rein in what he saw as a cowboy culture among the clandestine service but her initial decisions surprised her former colleagues. One of those was to approve bringing James Reece back into the fold as an asset, which was an enormous political risk given his status as a domestic terrorist. Subsequently she’d approved the operation that resulted in Reece and Freddy Strain saving the life of the U.S. president by foiling a sniper and chemical weapons attack in Odessa, Ukraine. Those events had propelled her to the directorship. She hadn’t forgotten that it was the bold actions of Reece and Freddy who had made that happen.
Pyne let them simmer for a good twenty minutes, the oldest power play in the book. He then entered in a flourish, with his trademark blow-dried salt-and-pepper hair and capped-tooth smile. Despite a job that required long days indoors, his skin was tanned a deep copper. It didn’t seem like the job was keeping him too far away from the golf course. He offered both a decent handshake and took a seat at the head of the table, in the chair embroidered with the presidential seal. The signal was an obvious one; in this room, I am the president.
Pyne glanced