I want you to speak to me first before responding. Understood?”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
“And what’s this issue with our ambassador in Abu Dhabi?”
“He’s upset that he hasn’t been fully read in on what’s going on.”
“He’s upset? What did you tell him?” the President asked.
“I told him he didn’t have a need to know and that you’d be glad to appoint a new ambassador if he didn’t cooperate.”
“Did that work?”
The Secretary of State nodded.
“Good. As long as Norseman makes it out of the UAE with everything, that’s all we care about. When’s he due to arrive?”
“It’s a fourteen-hour flight, so they should arrive here around 0700.”
The President looked at CIA Director McGee. “You’ve got a full crash team meeting the plane?”
“Yes, sir. Crypto, finance people, NSA, the whole nine yards. We’ll dive right into the material as soon as he touches down.”
“Good,” the President repeated. Looking back at the FBI Director, he said, “Before you all hear the bombshell Treasury has uncovered, where’s the Bureau in regard to the Chinese princelings?”
The FBI Director looked at his colleagues. “The Politburo Standing Committee is the most powerful body in China. It is composed of nine members. Of those nine, four have sons attending college or grad school in the United States, and one has a granddaughter.
“Because of who their fathers, and in one case grandfather, are, they have been flagged for special monitoring. Communications, rotating physical surveillance, that sort of thing. In light of the Snow Dragon revelations, the FBI has stepped up its monitoring of the princelings. We now have them under 24/7 surveillance. We’re also monitoring all of their communications in real time.
“If China’s attack is as bad as predicted, we believe the princelings will be moved, or given some sort of head start before it takes place. They could be our only canaries in the coal mine.”
“I wouldn’t put all my resources in just one basket,” the Secretary of State cautioned.
“We’re also watching Chinese embassy personnel and other high-ranking Chinese currently in the country,” the FBI Director replied.
“Anything else?” the President asked, looking around the table. No one spoke. “As we all know, Gold Dust is a zero-communication op. We won’t hear back from the team until they have been exfiltrated from North Korea. In the meantime, we have something else.
“Based upon the intelligence the CIA received, I asked the Secretary of the Treasury to look into another possible motivation for a Chinese attack. The Secretary has come back with some very disturbing information. Mr. Secretary?”
CHAPTER 22
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Secretary of the Treasury Dennis Fleming looked like an aging bank president. He kept his gray hair short and neatly combed, wore gray suits, wingtip shoes, and muted ties. He took notes in pencil on a large, white legal pad. He was bullish on America and its prospects for economic recovery. The President’s “Wild West, blow the gunk out of the system, trim all the fat to the bone, and let the pieces fall where they may” style was disconcerting to him, to say the least.
Where the President saw the economy as an Abrams tank that needed to be whacked with a gigantic wrench to get it going in the right direction, Fleming saw it as a Swiss watch that needed delicate adjustments. While the President’s cowboy rhetoric and bold approach to problems was popular with a public beset with economic worries and a national identity crisis, every time Porter stepped up to a microphone, Fleming’s heart seized in his chest. He was convinced that one of these times Porter was going to fly wildly off script and send the markets tumbling.
But President Porter had no script. He had a vision for returning America to greatness and either you were on board or you were tossed overboard. He made no secret of the kind of people he wanted around him.
That didn’t mean, though, that the President sought only to surround himself with yes-men. He welcomed healthy debate and differences of opinion. But you had better be prepared to defend your position. And no matter what else, your policy ideas had to be informed by the same sense of America’s continued potential that coursed through Porter’s veins.
In the history of the world, Porter was fond of saying, there had never been a greater force for peace, stability, liberty, and freedom than the United States. Before America, the history of mankind had been one of tyranny, with the masses lorded over and controlled by the few. The United States had been established to