Situation Room. Jack Mars

men flanked the entryway. Big, bald Kurt Kimball, Susan’s National Security Advisor, was already inside, standing in front of a large flat-panel screen mounted on the wall. He was talking to a young tech guy and holding a remote control in his hand.

      The place was filling up. Kurt had several staff members in the room, and his two top intelligence analysts, both of whom he’d brought over from the RAND Corporation as soon as he arrived.

      Trish Markle, the new Secretary of State, was in a seat facing Kurt, and talking to two of her young staff members. Trish had been in her job six weeks already. She had been an Under Secretary at the State Department when Mount Weather happened, and Susan had simply promoted her to the top slot. Trish was forty-seven years old. She had spent long years as a government bureaucrat – maybe too many. So far, she was doing an unremarkable job as Secretary.

      “Kurt,” Susan said, cutting through the background chatter.

      He looked Susan’s way, then came over. He shook hands with Congressman Parowski. “Mike, good to see you. I hear there’s a big announcement coming.”

      Parowski glanced at Susan. “Interesting. I just heard about it myself.”

      Kimball smiled. “Word travels fast down these hallways.”

      “Kurt,” Susan said, “if you’re ready, I want to get started. I feel like we’re already behind the eight ball on this. There are huge gaps in my knowledge.”

      “I’m ready. But people are going to continue to straggle in while we’re talking. And the analysis we have is very, very preliminary. Mark Swann just finished uploading the last of the files to secure servers maybe twenty minutes ago.”

      “That’s okay. I don’t need all the details. Just get me, and everyone else in this room, up to speed about the overall threat.”

      Susan sat down at the head of the long conference table. Kat Lopez stood behind her and Mike Parowski sat to her left. For a second, Susan remembered how she used to feel in this room. In the early days, after the June sixth attacks, and during the Ebola crisis, she felt overwhelmed. Everything almost took on a surreal quality.

      She had dropped into the Presidency as if from outer space. There were a lot more men around her in those days, and a lot of military men. It made her paranoid. The former President had just been assassinated, in part by military men. When the men stared at her, they looked like sharks eager to feed upon a tender morsel.

      Things were different now. She was the quarterback. The people around her were her people – either hand-picked by her, or people from the previous crew chosen to stick around, in many cases vetted by Kurt Kimball personally. She liked the team she had.

      “Okay,” Kurt said now. He raised his hands in the air. “Okay, everybody, let’s listen up. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and more is coming in all the time, so we’re going to get started. Anybody who doesn’t belong in here, you know where the door is.”

      He looked at Susan. “Madam President, thanks for coming.”

      She made a spinning wheel motion with her hand. Let’s go.

      Behind Kurt, a photo of the Black Rock Dam appeared. It was a giant, made of gray concrete, looming high above the camera angle.

      “Okay. All of you know by now that the floodgates opened early yesterday morning at the Black Rock Dam in western North Carolina, near Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Millions of cubic feet of water were released before workers could close the dam again, inundating a resort and several towns downriver from the dam. Preliminary estimates are that a thousand or more people died in the sudden flooding, and there was more than a billion dollars in property damage. The Black Rock resort, three miles south of the dam, was completely destroyed.”

      Next to the image of the dam a new photo appeared. It was of a large Asian man in an orange jumpsuit, his arms and legs shackled as he was led from the back of an SUV. “This is a man identified as thirty-two-year-old Chinese national Li Quiangguo. We have no idea if that was his real name. We suspect that it wasn’t. We do suspect he was a Chinese intelligence agent.”

      “Was?” Susan said. “Wasn’t? Why are you putting him in the past tense?”

      Kimball looked at her. Then he looked at Kat Lopez. “Okay, somehow that little piece of news didn’t reach you. Li Quiangguo is dead. There was an incident at the FEMA camp where Li was being held. Luke Stone and another operative were there to question him this morning, on your orders.”

      Susan nodded. “Yes, I’m aware of what my orders were.”

      “No one is quite sure what happened because we haven’t talked to Stone yet, but apparently the prisoner soiled himself during the course of the interrogation.”

      “Wonderful,” Susan said.

      Susan thought of Luke Stone, and the idea of bringing him back for this operation. She wondered for a second if maybe it would have been better to let a sleeping dog lie. “How did that happen?”

      Kimball shrugged. “People become afraid during aggressive interrogations. Afterwards, Stone told the camp director that the subject had been cooperative, and he and his team were going to investigate a lead Li had give them. Rather than have Li sit around with poop in his pants, the director decided to let him have a hot shower. This is also a pretty standard operating procedure. If a subject gives you something, you give them something in return. The reward makes it more likely they’ll give you something else.

      “Only they allowed Li into the shower by himself, with two guards standing outside the door. They also removed his manacles at the wrists and ankles. It turned out he had a powerful dose of cyanide embedded in a capsule inside a false tooth in his mouth. He pulled out the tooth and swallowed the contents of the capsule within seconds of when the water started running. He began experiencing seizures within a minute and a half. He was dead inside four minutes.”

      “Was he tortured?” Susan said.

      “There are no marks on his body, except ones consistent with the small amount of resistance he put up when he was arrested.”

      “Is that what I asked you?” Susan said.

      Kurt shook his head. “I think you should ask Luke Stone if the subject was tortured.”

      A low murmur went through the room.

      “What’s next?” Susan said.

      Kimball moved to another slide. It showed an image of a low-slung red brick warehouse building along an industrial road. “Li Quiangguo gave Stone and his team information that led them to this warehouse. Inside the warehouse, they found evidence of the import-export business which was Li’s cover story in the United States. They also found evidence that Li was compiling intelligence about a list of potential cyber attack soft targets in the United States. That list is as long as your arm. It contains extensive data about each target, and was kept on three CD-Rom disks in a locked drawer in the locked office of the warehouse. The information was kept nowhere else that we are aware.”