The First Commandment

CHAPTER 86

It was late, but the president had told his DCI that he would wait up for his assessment. When James Vaile arrived, he was taken upstairs to the residence.

The president was in his private study watching the Chicago White Sox play the Kansas City Royals. It had been a great game that had gone into extra innings.

When the DCI knocked on the study’s open door, Jack Rutledge set down his drink, turned off the TV, and waved him in.

“Are you hungry?” asked the president as the CIA chief closed the door behind him and took the empty leather club chair next to him.

“No thank you, sir.”

“How about a drink?”

Vaile shook his head and politely declined.

“Okay then,” said Rutledge, glad to be getting on with it. “You’ve had a chance to look at everything. Let’s have it.”

The DCI withdrew a folder from his briefcase and opened it. “Mark Sheppard is no Woodward or Bernstein in the writing department, but he more than makes up for it in the depth of his research.”

Vaile handed a copy of the reporter’s article to the president and continued, “The attention this piece would have brought to the Baltimore Sun would have sent their circulation through the roof. Based on Sheppard’s notes, the paper was looking for ways they could stretch the story into a series of articles. They’d already planned to re-create the car accident, as well as the takedown of the John Doe hijacker in Charleston — fake FBI agents and all.

“We’re just lucky this guy Sheppard came looking for a statement a week before he was going to press. Had he come the night before, Geoff Mitchell and the press office wouldn’t have been able to put him off while they claimed the White House was looking into it.”

“And you never would have had time to get to him,” said the president as he finished scanning the article.

“Not the way I needed to,” replied Vaile.

“Then we dodged the bullet.”

The DCI shook his head. “Right now, Sheppard’s editors have to be fuming. This story was the best thing to come along for their paper in years and now it’s been torpedoed.”

Rutledge had a feeling he knew where this was going. “You think if we put out the alert on the school buses that might trigger the Sun into running Sheppard’s story anyway?”

“It’s always possible. Though we’ve got all his original source material, they’ve got the notes they took in their editorial meetings. If they suspect Sheppard killed his story under duress, they might smell blood in the water, decide to reinterview his sources, and run it all without his name on it.”

“Then he’d better have been damn convincing when he withdrew it.”

Vaile nodded. “He definitely had the proper motivation, that’s for sure.”

“Yet, you’re still opposed to sending out any sort of Homeland Security alert.”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

The president set the article down on the table. “If an attack does happen, what then? You don’t think at that point the Sun will repackage the article in a way that’s equally damaging?”

“How could they? We’re the only ones who know the full story. What they have is only a small piece of the puzzle, and it’s a piece we can spin. It’ll show we were engaged in a concerted effort, before the fact, to bring the terrorists to justice. Harvath’s already killed two of them, two more are about to be apprehended in their home countries, and we’ve got multitudes of agents in the field trying to track down the fifth and final one. I think we should let this play out.”

Rutledge admired Vaile’s confidence, but unfortunately he wasn’t convinced. “If we learned anything from 9/11, it’s that hindsight is always 20:20. People will demand to know why, if we knew about a threat to school buses, we didn’t put out an alert.”

“Because,” replied the DCI emphatically, “putting out an alert is an admission of guilt. It would tell our enemies that we believed we had broken our word and that we deserved to be hit, which couldn’t be further from the truth.”

The president tried to say something in response, but Vaile held up his hand in order to be allowed to finish. “Rightly or wrongly, our agreement with the terrorists was based on the assumption that the five men released from Gitmo would not use their freedom to strike against us here at home.”

“Of course,” said Rutledge. “We agreed not to hunt them.”

“That’s what’s been bothering me. The more I look at this, the more I believe the terrorists have had other plans all along.”