Tom Clancy Support and Defend

4

Ethan Ross ran late for work almost every Monday, and today was no exception. He would never admit it, but arriving fashionably late was by design; he found punctuality to be beneath his station, and chronic tardiness nothing more than a harmless passive-aggressive way to protest the inflexible rules of his organization.

He’d slept in a little this morning, not at home in Georgetown, but at his girlfriend’s place in Bethesda. Last night he and Eve had gone out to a bar to watch a Lakers game that didn’t end till after eleven here on the East Coast, and then they’d stayed for one more round that had somehow turned into three.

They’d finally made it to bed at one, and to sleep at two after Ethan’s amorous mood overpowered the five greyhounds he’d consumed. He’d planned on going home to spend the night at his own place, but after sex, all he wanted to do was roll over to the edge of the bed and crash until morning.

At eight-fifteen Ethan awoke suddenly, roused by a panicked and shrill rendering of his name.

“Ethan!” The voice was Eve’s, and his eyes opened and fixed on her alarm clock, because she was holding it in front of his face.

“Calm down,” he said, but she was up and running for the bathroom, because punctuality was more her thing than it was his.

He made it downstairs to his red Mercedes coupe a few minutes later, cranked up some music and drove south to his town house on 34th Street, where he indulged in a long, leisurely shower and then took all the time he needed styling his blond hair with molding clay. He dressed, then stepped in front of his full-length mirror so he could check the fit, cut, and sheen of his gray Ralph Lauren sharkskin suit. Satisfied that his purple polka-dot tie wasn’t too much with the sharkskin, he slipped on a pair of cherry loafers and gave himself one more long appraisal in the mirror, assessing and then approving his style and looks.

At nine he sauntered down the front steps of his row house, still unhurried and unstressed, and he climbed back into his warm Mercedes and headed off to work, music blaring again.

Traffic on Wisconsin Avenue wasn’t too bad, but he hit his first snag of the day when he found Pennsylvania to be mired in gridlock. While he crept forward he sang along with his Blaupunkt stereo. Neil Young’s On the Beach was a 1974 release that would have been a unique listening choice for most thirty-two-year-olds, but Ross had grown up with it. Revolution music, his mother used to call it, although Ethan realized there was a certain dissonance to the concept of singing along with anti-establishment songs while driving his luxury car on his way to his government job.

No matter. Ethan still considered himself something of a rebel, albeit one with a more realistic worldview.

He’d been listening to his old albums since he got off work on Friday, both alone and then with Eve. She didn’t much care for them, but she didn’t complain, and he didn’t really give a damn. Eve was a brilliant but hopelessly submissive Korean girl who would walk on glass for him if he told her to do so, and sometimes Ethan liked to unplug on the weekends, to go from five p.m. Friday to nine a.m. Monday without checking his phone, his iPad, or watching any TV. He didn’t do it often, but there were times when his job was too stifling: endless boring meetings and conference calls and lunches with people he didn’t want to eat with or trips with people he didn’t want to travel with. He’d had a few months like this, his work was frustrating him and interfering with his well-cultivated self-image as a D.C. power player, and only detoxifying himself from work and inoculating himself with the music of his childhood could refresh him and get him ready to face work again on Monday.

Eve didn’t complain; Ethan was certain she was just happy to have him to herself for two full days.

He checked his hair in the rearview, turned up Neil Young even louder, and sang along, pitching his voice in and out of key and fighting the power the only prudent way to do so at present.

Ethan Ross liked to tell people he worked at t he White House, and it was true, with a caveat. His office was in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the West Wing, and while the Eisenhower EOB housed many offices for White House personnel, it wasn’t, strictly speaking, the White House. West Wing employees distinguished themselves from Eisenhower Building employees by saying they worked “inside the gates,” while the EOB staff worked “outside the gates.” Ross didn’t see any distinction himself. He was a White House staffer to anyone who asked, or anyone who would listen, for that matter.

He had spent the last three years here, spanning two administrations, serving as deputy assistant director for Near East and North African affairs in the National Security Council. He prepared policy papers for the President of the United States, or at least he coordinated the preparation of policy papers for the national security adviser, who then determined if the president should see a summary of them. The papers came from the work of the Department of State and the U.S. intelligence community, as well as a series of domestic and international think tanks and academic institutions.

His job, as he described it, was to give POTUS the best information available for him to conduct policy.

But his job, as he actually saw it, was to push paper while others made key decisions.

Ethan worked closely with the U.S. intelligence community, getting data from most all of the sixteen agencies related to his region. Not just the CIA, but also the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, sometimes even the military intelligence agencies. Coordination was his role, he wasn’t a decision-maker himself, but he did have his finger on the pulse of happenings in his region.

It was a moderately high position for someone his age, although, as far as Ross was concerned, it was far beneath him. He had considered the work just barely impressive at twenty nine when he was put in the post, but now, two weeks before his thirty-third birthday, each and every day he lamented what he saw as his slow rise to the ranks of the power players.

His work no longer pushed him. Ethan thought he was smart enough to phone it in, and so that’s exactly what he had been doing for some time.

He hoped to advance out of this job soon — not into something higher at NSC, this had just been a placeholder for him— rather, he wanted to make his way into the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. He had been bred for a life of high-level work in an international organization. His father had worked as a staffer in the UN for twenty-five years before becoming an international-studies professor, both at universities abroad and then back home in Georgetown. His mother had served in the Carter administration as an undersecretary in the United States Mission to the United Nations, then as ambassador to Jordan during the Clinton years, before herself becoming a professor at Georgetown and a best-selling author of political biographies.

Ross was a government employee, a federal worker, but he was also something of a contrarian. He got it from his academic upbringing. He felt most people he worked with in government were unintelligent and boring. He didn’t talk about his personal political beliefs around his coworkers — he didn’t have that sort of a White House job — but he quietly considered himself ideologically opposed to the administration in power.

Just like every workday, Ethan parked his red E-Class coupe in a parking facility a block away from the Eisenhower Building and, just like every workday, it pissed him off when he walked to the EOB and saw open parking spaces in the lot. His position did not merit a reserved parking space; only the highest-ranking two dozen or so execs had such privileges.

He stepped through the gate at the 17th Street entrance, then pulled his badge out of his coat. He was late enough that the security line was short, so in under a minute he left the drab gray outbuilding and headed up the steps into the main building.

The Eisenhower EOB used to be known as the State, War, and Navy Building, and it had been the nexus of American foreign power at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century — the era when America emerged as a world leader. It had been constructed over a seventeen-year period in the late 1800s, and crafted in the ornate architectural style known as French Second Empire. The elaborate symmetrical iron cresting, balustrades, and cornices were meant to portray permanence and character, and many felt the huge structure, in many ways, overshadowed its next-door neighbor, the White House.

Ethan wasn’t as impressed with the architecture as others were, because Ethan knew the Eisenhower Building wasn’t the power center it used to be, and certainly nothing like the building next door at 1600 Penn.

He made it into the third-floor NSC wing at 9:39, entered his small office, put his coat on the rack, and frowned. His secretary, Angela, always had his coffee ready for him, a Venti mocha from Starbucks that she picked up on her way in to work and placed next to his telephone to the right of his desk.

Angela was here, he had seen her sweater hanging over the back of her chair in his outer office when he entered, but his coffee was nowhere to be found.

Ross sighed. You had one job, Angie, and you dropped the ball first thing on Monday morning.

A moment later he heard movement outside his office, and he called out as he sat down. “Angie?”

His fifty-four-year-old secretary appeared in the doorway a moment later. “Good. You’re here.”

With both a look and a tone crafted to convey just a hint of displeasure, he said, “Did you forget my coffee?”

“No, sir. I put it at your place in the conference room. Everyone else is waiting.”

Ethan jerked his head to his morning agenda lying on his blotter, worried he’d forgotten a meeting. Rarely did he have any planned events so early on a Monday. But his agenda confirmed he was free. “I don’t have anything till ten-thirty, and that’s off-site.”

“They said they were calling everyone on their way in. I thought you’d gotten the message.”

Ethan had heard his phone ring through the sound system in his Mercedes, but he’d muted the call without looking at it. The speakers had been pouring out Neil Young, after all, and by the time the last smoky notes of Ambulance Blues drifted away, he’d been pulling into the parking lot and he’d forgotten about the call.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know, but it must be a big deal. Everyone was supposed to be in the conference room at nine-thirty.”

Ethan looked at his watch. It was 9:41.

He sighed again, and headed off for the conference room.