True Faith and Allegiance

39

The President of the United States and the First Lady had begun their Sunday by taking their two youngest children to Mass.

They did this as much as they could when they were both in town, but today was special for them, in that the Ryans’ elder daughter met them at the front steps of the cathedral to join them for the service. The President didn’t get to see much of Sally these days. She lived north of Baltimore and she didn’t like spending time at the White House, with the hassle of the media and the phalanx of security she had to endure, although whenever her parents and siblings could get away to their home on Peregrine Cliff she tried her best to drop in.

While Jack Ryan, Jr., had his father’s legacy to live up to and contend with, for his sister, it was all about Mom. Sally was currently in a neurosurgery residency at Johns Hopkins, and there, as was the case around the medical community in general, no one particularly cared that her father was the President of the United States. But there was no getting around it for Sally that her mother was the famous Dr. Cathy Ryan, chief of ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins.

Of course Cathy was also First Lady of the United States, but she’d been juggling these two hats for many years, and though she was old enough and comfortable enough to retire, she continued working, performing surgeries, teaching younger doctors, and serving on several hospital boards.

While everyone in the family still called her Sally, the eldest of the four Ryan children had begun using her given name, Olivia, over the past few years. Virtually everyone in the United States over the age of thirty knew the story about what had happened to the firstborn child of future President Jack Ryan, when Sally had been severely wounded by Irish Republican terrorists. The name Sally Ryan and the legacy of that attack followed her everywhere she went after that, so once she became a doctor she all but dropped it and went with Olivia.

Olivia had not yet married, but she was two years into a relationship with a good-looking orthopedic surgeon from Turkey named Davi who made her the happiest she had been in her entire life. She had all but lived for her studies in her twenties, and all but lived for her work so far in her thirties, but for the first time working sixty-hour weeks was becoming tough to manage, because with her boyfriend’s similarly arduous schedule of surgeries and on-calls, they rarely got to see each other more than a couple times a week.

Of course the press had gotten hold of the fact she was involved with a Turkish doctor, and they intimated that President Ryan would soon have a Muslim son-in-law, and wondered how that would affect U.S. foreign policy. Davi happened to be a Roman Catholic, something it would take the American media too much work to figure out and too many precious seconds of airtime to explain, so they didn’t clarify this point.

The President and his elder daughter’s boyfriend had gotten along well when they did sit down with each other, but Olivia was a private person when it came to her personal life, so besides a couple of all-but-mandated visits to the White House and a memorable Thanksgiving at Peregrine Cliff, Davi had been spared much of the public attention that would come with dating the daughter of the sitting Commander in Chief.

But Davi and Olivia’s relationship wasn’t conducted in complete privacy. The couple also had the Secret Service detail to contend with. Olivia had become a great friend of the two men and two women who worked her detail, but it had added a complication to her romantic life.

Just a month or so earlier Olivia and Davi had stayed at a cabin her parents had recently purchased in the Blue Ridge Mountains for a weekend of fresh air and grilling out. The Secret Service detail came along in a follow car and moved into two rooms of the five-bedroom luxury cabin on thirty-five wooded acres near Old Rag Mountain, and they walked point and rear security while the couple just seeking a brief time away from the city for some romance strolled the nearby mountain trails with their dogs.

It was a shock to the system for Davi, who still hadn’t gotten used to the chaperones accompanying him on his weekend getaways with his girlfriend, but by now Olivia was more than accustomed to always having a couple of extra friends with her wherever she went.

After Mass this morning Olivia, Katie, and Kyle went together to the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall — along with the personal protection agents for all three of them — while Cathy and Jack Senior returned to the White House.

Ryan said good-bye to his wife in the private residence and turned for the West Wing without even taking off his jacket from church. He knew he’d have to go straight into the Situation Room to talk about the two bombings that had taken place overnight, but when he got there he learned from a frazzled-looking Bob Burgess that the commander of CENTCOM had been murdered that morning in Tampa.

Although today’s homily had been on grace, twenty minutes after the sermon ended, the President wanted to put his fist through the wall of the conference room.

When everyone was present and seated, Ryan saw there was a man he did not recognize in the room, sitting just one seat down from Secretary of Homeland Security Andy Zilko. Ryan knew this newcomer would be some sort of a briefer to add to something the DHS wanted to tell the President, but he wanted to know who the man was before they got started.

Ryan, still reeling from the news of General Caldwell’s death, said, “Andy, will you introduce your guest, please?”

Secretary Zilko said, “Yes, Mr. President. Dr. Robert Banks is the director of the National Cybersecurity Protection System. I brought him in to give you a briefing on outside intrusion attempts into federal networks.”

Dan Murray interjected, “If we could, Mr. President, I’d like to start with a rundown of last night’s terror attacks in the U.S. before we get into that.”

“Sure. Go ahead, Dan, then we’ll give the floor to Dr. Banks.”

The AG went into detail about the successful attacks in Pittsburgh and Monterey, and the new attack in Tampa. The President asked questions about the evidence found at the various scenes, video surveillance, DNA, and the methods and equipment used in the attacks. All three crime scenes were still active, so there would be more information to follow, but the attorney general had known Ryan would want a lot of detail, so he came prepared with an iPad loaded with all the preliminary information from each scene.

Bob Burgess added his input on the assassination outside MacDill Air Force Base. The U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigative Service had control of the scene, for now, but they had communicated everything to the FBI, so Burgess had little on the case that Murray did not. The Bureau had a full forensics, investigation, and counterterrorism team en route from D.C. to Tampa, and a Joint Terrorism Task Force unit from Miami was flying over the Everglades in a Falcon 50 right now, but the SecDef made it clear all these hits on the military meant the Pentagon wanted to be involved in every step of the process.

Murray and Ryan agreed that Homeland Security, Defense, and DoJ all needed to partner on this issue.

When Ryan asked about steps being taken to protect the military, Burgess said, “We are at the highest base readiness here in the States, we are notifying all our commands to communicate this new danger, but we haven’t done much tangible for those outside the wire of our bases.”

“Do you have recommendations?”

Burgess said, “I have a team coming up with a plan right now. Whether it’s more guns in the hands of more men and women off base, more armed MPs and security forces in off-base locations that are frequented by military personnel, better coordination with local law enforcement, or other measures, I’ll present everything to you just as soon as I can.”

Jack turned to Dan Murray. “What have we learned from the dead terrorists?”

“We’ve identified four of them. One of the two in North Carolina and three of the four in Virginia. All four of these men had indeed flown to Guatemala, Mexico, or Honduras during the time window for what we suspected to be al-Matari’s training operation in El Salvador.”

“The Language School.”

“That’s right. It looks like this proves the camp was, in fact, a training base for the Islamic State.”

Ryan said, “And the fact that the training seems to have paid off, and everyone was able to get back into the U.S., will embolden ISIS to try something like this again.”

He turned to Scott Adler now. “State needs to be on top of this, Scott. Not just with El Salvador, but with all nations in the hemisphere. Get your ambassadors out there, have them talk to national leaders, and tell them what we think went on in El Sal and how it’s affecting us now. Let them know we’re watching out for it to happen again, and we will do whatever it is we have to do to stop it. Ask these nations for their help, but make clear to them that a lack of help from them will necessitate action from us.”

Secretary of State Scott Adler understood exactly what his President wanted. The State Department wouldn’t make threats to any ambassadors or national leadership, but U.S. ambassadors would convey the gravity of this situation. And it would be made clear to all that the Ryan administration would not take no for an answer. The other nations of the hemisphere would have no problem understanding that a failure to act on their part to prevent terror camps within their borders would, at the very least, hurt their relationship with the United States, and could even lead to the United States’ violating their sovereign borders to take matters into their own hands.

Ryan knew it was too early for any conclusions, but he turned to Mary Pat Foley and CIA Director Jay Canfield. “Any chance this is not the work of Musa al-Matari?”

Canfield said, “I would be very surprised. Astonished, actually. He is ISIS’s chief lieutenant for North American affairs, and a leader in their Emni unit, which recruits foreign operators. We also know he’s been trying to get assets into the U.S. to commit terrorism. He disappeared, trained a group of Americans to commit terrorism, and we know some of these, if not all of these, Americans are back here in the States. From what we know about al-Matari, he is a hands-on type of leader. I think these are his people, and I think al-Matari is here somewhere himself as well.”

Mary Pat agreed. “We know of no one else in the Islamic State’s Foreign Intelligence Bureau who does what al-Matari has been trying to do over here. This is his work. That said, if you look hard, there is some hopeful news in all this. There have been a total of seven attacks in four days, and al-Matari’s operators have lost seven of their number in these attacks. Judging by current attrition numbers and our estimates of the size of his force, this operation of his will not last three weeks at this pace, though to be fair we have no way to be certain his ranks won’t be replenished somehow. As you know, the Islamic State has a robust recruiting program. It is possible they will recruit from the remote-radicalized here in the U.S. and give them orders. This will give al-Matari new blood to draw from, although they won’t have the training that his core cell possesses.”

Ryan addressed Arnie Van Damm. “I want airtime tonight on the networks to talk to the nation.”

Van Damm made a face of disagreement. “Mr. President, you don’t have enough to say at this point. Make a statement in the press briefing room, do it this afternoon, take questions. Dodge what you can’t answer, but express the grief and outrage you feel and make it clear to the American people that everyone is laser-focused on this.”

“But—”

“If we sit you down behind your desk with what we have now you are going to look lost. Even much of what we do know about the attacks will need to remain classified. Let’s do it in the briefing room this afternoon.” Arnie looked at his watch. “It’s Sunday. Even with these attacks the briefing room will be half empty, so I’ll need to get all the media in first.”

Ryan said, “Okay. Why don’t you go and get started on that?”

Van Damm left the room, talking to a pair of his assistants on the way out. All three of them would be on the phone with various White House correspondents within moments, frantically trying to get everyone into the building in the next couple of hours.

Ryan said, “What about the other piece of this puzzle? Where are we with the investigation into the intelligence breach at the heart of this?”

The secretary of homeland security cleared his throat. Ryan had been around Andy Zilko long enough to see immediately he was uncomfortable with what he was about to convey. “Men and women from the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center have identified a potential compromise of federal PII.”

“What is PII?”

“Personally identifiable information.”

“Okay. At least we’ve found something. Whose information has been compromised?”

There was a pause, and Dr. Robert Banks from the National Cybersecurity Protection System stood up. “Mr. President, the compromise encompasses those who filled out an SF-86 application for sensitive position questionnaire.”

Ryan knew that everyone in government with classified access — as well as millions of contractors who worked for certain government entities — had all filled out an SF-86. “Who, specifically?”

“Well… actually, everyone. Everyone since 1984, and up to a point roughly four years ago, that is.”

Ryan blinked hard. “You are saying every… single… person… who has applied for classified access in the U.S. government during a thirty-year period has been compromised to some unknown enemy?”

“I am sorry to say… but that appears to be the case.”

Ryan’s jaw muscles flexed, but his voice remained level. “Explain, Dr. Banks.”

“We are still doing forensic work on our servers with the Office of Personnel Management, and so far we have not found evidence of an intrusion, but we have discovered that an unauthorized administrator access was created, and this unsanctioned administrator logged in through a back door to the e-QIP system about four years back. E-QIP holds all SF-86 applications.”

“Who was given this access?”

“At this point, we don’t know, but at the time OPM actually had zero IT security staff of their own. They contracted with one of the biggest cybersecurity firms in the nation, but about a year after this, an investigation discovered that firm had farmed out some of its work to a smaller company.” Banks cleared his throat. “In Bangalore, India.”

“So,” the President said, “prior to two years ago, we outsourced the safekeeping of the personnel records on every person seeking classified access who ever worked in government service.”

“Yes, Mr. President. Again, OPM stopped working with the firm and we fined them for breach of contract.”

“So the barn door has been shut, but the horses have run off to China.”

“Uh… I don’t know about China. Perhaps it was someone else.”

“Pardon my bias. Last time, it was China.”

“It was, indeed. It was found that the OPM did not even maintain a list of which servers, databases, and devices were in its inventory, so it was impossible to protect the data held there.

“Whoever accessed the OPM files, it was during the time the Indian company was working on internal security at the network. The credentials of a contract employee with the correct access were duplicated and these creds were used to create a new user with full admin access.”

Ryan drummed his fingers on the table. “This cache of files has information on everyone who has ever sought classified status. Everyone?”

“Well… since, as I said, 1984 to four years ago.”

“I’m no computer expert, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t have this network in ’84.”

“No, Mr. President. At that time this was all on microfiche. In a modernization plan in the nineties, all the microfiche from 1984 on was transferred to the computer files.”

“Terrific.” Ryan thought for a second. “I guess I’m in there.”

The briefer, who was already terrified, went white. “Ah… I don’t know. I didn’t look to see if any individuals—”

Ryan said, “It would have been a couple years before, but of course other checks were done on me as I moved up through the ranks at the Agency and then in the executive branch.”

The doctor suddenly seemed slightly more relaxed. “This is just the SF-86 form, along with fingerprints, so if you filled yours out prior, you would not be in there.”

Ryan shrugged. It didn’t really matter, this was one of the largest disasters he’d ever heard of. He looked at the nervous man down the table from him. “Dr. Banks, you aren’t on trial here. I’m royally pissed about all this, but I know better than to shoot the messenger.” He leaned forward a little. “You tend to get less clear messages that way.”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Banks said, but he didn’t seem any more at ease. He added, “We have incident-response teams working around the clock to identify who has taken this information, exactly when, and exactly how. We do feel it was a one-time data dump, and we have rescinded all admin access of the system until each person involved can be revetted, but clearly damage has been done in this case.”

Ryan turned to Andy Zilko. “Andy, I’ve seen the numbers. We’ve spent five billion on the National Cybersecurity Protection System to avoid just this sort of event. After the Chinese got into our intelligence network a couple of years back, people who are paid to watch these things assured us it would not happen again.”

Zilko’s unease was as obvious as Dr. Banks’s. “Yes, sir. I can say we have made strides to improve our cyberprotection systems in the past four years.”

“What strides?”

Zilko thought for a moment. “Well… since we’re discussing the OPM, for example. The new in-house personnel are in the process of making the security there more robust, but they haven’t been moving as fast as we would have liked.”

Ryan closed his eyes in utter frustration. The majority of his life had involved, in one form or another, dealing with government bureaucracies. He always thought he couldn’t be fazed, no matter the bureaucratic malfeasance. And he was always finding himself to be wrong on this point.

“How many currently holding clearance have been compromised?”

Zilko turned to Banks, who answered the question. “Right now, Mr. President, there are just over four and a half million people holding security clearances. The vast majority of these people would have filled out an SF-86 before the system was breached. I think we could be looking at a number of around four million men and women.”

Ryan said, “More than four million current government employees or contractors could be at risk from this breach. Military officers, elected officials, technical experts, those tasked with guarding our nuclear stockpiles.”

Dr. Banks said, “I’m afraid it is every bit as bad as that, Mr. President. The SF-86 won’t out someone as a CIA employee directly, in fact the CIA uses their own system for classified applications, but many if not most CIA officers had to fill out an SF-86 for their cover job, like working in an embassy with the State Department, or else they were former military or law enforcement with classified access, in which case they would be in there anyway. A top-flight data miner and ID intelligence specialist can look for certain anomalies to see things that don’t add up. You have a guy working in the embassy in Madrid, for example, who is a covered CIA officer. He works as a consular officer, but his SF-86 shows him spending eight years in Naval Intelligence, or serving as an Army Ranger or Green Beret. An interested party is going to determine pretty quickly that this guy is an Agency case officer, and not over in Madrid stamping passports.”

Ryan rubbed his nose under his glasses. “And now it appears Musa al-Matari has this information, as well as others. This is a complete nightmare. Even if we stop al-Matari and all his cell members, even if this misuse of the OPM data is halted, we can never be sure who has all this information that leaked out.”

“That is unfortunately correct, Mr. President.”

Ryan said, “We need the best in the business telling us how to mitigate this damn disaster. We owe that to the people who work for us or have worked for us in the past. That’s for tomorrow. For today… today we find the people using the intelligence to target our people, and we stop them.

“Mary Pat, we need to develop a full-spectrum counterintelligence plan to deal with this. All government employees and contractors are, at this point, potential human targets,” Ryan said. “It’s been made abundantly clear to a few of them. General Caldwell, for example. This needs to be communicated to every last one of those affected. Now.”

“Under way as we speak, Mr. President. As DNI, I can take the lead on this and integrate everyone we need to integrate to get the word out.”

DHS Secretary Zilko raised his hand. “Mr. President. I do want to stress that the breach happened during the previous administration.”

Ryan felt the boiling heat on his face, but he didn’t let his anger overtake him. He pointed at Zilko. “I don’t ever want to hear you say that again about this or any other crisis. We aren’t here to cover our asses. We’re here to serve the United States of America. For four damn years people in this administration have known that a company in India had access to sensitive material. Just because we didn’t know they took it is no reason to pat ourselves on the back. Just because you didn’t know personally, people you are responsible for did. And just because I didn’t know personally, I am responsible for you.”

Zilko looked away. Softly he said, “Of course, Mr. President.”

Ryan moved his pointed finger around the room. Everyone, even Mary Pat and Dan, got the finger and the intense eyes that came with it. “Everyone in here needs to take responsibility for finding our way out of this debacle. We need to accept that we bear significant responsibility for these deaths and injuries, because despite any excuses we might think we have, this all happened on our watch. Maybe not the initial breach, but the fallout from it.

“Now… let me explain what is going to happen. We will find Musa al-Matari, we will discover who was responsible for the breach and take them off the game board, and only then, when this is over, I will ask for a stack of resignation letters on my desk. Ladies and gentlemen, we owed our bravest citizens better than we gave them. We’ll fix it going forward, but I want a full accounting of the past.”

Ryan stood and stormed out of the room, as angry as he’d ever been in his life. America was endangered by innumerable outside threats. He had long ago learned to accept this. But he’d never been able to come to terms with the amount of self-inflicted damage the nation incurred because of poor job performance and those who did not take threats seriously.