Code Word: Paternity, A Presidential Thriller (3 page)

“OK. Look at each other! This is for all those
who died today and for all those we will, by our shared sacrifices, protect. I
want all of us—and the entire world—to hear these words rising from the lips
and hearts of three hundred million free and determined people. Shout them out
those windows you opened!

“I pledge
allegiance to the flag of the United
States of America, and to the republic for
which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice
for all.”

The camera
closed in, offering the president’s confident, determined features as a shield
against the dangerous, uncertain universe.

“Tonight and for many nights ahead, we
have far to go before we sleep, and promises to keep.”
 
Martin paused, gazing intensely into the
camera, and said, with slower cadence and a harder tone, “And promises to
keep.”

Chapter
3

As video from a
Predator drone out of Creech air base streamed before them, Graciela Dominguez
Martin, “Ella,” squeezed Rick’s hand as if in physical pain. The president’s
eyes, which had been drooping, opened wide. Ella saw him hunch, as if the
sights were weights piling on his back. A few floors of some casinos were still
standing, but mostly the view was of debris. Portions of the street grid
cross-hatched endless views of rubble. As the aerial camera swept farther from
ground zero, they saw the remains of automobiles.

People near ground zero had been
vaporized or burned to wind-scattered ash. The bodies of others farther away
looked like most other debris, mercifully disguised as scorched chunks of
concrete or the charred beams of demolished buildings. But with distance from
the explosion, shapes became human bodies. Rick and Ella turned toward each
other. He opened his mouth, but before words came Ella nodded and he remained
silent.

Farther out they saw survivors, figures
that moved like people but didn’t look like people, clothing, skin, and hair
burned off.
They’re like pulpy store
manikins
, thought Rick, his gorge rising at the sight of their raw tissue.
How can they be alive?

One manikin walked slowly toward the
camera. In its arms were two small bodies, children’s legs dangling and
swinging as the adult tottered along.

“Oh
my God!” he said, thinking about their own two kids. Then he thought,
get a grip! You can’t personalize this;
you’ll do something dumb if you do
.
Anger
is a distraction, a weakness.
Ella read her husband’s mind, his character
being as familiar to her as his appearance.

It was early in the morning, and they
were on the couch in their cramped, underground quarters. Ella was near Rick
but not touching him.
As by unspoken agreement they
gave each other
space
to process the video
feed, but their hands crossed the gap, left holding right.

Ella’s face was framed by shoulder-length
black hair that appeared sable at times. She usually offered the world a
friendly but earnest expression; an especially keen observer would sense that
her earnestness was the tip of an iceberg of determination.

Rick punched off
the parade of horrors and looked at his wife.
“How’re you doing, Ella?”

Her reply surprised him, the words
darting at him like sparks from a fire: “It was murder! Murder! Those men,
women, and children were killed for no reason other than that they happened to
be in Las Vegas
yesterday. They didn’t die in a tsunami or a hurricane or an earthquake. They
were murdered—by people who planned very carefully for a long time and who
rejoiced when it was done. I want to kill the bastards who did this! I want to
kill them personally and very painfully.”

She
means it,
thought Rick,
recalling her stories of childhood amidst the violence and vendettas of Mexico’s drug
wars
. Is that where we’re headed now?
Revenge? Will we ignore the rule of law and snarl off into the jungle, mauling
every creature that crosses our path?

After a moment
he said, “What would you do if you were me?”

“I think I’d become a remorseless killing
machine. Spend every waking hour pushing the FBI, the CIA, and the military to
find the people who set off that bomb and the people who gave it to them.”

“Would you hold
both of them equally responsible?”

“Yes! After all, people hiding in caves
in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen couldn’t have built that bomb
from scratch. Some government gave it to them or failed to ensure it couldn’t
be stolen.”

Rick looked
sharply at her.

“Ella, we don’t know that people hiding
in caves did this. For all we know right now it could have been an American
extremist group, using a stolen American nuke. It’s too soon for me to become a
remorseless killing machine! I don’t know who to go after. Yesterday’s NSC
meeting was full of people pounding on the table without a clue what to do,
except threaten. It was all heat and no light. There’s no one to punch in the
nose, yet, and nothing I can do to bring back Las Vegas or the people whose bodies we just
saw!”

Ella looked thoughtfully at her husband
of twenty-six years. He was optimistic by nature and believed compromise was
always possible, although sometimes painful. Rick had both the instinct and the
ability to defuse conflict, and she had seen him build consensus where none had
seemed possible. Rick’s world-view did not admit of undying hatred. He had
never encountered a purely malevolent human being.

Ella shivered, because she had
experienced both in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, in the person of drug lord
“Chapo” Guzman. Guzman vowed to kill not only her father, Colonel Dominguez,
but the entire family. Before his own death by assassination, Guzman did indeed
kill her father, after torturing him for a long time.

 
She knew the world held some who were
powerful, cruel, fearless, unmoved by reason or suffering, and utterly
unwilling to compromise. Guzman and others like him were evil itself. Facing
such demons, others either did as they were told or accepted a fight to the
death.

Ella wondered if Rick would be able to
find and harness the visceral force he needed now.

“Rick, what you said to the country a few
hours ago was carefully reasoned and balanced. It was right for now. But within
a few weeks Americans won’t want a president who speaks in careful nuances. They’ll
want Winston Churchill, or maybe General Patton. You can’t do what you have to
do by your usual balanced, obscenely rational approach!”

 
She grabbed his forearm and challenged him,
eyes vivid with outrage: “Rick, you’ve got to do whatever it takes to get the
people who did this and keep it from happening again!”

“Ella, you can
be certain that when the facts are in, I’ll be Winston Patton.”

Ella shuddered,
recalling the awful scenes of Las
Vegas and of her childhood. Churchill and Patton were
fierce. Her father was fierce. Guzman was fierce. She didn’t know if Rick was.

Chapter
4

Shoulders
sagging despite his sky-high caffeine level, Director of National Intelligence
(DNI) Aaron Hendricks sat in an office near the ops room at the National Counterterrorism Center.
He had appropriated it the day before and not left since, except to go to the
bathroom or one of the conference rooms. Looking at his watch, he decided that
the
New York Times
had posted the
day’s edition. He clicked his mouse and began to read the editorial:

THERE
ARE NO WORDS

Just when we
thought we had put 9/11 behind us, at a time when there are no U.S. troops
engaged in questionable wars, just when we had eagerly embraced long-overdue
social and economic reforms in the United States, comes the horror of Las
Vegas. The irony and cosmic unfairness of it leave one breathless, as does the
scope and scale of the suffering visited on the citizens of Las Vegas.

There are no
words. But words are what a newspaper has, so we’ll try to make the best of
them. We offer a half dozen.

Wisdom
.
May we have the wisdom to reject preconceptions and instant answers from those
who will uncritically blame the usual suspects and offer easy, comfortable
answers and neat solutions.

Compassion
.
For the victims and their families, but also for those who, by their appearance
or dress, embody the stereotypical bogeyman that some will see on every street.

Focus
.
Focus on aiding the stricken of a disaster that far exceeds Katrina, and on
learning who attacked us and why.

Tolerance
.
For those who don’t look or think as we do, who would otherwise be easy targets
for the rage that will seek expression now.

Inquiring
.
Asking the hard questions. Rejecting the easy answers. Leaving no stone
unturned, no assumption unexamined. We must know who and what failed to give
warning of the plot.

Inclusive
.
Uniting the nation and the world to resist terrorism and to address and
ultimately eliminate its causes.

President Martin’s
first words to the nation and the initial, even instinctive, reactions of his
administration demonstrate that he knows these words and embraces them.

It’s
not going to take as long this time around
, Hendricks thought.
One
day after the explosion and the Times is already building the gallows.
Despite the pious call not to reach for easy answers, the DNI knew the
intelligence community would be blamed.

Hendricks’ eyes narrowed and his lips
became a thin line as he thought about it.
Perfect,
omniscient intelligence is the silver bullet that politicians invoke to avoid
making hard choices. If the intelligence community is performing properly, they
say, it will tell us who’s going to attack, where they will strike, when, how,
and also why. Each time the world demonstrates that intelligence is never
perfect, politicians express shock and disappointment, restructure intelligence
organizations, hand out some extra bucks for “technology enhancement,” and
announce that they have solved the problem, so long as the intelligence
Neanderthals don’t slouch back into their old ways.

Director Hendricks gave it no more than a
month before he would be seated before congressional committees, getting his
ritual comeuppance, and making his ritual apologies. He knew
he
was safe; he was too far from the
desks where raw intel was handled and judgments made. But this time, he
figured, he’d have to throw some of the poor bastards who actually did that
under the bus. Then Scott Hitzleberger, CIA Director, would probably fall on
his sword to protect them and he’d have to go, too.

Glancing at a clock, Hendricks realized
he just had time to pee before taking the chopper to the president’s bunker. He
logged off and headed for the bathroom, popping another antacid tablet.

Rick
Martin
, he thought,
smart, likeable, articulate, but I doubt he
knows who he is, really. Like another president who faced an existential crisis
right away, Jack Kennedy, he’s never been tested big time. Kennedy at least had
the PT-109 experience. Rick Martin’s never done anything tougher than a
presidential campaign, not that those are easy, but they’re about the
candidate, how much risk he’ll take, what he can endure and put his family
through, and what he’s willing to do to win. Being president of the United States
is about three hundred million people and the nation whose actions or inactions
set the boundaries of what’s possible in a lot of the world.

And
Paternity! What’s he gonna do with the evidence, compelling but not undeniable,
not a smoking gun?
He
thought about their first discussion, on Martin’s third day in office.

At his request, he and the president had
had their first meeting not in the Oval Office, but in the White House SCIF,
the Special Compartmented Intelligence Facility. Called “the skif,” it was
literally a room within a room, as secure as unlimited funds and technology
could make it. The Oval Office was equally secure, but the DNI didn’t control
it, or the records of access to it, or the microphones that recorded
conversations within it. The skif, however, was under his control. Also, he
knew the value of theater when briefing a new president.

“Mr. President, I asked for this meeting
with you alone, and here, to tell you about the most closely held intelligence
asset this country possesses. The code word for it, which is itself top secret,
is Paternity.”

The president made a “go on” gesture with
one hand and sat expressionless, signaling, Hendricks supposed, that
this
president’s trust was not a given.
Of course, that was
always
so with
intelligence. Hendricks sighed inside and continued.

“Mr. President, Paternity refers to the
scientific capability we have to determine the origin, the paternity one might
say, of plutonium and highly enriched uranium, called HEU. By origin, I mean at
least the country of its manufacture and in many cases the specific facility
where the material was produced. We’re able to do this by analysis of the HEU
or the plutonium itself and by analysis of fallout particles in the atmosphere
and the ground if it has exploded. This scientific capability has a number of
potentially important applications, as I’m sure you will appreciate.”

After pretending a bit too obviously to
reflect, Martin said, “And one of those applications would be, if a nuclear
weapon was detonated anonymously in this country, we could figure out who had
made it.”

Ignoring Martin’s sarcasm but noting his
vanity, Hendricks replied, “Indeed we could, Mr. President! And also if, as is
to be hoped, we intercepted a bomb
before
it was detonated, for example by detecting it in a radiation portal scanner.”

“Tell me something about it. How did we
get this capability, how certain are you of the accuracy . . . and why keep it
secret? It looks like a deterrent to me.”

“It’s a long story, Mr. President, which
I will condense severely at this telling. But, as to the last of your
questions, why is it that we don’t we announce Paternity as a deterrent
measure? Because it would reveal extremely sensitive intelligence sources and
methods and because, if attention is directed to it, certain states will
attempt, possibly successfully, to develop countermeasures. Better to keep this
rabbit in our hat until we need it. That, sir, has been the conclusion of every
president since Jimmy Carter began the program, which is called the Paternity
Project.”

“Mmmph! Well,
this
president may change that”

When Hendricks didn’t react, Martin said,
“Go on.”

 
“When the Pakistanis tested six nukes in 1998,
samples of the gasses that escaped from underground showed that most of the
bombs used HEU from the Pakistani facility at Kahuta, but at least one of them
used HEU from a Chinese enrichment facility. We know through investigation of
A. Q. Khan’s nuclear black market operation that the Pak bomb program had,
indeed, obtained HEU from the Chinese.

“In 2006 and 2009, when the North Koreans
tested plutonium weapons, also underground, analyses showed the plutonium was
reprocessed at Yongbyon, something that the North Koreans publicly confirmed.”

At this, he
paused briefly before adding, with emphasis, “Paternity works, Mr. President!”

After a short silence, Martin said, “Who
in the Rogers
administration knew about Paternity?”

“Mr. President, since 1976 only a small
group of intelligence people have known about Paternity in order to keep the
program ready. Typically, presidents have directed that their national security
advisor, secretary of defense, chairman of the JCS, and heads of the House and
Senate select intelligence committees be kept in the loop.

“There’ve been variations: In 1998,
President Clinton had Secretary of State Albright brought in so she could
confront the Chinese ambassador about their assistance to Pakistan’s
nuclear bomb program. In Bush Two, no surprise, Vice President Cheney was in
the program.

“In sum, it has been a tight circle—and
with good reason. Since Nine-eleven, there have been occasional news articles
suggesting that governments are trying to develop some capacity to determine
the origin of nuclear materials. As a result of your predecessors’ caution,
there has never been even a hint about Paternity.”

“You just said that Albright told the
Chinese about Paternity—who knows who they’ve told?”

“That’s so, Mr. President, but it hasn’t
been in their interest to reveal it. One doubts that this is an episode of
which they are particularly proud. The Paks didn’t ask permission before using
the HEU in a test or even give the Chinese a heads-up. When Secretary Albright
gave their ambassador a dressing-down, it caught the Chinese flat-footed. They
don’t like that sort of thing.”

Martin thought for a moment. “Mac and the
committee chairs already know—right?”

Hendricks nodded.

“Then for now brief only Eric and John.
I’ll bring Bruce in if he needs to get involved.”

Hendricks knew the vice president, Bruce
Griffith, would be upset if he learned of this decision because he’d see being
in the program as a sign of prestige. It was revealing that Martin was cutting
him out—an observation he filed away.

“Mr. President, a few minutes ago I
mentioned A. Q. Khan, known as the father of the Muslim bomb.”

Martin nodded.

“Dr. Khan didn’t only enable
Pakistan
to go nuclear. We’ve followed his footprints through the clandestine nuclear
weapon programs of North Korea,
Libya, Iran, Iraq,
and South Africa.
We suspect al-Qaeda approached him. Kahn probably rebuffed al-Qaeda, but he did
sell uranium enrichment technology, equipment, and probably warhead
plans—Chinese, we think—to those countries. He may also have sold weapons-grade
uranium and plutonium to them or others. Truth be told, we just don’t know all
his customers, despite the fact that his activities were revealed
and—probably—halted in 2004.

Hendricks flicked a bit of lint from the
left sleeve of his dark suit, somehow subtly linking that gesture to his words,
“The Khan connection is just a footnote, but this seemed a good time to mention
it.”