The First Commandment

“Why don’t you help me? Let’s start with that group of detainees you released from Guantanamo Bay a little over six months ago.”

Now it was the president’s turn to be silent. After a long pause, he spoke very carefully. “Agent Harvath, you’re treading on extremely thin ice.”

“Mr. President, I know about the radioisotope that was supposed to track them and I know it was found in the blood above my doorway. One of those men is sending a message by targeting the people close to me.”

“And my word that the people I have on this are doing all they can isn’t good enough for you?”

“No, Mr. President. It isn’t,” replied Harvath. “You can’t shut me out any more.”

Rutledge bowed his head and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t have any choice.”

Harvath didn’t believe him. “You’re the president. How’s that possible?”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss any of this with you. You need to obey my orders or else you and I are going to have a very big problem.”

“Then it looks like we’ve got a very big problem, because there’ve already been three attacks and they’re going to keep coming unless I do something.”

The president paused as his chief of staff slid him a note. When he was done reading it he said, “Scot, I need to put you on hold for a minute.”

Clicking over to the line where the director of Central Intelligence, James Vaile, was waiting, Rutledge said, “You’d better be calling me with some good news, Jim.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. President, I’m not. Actually, we’ve got a bit of a problem.”

“That seems to be par for the course today. What is it?”

“Are you alone?”

“No, why?”

“This has to do with Operation Blackboard.”

Blackboard was a codename the president had hoped never to hear uttered again, but ever since Tracy Hastings’s shooting it seemed to be all he and the DCI talked about.

Placing the receiver against his chest, Rutledge asked his chief of staff to clear the room and close the door behind him.

Once everyone was out, the president said, “Now I’m alone.”

Chapter 47

The CIA director got right to the point. “Mr. President, you’ll recall that one of the Gitmo detainees exchanged in Operation Blackboard was a former Mexican Special Forces soldier turned Muslim convert who was helping to train Al Qaeda operatives. His name was Ronaldo Palmera.”

Though the president normally remembered only the most significant names in the war on terror, the names of the five men released from Guantanamo had all stayed with him. At the time, it was because he harbored a fear in the deepest recesses of his soul that the names would one day come back to haunt him. Suddenly it looked as if that fear was about to become reality. “What about him?”

“Palmera was struck and killed by a taxi cab in Querétaro, Mexico.”

“Good.”

“His wrists were Flexicuffed behind his back when it happened,” replied Vaile.

“Not so good, but from what I recall the man had a lot of enemies. He was an enforcer for some of the big drug cartels down there, correct?”

“Yes, Mr. President, but that’s not the problem. Apparently, Palmera jumped through a window and then ran out into the street. Three men, three white men,” Vaile added for emphasis, “were seen coming out of Palmera’s residence immediately afterward. One of them removed Palmera’s boots and then they disappeared.”

“Removed his boots?”

“Yes, sir. You’ll recall that Palmera was rumored to have made a pair of boots from the tongues of the Special Forces and CIA agents he killed in Afghanistan. When he was captured, we looked but never found the boots. He obviously had them stashed somewhere and picked them up after he was released from Guantanamo.”

“Obviously,” replied the president, who could feel an intense headache coming on. He looked down and saw the blinking light of the line where Harvath was sitting on hold. “So according to your information, three gringos were responsible for Palmera exiting his home, through a window, with his arms Flexicuffed behind his back, at which point he ran into traffic and was run down by a taxi cab.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

“Then one of these men removed Palmera’s boots and the trio fled the scene?”

“Exactly,” replied Vaile. “We think they may have come in via Querétaro’s international airport, and we’re working on getting hold of the aviation logs as well as customs information and security tape footage now. I don’t need to tell you what this is starting to look like.”

“I know exactly what it looks like. It looks like we broke our word. None of those men from Gitmo were supposed to be touched. Ever.”

“In all fairness, Mr. President, if we’d been able to track them, we might have been able to prevent this from happening.”

“I’m not going to rehash that, Jim,” replied the president, growing angrier. “Secretary Hilliman and the folks at DOD had every reason to believe the isotope tracking system would work. We still don’t know how the terrorists found out about it.”