sipped from his glass and took in the view of the Potomac. The lights of the city were winking. ‘Not good, Jim. Not good at all.’
‘Did Zheng even understand what you were telling him?’
‘He understood. I’m not sure he believed me, but he understood.’
‘Will he get us the statement, from the North Koreans?’
‘I think so. Later tonight, he said.’
‘Has the President brought it up?’
‘At the briefing this morning, he mentioned it. The CIA briefer looked blank. I jumped in. I said we were still working on a translation.’
Bruton shook his head. ‘This is horrible.’
‘The good news is, there’s been nothing more out of Pyongyang. I think Beijing have told them to zip it.’
‘For five days.’
‘Exactly. Five days.’
‘And then?’
‘Then North Korea would have every justification, given what happened this morning, to launch a pre-emptive attack on the United States. And China can’t promise they won’t stop them.’
There was a moment of silence. They both looked towards the Kennedy Center, illuminated and shining. Inside, doubtless hundreds of well-dressed, well-paid members of the capital’s elite were blissfully unaware of how close they had come just sixteen hours earlier to being incinerated.
Bruton spoke first. ‘Even if Pyongyang come to Jesus, play nice, it still could happen again. With them or with someone else.‘
‘Of course it could.’
‘And next time we might not get so lucky.’
‘The War Room couldn’t pull the same stunt twice.’
The two men paused again. Kassian would think often of the moment that followed. Were they awed by the thought they were about to utter, by the weight of it? Or were they hesitating, wondering which one of them was going to say it out loud first?
In the end, it was Kassian. ‘The current situation is unsustainable.’
Bruton nodded.
Kassian went on. ‘At any moment, a civilization-ending decision could be made.’
‘And there’s not a blind thing we could do to stop it. We’re impotent.’
‘On this, his power is absolute. He’s the nuclear monarch.’
Bruton raised his eyebrows.
‘That’s the term of art apparently, you know in “the national security community”. Can you believe that? No one even hides it.’
‘So he has no obligation to discuss anything with us?’
‘Not with us, not with Congress. Nobody. He can take this step at any time, for any reason. And we now know he’s ready to take it.’
Bruton knocked back his whisky. ‘Do you remember the oath we took, right at the start?’
‘I do.’
And suddenly, there on the balcony of the Watergate, the White House Chief of Staff and the US Secretary of Defense both raised their right hands and, in the dark, declared, ‘I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.’
Kassian drained his whisky glass. ‘Our oath is to defend the Constitution. It’s this republic we have to save. Against all enemies.’
‘Yeah, but now you’re cherrypicking.’ Cherr-pickin’. ‘What about “obeying the orders of the President of the United States”? That’s in there too.’
‘Like I said this morning, we are only required to obey those orders which are lawful. An unprovoked nuclear strike that will destroy America and most of the human race cannot be lawful.’
Bruton knew where they were heading. They both did. ‘It is our constitutional duty then.’
‘Yes, Jim, I believe it is. I believe we are honour-bound, by virtue of the oath we swore, to do all we can to remove the President.’
Chevy Chase, Maryland, Monday, 9.25pm
Robert Kassian considered asking the Secret Service man to knock on the man’s door, but feared that might backfire. The mere sight of an agent on a suburban street (and no matter how much they bragged to the contrary, they always looked obvious) would attract too much attention, might scare their man off.
But neither could they simply turn up themselves, unannounced. That too would get attention. Even if he was not recognizable, Jim Bruton was. Within a few minutes, somebody would have tweeted a photo with the caption: Guess who just turned up in this neighbourhood. What *are* they up to?
The obvious solution was to call ahead. But every call on their phones was logged. Same was true of the driver’s. It was not worth the risk.
So they simply pulled up in Kassian’s official car – which was fractionally the less visible of the two – and asked the driver to go knock on the door and inform Dr Jeffrey Frankel that the White House Chief of Staff was waiting outside on an urgent matter and ask if he would be so kind as to allow him to come in.
To Kassian’s relief, the doctor and his wife were alone. No house full of teenagers, no Washington dinner party: that, he hoped, would reduce the likelihood of a leak. Dr Frankel said nothing in the hallway, though when he saw that there were two of them – that the Defense Secretary was here too – he furrowed his brow. He waved them into his study, which looked out onto the street.
‘Excuse me,’ Kassian said, closing the curtains without asking the doctor’s permission. ‘Just to ensure a little more privacy.’
Dr Frankel’s face creased in irritation. He looked older than the sixty-four years registered in the White House personnel database. His face was lined, even wizened. What hair he had was white and wiry, framing a birdlike face.
Kassian looked around. There were pictures on display on every available surface: Frankel and wife on vacation in Florida; Frankel and daughters deep-sea fishing; Frankel raising a glass at a bar mitzvah; relaxed and smiling with adult children and a horde of grandchildren, at what appeared to be a Thanksgiving dinner.
Of the fact that Frankel was physician to the President of the United States, and that he had ministered to several other key Washington players, there was no sign. Kassian had seen enough private studies in this town to know this was
