Chapter 139: Picking Up The Pieces

Wednesday, September 12, 2001

I woke Wednesday morning when Stormy whined to go outside. It was cool, but I wandered out in my bare feet with her, with a Secret Service agent hovering nearby. After she did her thing, I took her back inside and unhooked her leash, and she thundered back up the stairs. I followed. The girls were back in their room and Marilyn was stirring awake. I went on into the bathroom and stripped yesterday’s clothes off and took a quick shower.

“Good morning,” I heard from the bathroom. It was Marilyn sitting on the toilet. Just as I reached to turn off the water there was a loud WHOOSH followed by, “Sorry!”

I climbed out and attempted to look superior to her. It didn’t last since she looked worried. “Good morning. Get a decent night’s rest?”

“I’m sorry about last night. Where did you sleep?”

I did a head nod towards the bedroom and beyond. “In the den. I’m fine. I need to get to the office.”

“You’re the President now, aren’t you?”

I nodded again, as I toweled dry. “Pretty much. The title is Acting President, but I’ll probably be sworn in by the end of the week. Are you okay with this?”

That got me a wry look. “Well, it’s not like we never knew it couldn’t happen. Still, it’s different than if you actually ran for it, you know?” She pulled on a bathrobe and asked, “How is this going to change things? Do we move into the White House?”

I shrugged. “Not until after Laura and the girls move out. I think that would be more than a little tacky, don’t you?”

Her eyes opened wide. “Oh my God! I never even thought of that! Laura ... Oh, God! I need to call her...”

“Please, do that today. Don’t say anything about them moving out or us moving in. Just call and offer some support.” Marilyn got along well with Laura Bush, much better than George and I had been getting along. Marilyn had teaching degrees, even if she hadn’t been a teacher, and Laura was a librarian. They had done several joint projects together, usually something related to education and reading, mostly in the general D.C. area.

“Of course.”

I finished dressing and headed out, with Marilyn behind me in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. The girls were still upstairs, so I didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to them. Breakfast was a quick bagel and cream cheese and juice, and then I was off to the White House. I got there by 8:00, by which time the place was already a beehive of activity. It never really goes to sleep, of course. A lot of the office staff starts coming in before 6:00, just to prepare for the President to arrive.

As usual, the first person in my office was a National Intelligence Officer with the President’s Daily Brief, a daily summary of the latest intelligence. It was compiled by the CIA overnight and the first person to get it is the President. Other people to get it typically included the Vice President, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the National Security Adviser. I knew for a fact that there had been arguments made by Cheney and Wolfowitz to cut me out of the loop, but Bush hadn’t gotten to that point yet. I read it over quickly and wasn’t surprised by any of it. Most of the world’s militaries had increased their levels of readiness, the smart ones because they were worried about Islamic nut jobs, the dumb ones because their neighbors had increased their readiness. The rest of the brief was mostly information about various terrorist groups. Nothing like locking the barn door after the horse had bolted.

I raised an eyebrow at one piece, which was tying Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein. “What is the basis for stating that Osama bin Laden is sharing information with Saddam Hussein?” I asked.

“I’m not at liberty to say, sir,” he replied.

I set the Brief down on my desk. “You want to think about that for a second and come up with another answer, buster?”

“Sir? That information is classified and cannot be divulged.”

This fellow was in his late twenties, a junior version of the regular NIOs who met with the President. “Sonny, I’m the Acting President of the United States. When I tell you I want some information, you can trust that I really want it.”

He looked very confused at this. “Sir, my understanding is that this is just something temporary.”

“Uh, huh. Who told you that?” I asked pleasantly.

“Mister Wolfowitz, sir, and Mister Libby.”

“Scooter said I’m just temporary, too?”

“Yes, sir. You’re going to be Vice President again as soon as the President is rescued, so we shouldn’t break security,” he told me.

“And besides, I’m not going to be here much longer anyway, right?” He didn’t know what to say to that, but it was obvious he had heard this. “Okay, thank you,” I told him.

He looked relieved. He collected the report and left. Yet one more damn thing to sort out.

One important moment came when Frank Stouffer came through and said, “Air Force One, the spare anyway, is in Houston. The first President Bush and Mrs. Bush are going to leave within the next hour. They’ll be here sometime early this afternoon.”

“Okay, Frank. I want you to keep track of that and head over to Andrews when it lands. For as long as the Bushes are here, you belong to them. Get them where they need to be. Grease the ways. If the Bushes want you to take off your skin and dance in your bones, do it. Got me?” I told him.

“Understood, sir.”

“Good man. President Bush was President when I first got to Congress. I have a lot of respect for the man, and I expect you to show it.”

“I won’t fail you, Mister President.”

I stood up and smiled. “I know you won’t, Frank, that’s why I’m giving you the job. One thing ... I am sure the first thing the Bushes will want to do will be to see Laura and the girls. Make sure to mention to Mister Bush that I would appreciate some of his time. This afternoon would be good, if possible.”

“Yes, sir.” He left to go about his duties, and I thought about him for a second. He was now my Deputy Chief of Staff, a big step up from the Vice President’s Chief of Staff. He’d been with me just over a year now, since when he came on board with me after Springboro. I’d been using him as a combination Chief of Staff and body man. Deputy Chief of Staff meant I’d need to find a new body man. One more damn thing to do.

I headed to the meeting I had ordered for the morning. It was time to sort this mess out. I grabbed a covered leather clipboard sporting the Presidential Seal and tossed a few items in it.

We were meeting in the Cabinet Room, and I took the central seat at the long table. There had been a quiet buzz as I came in, but it silenced as I sat down. I glanced around. As far as I could tell, the key people I wanted to speak with were present, and there looked to be an equal number of other people, their deputies, most of whom I didn’t know, sitting in chairs behind their bosses, along the wall. Everybody’s eyes were on me as I sat down.

“Thank you all for coming,” I started. “Now, before we get into anything, I want to tell you something. Last night, when I got back to the house, I found my wife sleeping in her bathrobe on the couch, with the television on showing the news from yesterday. She had been crying. Upstairs, my daughters were upstairs in my bed, also asleep with the news on, and they had been crying as well, and they were huddled up with my dog to protect them. All across this country the people who rely on us to protect them are crying in their beds because they are scared! We have failed to protect them. We have to fix this, and this meeting is the start. If you do not understand this, there’s the door. Is that clear enough?”

A chorus of “Yes, sir!” came from around the table, some clear and some mumbled.

I looked around and nodded to everybody. “Thank you. Okay, first things first.” I looked around again. “Where’s Joe Allbaugh?” Joe was a longtime political fixer and was now the head of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration. He was a longtime pal with the President.

A voice came up from the end of the table. “He’s at a conference in Montana, sir. I’m Michael Brown, Deputy Director of FEMA.”

It took me a second to recall Brown’s round face, and then it hit me. This was the guy who, on my first run, had been running FEMA at the time of Hurricane Katrina. Yeah, Michael ’Heck of a job, Brownie!’ Brown. Great! For years both political parties had been using FEMA and a few other agencies as dumping grounds for politicians who managed to raise enough money for them and needed an easy job. Both Allbaugh and Brown were exactly that.

“Okay, Mister Brown, what’s the current status with the crash sites?”

To be fair, his answers were clear and concise and accurate as to what we knew. The Pentagon was severely damaged on one side, but not destroyed and was still functioning, and the structural design of the building (five separate rings, one inside the other, with connecting corridors at the vertices) broke the building into separate sections. We probably had a few hundred dead, but the fires were out, and cleanup was proceeding.

The real problem was New York, where we now had two gigantic piles of smoking rubble. Giuliani was running the show, and doing it competently, and had all the men and equipment he could ask for. The biggest problem was the choking smoke and dust surrounding the area. Otherwise, everything that could be done was being accomplished, but it would be slow. There were some survivors, but not many.

“Thank you. A few questions. Do they have enough respirators and gas masks, that sort of thing? Does FEMA have a stockpile of that? Can we get them more?”

“They are using what they have, and more are being rushed in,” he replied.

I nodded and made a note to talk to Tommy Thompson. He would need to alert the Centers for Disease Control about possible health hazards from all that shit.

“When do they expect President Bush to be rescued?” asked Cheney.

I eyed him for speaking out of turn, but then looked at Brown. “It’s the next question. Any ideas, Mr. Brown?”

He simply shook his head. “I’m sorry, but that seems like it is going to be a real long shot. So far none of the people who have gotten out or been found were from above the plane strikes. They are still looking, of course, but ... sir, there’s just nothing left!”

“Thank you, Mister Brown. I appreciate how difficult that is to say.” To the group I stated, “Last night I met with the leadership of the House and the Senate. John Boehner and Harry Reid volunteered to go to New York to report back to Congress on the rescue and recovery operations.” To Brown I said, “Make sure that you do what you can to help them. Do we have any idea what the count is yet? How many people were in there?”

He shook his head. “No. A lot of people managed to escape, at least from the lower levels, but nobody was running a head count. We probably won’t know for days, maybe weeks.” He thought for a second, and then added, “It will be in the thousands.”

There were a few gasps at that. There had been wild speculation on the television stations yesterday, but this sounded ominously official.

I muttered something rude under my breath and then nodded. “I’m going to need to see this for myself. This afternoon, I should be able to get over to the Pentagon. Tomorrow, I can fly to New York.” I looked around and caught the eye of one of the Secret Service agents on the periphery. “Did you catch that? I’ll take Air Force Two. Please set that up, along with a drive over to the Pentagon later today.”

“Yes, sir.” He departed the room.

To the others I added. “The original Air Force One is still in New York, and I loaned the second to the President’s father.” I turned to Colin Powell. “Are we still at DEFCON 3?”

“Yes, sir, but nothing seems to be happening. I think we should downgrade to 4,” he replied.

“That is much too preliminary!” argued Cheney. “We need to maintain this readiness state. We’ll be making a response to this as soon as President Bush is returned to office.”

“When we make a response, then we can worry about the readiness state at that time. Until then, maintaining a Level 3 readiness state puts excessive wear and tear on both the troops and the equipment, and costs us an excessive amount of money for a level of protection not currently warranted,” responded Powell.

I looked at Powell. “Are we locked down overseas, too?”

“Yes, sir.” He gave us a quick outline of what DEFCON 3 involved, including increased patrolling with planes, readying vessels for sea and increasing naval patrols, and locking down on overseas bases.

I listened for a bit, and when he was finished, I said, “Okay, after we are done here, take us down to 4, but keep the overseas bases tight, and keep some planes flying. We’re going to need to begin taking security a bit more seriously.”

“Sir, that’s a call for President Bush to make,” interjected Cheney.

Time to handle this; the man just would not take a hint! I kept focused on Cheney, but raised my voice a bit, and said, “Mister Attorney General, is there anything in Section 4 of the 25^th Amendment specifying that the powers of the Acting President are not those of the President?”

I could feel all the eyes in the room on me. Ashcroft answered, quickly, “No sir, there is no restriction as compared to the President. As Acting President, you have the full powers of the President.”

I kept looking at Dick. “Very, good, sir. So, Secretary Cheney, do you have anything to add to that?”

Cheney was working his jaw, but simply said, “No, sir.”

“Thank you.” I looked back at Powell. “You have my orders. Any questions?”

“None. I will probably modify a few items based on intelligence, but I understand your intent.”

“Good enough.” I turned back to the table and looked up and down. “Okay, now for the fun part. Yesterday was the biggest intelligence failure this country has seen since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor! Would somebody please tell me what the hell happened yesterday morning?” I pointed at Paul Wolfowitz, head of the CIA. “You first.”

Wolfowitz looked confident as he responded, and I was surprised by the level of information he had available. How much he had known before the attacks and simply ignored, that I wasn’t sure of. Basically, he had several dozen members of a terrorist group called Al Qaeda who had managed to travel to the U.S., in some cases months ago, and Al Qaeda was now making public statements that they were the ones responsible. He then pronounced that Al Qaeda was taking orders from Iraq.

I made a few noncommittal grunts and then pointed at Louis Freeh, head of the FBI. He was on his way out, so to speak, a holdover from the Clinton days, and unpopular in the Administration. Originally, he was supposed to have left right after the Inauguration, but for some reason Bush held on to him as a sop to the Democrats. Nobody expected him to last through the year. “Louis, anything you guys have figured out?”

His report was similar, though he had less information. He didn’t know how many people were involved, or what weapons they had, or where they had been living, or where they had managed to learn to fly airliners. However, he promised that all that would be figured out, since every agent was being pulled off every other case to investigate this. It was a remarkably unsatisfying response. Even though it had only been a day, I had expected more.

I turned to Brian Stafford of the Secret Service. “Who do you have working on this?”

He turned and pointed at a man behind him, who stood up. “Deputy Director Ralph Basham, sir,” he said.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m sure we’ll be talking. Who’s the guy running this on the FBI side?”

“That would be Executive Assistant Director Collins Barnwell,” answered Basham.

“Is he here?” I asked, looking around. Nobody was jumping up, so I turned to Freeh and gave him a raised eyebrow.

“You only specified my deputy, sir,” he said lamely.

I muttered under my breath something else rude, and then finalized the decision I had been considering since last night. I simply nodded to myself for a moment, and then looked down the table to the Director of the FBI. “Well, that settles something for me.” I looked around the table. “It’s time for a frank discussion, folks. I met with Congress last night. One of the things that was mentioned was that the American people will be looking for some answers, and Congress will be holding hearings. They are going to want to know what happened, and they are going to be looking for a few heads to roll. People will be held accountable. We might as well get started.”

I opened my clipboard cover and pulled out a sheet of White House stationery. I slid it down the table to Freeh. “Mister Freeh, I am sorry to hear that you have decided to resign your position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Your many years of service will always be remembered. Just write ‘I quit’ on there and sign it and date it. That should be good enough.”

You could have heard a pin drop, and everybody stared. I was firing somebody? That just wasn’t done! The usual Washington response would be that the President would admit to various unspecified lapses in judgment and take the blame for everybody. Nobody would be hurt, and life would go on, business as usual. Screw that! Time for some people to get a wakeup call!

Louis Freeh just stared at me. I snapped my fingers at him and pointed at the paper. “Mr. Director, your performance a few minutes ago was totally unsatisfying. I have no doubt that when this finally gets figured out, the files of the FBI will have the names, ranks, and serial numbers of everybody involved. Do like I said. Write ‘I quit’ and sign and date it.” Stunned, he did as he was told. He passed it back, and I said, “Thank you. When you leave this room, turn over any identification, keys, etc. to somebody outside. Then, go home. You are no longer in the employ of the United States of America.”

“Jesus!” I heard somebody murmur. Freeh stood up from the table and slowly left, the look of a broken man on his face.

I looked over and saw his shocked Deputy Director. I crooked a finger at him and then pointed at the chair Freeh had just left. “Congratulations, you are the interim Director. From now on, when we have a meeting about what happened yesterday, I will expect your Executive whatever to be on hand, and I expect him to have a lot more answers than what I just heard. Are we agreed on that?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

I turned back to the Deputy Director of the Secret Service. “Mister Basham, from now on, you and this fellow Barnhart...”

“Barnwell, sir.”

I gave him a dour look at the interruption. “Do I look like I care? Barnwell! You and he are joined at the hip. I want you two working so closely on this that you can finish each other’s sentences! If you get an itch, I want him to scratch it! This afternoon I am going over to the Pentagon to see what happened there. Afterwards I want the two of you to see me here, and I am expecting a heck of a lot more info than I just got. Understood?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Thank you. You are excused. I want you to go find him and get this sucker cranking!” Basham left with a lively step and a look of determination. After he left, I pulled a second blank sheet from my pad. “Our next contestant is the Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration.”

“ME?” came from a few feet down the table to my right. “What did I do?”

“Ah, there you are, Ms. Garvey.” I slid a blank piece of stationery down the table. “Ms. Garvey, it’s not what you did, but what you didn’t do. Your agency is supposed to regulate the airlines, and instead they regulate your agency. Now, while I will admit that you didn’t create this situation, you did nothing to change it, either. We might not know what happened, but airplane security falls under the regulations of your agency. I can guarantee that in your files will be a list of proposals that could have stopped this but were never implemented. So, sign away.”