Waddell advanced to the first slide in his PowerPoint presentation and everyone watched as a dusty Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up in front of the weather-beaten façade of a long single-story structure. “What you are looking at is a Muslim religious boys’ school, or madrassa, on the outskirts of Mogadishu. The man getting out of the car on the right is Mohammed bin Mohammed, aka Abu Khabab al-Fari, or as our analysts are fond of calling him, M amp;M. He is known as al-Qaeda’s master bombmaker and head of their weapons of mass destruction committee. Born in Algeria in 1953, he has training in both physics and chemical engineering.”

Waddell then advanced through a series of still images as he continued to narrate. “At al-Qaeda’s Tora Bora base near Jalalabad, Mohammed not only built and managed a facility for the manufacture of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, but he provided hundreds of operatives with training in the use of those weapons. Most of you are familiar with the images that made it into mainstream media showing the scores of dead dogs, cats, donkeys, et cetera scattered outside the complex.”

Everyone in the room was indeed familiar with the photos, but it didn’t make them any easier to have to see again. Around the table, they nodded their heads in grim unison.

“The photos only heightened some of our worst fears about the ghoulish experiments we suspected M amp;M was carrying out with anthrax and other biological and chemical poisons.

“When our teams hit the site in 2001, we found hoards of documents authored by Mohammed. They bore little similarity to the other terrorist manuals recovered at al-Qaeda safe houses throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, which in comparison were extremely crude. Mohammed’s manuals contained very innovative designs for explosive devices and represented a huge leap forward in al-Qaeda’s technological capabilities.

“On September ninth, two days before the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mohammed’s facility was completely abandoned and he was evacuated to an unknown location somewhere in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Despite numerous leads, we had not been able to assemble any verifiable eyes-on intelligence for him. Until this morning.”

“Any idea what he was doing at the madrassa?” asked Secretary of State Jennifer Staley.

Waddell turned to James Vaile, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to see if he wanted to field the question.

DCI Vaile looked at Staley and said, “There have been reports that some elements of al-Qaeda are taking advantage of the absence of a strong centralized government in Somalia to reestablish themselves and open up training camps.”

Homeland Security Secretary Alan Driehaus shook his head and said, “I suppose the fact that we wouldn’t touch Mogadishu or any of that area with a ten-foot pole only adds to its appeal for them.”

“How do you know we wouldn’t touch it?” asked General Hank Currutt, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. A patriot who had bled for his country on more than one battlefield, Currutt had never been a big fan of Driehaus’s. He felt the secretary’s position called for a warrior familiar with combat rather than a career attorney familiar with nothing more than the inside of a courtroom.

For his part, Driehaus resented Currutt’s constant implications that he wasn’t up to the task and that serving his country for more than two decades in the Department of Justice was somehow less noble than having served it in the armed forces. “Considering the whole Black Hawk Down incident and the fact that our resources are stretched too thin as it is,” replied Driehaus, “I just assumed we wouldn’t be too hot to jump into another conflict over there. I think we need to start being very sensitive to the perception that we’re empire building.”

“Empire building?” replied Currutt. “Is that what you think this is?”

“I said that’s the perception, but you’d have to be blind not to see where it comes from.”

“Well, let me tell you something. We’ve sent a lot of brave young men and women to fight for freedom outside of our borders and the only land we’ve ever asked for in return is enough to bury those who didn’t come home.”

The room was completely silent.

Normally, the president embraced healthy differences of opinion among his cabinet members and advisors, but he knew something that Secretary Driehaus didn’t. Hank Currutt was at the “ Battle of the Black Sea,” as that infamous eighteen-hour firefight in the heart of Mogadishu ’s Bakara Market was known. Eighteen servicemen had been killed and more than seventy wounded.

There were too many pressing issues vying for their attention to allow the animosity between Driehaus and Currutt to become the focus of this meeting. They needed to concentrate on the matter in front of them, and Rutledge was enough of a statesman to know that allowing Currutt to jump across the table and rip Driehaus’s throat out was anything but productive.

The president said, “As far as I’m concerned, all options are on the table at this point. Mohammed is one of the most dangerous threats to this country and I have to be honest, up to this point I’d been harboring a secret hope that with all the bombs we dropped on Tora Bora, we had pulverized whatever rock he was hiding under and that’s why we hadn’t heard anything from him. But now we know differently and I want to discuss what we’re going to do about it. General Waddell, it was your folks that gathered the intel. What’s your read on this?”

“Well, Mr. President, we know from the documents we’ve recovered and from our interviews with detainees both at Gitmo and in Afghanistan that Mohammed had been trying to assemble very sophisticated delivery devices for multiple terror attacks inside the United States. We’ve got eyes on him right now and I think we need to strike while the iron is hot. We’re never going to get a chance like this again. I say we take him out.”

“Director Vaile?” inquired the president as he turned to the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. “Would you concur?”

“Normally, I would, but we’ve got a problem in this case.”

“What kind of problem?” asked Waddell.

“We know that despite our successes al-Qaeda is reconstituting itself. They have a myriad of attacks at different stages of development here in the United States and abroad, some of which we’re on to and many of which we’re still trying to smoke out.

“As you are aware, Mr. President, one of the most troubling pieces of intelligence we’ve uncovered recently is that they’re very close to completing a transaction that would allow them to launch an unprecedented nuclear attack on the U.S. Based upon several converging streams of intelligence, including the loss of our field operative and the satellite imagery we pulled from Marrakech, we have a very high degree of certainty the transaction was masterminded and is being controlled by Mohammed bin Mohammed. The CIA’s position is that it’s vital to national security that he be taken alive for interrogation purposes.”

“You mean torture by some friendly government,” replied Secretary Driehaus. “The ultimate in American outsourcing.”

Vaile fixed the head of the DHS with a very unfriendly stare.

“Where would we send this one? The ex-Soviet facilities in Eastern Europe are pretty much out of the question, especially now that the press has been all over them. Most of the Western Europeans won’t allow us to use their international airports as transition points anymore. So, I suppose that leaves us with our old fallbacks. Egypt? Jordan?”

“Which side are you on, Alan?” asked Vaile.

“I side with the rule of law,” replied Driehaus.

Everyone in the room knew the secretary was not a fan of the administration’s extraordinary rendition policy. It was a strategy that allowed prisoners to be handed over to foreign governments who conducted torture so that the United States could sidestep its own laws strictly forbidding it.