"I'm now well aware of that," the President snapped, not bothering to hide his annoyance. "What I'm not well aware of is who the hell authorized it?"
The Oval Office, in the southeast corner of the White House West Wing, was, in the eyes of many, a small, unimposing prize for all the effort required to take up residence. John Hansen, however, seemed not to notice. He commandeered whatever space he happened to occupy and made it seem an extension of his own spirit. In fact, he rather liked the minimalist quarters, heritage of a time when U.S. presidents had much less weight on their shoulders. From here the wide world opened out. For one thing, the communications here and in the Situation Boom in the basement put the planet at his fingertips. Next to a gigantic push-button multiline telephone was another, highly secure and modernistic, digital voice transmission system that could take him anywhere.
As the old-fashioned Danish grandfather clock—his only personal item in the office—began to chime the half hour, he glanced once more over the crisis summary that Alicia Winston had hastily assembled and had waiting on his desk when he returned from New York. Her office was conveniently just behind one of the three doors that led into the Oval Office. Another led to his personal study, passing through a small kitchen, from which now came the aroma of fresh-brewed Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. The third opened onto a corridor, with the standard six Secret Service people, through which he expected to see his national security adviser appear at 1:45 p.m. Then, according to his schedule, he had to try to put all this out of his mind at 2:30, when he was due to host a delegation of troglodytes from the Hill. Nuclear disarmament did not have a lot of friends in Tennessee and Washington State. He was going to have to make some concessions, he knew, but politics was about compromise, always had been.
"Apparently the ship was put into place without authorization," Brock went on. "There was some back-channel request from NSA. They wanted to keep tabs on a space project on an island in the Aegean."
"SatCom. Now we're spying on Americans, is that it?" Hansen leaned back in his high, Kevlar-protected chair and tossed a telling glance toward Morton Davies, his chief of staff, who monitored most of his incoming calls. They both had received an earful on the Cyclops project from his old professor, Isaac Mannheim—who claimed it would demonstrate to the world that America's private sector still had plenty of life left, could stand up to the Europeans and the Japanese when it came to innovation. SatCom's independence from government, at least to Mannheim's way of thinking, was precisely its greatest virtue.
"Well, damn NSA," he continued. "This is an outrage."
He recalled that he'd sent the new director, Al Giramonti, a pointedly worded memo on that very subject. When John Hansen took office, the National Security Agency was still liberally exercising its capacity to monitor every phone call in America from its vast array of listening antennas at Fort Meade. He had resolved to terminate the practice. He thought he had.
"It was just routine surveillance," Brock insisted, squirming. He was in his late fifties, bright, with horn-rimmed glasses and a high forehead. He also was black, and he felt he had more than the usual obligation to make his President look good. "There was a satellite test launching in the works. The whole project has been kept under wraps, and NASA wanted to know what was going on. The National Security Agency had a platform in the area, so it all more or less meshed. There was nothing—"
"And what do the Israelis have to say for themselves?" the President pushed on. "The Hind had their markings."
"They deny they had anything to do with it." He squinted toward Hansen, trying to seem knowledgeable yet uncommitted. Which way was the wind going to blow next? "Even though the helo was plainly ID'd by—"