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“I like her,” Foley said. “She’s honest. The kind of gal I would have tried to recruit.”

“Be my guest,” Ryan said. “She’s not likely to be here long with a brain like hers.”

As was his habit, Ryan poured his guest’s coffee before his own. Being President was a lonely job. Hell, he thought, sometimes being Jack Ryan could be a lonely job. People had come to expect a certain decorum in his actions, a measured restraint when what he wanted to do was beat some bad actor to death with a hammer. He’d proven more than once that he wasn’t beyond using the full force of the presidency with devastating effect. But the times Mary Pat had talked him off the ledge were too numerous to count.

Apart from his wife, Cathy, Mary Pat Foley was Ryan’s closest confidant. Blessed with an innate ability to read people within a few moments after meeting them, she’d been a skilled field officer with the Agency. Her husband, Ed, had been the station chief in Moscow during the turbulent eighties — when things were even worse between the U.S. and Russia than they were now — marginally. Mary Pat was well known among her cohort as a bit of a cowboy, ready to take any manner of risk for her agents — a mother hen. She’d taken Ryan under her wing early on, mentoring him, offering advice from a near peer when he was still new to the CIA and unaccustomed to the Byzantine ways. Her maiden name was Kaminsky and she spoke Russian with the colloquial ease of someone who’d grown up in a Russian household, peppering her conversation with just the right mixture of humor and resignation to the vagaries of life to make her blend in like a native. She could think in Russian — beyond just the language — which made her invaluable as the top intelligence officer for Ryan’s administration.

Ryan used the point of his knife — Cathy preferred Shun when it came to blades — to pop a poached egg. He paused for a moment, watching the yolk mix with the hollandaise and drench the English muffin in liquid gold. Ryan didn’t do Instagram, but if any food was photogenic, this was it. He savored a bite — much richer than the steel-cut oats and skim milk Cathy normally made him eat — and then took a sip of coffee before speaking over the top of the cup.

“So, what’s this about Yermilov?”

Knife in one hand, Foley used the other to gesture at Ryan with her fork. “The man is a menace, Jack. You know that? He’s shameless.”

“Talks regarding Russia are becoming quotidian,” Ryan said.

Foley chuckled. “Doing your crosswords this morning, Mr. President?”

“Keeping the language alive,” Ryan said. “At any rate, it’s not a secret Yermilov fancies himself the next tsar. This report on China…”

“I’m briefing you on Russia, Jack,” Foley said. “Seriously, why do you keep asking about the Chinese? I’m your director of national intelligence. Do you know something I don’t know?”

“Hey,” Ryan chuckled. “I read Intellipedia.”

“Of course you do.” Foley dabbed her lips with a linen napkin, leaving a trace of red lipstick, and then looked at Ryan. “In your spare time.”

Part of the government’s venture into Web 2.0, Intellipedia was an online data-sharing system overseen by Foley’s office. Much like Wikipedia, the collaborative tool allowed intelligence analysts — half of them barely thirty years old, from what Ryan had seen — from the seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies to post and share to wikis classified up to and including Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS SCI) regarding their areas of expertise. The forum was open to those with the necessary security clearance. Personal opinions were not only allowed but encouraged. In Ryan’s view, one of the best things about what his friend John Clark called Wikispook was that it was not anonymous. Submitters shared an opinion, and then had to own it. Any analyst was free to state individual views that would be shared with anyone with the appropriate clearance, but that opinion linked back to the analyst, not some nameless avatar or pseudonym.

Ryan took another bite of eggs Benedict, wishing he had longer to savor it. “We’re always on the brink of something when it comes to Nikita Yermilov,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not discounting your intelligence product. These guys have been studying the way we wage war for the last couple of decades — and figuring out how to counter it. We’ve got to start looking at things differently. The next war will likely be on ground we don’t yet even comprehend at this point. Cyber… AI… who knows what.”

“No argument there,” Foley said. “Both Yermilov and Zhao are running more and more active measures against the West every day. The bad old days with a hell of a lot more technology. The Bureau arrested two Chinese illegals in Queens last week — brothers living under the assumed identities of two children who died in the late seventies.”

Ryan gave a contemplative nod. “I read that brief. Your people are following a couple more, if I’m not mistaken.”