Pryce waited as the imagery came up on the screen, as Miles Jameson’s Montana ranch came into view of the NRO satellite she’d re-tasked.

There was going to be hell to pay for this.

“This is a really bad idea, boss,” Kaori said, her voice low, urgent. “Why don’t you take this to the Attorney General?”

Pryce shook her head. Sam Cruz was deep in the President’s camp. There was no hope there.

“No, Kaori. You heard me. You have a copy. If anything happens, you take everything to Stan Kim.”

Kaori pursed her lips at that. “If anything happens to you, that is.” She sounded unhappy. “You’re not a field agent, boss.”

Pryce ignored that and concentrated on the screen. There it was. She zoomed in the image.

Snow. Sprawling complex. Three buildings. Six, seven vehicles in sight. Any number in the garages.

Field ops succeeded or failed based on intelligence and planning. That’s what it really came down to.

“Tell me again how we know he’s in there.” Pryce said.

Kaori ticked the data points off on her fingers. “One, the Secret Service roster shows his detail is there presently. All of them. Two, NSA shows his phone there. Three, NSA shows the phones of his aides are there. Four, satellite data shows no evidence of him leaving. He’s in a wheelchair. It’s pretty obvious when he comes and goes. He hasn’t left for weeks.”

Pryce nodded. “Time he got a visitor, then.”

Pryce stared out at the windows of the charter plane as it came down towards the airport outside of Billings, Montana. The state was blanketed in white, smothered in snow, illuminated by early morning glow, even as the rest of the country went through the mildest winter on record.

Warm air carries more moisture, she remembered an officer lecturing in one of the Pentagon briefings on climate-driven conflict. Sucks it away from some places, concentrates it in others. We’re seeing more dry winter days and more blizzards. More droughts and more super-storms.

She shook her head. That was a problem for her day job.

Right now…

Right now her problem was to unravel a mystery.

To spring a trap on a President. On two Presidents.

And then to stay alive.

Planning. Superior planning. Superior intelligence. The element of surprise.

She had all of those. She’d thought the plan through backwards and forwards, gamed it out in dozens of different scenarios.

So why was there a knot in her stomach?

Maybe I should have taken that Secret Service detail after all, she thought.

The car was waiting for her on the tarmac, as she’d requested, a sleek silver all-wheel sedan under a uniformly grey sky. The flight crew helped her load the gear bags she’d brought into the trunk. Pryce thanked them, re-confirmed her next booking with them, and then was off.