“I expect to hear from you ninety minutes from now. And I want answers. Do you understand me?” Cook turned on a light and saw his wife standing in the doorway to his bedroom. Years ago, it would have been startling, but now it would have been more startling if she hadn’t been there. Her mind no longer seemed capable of completely turning off. The best she could do was to enter something akin to a semiconscious trance for five hours a night.

“Yes, sir. I understand completely.”

He disconnected the call as his wife pulled her silk robe closer around her neck.

“What happened, Tony?”

“Mitch Rapp just ran some kind of rescue operation in Uganda.”

“Was it successful?”

“No one knows. No one knows shit.”

She disappeared back into the adjacent room where she slept as he slipped out of bed. He tried to quell the rage and frustration that so often overwhelmed him, concentrating on the simple task of pulling on a pair of sweatpants. He’d made strides in hiding his emotions but, like everything in life, it was a delicate balance. Passion translated into charisma, and charisma was what had allowed him to fill the power vacuum created by Christine Barnett’s death. It was what made leaders. And rulers.

Voters didn’t care about public policy or economics or even their own well-being. What they wanted was to connect with their leadership on a gut level. To feel a part of something. To believe that they had power. And he could make that happen because to some degree he felt the same things. He understood what they wanted. What they loved. What they hated. The difference was that he had the strength and intelligence to act on it while they wallowed.

Cook slipped a T-shirt over his head and walked into his wife’s bedroom. She had her back to him, tapping calmly on a laptop.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking at the investments I made when the Saudis assured us that they had the resources to get rid of David Chism.”

“And?”

“In the less than two weeks since his disappearance, we’re up just over twenty-three million dollars.”

Cook had enjoyed a close relationship with the Saudis going back to his days as the governor of California and that bond had become even stronger since he’d taken control of the White House. The new prince had approached him through back channels to float the idea of using Gideon Auma to neutralize David Chism.

While Ward and Chism were unquestionably an existential threat to the general world order, they were a very specific threat to the Saudis. Ward’s research into renewables was accelerating the collapse of the Middle Eastern energy industry just as Chism’s research was undermining the royalty’s heavy bets on the pharmaceutical industry. Bets that they were relying on to pay for their eventual—and almost certainly inevitable—escape from their country.