As was fitting for the men and women who had to make the hardest of decisions, most of the Subcommittee were physically present for the briefing. The President would be joining them via teleconference from his bunker. The minute that the Secret Service had learned that Franks was still in town and that he was proclaiming that The Contract had been violated, they had rushed the President to safety. A few high ranking members of the Secret Service had worked with Franks in the past. They knew what Franks was capable of, so there had been no discussion on the matter.

Stricken rather enjoyed the idea of the President being carried off the golf course by nervous gunmen who understood just how dangerous Franks was when he put his mind to something. It would help drive the point home, to make it visceral. He’d long felt that the President saw the supernatural threats arrayed against them in an academically abstract fashion, as opposed to the blood and guts, world-ending, mind-shattering horror of the reality. It was a good thing to let the President feel like he had some skin in the game.

The secret cabal had been having a heated debate for the last few minutes. It was all about damage control and what national secrets Franks might be able to sell . . . Like Franks cared about money. Stricken had sat the argument out. They were idiots. They didn’t get the big picture. Dwayne Myers had been a fixture in these meetings. Though he and Stricken came to very different conclusions about how to deal with the threats, at least Myers had a clue . . . which was exactly why Stricken had made sure he’d been replaced.

“He’ll be joining us in one minute,” said one of the . . . hell . . . Stricken wasn’t sure what to call them. Secretaries? Scribes? Minor teat-sucking hangers-on? He wasn’t sure. The debate died off. Everyone knew who the pencil pusher was talking about. Mr. The Buck Stops Here Unless I Can Blame It On Somebody Else. They turned the lights up a bit. Stricken made sure his tie was straight.

The conference room was relatively dark, not because of any sort of attempt at nefarious secrecy, because it wasn’t like the members of the Subcommittee didn’t all know each other already—they all went to the same cocktail parties—but rather because the congressional liaison to the MCB had been using a projector for his Power Point presentation about the makeup of the manhunt’s resources. They were in the middle of a national fucking catastrophe but of course some government functionary had taken the time to make a fucking slideshow about their response . . . You people are like a bad stereotype . . . The presentation had been helpful though. He’d learned that the MCB investigation had turned up some inconsistencies, mostly because Franks had managed to shoot his Japanese Spider Demon, which had then squirted forensic evidence everywhere. But that hardly cleared Franks, and most of the Subcommittee interpreted that to mean Franks had brought in some unknown form of help.