“It did, and it was rather brilliantly nipped in the bud in an operation that was conducted on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was kept very, very quiet. The problem began after the culprits were taken—diplomats in D.C. and London, a pair of them twins. They were declared persona non grata in both countries and shipped back to their home country—a tiny Arabian sultanate called Dahai—in one of the sultan’s fleet of jets, escorted by British and American jet fighters. Nearly all the way.”

“Nearly?”

“The fighter pilots were ordered to break off the escort once the jet was over the Arabian Sea. At that point, Lance Cabot took it upon himself to intervene.”

“Intervene how?”

“I was assigned by the president to investigate the incident, and I managed to get an admission out of Lance that he called the CIA station head in neighboring Yemen and suggested that he might prevail upon the head of an organization called Freedom for Dahai, who oppose the sultan, to station some men on the beach near the approach end of the runway, equipped with a Russian-made, shoulder-fired, laser-guided ground-to-air missile.”

“With what result?”

“The jet was blown out of the sky, a couple of miles out to sea, killing all aboard. Freedom for Dahai then issued a statement, claiming responsibility for the event.”

“Well, that was all neatly tied up, wasn’t it?”

“From Lance’s point of view, yes. He was doing what he believed the president would do, while giving her airtight deniability. From MI6’s point of view, however, things got messy fairly quickly.”

“How?”

“The twins aboard the jet were said to be the sons of the sultan by a member of his harem, and the third diplomat was the sultan’s nephew. Somebody in Dahai intelligence got wind of Ian Rattle’s involvement—he led the team that squelched the assassination attempt in London, extracted the twins, and shipped them back to Dahai. There were subsequently two attempts on Ian’s life in England—one in London and one at what was thought by MI6 to be a safe house in the country. Both narrowly failed, and Felicity thought it advisable that he be spirited out of the country and made to vanish, until they could track down the leak in MI6 and make England safe for him again. They smuggled him aboard a diplomatic flight out of an RAF base, and he landed at Dulles this morning. The Agency transferred him to my custody for the flight to Teterboro. Now here we are, and you can blame me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“I knew about the security upgrades to this house that the Agency undertook when you were experiencing difficulties with a Russian mob a while back, and it was my suggestion to the president that yours would be a perfect safe house.”