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  Praise for the Executive Series

  “Executive Command mixes terrorists, politics, drug gangs and technology in nonstop action! Gary Grossman creates a master villain with a horribly plausible plot to attack the United States; one that will take Scott Roarke and Katie Kessler right to the brink and then over the edge. So real it’s scary!”

  Larry Bond

  New York Times bestselling author of Exit Plan, Cold Choices, Red Dragon Rising

  “Moving at break-neck speed, Executive Command is nothing short of sensational.

  Grossman is a master storyteller who sets you up and delivers. Expertly woven and highly researched. Executive Command is not just a great book, it’s a riveting experience.”

  W.G. Griffiths,

  Award Winning, bestselling Author of Methuselah’s Pillar, Malchus, Driven, Takedown, Talons

  “Executive Command ramps up the excitement from Executive Actions and Executive Treason. This time, the terrorists’ target is not America’s political institutions, it’s America itself through the nation’s unprotected water supplies. Grossman found the way to make this an even greater thrill ride! I was absolutely riveted!

  A truly bravura performance from a master of the political thriller!”

  Dwight Jon Zimmerman,

  New York Times bestselling co-author of Lincoln’s Last Days (with Bill O’Reilly), Uncommon Valor, First Command

  “Grossman combines detailed knowledge with a frightening, realistic plot to create a non-stop, suspense filled roller coaster ride. Executive Command is a great read!”

  Allan Topol

  Bestselling Author, The China Gambit, The Spanish Revenge, Conspiracy

  “Intricate, taut, and completely mesmerizing, Gary Grossman’s thriller Executive Treason is a hit! Grossman expertly blends together globe-spanning locations, well-researched technology, finely crafted narrative, and intriguing characters to create a virtuoso tale. Highly recommended.”

  Dale Brown

  New York Times bestselling Author

  “Executive Treason is more chilling than science fiction. Gary Grossman shows how the media itself can become a weapon of mass destruction. You’ll never listen to talk radio again without a shiver going down your spine.”

  Gary Goldman

  Executive Producer, Minority Report; Screenwriter, Navy SEALs & Total Recall

  “Executive Actions is the best political thriller I have read in a long, long time. Right up there with the very best of David Baldacci. Gary Grossman has created a masterpiece of suspense; powerfully written and filled with wildly imaginative twists. Get ready to lose yourself in a hell of a story.”

  Michael Palmer

  New York Times bestselling Author

  “Break out the flashlight, and prepare to stay up all night: Gary Grossman has written a sprawling, captivating political thriller, filled with meticulously researched details and riveting characters. Once you start reading Executive Actions you won’t be able to put it down.”

  Bruce Feirstein

  James Bond screenwriter, and Vanity Fair Contributing Editor

  EXECUTIVE COMMAND

  Gary Grossman

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Gary Grossman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, or incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected].

  First Diversion Books edition October 2012.

  ISBN: 978-1-938120-08-4

  Also by Gary Grossman

  The Executive Series

  Executive Actions

  Executive Treason

  Old Earth

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Principal Characters

  x1

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  x2

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  x3

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Fifty-five

  Fifty-six

  Fifty-seven

  Fifty-eight

  Fifty-nine

  Sixty

  Sixty-one

  Sixty-two

  Sixty-three

  Sixty-four

  Sixty-five

  Sixty-six

  Sixty-seven

  Sixty-eight

  Sixty-nine

  Seventy

  Seventy-one

  Seventy-two

  Seventy-three

  Seventy-four

  Seventy-five

  Seventy-six

  Seventy-seven

  Seventy-eight

  Seventy-nine

  Eighty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  More from Gary Grossman

  Dedication

  To Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, Dave Garroway, Hugh Downs, Frank McGee, Ernie Tetrault, George Reading, Tom Ellis, Arch McDonald, and all the great anchors, journalists and commentators who helped shape my political awareness through their national and local broadcasts.

  To all those who sit in their chairs,

  Remember the age-old quotation, attributed to many writers,

  including Mark Twain,

  “A lie can travel halfway around the world

  while the truth is pulling its boots on.”

  Prologue

  In sixth century BC, during the siege of Krissa, Solon of Athens contaminated water with herbs. The Romans used arsenic, a popular and readily available poison. Toward the end of the Civil War, Union General William T. Sherman tainted Confederate drinking supplies during his march to the ocean. The general had developed and perfected his methods during the war on the Seminoles in Florida years earlier. Poisons continued to be dispensed during World War I, and in 1939, the Japanese reportedly poisoned water supplies in Mongolia.

  In the 1970s, wells in Bangladesh were contaminated with arsenic. Decades later, Palestinians on the West Bank claimed that Jewish settlers poisoned th
eir only source of drinkable water.

  The FBI derailed a plan in the mid 1980s to introduce cyanide into the water supplies of major U.S. cities. Four Moroccans were arrested in 2002 just before lacing water in Rome with powdered potassium ferric cyanide.

  In 1996, America’s Safe Drinking Water Act identified contaminants and poisons, which, in the hands of terrorists, would pose one of the greatest risks to the infrastructure of American life. Since then, law enforcement has investigated tampering at hundreds of U.S. water sheds, reservoirs, and water supply tanks.

  But the worst is yet to come.

  Principal Characters

  Houston

  Abdul Hassan

  Carlita Deluca

  Miguel Vega

  Manuel Estavan

  Durham, NH

  Dr. Satori

  The White House

  Morgan Taylor, President

  Scott Roarke, Secret Service Agent

  Katie Kessler, Deputy White House Counsel

  John “Bernsie” Bernstein, Chief of Staff

  GEN Jonas Jackson Johnson, National Security Advisor

  Norman Grigoryan, Secretary, Dept Homeland Security

  Eve Goldman, Attorney General

  Bob Huret, Secretary of State

  Louise Swingle, President Taylor’s secretary

  Washington, D.C.

  Duke Patrick, Speaker of the House

  Shaw Aderly, U.S. Senator, Missouri

  Nathan Williamson, Chairman, Center for Strategic Studies

  Christine Slocum, speechwriter

  Jim Vernon, sales executive

  Lily Michaelson, sales executive

  Leopold Browning, Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court

  Richard Cooper, former Lt., U.S. Army

  CIA

  Jack Evans, Director National Intelligence (DNI)

  Vinnie D’Angelo, CIA agent

  Raymond Watts, CIA officer

  The Pentagon

  CPT Penny Walker, Army intelligence

  The FBI

  Robert Mulligan, Director, FBI

  Curtis Lawson, Assistant Director, FBI

  Shannon Davis, agent

  Duane “Touch” Parsons, facial recognition expert

  Roy Bessolo, agent

  Komar Erkin, agent

  Nancy Drahushak, agent

  Chuck Rantz, agent

  Raymond Watts, agent

  Greg Ketz, agent

  Montana

  Ricardo Perez

  SGT Amos Barnes

  Cheryl Gabriel

  Massachusetts

  Charlie Messinger, a businessman

  Paul Le Strand, a businessman

  New York

  Paul Twardy, journalist

  Mexico

  Oscar Hernandez, President

  Elder Cabrera, Chief of Staff

  Paraguay

  Ibrahim Haddad, a businessman

  Minneapolis

  Lawrence Beard, U.S. District Court Judge

  Russia

  Arkady Gomenko, an analyst

  Yuri Ranchenkov, Deputy Director, FSB

  Vinnie D’Angelo, CIA agent

  Major Sergei Kleinkorn, supervisor

  Aleksandr Dubroff, retired Russian Colonel

  Centers for Disease Control

  Dr. Glen Snowden

  Dr. Bonnie Comley

  Navy SEALs and U.S. Command

  Vice Admiral Seymour Gunning

  Commander B. D. Coons

  Commander Robert Shayne

  Anthony Formichelli

  Jim Kaplan

  Steve Smoller

  Joe Hilton

  Walter Canby

  Rob Perlman

  GEN Jim Drivas, Special Operations Command

  CPT Susan Mitnick

  x1

  One

  George Bush Intercontinental Airport

  Houston, TX

  3 January

  He tried not to look nervous.

  “Step forward.”

  At first, the man didn’t hear the order. The thick, bulletproof glass of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection officer’s booth muffled the sound.

  “Step forward,” the agent at the Houston terminal repeated.

  The man wanted to be invisible. Mistake. His instructions were to blend in, act casually, and make small talk. He was five-eight, clean shaven. He kept his brown hair medium length; normal. Except for a small scar under his chin, there was nothing memorable about his look. Nothing distinctive.

  “Step forward!”

  He tensed. Not good. He should have smiled politely and done as he was told. However, the man was not used to being told what to do by a woman. He hesitated again and was slow to hand over his passport.

  The agent didn’t know how much harder the president had just made her job. Generally, work came down to evaluate, stamp, and pass. Sometimes it took longer, but it was usually the same thing every hour of every day. Evaluate, stamp, and pass. In twelve years, she’d probably only flagged twenty people, principally because they were belligerent to her and not a real threat. It was different today. Houston was beta testing a new system that was sure to be on a fast track everywhere. But right now it was slow, and Agent Carlita Deluca was already feeling pissed off.

  The man finally passed his papers under the glass in the booth. With the Argentine passport finally in hand, she studied the picture; then the man before her. The evaluate part. She made quick assessments. Recent scabs on his face. Cuts from shaving? Sloppy knot on his tie. Not a professional. She rose up from her chair and examined his rolling suitcase. Brand new. Then Deluca looked at the passport more closely. Armenian name, but citizen of Argentina. She checked whether he had traveled in the Middle East. No stamps.

  “State your business in the United States.”

  The man cleared his throat. A bad signal, but he didn’t know it.

  “Job interview.”

  She listened to the accent. Carlita Deluca had become pretty good at detecting certain regionalisms. Not Armenian. German? She needed more.

  “Where?”

  “University. I’m a professor.” He put his hand out impatiently, expecting his passport, which Deluca didn’t return.

  “Of what?”

  The man shifted his weight from one foot to another. “Philosophy. Comparative religions.”

  “Have you taught here before?”

  “No.”

  “And where is your interview?”

  “New York.”

  Deluca nodded, scanned the passport through her computer and waited while the photo traveled as data bits across the Internet. The accent? Definitely not German. Not European at all. More….

  A video camera also captured the man’s image at the booth. The new image and picture on the passport were instantly cross-referenced against millions of other photos through FRT or FERET—Facial Recognition Technology. Some of the process was standard post 9/11; some as recent as the president’s last sentence.

  “What school?”

  “Universidad Nacional De Cordoba‎,” he answered, almost too quickly.

  “No, where is your job interview?”

  “Oh, New York University.”

  Middle Eastern? She couldn’t quite peg it yet. So, Deluca continued to study the man. It also gave the computer—which she understood very little about—time to talk to whatever it talked to. It was definitely sluggish, and the line behind the man was growing longer. She stamped the passport and wondered whether the computer was even working. It was.

  A 2004 report to Congress concluded that America’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies missed, ignored, or failed to identify key conspirators responsible for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The public agreed. People who should have been flagged as dangerous or, at the very least, undesirable, entered the United States undetected. Once here, they engaged in highly suspect activity that went unchecked.

  It’s not that the system didn’t work. There was no effective system. Th
at changed with the establishment of Homeland Security Presidential Directive 6. In Beltway speak—HSPD-6. The White House directive, issued September 16, 2003, consolidated interagency information sharing. The avowed goal—to put the right intelligence into the hands of the right people; securely and in a timely manner.

  At the center of HSPD-6 is TSC—the Terrorist Screening Center. The department has been charged with identifying, screening, and tracking known or suspected terrorists and their supporters. Feeding TSC is the FTTTF, the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force, and TTIC, the Terrorism Threat Integration Center, all administered by the FBI.

  In addition to establishing the TSC, HSPD-6 effectively rerouted watch lists and terrorist identification programs through another service called TIPOFF.

  This is precisely where the photograph of the man at the airport was being examined electronically against hundreds of thousands of other pictures.

  TIPOFF began in 1987 with little more than a shoe box full of three-by-five-inch index cards. Now it ran through a complex computer network; one of the most secretive in the world. Every nanosecond, search engines mine data from CIA deep cover reports, to Customs photo scans, right down to Google, Yahoo, and Bing images. Until recently, the subjects in the TIPOFF database were primarily non-U.S. persons. Out of necessity, that changed. Today, the program cross-references records of American citizens and even legal permanent residents who are “of interest.” It feeds that information to the U.S. Customs Service, now administered by the Department of Homeland Security.

  The man’s “biometrics”—the physical characteristics including facial geometry—were being interpreted at the speed of light by the TIPOFF computers. The nation’s interlocked FRT programs rejected more than 99.999999 percent of the matches. That took less time than the next step. The program kicked the photograph back into the database for further analysis when it registered positive against some fourteen other pictures.