Executive Power by Vince Flynn

needed some time alone to think before he met with the president. He’d promised himself that he wouldn’t allow his new position of influence to be wasted.
    The whole reason he had this new position was that his cover as a covert counterterrorism operative had been blown during his boss’s confirmation hearing by a congressman who had no admiration for the Agency, and now every piece of crap from Boston to Baghdad knew who he was and what he looked like. His face had been broadcast across the airwaves. He was called America’s first line of defense against terrorism. Virtually every newspaper in the country had reported his story and there had been several magazine covers. The entire thing was unnerving to him.
    The media spectacle his career had become went against everything he knew. Most of his life since the age of twenty-two had been a secret. Not even his brother had known that he worked for the CIA. Now, because of all the publicity before he even hit forty, he had been unceremoniously retired from the field, brought in from the cold and given a new job and a new title to go with it. He was now special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence on counterterrorism.
    Terrorism had finally reached out and touched America, and her citizens were finally waking up to the fact that there were people out there who hated them, zealots who wanted to see the Great Satan toppled. The president and Rapp’s boss, Director Irene Kennedy, had given him a mandate. In addition to working in conjunction with the Agency’s counterterrorism center, they asked him to thoroughly study the nation’s counterterrorism capabilities and come up with a recommendation on how to streamline operations and improve defenses. Rapp’s first response had been to tell the president to start focusing on offense. So far the president had shown no signs of following that advice.
    Kennedy, knowing Rapp better than anyone, admonished him to keep his temper and tongue in check. She told him to look at the study as a fact-finding mission. The ass-kicking would come later when he gave his report to the president and the National Security Council. That was when he could vent and let the truth be told, and Irene Kennedy knew better than anyone that the truth did need to be told.
    If Rapp had learned anything during his lengthy study of America’s counterterrorism efforts, it was that there were too many meetings. Too many meetings that accomplished nothing, and more often than not, created more red tape and hassles for the people who were on the front lines doing the important work. The meetings were a colossal waste of energy and resources. They never started on time and they always ran over, and that was the least of their problems. Now that he was on the inside, after spending more than a decade abroad working covertly for the CIA, he could see why so many in Washington thought the Agency had dropped the ball.
    The Agency had become the antithesis of what Colonel Wild Bill Donovan, its founder, had designed it to be. It was a risk-averse haven for bureaucrats to put in their time so they could retire and collect their pensions. Sensitivity training and diversity workshops had taken priority over recruiting case officers with foreign language skills who had the chutzpah it took to run covert ops.
    Thanks to Aldrich Ames, the FBI had been invited to join the Agency’s Counter Intelligence Center. The brothers in dark suits had eviscerated the ranks of Langley’s few remaining good case officers, for the simple reason that too many of the men and women in the directorate of operations were mavericks. Never mind that mavericks, independent thinkers, were exactly who Wild Bill Donovan and President Roosevelt had in mind when they started the Office of Strategic Services at the onset of World War II. Donovan and Roosevelt understood that you didn’t hire decent, respectable, risk-averse family men to spy on the