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The helicopter ride to Washington was uneventful and silent. The pilot barely spoke. Secret Service agent, Jim Rosenbaum, met me in the lobby.

“Thanks for coming in on such short notice.” He shook my hand and then motioned for me to follow. “We need help and General Norton, your boss at the NSA, said you were the guy for the job.”

“General Norton?” I stopped in my tracks.

“Yes, sir. He’s here. Come on, they’ll explain everything.”

I followed him down the mostly empty hall. We went down a few more side corridors before he stopped and opened the door to a conference room. I counted nine people—six men and three women—seated around a round table, including General Norton, and Candace Kim.

General Norton rose from his chair when he saw me. “Slash, thanks for coming. We need your help.”

He motioned to an empty seat across from his, so I took it. Agent Rosenbaum closed the door but didn’t stay. I recognized a few of the faces around the table. Candace Kim was the director-elect to the NSA. She would be my boss once General Norton retired in a few months. There was also Director Steven Carlson of the Secret Service, and I’d personally worked a couple of times with Eugene Choi, head of the Secret Service Cyber Fraud Task Force, and Martin Wojcik, the top guy at the CIA’s cybersecurity division. A tall thin man came forward and introduced himself as Robert Thornton of the FBI.

“Bob is the executive assistant director at the Criminal, Cyber, Response, and Services Branch at the FBI,” General Norton said. “He may be the only one who truly knows what’s going on right now. We apologize for taking you away from the wedding festivities but given what has happened over the past few days, we decided things weren’t exactly as festive as you’d planned. Besides, Candace suggested that you were exactly the person we wanted to bring in.”

“Neededto bring in,” Candace corrected.

The general dipped his head in agreement. “I stand corrected. Needed.”

I leaned forward, my elbows on the table. “Did you get anything from the guys we brought in at the church?”

General Norton turned to Bob Thornton. “That and a little bit more. Can you give him the rundown, Bob?”

Bob sat down and steepled his hands in front of him. “Not as much as we had hoped, but perhaps enough. The two guys you captured, Hugh Tranh and Charlie Tubbs, are accomplished drone operators who have a history of unproven criminal activities. Twice, we believe they’ve used drones to drop weapons to inmates inside maximum-security prisons. Our sources say that they are often hired to provide aerial cover for large criminal smuggling operations, alerting their clients when law enforcement responds. They have avoided criminal prosecution by carefully selecting their clients and jobs and leaving no traces. Charlie works part-time for a local videography company, High Spy. The owner of the company? You guessed it—Hugh Tranh. We believe they use the company as a commercial front to purchase and operate drones for their illegal activities.”

“Were they cooperative?” I asked.

“Not at first. Gave us the criminal equivalent of name, rank, and serial number, then asked for a lawyer. Then the Maryland police handed us our leverage. Seems they had thought to bring in a bloodhound in case our operators had fled. Once their dog had our guys’ scents, it didn’t take us very long to find where they’d buried two drone controllers.”

“How did they react to you presenting them with the controllers?” I asked.

“They both looked shocked,” Bob said. “Then we started listing the likely charges. There were over thirty—and we were just getting warmed up—when Charlie cracked, babbling everything he knew. There wasn’t any point for Hugh to remain silent at that point, so he added what he knew.”

I made a mental note to ask to see the controllers later. “Do they know who hired them?”

Bob shrugged. “They said they were only contacted by phone, and it was a different number every time—probably disposable phones. The hit money was paid anonymously in bitcoin. After today’s attack, they were to wait for a call to report mission success. They assumed they’d get a call after the hit appeared in the papers.”

General Norton nodded. “Since they didn’t bring their phones with them to the church to avoid any risk of being tracked, we sent teams to their houses and business to collect their computers, phones, and other devices. They provided us access to their phones to substantiate their claims regarding the calls. They also showed us the bitcoin account where the money was deposited, so we know the time of that transfer and the bitcoin account that provided the money.”

“Why did they attack Bluff House and then again at the park and the church?”

“They claim they didn’t know anything about the Bluff House attack except what was in the paper,” Bob said. “They claim they were paid two hundred thousand dollarsup frontto take out two foreign businessmen in a motorcade. They were very surprised, and apparently upset, to find out that the motorcade they attacked was from the White House.”

I sat back in my chair, thinking. “This isn’t adding up. Two foreign businessmen? There aren’t any foreign businessmen among our wedding guests. Are we sure the rehearsal dinner and the drone attacks are related?”

“All good questions for which we do not have a definitive answer, yet. We’re also confused with the timing. The first lady was present for the first attack. Given their well-planned attack, they obviously knew she was there. But she wasn’t for either of the two drone attacks. Is their intelligence good or poor? If good, then the first lady wasn’t the intended target. If not, why attack her in the first place?”

“That means the target would have to be someone who was present today for the attack,” I surmised.

“That was our assumption, too. When we pressed Tranh and Dobbs, they were reluctant to say more about who specifically were the two businessmen being targeted. We think they’re being cautious because of specific intent-to-kill concerns, and they want to retain a little leverage in leniency negotiations. However, they’d been assured that their targets would be at the church today and apparently, they were.”

I studied him for a moment, my mind working out where he was going with this line of questioning. “You’re convinced the first lady wasn’t the intended target.”

“We are. But the target must have made powerful and vengeful enemies to risk bringing the full US government against their scheme.”

“You think it’s me?”

General Norton took that moment to lean forward. “It crossed my mind. It crossed all our minds.” He spread his hand out around the table including everyone there. “There were two attacks where the first lady wasn’t there. But you were there for each one.”