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in.”
    Suddenly the President gave one of the disarming “awe shucks” grins for which he was so famous. “We have in this room,” he continued, “some of the most respected analysts, gathered from all of the agencies that form our Intelligence Community. In addition, we have highly educated people hailing from our great universities: Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, Yale . . . maybe I should reverse the order,” he chuckled, and the room chuckled with him. “We have individuals in this room who have been station chiefs in Riyadh, in Islamabad, in Khartoum, and elsewhere. We also have people who excel in finding patterns in oceans of data where others see nothing but chaos.”
    At that point Turbee saw those powerful eyes fall directly on him, and immediately looked down at his feet. The speech continued for a little longer, and he was impressed in spite of himself. Having only recently graduated from the university life, Turbee, like most university students, felt that the man was a twit and had come to power only because of his last name. But there was nothing stupid about this speech, and nothing weak about the man. Turbee felt a grudging respect begin to grow, and found that he was actually looking forward to working for and with this man. As the President finished his speech and was ushered out, Turbee wished he could go out and shake his hand, but found himself instead rooted to the floor.
    A T TTIC, the day began with a discussion of the President’s Daily Brief, or PDB, and the issues that it raised. The PDB was a briefing prepared every day for the President by the Office of Current Production and Analytic Support, a division of the CIA. Over the years, the PDB had been expanded, until the people handling it renamed it the National Intelligence Daily. During the Kennedy administration, it was reformatted and rearranged, and took on the appearance of a small newspaper. One President had even joked that it should contain a few ads and a sports section. It reflected the Intelligence Community’s perspective on the affairs of the present day, and was the most important newspaper in the country, possibly in the world. The PDB came into play when TTIC was charged with specific tasks by the Director of Central Intelligence or the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. On a number of occasions, the orders came directly from the President. Through hard work and the enormity of their responsibility, especially in regard to issues that made the front page of the PDB, the members of the team soon began to respect one another and to resemble the team that their President had directed them to be.
    Many of them continued to wonder about Turbee, though. His messiness, his proclivity to bring food into his workspace without eating it, his pale features, and his unusual repetitive motor mannerisms all puzzled them. One day, however, Turbee showed the team why he was there. On that day, at 7:34am, Madrid time, unknown terrorists detonated explosives on four trains in that city, using cell phone transmissions. More than 200 people were killed, and 1,500 were injured. It was the worst terrorist action that Spain had ever experienced. The bombings occurred during a national election, so the Spanish government immediately blamed the ETA, a Basque separatist organization. The matter was front and center in the PDB the next morning in Washington, and was vigorously discussed during the TTIC morning meeting.
    The man leading the discussion was Liam Rhodes. Rhodes, age 45, came from a family that had a history with the CIA—his sure ticket into the Intelligence world, if he wanted to take it. He was a West Point graduate, a former Marine, a Desert Storm vet, and a scholar. After leaving the Marines, he had been admitted to Harvard, where he had obtained a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies in a record three years. After taking time off to handle some family issues, he had re-entered the Intelligence arena as an analyst in the CIA’s Middle