Black Ghosts by Victor Ostrovsky Page A

the senior Secret Service officer in charge of the presidential detachment, was one of the two. He was about to leave, the president having just signed his forty-eight-hour schedule update. The other was Terry Kay, personal secretary to the president.
    â€œThe call from Moscow should be coming through in half an hour,” said Kay. “The briefing is scheduled for eleven.”
    The president looked at his watch. It was five to eleven.
    In the west wing of the White House, Bud Hays was also looking at his watch. He had three minutes to deliver the briefing note to his boss. The president’s National Security Council staff adviser was scheduled to present it at the briefing in the Oval Office.
    The National Security Council, or NSC, is an executive council formed in 1947 to coordinate the defense and foreign policy of the United States. The principal members of the NSC are the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the secretary of defense. Their special advisers are the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as part of the defense department, and the DCI—the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
    Various other members of the NSC are drawn from the intelligence community at large when their particular expertise is called for, such as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the central coordinator of the various arms of defense intelligence which include Army, Naval, Marine Corps and Air Force intelligence, or, on occasion, the head of the National Security Agency, the highly secretive and extremely powerful organization in charge of U.S. communications security activities.
    Bud Hays was middle age, of less than average height, and with a spare tire around the middle. No one would guess, from looking at him, that he was one of the key players in the U.S. intelligence game.
    Bud looked again at his watch. Angela, his secretary, was busy at her workstation, inputting the final changes to the briefing note. She was a perfectionist when it came to her work and her hair, and she had no intention of letting one of the girls under her botch a paper that was going into the Oval Office. The note dealt with some new developments in Russian terrorist activity emanating from the troubled region of Chechnya. The topic was rather sensitive, due to the active sources that provided the information and the pending arms verification treaty. The Russians had insisted time and again that the region was finally under control, but the facts contained in the document were somewhat different. Bud had decided on several last-minute changes to the briefing note, in order to downplay the seriousness of the terrorist threat. After all, there was no sense in upsetting the apple cart, not while everything was going so well—as he’d been told by someone who was going to see to it that he had a great future after he left government service.
    Having been in the business for more then ten years, Bud knew that the politicians who came and went through the corridors of the White House could only digest things that were relayed to them in bite-sized pieces, while the only outcome they really cared about was the one that played itself out on TV.
    He had made the changes by hand and had given them to Angela just a few minutes ago. Fortunately, he thought, looking again at his watch, she was very good at her job. And that’s not all she was good at. Angela noticed his stare and returned a warm smile, filling him with pride and lust.
    However, Angela’s feelings were at odds with her expression. She thought Bud was a little weasel and could barely stand to let his sweaty hands touch her. But she also knew that his sexual satisfaction was her ladder to bigger and better things—neither of which, she thought, should be hard to find in his case.
    The printer hummed into life, running off the remaining pages.
    â€œIt’s done,” she said, slipping the papers into a green