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papers came from the work of the Department of State and the U.S. intelligence community, as well as a series of domestic and international think tanks and academic institutions.
    His job, as he described it, was to give POTUS the best information available for him to conduct policy.
    But his job, as he actually saw it, was to push paper while others made key decisions.
    Ethan worked closely with the U.S. intelligence community, getting data from most all of the sixteen agencies related to his region. Not just the CIA, but also the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, sometimes even the military intelligence agencies. Coordination was his role, he wasn’t a decision-maker himself, but he did have his finger on the pulse of happenings in his region.
    It was a moderately high position for someone his age, although, as far as Ross was concerned, it was far beneath him. He had considered the work just barely impressive at twenty nine when he was put in the post, but now, two weeks before his thirty-third birthday, each and every day he lamented what he saw as his slow rise to the ranks of the power players.
    His work no longer pushed him. Ethan thought he was smart enough to phone it in, and so that’s exactly what he had been doing for some time.
    He hoped to advance out of this job soon—not into something higher at NSC, this had just been a placeholder for him— rather, he wanted to make his way into the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. He had been bred for a life of high-level work in an international organization. His father had worked as a staffer in the UN for twenty-five years before becoming an international-studies professor, both at universities abroad and then back home in Georgetown. His mother had served in the Carter administration as an undersecretary in the United States Mission to the United Nations, then as ambassador to Jordan during the Clinton years, before herself becoming a professor at Georgetown and a best-selling author of political biographies.
    Ross was a government employee, a federal worker, but he was also something of a contrarian. He got it from his academic upbringing. He felt most people he worked with in government were unintelligent and boring. He didn’t talk about his personal political beliefs around his coworkers—he didn’t have that sort of a White House job—but he quietly considered himself ideologically opposed to the administration in power.
    Just like every workday, Ethan parked his red E-Class coupe in a parking facility a block away from the Eisenhower Building and, just like every workday, it pissed him off when he walked to the EOB and saw open parking spaces in the lot. His position did not merit a reserved parking space; only the highest-ranking two dozen or so execs had such privileges.
    He stepped through the gate at the 17th Street entrance, then pulled his badge out of his coat. He was late enough that the security line was short, so in under a minute he left the drab gray outbuilding and headed up the steps into the main building.
    The Eisenhower EOB used to be known as the State, War, and Navy Building, and it had been the nexus of American foreign power at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century—the era when America emerged as a world leader. It had been constructed over a seventeen-year period in the late 1800s, and crafted in the ornate architectural style known as French Second Empire. The elaborate symmetrical iron cresting, balustrades, and cornices were meant to portray permanence and character, and many felt the huge structure, in many ways, overshadowed its next-door neighbor, the White House.
    Ethan wasn’t as impressed with the architecture as others were, because Ethan knew the Eisenhower Building wasn’t the power center it used to be, and certainly nothing like the building next door at 1600