His 16th political thriller opens wIth President Franklin Blake surviving a terrorist attack at a ceremony marking the anniversary of the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City, but unfortunately, not the first lady.
Kincaid’s new wife and chief of staff, Christina, attempts to identify the people responsible for the new Oklahoma City outrage - a group that may include the usual suspects as well as the corrupt insider. Besides getting details wrong (the Department of Homeland Security is led by a secretary, not a director), the author also fails to give the Kincaids creditable adversaries (the two Secret Service agents who pose as lobbyists try to intimidate Christina with compromising photos of her husband, but one of them forgets to remove his Secret Service lapel pin!).
At the magnificent memorial held on the site of the Oklahoma City bombing, the President, the First Lady, senators and other luminaries are on the stage taking their seats as they wait for the speeches to begin. The security is tight until an agent breaks protocol in an almost unnoticeable way. But someone notices it, and that person confronts the agent, who just ignores him. The President makes his way to the podium. Then a shot breaks the silence.
Kincaid’s thoughts run from blaming himself for the current tragedy to the attack that had become a nightmare. His cheek still stung where the bullet had grazed him and his most haunting memory was of all those agents dropping before his eyes. How does one recover from witnessing and being part of such a carnage?
After 9/11, the Patriot Act had granted the FB enhanced powers to wiretap and to monitor private Internet activities. Now, in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City attack, a group of senators and their henchmen propose a new level of snooping that would make warrants unnecessary and put total control for such decisions into the hands of one person. Under the guise of catching terrorists, American law would be changed into a free pass to suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights - the foundation that the United States of America rests upon.
As always in Bernhardt’s books, nothing is as simple as it seems on the surface. He twists elements that at first may seem random, but they are not.