The Golden Hour Read Free Page B

Department. I’m sure they appreciated your help. And thank you for letting me know. Is Jessica with you?”
    “No. She’s home with the kids.”
    “Is she working again?”
    “A bit. She took time off when Noah was born and all the travel became too much. But she’s starting to work again. A coffee project in Ethiopia and rice somewhere in southeast Asia, I think. I’m never sure where’s she’s going. I can never keep track.”
    “Good for her,” he said, sounding increasingly weakened. “I’ve got to get off the phone now. I’m sorry. Send my love to Jessica.”
    “I will. Thanks. And good-bye, BJ.”
    “Good-bye, Judd. Au revoir.”
    Judd slumped back into the airport chair. Satisfied the day wasn’t a total loss, he relaxed, half reading through some papers he was supposed to be grading and half scanning the crowds for George Stephanopoulos or David Gergen.
    Judd’s flight was finally called, and he stood in line again,waiting to board. As he approached the front to hand over his ticket, his phone rang. The caller ID flashed “202” with no other numbers.
How odd,
he thought. Handing his ticket to the attendant, and trying not to drop all the papers, he wedged the phone between his ear and shoulder.
    “Uh, hello?”
    “Ryker, this is Landon Parker. That was impressive. Especially the Golden Hour for a coup and the hundred-hour thing. Very illuminating. And timely, too. The Secretary is in Brussels today for the NATO summit and will be announcing a new State Department Crisis Reaction Unit. She is also going to announce the director who will launch and lead this effort. That person is you. Ryker, do not get on that plane.”

4.
    FOGGY BOTTOM, DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
    ONE YEAR LATER
    MONDAY, 9:55 A.M. EST
    “This is three-one-four, we are two minutes out.”
    The security officer in the front seat was holding his right ear and talking into his left wrist. The aide sitting next to Judd was, as he’d been doing for most of the past four hours, tapping feverishly with his thumbs on his BlackBerry.
    As the black Suburban crossed over the Arlington Memorial Bridge, returning Judd to the District of Columbia, his dreams of a lazy day of white sand and Carolina barbecue were long gone. Instead, he was reprising all the questions he should have asked Landon Parker that day twelve months ago.
If I
only knew then . . .
    •   •   •
    He had been so surprised and thrilled at being asked, that he hadn’t even considered asking about staff or a budget. It was just plain naïve not to consider how a new office, much less one led by an outside academic parachuting in, would be received by theexisting system. All bureaucracies were turf obsessed, he knew. But he was shocked at the particularly virulent, dog-eat-dog subculture of the United States Foreign Service.
    Maybe it was all the tours locked in the fishbowl of an embassy fortress in a faraway dangerous place. Perhaps it was the cocktail of hyperambition, natural human pettiness, and living just on the edge of Washington power. Being within reach of those with true influence can make it feel so far away. And even more desirable. Or possibly, Judd thought, it was just a spectacular irony that those tasked to build friends for America around the world would treat each other with such disdain.
    The result for Judd Ryker was a beautiful oak-paneled office with a view of the Lincoln Memorial, a mandate to help the United States government respond more quickly to evolving crises around the world, and no means whatsoever to get this task done. Who would want some new guy with his charts and data sticking his nose into their business? No one.
    In his first few weeks on the job, shooting had erupted in the Solomon Islands, an unstable archipelago in the South Pacific. Judd had been completely iced out. He’d even had solid new data on the causes of conflict in small island nations. Neither the Pacific team nor the Australia office director would even answer