A fragile sense of victory had settled over the West Wing. In the week following the disastrous committee hearing, Arthur Kenwood and his lobbyists had gone silent. The Patriot Push Act, guided by the newly energized Anna Hayes, was making steady, quiet progress. For the first time, it seemed their audacious plan might actually have a chance.
The calm shattered on a Tuesday morning.
Miles Vance burst into the Oval Office without knocking, his face the color of ash. He held a tablet in his trembling hand, the screen displaying the lead story of the nation's most respected newspaper.
"Sir," he stammered, his voice tight. "It's started."
He took the tablet. The headline was a cannonball shot through the morning's peace: PRESIDENT'S PRE-ELECTION DUBAI DEAL RAISES ETHICS QUESTIONS: Foreign Cash Funneled to Family Business?
The byline belonged to Sarah Jensen, a Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist known for her meticulous research and her refusal to back down from a fight. The story was a masterpiece of innuendo and carefully curated facts. It detailed a complex hotel licensing deal the President's private company had pursued in 2015, before his election. It involved a Dubai-based investment fund with opaque connections. The article didn't outright accuse him of a crime; it was far more insidious. It simply laid out a series of supposedly damning documents—leaked emails, wire transfer requests, meeting notes—and asked pointed questions, letting the reader's imagination fill in the blanks.
It was a character assassination, executed with surgical precision.
As he read, the host's memories supplied the context with perfect, jarring clarity. He remembered the Dubai deal. It had been a frustrating, labyrinthine negotiation that ultimately fell apart over financing. The memories were colored with the old President's rage and frustration at the collapsed deal. But he felt none of that. The man from the future felt only a profound, chilling detachment.
He was being attacked for a life he had not lived, for decisions he had not made. He was a ghost being haunted by the sins of his vessel.
"The phones are ringing off the hook," Miles said, pacing frantically. "CNN is running a special report. The talking heads are demanding an independent counsel. This is Kenwood's work, sir. He couldn't kill the bill, so he's trying to kill the President."
The old President would have been raging. He would have been on the phone with his lawyers, tweeting furiously, calling the story a witch hunt. He would have been emotional, reactive, and loud.
But he sat in silence, his eyes scanning the digital copy of the article again, not with anger, but with the cold, dispassionate focus of a crisis analyst dissecting a problem. He wasn't reading the accusations. He was studying the weapon. He was looking for the fingerprints of the man who had built it.
In a darkened office across town, Arthur Kenwood watched the cable news coverage with a deep sense of satisfaction. He had met with Sarah Jensen himself, playing the part of a reluctant source passing on information from a "concerned patriot" within the Treasury Department. He had given her a trove of documents, ninety percent of them real, ten percent of them clever forgeries or taken out of context to create a narrative. He knew Jensen's integrity would lead her to verify the real documents, and in doing so, she would unknowingly legitimize the fictions he had woven among them.
He had successfully changed the battlefield. The conversation in Washington was no longer about supply chains and tariffs. It was about presidential corruption.
Back in the Oval Office, Miles was spiraling. "We have to issue a denial. We need to get our surrogates on television to push back. We need to…"
"Quiet, Miles," he said, his voice cutting through the panic. His command was so absolute, so devoid of alarm, that Miles stopped pacing instantly.
He wasn't looking at the headline anymore. His finger was tracing a single name deep in the body of the article: the managing director of the Dubai fund, a man named Fadi Al-Hassan.
"This story isn't a fire, Miles," he said, looking up from the tablet, his eyes clear and focused. "A fire spreads uncontrollably. This is a construct. A machine. And every machine has a weak point."
The host's memory of Al-Hassan was of a smooth, frustratingly evasive negotiator. But his own analytical mind, honed in a future of interconnected data, saw not a person, but a node. A nexus of information.
"Kenwood thinks he's attacking my past," he said, a cold, dangerous light entering his eyes. "He's made a critical error. He assumes my relationship with my own history is the same as any other man's. He thinks I'll be defensive. Emotional."
He stood up and walked to his secure terminal. "He has no idea I'm about to treat my own past as a hostile intelligence file."
He turned to his shaken Chief of Staff. "Get me the complete, unredacted NSA and CIA profiles on Fadi Al-Hassan and every board member of his fund. I want every business partner, every wire transfer, every phone call a satellite has ever picked up. I want to know who he talks to in Beijing and Moscow. I want to know where his children go to school."
Miles stared at him, a new kind of fear replacing his political panic. This was not a president preparing a press release. This was a commander preparing a counterintelligence operation.
"Kenwood has handed me a thread," he said quietly. "He thinks it's attached to a scandal that will unravel me. He's wrong. It's attached to his own network. And I'm going to pull it until his entire world comes apart."