Washington, D. C., Wednesday…

Pierce Hamilton, National Security Advisor to President John Fulton, sat across from the President's desk in the oval office. While Fulton shuffled through the papers - when would the old man use classified e-mail and video-mail like everyone else? - Hamilton looked around the office.

The White House was showing its age. It had gone through various repairs and upgrades on both the inside and outside, the last major one two years before Fulton took office. But a lot of the furnishings could only be classified as very old and worn antiques. That didn't seem to bother Fulton. He was something of an antique himself.

President Fulton had won the election his first term with a populist and antiwar platform. In the primaries, his only strong contender had been Stephanie Williams, who was known for her tough anti-crime positions and America-first ideas. She had become his VP on the ticket and they had won in a landslide. The other principal party's candidate, associated with the war and foreign policy failures of the previous administration, didn't stand a chance. The third party was almost a no-show.

Pierce Hamilton was a small, wiry and bookish individual who had become associated with John Fulton when the man was governor of Missouri. His unruly mop of rust-colored hair, blue eyes, sunken cheeks, and Pinocchio nose often caused people to underestimate him. In his everyday life and in his role as National Security Advisor, he had the kind of analytic mind that often allowed him to leap beyond the ordinary solutions achieved by small, conservative, strictly logical steps to really novel solutions derived from bold intuitions. He needed every bit of his mental capacity in order to manage the vast intelligence network which would degenerate into chaotic and often competitive bureaucracies without his guidance. He needed that network to be working well, as it provided him with the data that allowed him to counsel the President with what he hoped was the right solution for a given situation. Some of those in that network often feared or despised him, although, in spite of the power he wielded, he was a firm believer in justice and fair play, so most respected him. Many called him the President's conscience.

John Fulton needed no conscience, however. He had grown up in poverty in a black St. Louis slum, starting out his political life as a sixteen-year-old volunteer in a heavily contested presidential campaign. His conscience was honed by his parish priest, a staunch fighter for the common good, who often was at odds with his bishop. When Fulton's father died at the age of twelve, the parish priest became the father figure.