The Oval Office, long after midnight, had transformed. It was no longer a seat of state, but the central node of a vast, invisible nervous system. The President sat alone in the darkness, illuminated only by the glow of the secure terminal, a digital ghost sifting through the secrets of the world.
Raw intelligence, the lifeblood of the American empire, flowed to his screen. It was a deluge of encrypted signals, financial transfers, satellite imagery, and human intelligence reports that would have taken a team of analysts weeks to process. But he was not a normal analyst. He possessed a unique filter: the memory of the future.
He dove into the file on Fadi Al-Hassan. He saw the wire transfers and shell corporations of 2018 not as they were, but as what they would become. He saw a minor investment in a fledgling biotech firm and knew it would be worthless in six months. He saw a casual real estate purchase in London and knew it was the future safe house for a defecting Russian oligarch. He was a phantom walking through the past, seeing the consequences of actions before they were even fully taken.
He followed the money from the failed Dubai deal, a complex web designed to obfuscate. But he wasn't looking for the corruption the news story alleged. He was looking for a destination. For a motive. After hours of tracing funds through shell companies in the Caymans and Cyprus, he found the nexus point: a significant, hidden investment in a rising Chinese technology firm called Zentai Dynamics.
To any analyst in 2018, Zentai looked like a rocket ship. Its stock was soaring, and its work on AI-driven gene sequencing was hailed as revolutionary. But he knew the truth. He had read the classified after-action reports from the late 2020s. Zentai was a front, a state-sponsored tool for intellectual property theft and a key component of the Chinese military's technological ambitions. He knew that in a few years, Zentai would be sanctioned into oblivion, its name synonymous with espionage.
Al-Hassan's fund was heavily invested in a company that was a ticking time bomb. But that wasn't enough. He needed the second thread. The thread that led back to Arthur Kenwood.
He re-tasked the intelligence apparatus, commanding a deep search. He wanted every known financial link to Zentai Dynamics cross-referenced with the personal and professional portfolios of Kenwood and the board members of every company PhRMA represented.
The algorithms churned. The system hunted.
Then, at 3:17 AM, he found it. The connection. It was elegant in its corruption. Three of the largest pharmaceutical giants Kenwood represented, the very companies that would be most affected by the Patriot Push tariff, had used their offshore venture capital arms to invest hundreds of millions of dollars into Zentai Dynamics. They were betting on the company's gene-sequencing tech to fuel their next generation of profits.
He called Miles Vance into the darkened Oval Office.
His Chief of Staff, haggard and exhausted from a day of fending off the media, stepped into the room. "Sir? Any progress?"
He pointed to the screen, where he had mapped out the connections in a simple, damning chart. "The Dubai story isn't the reason for their fight, Miles. It's the smokescreen," he said, his voice low and cold.
He explained the link. The pharmaceutical giants, Kenwood's clients, were secretly in bed with a hostile foreign intelligence front. They were fighting his bill not just to protect their current supply chains, but to protect a massive, deeply compromised, and borderline treasonous future investment.
"They're fighting the Patriot Push because if we begin a serious economic decoupling from China, Zentai will come under scrutiny years ahead of schedule," he concluded. "Their nine-figure investment will evaporate. They are willing to risk our country's medical independence to protect their dirty secret."
Miles stared at the chart, his political panic replaced by a cold, patriotic fury. He was looking at a conspiracy that dwarfed a simple smear campaign. "What… what do we do? We can't declassify NSA intercepts."
"No," he agreed. "We can't show our hand. We can't let them know how we know." He looked at the name of the journalist on the original article: Sarah Jensen. "She's a good reporter, Miles. She just followed the evidence she was given. We're going to give her a new trail to follow."
He began to type, creating a new, anonymous dossier. He carefully selected non-attributable pieces of information: public investment records from Hong Kong, shipping manifests, corporate filings from the Cayman Islands. He wove them together, creating a series of breadcrumbs that were all verifiable through public means, if a journalist was tenacious enough to look. It was a map that would lead her to only one possible conclusion.
He finished and saved the file to a secure, encrypted drive.
"Kenwood tried to make me the story," he said, standing up from the desk. The first hint of dawn was breaking over the horizon. "We're about to make him the story."
He handed a small thumb drive to his Chief of Staff.
"Prepare a package," he commanded, his voice leaving no room for argument. "No fingerprints, digital or otherwise. Anonymous courier. I want this on Sarah Jensen's desk by sunrise. Not at her office. At her home."