Chapter 1: The First Spark
The ballroom had tipped past warm into stifling, the kind of heat that made everyone a little louder, a little more certain than they actually were. Jon Favreau stood with his back half against a column, jacket folded over his forearm, watching the rhythm of the room more than any one speaker—the cadence of agreement, the polite nods, the way people kept landing on the same phrases like they were stepping stones: credible threat, we can’t wait, after 9/11 we have to act.
It all sounded measured. Responsible. And it all felt… off.
A student moderator called for another open-floor comment, and Jon let his eyes drift toward the aisle just as she stood.
It hit him in that immediate, almost embarrassing way—before she’d even spoken. She wasn’t trying, which somehow made it worse. There was nothing ornamental about her, nothing curated for effect, and still his brain stalled for half a second like it needed to recalibrate. Blonde hair pulled back loosely, a face that didn’t soften itself for anyone, eyes already fixed on the front like she’d decided something long before she got out of her chair. Beautiful, yes, but not in a way that asked permission. It was… pointed. Intentional. You noticed it whether you wanted to or not.
She stepped up to the mic and adjusted it down a fraction, her expression already tight with something like disbelief.
“Okay,” she said, and the word came out on a breath that was almost a laugh, except there was no humor in it. “I feel like I’m in a different meeting than the rest of you.”
A few people chuckled reflexively. She didn’t.
“Hans Blix reported to the UN on January 27th that they’ve conducted over four hundred inspections across more than three hundred sites,” she continued, her voice steady but edged. “No stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons. No active nuclear program. That’s not speculation—that’s what the inspectors on the ground are actually finding.”
The room shifted, just slightly. Jon felt it ripple through the chairs.
She lifted a hand, ticking it off like she’d rehearsed it in her head a dozen times and was now irritated she had to say it out loud.
“The aluminum tubes? The Department of Energy says they’re not suitable for centrifuges. The uranium from Niger story? The documents are already being questioned as forgeries. And we’re still standing here acting like the case is airtight because the administration keeps saying it is.”
Someone near the front started to speak—“That’s not—”—
She turned her head just enough to catch him, not sharp, not loud, but final. “It is. You can read the reports yourself.”
Jon felt something like a jolt of recognition. Not just that she knew what she was talking about—but that she trusted herself to say it in a room that clearly didn’t want to hear it.
She leaned in a fraction, her grip on the podium tightening, not nervous—anchored.
“And inspections are working,” she went on, more emphatic now. “Blix and ElBaradei are asking for months, not years, because they’re getting access, they’re getting compliance, and they’re not finding what we’ve been told is definitely there. So why are we pretending this is urgent?”
A beat. Her eyes moved across the audience, sharper now.
“Containment has worked for twelve years. Iraq’s military is a fraction of what it was in 1991. They’re under sanctions, under surveillance, under constant threat. This isn’t an imminent danger—it’s a managed one.”
Jon could feel the tension ratchet up. This wasn’t abstract anymore. She was dismantling the scaffolding people were leaning on.
“And the 9/11 connection—” She let out a short, incredulous breath, shaking her head. “There isn’t one. The intelligence community has said there isn’t one. Saddam Hussein is a secular dictator who’s spent decades crushing Islamist movements. The idea that he’s working with Al-Qaeda is not just unproven—it doesn’t make sense.”
A few people clapped—quick, nervous, then stopped when it didn’t catch.
She didn’t look at them. She was looking at the people who weren’t.
“This is a preemptive war,” she said, slower now, each word placed carefully. “Which means we’re not responding to an attack. We’re deciding, based on disputed intelligence, to invade a country because they might become a threat at some point in the future.”
Her mouth pressed into a thin line, something like anger flickering through.
“And if we’re going to do that, then we should at least be honest about the consequences. Iraq is not a blank slate. It’s Sunni, Shia, Kurdish, held together by a dictator we’re planning to remove with no plan for what replaces him. That’s not stability. That’s a vacuum.”
She straightened slightly, her gaze sweeping the room again, daring someone to meet it and push back.
“And we’re doing it without broad UN support,” she added, almost as a closing argument. “So we’re not just starting a war of choice—we’re doing it in a way that undermines the very international system we claim to be defending.”
Silence, this time. Not total, but heavier. People looking at each other instead of nodding along.
She exhaled, some of the tension leaving her shoulders, but not the edge.
“I don’t know,” she said, and now there was a trace of something almost like disbelief again, softer but cutting in a different way. “It just feels like everyone decided what they wanted to do first and then went looking for reasons to justify it.”
That landed.
Jon felt it, clean and immediate.
She stepped back from the mic like she was done—no flourish, no waiting for approval—and for a second the room didn’t quite know what to do with her. Then a pocket of applause broke out, scattered, uneven, joined by a few more voices that sounded almost relieved to have something to clap for.
The silence didn’t hold.
It cracked almost immediately, not into applause this time but into motion—hands going up, people half-standing, the moderator blinking like he hadn’t expected the room to turn on a dime from polite agreement to something sharper, messier.
“Okay—uh—let’s, let’s take a few responses,” he said, trying to regain control, gesturing vaguely to the front rows.
Jon felt himself shift, straightening without realizing it. She hadn’t moved from the microphone. If anything, she’d settled into it, one hand resting lightly against the edge of the podium, her weight angled onto one hip like she had all the time in the world.
A guy near the center aisle got called on first, already leaning forward, voice tight with the kind of confidence that comes from thinking you’re about to correct someone.
“You’re ignoring the fact that after 9/11 we can’t afford to wait for threats to fully materialize,” he said, projecting, glancing around like he expected reinforcement. “The whole point is that we have to act before it’s too late.”
She didn’t interrupt. She let him finish. Then she tipped her head slightly, studying him for a second in a way that made Jon feel, inexplicably, like he was the one being evaluated.
“Okay,” she said, measured. “So just to be clear—your argument is that because we were attacked by Al-Qaeda, we should invade a country that the intelligence community says is not working with Al-Qaeda.”
A flicker crossed the guy’s face. “That’s not—there are links—”
“There aren’t,” she cut in, not raising her voice, just closing the door on it. “The CIA has said there aren’t operational links. The State Department has said there aren’t operational links. You can keep implying it, but that doesn’t make it true.”
A murmur rippled through the room. Jon felt it—half resistance, half something like reluctant interest.
“And preemption,” she went on, her tone tightening just slightly, “is supposed to be about imminent threats. Not hypothetical ones you build a case for after the fact. Otherwise we’re just saying the United States gets to invade any country we decide might be dangerous someday.”
She gave a small, almost incredulous shrug. “That’s not a doctrine. That’s a blank check.”
The moderator pointed to another hand, a girl this time, notebook already open on her lap like she’d been waiting.
“But Saddam has used chemical weapons before,” she said quickly. “Against his own people. Doesn’t that prove he’s capable of it again?”
Rina’s expression didn’t soften. If anything, it sharpened.
“Yes,” she said, nodding once. “In the 1980s. When we knew about it. And continued to support him anyway.”
That landed like a dropped glass.
“So if your argument is that using chemical weapons disqualifies someone from being tolerated by the international community,” she continued, leaning forward just a fraction, “then we should probably start by acknowledging our own role in that history before we use it as a justification for war twenty years later.”
The girl opened her mouth, then closed it.
“And again,” Rina added, more quietly now, but no less pointed, “capability in the past is not the same as current stockpiles. That’s why inspections exist. And right now, inspections are not finding them.”
Jon felt a low, involuntary exhale leave his chest. Jesus.
Another hand shot up, this one from the back—older student, louder voice, less interested in nuance.
“You’re putting a lot of faith in the UN,” he said, almost scoffing. “What if they’re wrong? What if we wait and then it turns out he does have nuclear weapons?”
She let out a short breath through her nose, something almost like a laugh, but edged.
“Then we go to war with actual evidence,” she said. “And with international support. And with legitimacy.”
She straightened slightly, her eyes locking onto him now.
“But that’s not the situation we’re in. The situation we’re in is that we don’t have that evidence, and we’re choosing to act anyway. And you don’t get to reverse-engineer urgency because you’re afraid of being wrong later.”
The guy shook his head, starting to push back—“That’s naive—”
“No,” she said, and this time there was steel in it. Not loud, but unmistakable. “What’s naive is thinking you can invade a country of twenty-five million people, dismantle its government, and not own the consequences.”
The room went quieter again, but it wasn’t the same quiet as before. This one was charged.
“You want to talk about worst-case scenarios?” she went on, her voice steady, controlled, but carrying. “Here’s one. You remove Saddam, you fracture the country along sectarian lines, you create a power vacuum, and suddenly Iran has more influence in the region than it’s had in decades. You inflame anti-American sentiment, you create new recruitment pipelines for extremist groups, and you end up staying there for years because there’s no clean exit.”
She paused, just long enough for it to sink in.
“That’s not hypothetical,” she said. “That’s what happens when you start a war without a plan for the peace.”
No one spoke.
Jon realized, distantly, that he was gripping his jacket a little tighter than before.
Another voice, softer this time, almost cautious. “So what do you do?” someone asked. “Just… nothing?”
Rina’s expression shifted—not softer, exactly, but more grounded, like she was stepping out of the argument and into something more deliberate.
“No,” she said. “You keep doing what’s working. Inspections. Containment. Pressure. You build an actual coalition if you need to act. You don’t rush into a war because it feels decisive.”
She glanced around the room again, slower this time, less confrontational, but no less certain.
“Doing nothing and doing something stupid are not the only two options.”
That hung there.
The moderator looked like he might try to move things along, but no one else raised their hand. Or maybe they did, but not with the same certainty as before.
Rina stepped back half an inch from the microphone, not leaving, just… done engaging on their terms.
Jon didn’t realize he was smiling until he felt it.
Not amused. Not exactly.
Impressed.
A little stunned, if he was being honest.
“Who is that?” he asked again, quieter this time, like the answer might matter more now.
The same guy beside him shrugged, less dismissive than before. “I don’t know. Harvard, I think.”
Jon let out a soft breath, eyes still fixed on her as people approached—some to argue, some to agree, all of them orbiting.
“Yeah,” he murmured, almost to himself.
Harvard.
Of course.
********
Jon didn’t leave when the session ended.
He told himself he was just lingering—waiting for the crowd to thin out, avoiding the awkward crush of people funneling toward the exits—but that wasn’t true, and he knew it. He stayed because she was still in the room.
He tracked her without meaning to at first. It was instinctive, the way your attention keeps snagging on something it hasn’t fully processed yet. She’d stepped down from the mic and been immediately pulled into a loose orbit of people—some leaning in, eager, others already bristling, arms crossed, ready to push back now that she wasn’t holding the microphone.
She didn’t retreat from it. That was the thing.
She stood there, shoulders loose but grounded, taking questions like she’d been doing it for years, not like she’d just spent ten minutes dismantling half the room. Jon watched the way she listened—actually listened—head tilted slightly, eyes locked in, and then responded with this almost surgical precision. No filler. No hedging. Just… clarity.
It was disorienting.
He’d been around smart people his whole life—Holy Cross was full of them, his internship circles even more so—but this felt different. Most people signaled intelligence. They performed it. She didn’t seem interested in that at all. If anything, she seemed faintly annoyed by the fact that she had to explain things that, to her, were already obvious.
Jon shifted his weight, still half-hidden by the column, trying to piece together what, exactly, had hit him so hard.
It wasn’t just what she’d said—though that had landed, undeniably. He’d read enough over the past few weeks to feel uneasy about the rush to war, the way the argument kept shifting depending on who was making it. But he hadn’t heard anyone lay it out like that. Clean. Specific. Grounded in facts that didn’t bend to the mood of the room.
No, it was how she said it.
Like she expected better from them.
That was the part that stuck.
“Dude.”
Jon blinked, turning slightly as Josh materialized at his side, already grinning like he’d walked in on something.
“You’ve been staring at that girl for, like, twenty minutes,” Josh said, following his line of sight without subtlety. “You good?”
Jon exhaled, dragging a hand over the back of his neck, trying for casual and not quite hitting it. “I’m not staring.”
“You are absolutely staring,” Josh shot back, amused. “It’s intense. I’m a little concerned.”
Jon huffed a quiet laugh, but his eyes flicked back to her anyway. “Did you hear her speak?”
“Parts of it,” Josh said with a shrug. “I was upstairs.”
Jon nodded once, like that explained everything. “Yeah. Well.”
He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t know how.
Josh squinted at her for a second, something clicking into place. “Oh—wait. That’s—” He snapped his fingers once, then looked back at Jon. “You don’t know who that is, do you?”
Jon frowned slightly, attention shifting. “Should I?”
Josh let out a short laugh, incredulous. “Dude. That’s a Lincoln.”
Jon’s brain stalled for a second. “What?”
“A Lincoln,” Josh repeated, like it was obvious. “I was talking to this girl from Harvard earlier—she said that’s Caterina Lincoln.”
The name hit like a delayed echo, something familiar snapping into focus a beat too late.
Jon straightened slightly, his gaze snapping back to her, really looking now.
Lincoln.
Of course.
His brain started pulling threads automatically, years of absorbed political lore lining up in seconds. Abraham Lincoln III—Chief Justice, civil rights titan, one of the last figures from that JFK/RFK era Jon had practically mythologized growing up. The kind of name that still carried weight in Massachusetts like it meant something.
And—
Eleanor.
His stomach dropped slightly as the memory surfaced. September 11. The coverage. Her face everywhere for a week straight—young, brilliant, gone. One of the stories that had stuck, that people held onto.
He looked at her again, sharper now, really seeing her.
And then—
“Oh, shit,” he muttered, more to himself than to Josh. “Didn’t she win the Olympics last year?”
Josh’s grin widened. “Yeah.”
Jon let out a quiet breath, something between disbelief and recognition settling in his chest.
Right.
Figure skating. Gold medal. The interviews—composed in a way that didn’t feel coached, just… controlled. The kind of control that comes from surviving something you shouldn’t have had to.
TIME cover. Every network. That story—losing her sister and then going out and winning anyway.
And now she was here.
In a Boston hotel ballroom, casually dismantling half a room full of future operatives like it was nothing.
Jon shook his head once, almost under his breath, still watching her.
“Jesus.”
Jon let out a slow breath, his brain trying to catch up to the version of her in front of him versus the one he’d seen on television.
“They didn’t say who she was,” he said, almost to himself.
Josh snorted. “Yeah, I think she likes it that way.”
Jon huffed a quiet laugh at that, but his eyes didn’t leave her.
Of course she did.
It fit. The way she’d spoken. The way she hadn’t once leaned on anything but the argument itself.
“Okay,” Josh said, nudging him lightly with his elbow. “So are you gonna keep staring, or are you actually gonna go talk to her?”
Jon hesitated.
It wasn’t nerves exactly—he wasn’t shy, not usually—but there was something about this that felt… different. Higher stakes, somehow, even though he couldn’t quite articulate why.
He glanced at her again. She’d just disengaged from one conversation, the guy she’d been speaking to looking faintly dazed, like he’d lost track of his own point somewhere in the middle of it.
She shifted her weight, scanning the room briefly, and for a second—just a second—her gaze passed over Jon.
Not lingered. Not a moment of recognition.
Just enough.
He exhaled.
“Yeah,” he said, more to himself than to Josh. “I’m gonna go talk to her.”
Josh grinned, already stepping back. “Godspeed.”
Jon rolled his eyes, but there was a flicker of something like adrenaline under his skin as he pushed off the column and crossed the room.
Up close, it was worse.
Not worse—just… more.
The presence. The focus. The way she seemed fully in whatever space she occupied, like she wasn’t splitting her attention to accommodate anyone else’s expectations.
She looked up as he approached, and this time her gaze did linger, assessing in a way that was immediate and unfiltered.
He felt it. And, weirdly, didn’t hate it.
“Hi,” he said, stopping a comfortable distance away, forcing himself not to overthink it. “That was—” He paused, recalibrating, because impressive suddenly felt too vague. “—really sharp.”
Her mouth curved, just slightly. Not quite a smile. More like she’d decided she didn’t hate that opening.
“Thank you,” she said, her tone even, but there was a flicker of curiosity there now. “That’s a better word than most people are using.”
Jon huffed a quiet laugh. “I’m guessing I missed some of the reviews.”
“You can imagine,” she said dryly, folding her arms loosely. “Apparently I’m naive, uninformed, and personally responsible for the fall of Western civilization.”
“Big day,” Jon said, deadpan.
That got a real smile—quick, but unmistakable.
“Something like that.”
There was a beat. Not awkward. Just… measured.
She tilted her head slightly, studying him. “So where do you land?”
Jon didn’t pretend not to understand the question.
He took a breath, choosing his words carefully—not because he thought she needed him to sound smart, but because he had the distinct sense she’d know immediately if he was bullshitting.
“I think the case they’re making is… inconsistent,” he said. “The rationale keeps shifting. First it’s WMDs, then it’s terrorism, then it’s democratization. And none of it feels fully substantiated.”
Her eyes sharpened, just a fraction.
“Okay,” she said. “So what do you think the strongest argument for going in is?”
Jon blinked, caught slightly off guard—not by the question itself, but by the direction of it.
He let out a small breath, thinking. “Deterrence, maybe,” he said slowly. “The idea that you can’t let regimes that have used chemical weapons before operate with any ambiguity about future capability. That waiting could be more dangerous if they are hiding something.”
She watched him closely as he spoke, not interrupting, but clearly tracking every piece of it.
“And?” she prompted when he paused.
“And I think that argument falls apart if the evidence doesn’t hold,” he said, more certain now. “Because then you’re not deterring a real threat—you’re establishing a precedent that we act on suspicion alone.”
A flicker of something—approval, maybe—crossed her face.
“Good,” she said, and there was no condescension in it, just a clean acknowledgment. “Most people stop at the first part.”
Jon felt a small, unexpected surge of satisfaction at that.
She shifted her weight slightly, uncrossing her arms, her posture opening just a fraction. “So you’re not pro-war,” she said, more as a conclusion than a question.
“I’m not convinced,” Jon replied.
Her mouth curved again, softer this time.
“That’s a better place to be than most of this room.”
There was a lightness to it now, the edge still there but less pointed at him.
Jon took a small risk. “You seem… convinced.”
She let out a quiet breath, something like a laugh, glancing briefly to the side before looking back at him.
“I am,” she said simply. “Mostly because I’m listening to the people who are actually doing the inspections instead of the people who’ve already decided the outcome.”
He nodded, then tilted his head slightly. “You always like being the only one in the room saying it?”
Her eyes flashed, amused. “I’m not the only one,” she said. “I’m just one of the only ones willing to say it out loud.”
Jon smiled at that, a real one now.
“Fair,” he said.
There was another beat, but this one felt different. Looser. Warmer.
She studied him again, but the edge had shifted—less interrogation now, more curiosity.
“So,” she said, almost casually, “what’s your name?”
“Jon,” he said. “Favreau.”
Something in her expression flickered—recognition, faint but there—and then settled.
“Caterina,” she said, like it was just a name, nothing more.
He didn’t call her on it.
Instead, he nodded once, meeting her gaze.
“Yeah,” he said, a small smile tugging at his mouth. “I figured.”
That earned him another flash of amusement, sharper this time.
“Did you,” she said lightly.
“Eventually,” Jon admitted. “You don’t exactly blend in.”
She huffed a soft laugh at that, shaking her head.
“I try,” she said.
“Sure you do,” he replied.
And this time, when she smiled, it lingered.