Empire

Finding the enemy

It was Reuben’s PDA that got Cecily through the first month of widowhood. Recording the shipments and financial transactions, following the trails, searching for patterns, tracking corporate entities, passing along names and leads to FBI and DIA agents: It was a vast spiderweb, with Reuben’s notes like dewdrops that reveal where the otherwise invisible strands must be.

It was an urgent task. And they were Reuben’s notes. Reuben’s words. It was his trail that she was following. All those days when he traveled on assignments he couldn’t tell her about, all those trips abroad and in America, all those nights when she could see that he was troubled and yet knew he couldn’t talk about it. Now he was telling her.

Meanwhile, Aunt Margaret brought the children down to Gettysburg and stayed with them. “I’m an old widow myself,” she said. “I know how hard it is. You need the children near, and you also need to lose yourself completely in something that isn’t your family. So here I am and here I’ll stay while you save the world.”

It wasn’t the world Cecily was saving. It might be America. It might be herself.

But one thing was certain. It was not going to save Reuben’s reputation. There was no way that he could have helped but see that something wrong was going on. Too much of what he did was within the borders of the United States. Most of the shipments seemed to go from port city to port city, so some illusion could be maintained that these weapons shipments were going overseas. But who would bring weapons from China or Russia to the United States in order to ship them to pro-U.S. partisan groups in Iran or Sudan or Turkmenistan? Reuben had to at least wonder if some or all of these weapons were meant to be used domestically.

Which was why he kept these notes on the PDA—and why he was so reluctant to give it into anyone else’s hands. Because he knew something dangerous was going on and he was helping with it—yet he believed he was doing it for a President that he admired and trusted, and so he acted the good soldier and did the jobs he was assigned to do.

Yet if it turned out to be wrong, he would have the paper trail—well, the digital trail—that someone could use to track it all down. Reuben never needed records like this. He had trained his memory like a Jesuit. So he was deliberately creating evidence.

He knew he was only guessing about the integrity of the people he served. If he guessed wrong, then he was serving traitors, and he could not claim that it had never occurred to him. All he could do was make sure that the full confession was here. The evidence to unravel what he had helped them do.

If only he had talked to me, she thought again and again.

And most of the time she answered herself: What did I know? What would I have counseled? Of course, caution, yes—I’m the woman who set aside the political career to raise a family. I choose safety. That’s what I do. But I also loved Reuben. Still love him. And I knew how unhappy he would be, to walk away from something that might have been in service of a cause, a President, he believed in.

So few seemed to believe in that President, and yet Reuben was sure that he was pursuing the right course. So would she have counseled him to give it up? To denounce it?

And… could he have given it up? It was clear now that he had been working for and with murderers and traitors. Would they have let him walk away, even she had advised him? No. There was too much danger that he would then denounce them—they would have killed him. And she would have spent the last year or so consoling her children about their father’s apparent suicide. Or traffic accident. Whatever method they used.

Things happened as they happened. Reuben accepted the hand dealt to him, and bet on it. Bet his life on it.

Whatever others may think of the choices he made, I know his heart. I know that he would and did sacrifice anything for the cause of freedom, in support of those he believed also fought for it. He took the long view of history. He cared about the world their grandchildren would inherit. He despised those who thought only of themselves, their immediate advantage. Whatever I might have advised him, he would have done what he did. I could not have changed him.

I wouldn’t have tried.

So she shed tears over her work, but she kept working.

Reuben’s jeesh came in and out of the Gettysburg White House, as the media were calling it now. She knew them all by their noms de guerre now: Cole, not Coleman; Load, not Lloyd. Mingo, Benny, Cat, Babe, Arty, Drew. Very young men when they first trained to be soldiers, but now men, seasoned veterans.

LaMonte knew an asset when he saw one. Eight extraordinarily good soldiers whose loyalty had already been tested. He turned them over to his National Security Adviser, and Averell Torrent used them for missions that required deftness, quickness. Seize this. Destroy that. In twos and threes they went out, sometimes in uniform, sometimes in civilian clothes, sometimes heavily armed in attack choppers, sometimes on domestic flights with no weapons at all.

They would find the agents of the Progressive Restoration and follow them to where their weapons or funds were stashed. The weapons were to be used to eliminate opponents of the Progressive Restoration in key states, as they had been used in the attempt to kill Cole, or to serve to defend states or cities that came over to the rebel side. The funds were to be used to bribe legislators, governors, mayors, and city councilors who needed a little help making up their mind.

Some of their small victories were kept secret; others, though, Averell Torrent went before the cameras to announce. Cessy soon realized that publicity depended on whether any rebels were killed who were not under arms. Take down a mech or blow up a hovercycle, and Torrent would go on the news, calmly and reassuringly telling the American people that an attempt had been made to assassinate a loyal American official, but the violent Progressive Revolution and its terrifying weapons had been stopped in their tracks.

But if the dead bodies were not men in body armor or ensconced in the new machines, then the event had no national significance. It was a matter for local law enforcement. If anyone noticed that the victims had been sympathetic toward the rebels’ cause, the killing was assumed to be the work of local right-wing vigilantes.

The result was that LaMonte’s administration retained its image of being infinitely patient, taking action only to protect American lives from the depredations of the rebels. And people got used to seeing Averell Torrent as the calm, reassuring voice of moderation, reluctantly taking action when forced to by the enemies of peace and freedom, but otherwise merely asking Americans to trust in the democratic process and not throw in their lot with the violence of the Progressive Restoration.

Meanwhile, the members of Reuben’s jeesh would stop in and see her whenever they passed through Gettysburg. They all regarded it as part of their work, to help her decode the Farsi that Reuben had used for his notes. Words and phrases that were repeated, she would learn, but many phrases weren’t in the dictionary, or at least not with the meaning he was using. Much of his Farsi was really the private language he and his comrades had developed—there was English slang in the Farsi, sometimes translated and sometimes transliterated, as there was also Arabic and Spanish and whatever other languages they happened to know.

It was all translated within a week, more or less. Then they helped her study the maps. She had threads that traced all the shipments, and as she learned whatever the FBI and DIA could find out for her about those shipments, she began to build up a clearer picture.

Meanwhile, she met with others in Gettysburg who were trying to figure out the Progressive Restoration movement—the rebels, as they called them now in the office. How much money would this all take? Who has that kind of money and can spend it without detection? Is the source of this foreign or domestic? They had to keep in mind the possibility that the Chinese were at the root of this. Or Al Qaeda. Even Russia. The joke inside Gettysburg was that it was really the French behind everything. They’d been secretly running the world since Napoleon, following an extraordinarily deceptive master plan that would eventually lead to conquering the world.

Jokes aside, it became clear to Cecily and those who agreed with her that a conspiracy like this had to be very tightly held or it would have been detected long before. Even true believers in a cause can be careless, but nobody had been. Nothing leaked. How?

The organization that Cecily imagined bringing this off consisted of only a handful of people, who then hired or encouraged others to do what they needed, but without telling them anything about what it was for.

But there were some points where they had to let larger numbers in on what they were doing. Somehow they had to recruit the soldiers who would run these machines, and the pattern was emerging: They must have recruited among groups of veterans who had turned against the war, the military, or the President. She had to assume it was the left-wing version of the way right-wing militias recruited. Find who’s pissed off. Then find the ones who are angry enough to train to kill for the cause.

The bodies of those killed at Great Falls and at the Holland Tunnel established the profile, and now the investigators were tracking down others who had dropped out of sight in the past year or so.

Another place where they had to let outsiders in on the secret was weapons development. This wasn’t something you did as a hobby. They had to recruit from among the experts—American experts, since nothing about the designs suggested European or Japanese concepts.

So the FBI worked on assembling a list of disgusted or disaffected researchers who had dropped out of sight over the years and could now be assumed to be working for the rebels. There were also some former automobile and aviation designers, computer engineers and hotshot programmers whose political views were far to the left and whose rage had seemed, to many of their coworkers, disproportionate. Some of them were found, having made perfectly innocent career changes. Others were not found at all. They went on the list.

The weapons themselves were still intimidating, but no longer baffling. With several mechs to study from the battle at the Holland Tunnel, the DOD experts had found nothing that couldn’t be built using existing design theory. Excellent, creative engineers built these weapons, but not necessarily geniuses. Their work could be duplicated and countered.

Except for the EMP gun. The DOD people still had not duplicated the technology that kept the directed pulse coherent over such a long range. It was a serious problem that the rebels had an air defense system that kept military aircraft from overflying New York City any lower than satellite level. The DOD was working on systems that would momentarily shut down all electronics while the EMP blew through. But planes that depended on electronics to stay aloft were almost as damaged by the shutdown as by the EMP itself.

The U.S. was used to having air supremacy. Over loyal territory they still did. But that territory was shrinking, bit by bit.

Because in the absence of a firm military response, Americans who viewed the Progressive Restoration as heroes began to believe that they might just bring this thing off. Some worried that the leaders of the Progressive Restoration had not come forward—but the New York City Council insisted that they were now leading the movement to “restore Constitutional government” and the Progressive Restoration was obeying their orders. It put democratically elected officials at the apparent head of the movement, and for many people who sympathized with their views, that was enough.

In the first month, the legislatures ofWashington State and Vermont passed resolutions joining themselves to the Progressive Restoration. In Washington the governor vetoed that action and mobilized the National Guard to make sure that no mechs or hovercycles showed up in Washington. The trouble was, he also asked President Nielson to keep U.S. forces from taking any “provocative military action.” In effect, the state had declared itself neutral territory.

Meanwhile quite a few cities had passed or nearly passed resolutions declaring their recognition of the Progressive Revolution. And there were well-orchestrated movements in other states pressing for their legislatures to jump on the bandwagon.

There was no shortage of liberals, from moderate to radical, who also condemned the rebellion. This was the wrong way to go about it, they said. Nobody should have died, they said. If the Progressive Revolution has any links to the assassinations of Friday the Thirteenth, they should be tried and punished for the crimes.

At the same time, many voices that condemned the rebellion also argued strongly against taking military action. Cecily was not surprised to hear them call for negotiations. Having lived for years with a soldier-historian, she knew that negotiations only worked when you had something to offer or when the other side thought they had something to fear from you. It was hard to see what negotiations with rebels would accomplish except to give them time to build more and more support in the rest of the country.

Cecily could hear Reuben’s voice in her mind, scoffing at all these people. If the states tolerate a takeover of the federal government by force, we’ll never have peace again, he’d say.

The trouble was he wasn’t here for her to argue with him, to tell him that if this rebellion was suppressed by military action against an American city, there would be no forgiveness for it. He would listen. He would realize that she was right, or at least that her views had to be taken into account.

Meanwhile, she worked at her investigation. The key was figuring out where all these shipments were controlled from, where the money flowed. When her information was complete, it could be combined with information from the other investigations and maybe they could figure something out.

She was glad she had her job and not LaMonte’s. Because the country’s split over how to respond to the war showed up in Congress. Party discipline was breaking down on both sides of the aisle. There were Democrats calling for military action against the rebels, and Republicans calling for a wait-and-talk policy. Each side of the debate saw only the worst possible consequences for the other side’s view.

Which was a recipe for indecision and obstruction in Congress. No one there had declared for the rebels; no one had resigned, not even the Congressmen from New York City. All were calling for the Progressive Restoration to leave New York.

But that didn’t mean that there weren’t substantial numbers of Congressmen acting to slow down any kind of military action. Part of that was to hold up approval of President Nielson’s appointments.

They approved George Sarkissian as the new Secretary of State, though with a battle; Averell Torrent sailed through as National Security Adviser. However, there was such virulent opposition to former Secretary of State Donald Porter as the new Vice President—it was called a needlessly provocative action—that the acting Speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate refused to push through a vote on his confirmation even though they were of the President’s party.

And there was no chance of getting a new Secretary of Defense through, regardless of who it was. The Republicans threatened to name one of their most radically right-wing members as Speaker of the House to replace LaMonte Nielson, making him the next in line for the presidency. But this was abandoned when legal experts in the law schools howled that even though it might be technically legal, the effect would be an end run around the Constitutional requirement that the new next-in-line to the presidency be approved by both houses of Congress. “It’s just what you’d expect,” said one of the sound bites, “given the reckless disregard for the Constitution shown by the Republicans from 2000 on.” Once that became the story, the maneuver became politically impossible and the House continued with an Acting Speaker.

International reaction was predictable but maddening.The sworn enemies of the United States were quick to recognize the Progressive Restoration, declaring their U.N. ambassadors to be ambassadors to the United States as well, downgrading their ambassadors in Washington to mere consular status. But that sort of thing was expected from those nations, hardly worth noticing.

It was the wait-and-see reaction from supposed allies in NATO and elsewhere that infuriated LaMonte and Sarkissian. As Sarkiss-ian said in one meeting, “Do our allies really want an armed rebellion controlled by unknown persons to get their fanatical little hands on the nuclear button?”

The worst was that President Nielsen’s inner council was divided as well. Sarkissian and Porter argued for military action. Torrent argued for them to wait. And so far, at least, LaMonte was deciding things Torrent’s way.

“You’re right,” LaMonte said to Sarkissian and Porter, more than once. “Our inaction is practically inviting other states to attempt to join with the rebels. But their resolutions have no legal force whatsoever. Passing a resolution doesn’t give them military power. When we decide to take action, we’ll take that action.”

The longer we wait means the larger the portion of the country that will have to be treated like an occupied enemy when the war is over, they said.

But always LaMonte would say, “It’s a struggle for hearts and minds. They want us to use military might. In their view, it proves that they’re right about us. So we’ll limit ourselves to very small military actions while we find out who these people really are. When we find out who’s funding all this and who’s giving the orders, then we can treat it as what it is—a police matter. We’ll arrest the perpetrators, seize their military and financial assets, and then welcome everybody back to constitutional government with open arms and no grudges. That can only happen if there’s no invasion, no bloodbath.”

Cecily attended some of these meetings, though not as a participant, merely as an observer and a resource if someone should need her to answer a question. She knew that LaMonte did not come up with this plan himself. His adamant stand in favor of investigation-before-invasion was Torrent’s plan.

But it was the right one. There was a reason why Reuben had respected the man so much. He was brilliant. He was completely nonpartisan. He always reasoned from practical principles: This might work, this certainly won’t. And as he sent Reuben’s jeesh out on missions that always worked, his stock rose higher and higher in the administration—and in Congress. He could speak the language of liberals to liberals and conservatives to conservatives, and yet his words to one group never antagonized the other. He was a living exemplar of what it might mean to be a moderate, if there were such things in American politics anymore.

It was also Torrent who heard from everybody working on the investigation. So it was hardly a surprise when he was the one who put it all together into some clear answers.

Not clear enough to announce anything, though. Because what he didn’t have was proof of the kind that would overwhelm the media and the opposition in Congress.

“We can’t build this like a legal case in corporate law,” he explained to Cecily and the jeesh. “It isn’t a judge we have to convince, it’s the very people who are most committed to disbelieving everything we say.”

“So who is it?” asked Cecily.

“We’ve known from the start who the most likely person behind all this is,” said Torrent. “Aldo Verus.”

“He’s a clown,” said Babe. “His birth name was Aldo Vera. A joke, like Armand Hammer.”

“He’s a straw man,” said Drew. “The favorite bugbear of conservatives.”

“Which is why we’ve worked so hard to find somebody else,” said Torrent. “But Verus has been using his uncountable fortune to fund ultra-left-wing movements for years. His avowed purpose has always been to bring down the late President. He closely monitors every dime he contributes to front organizations to make sure it’s being effectively used. He requires them to raise matching funds so he can husband his resources. He’s a smart guy, he’s grimly determined, and just because he announced his goal doesn’t mean he can’t be the one who’s accomplishing it.”

Torrent proceeded to enumerate the business holdings Verus had divested over the past two years. “He had plenty of money out of ordinary profits to fund the design of these weapons. But our weapons experts say that to get them from prototype to production, the big expenditures would have begun about two years ago. And that’s exactly when he started selling off these companies.”

“He can’t outspend the Defense Department,” said Cat. “Nobody has that much money.”

“He’s a better manager of his money than the Defense Department,” said Torrent. “He doesn’t have to maintain bases or pay the salaries of thousands of soldiers in Korea and Germany. He doesn’t have to please Congressmen. And he doesn’t have to match our military strength—he only has to have a credible enough force to cause us trouble.”

Torrent gave them copies of the report on the probable cost of manufacturing the mechs and the hovercycles. “We’ve run the numbers. Assuming he pays his soldiers comparably to U.S. soldiers, and assuming that only one out of five of the mechs is internally manned, while the others are controlled by a computer operator at a remote location, and comparing that with the money we know he got from the sales of directly-owned assets, our estimate is that a possible force configuration is 250 mechs, a thousand hovercycles, and an additional thousand soldiers who run the focused EMPs and handle routine foot patrol.”

“Don’t forget that he might have plenty of funding that isn’t his own money,” said Cat. “There’s all that Hollywood cash.”

“That all had to be put into tax-deductible organizations. The only American money he can spend without public accountability is his own,” said Torrent.

“But he might have tapped into Iranian money,” suggested Benny.

“Possibly. Or Russian or Chinese. But I don’t think so. If Verus accepted even a dime of foreign money, and it became known, then he’d lose vast amounts of his support. His cause can’t look like it’s sponsored by foreigners, period.”

“Okay,” said Cecily. “Let’s just say it’s Verus, and he has the force you estimate, what then?”

“Satellite photos of the forces deployed in New York City indicate fewer than fifty mechs and only a couple of hundred hovercycles.”

“A fifth of your estimate,” said Drew.

“Exactly,” said Torrent. “Where’s the rest of it?”

Arty immediately said, “He’s got stashes all over the country. Look how fast mechs and hovercycles popped up when they were chasing Cole.”

“Six mechs and a dozen hovercycles,” said Torrent. “Near the nation’s capital, at a time when they were needed to keep Major Malich’s PDA from getting into our hands. But I don’t think there are stashes all over, and you know why.”

“Secrets are hard to keep,” said Drew.

“Don’t divide your forces,” said Cole.

“Both,” said Torrent. “Verus can’t afford to have lots of hiding places, because these things are hard to hide. Especially the soldiers. It’s hard to disguise garrisons, especially if you’re training them to keep them in top form. And he doesn’t want tiny forces scattered around where he might never need them. He needs to have most of them in one really terrific hiding place. A place from which he can disperse them as needed.”

“Where?” said Cole.

“I don’t know,” said Torrent.

They all showed their disappointment.

“But you don’t know it’s Aldo Verus, either,” said Cecily. “So where do you think it is?”

“That’s why I had you bring in your map,” he said. “Just as Verus is the obvious guy, the place is obvious, too.”

Cecily lifted up the map and propped its frame on the end of the table. “I’ve been looking at it for weeks now, and it’s not obvious to me.”

“First, let’s look at what he needs,” said Torrent. “Rough terrain. A place where big things can easily be hidden. Which means forest or mountains. Or both. Iowa need not apply.”

The soldiers nodded.

“Then he needs it to be close to where he’ll need it. He isn’t planning to conquer the whole U.S., he’s going to try to win over and protect territories that are largely sympathetic to his cause.”

“Blue states,” said Drew.

“No,” said Torrent. “Because you know that ‘blue states’ and ‘red states’ are a lie. Most of the blue states are blue because the city vote overwhelmed the rural vote. But he can’t hide these things inside a city, can he?”

Again they agreed with his reasoning.

“Then he needs isolation. Unsettled territory. Few neighbors. That practically rules out the whole East and Midwest, doesn’t it? The land is too heavily settled, too constantly observed. Even in the wildest part of the mountains of New York State—ignoring how Republican those areas are—there are thousands of overnights and too much traffic on the roads.”

“So he goes west,” said Cole.

“Not California. Again, too populated and too many conservatives. There are only two states with wide open spaces, Progressive political dominance, and conservatives who feel so hammered they’ve practically given up.”

“Ecotopia,” said Mingo.

“Washington and Oregon,” said Torrent. “That’s right. Now look at Mrs. Malich’s map.”

Until that point, Cecily had seen it all as a web of shipments crisscrossing the country. But if you looked only at Oregon and Washington, Oregon was practically empty of endpoints. “It has to be Washington,” she said. “But where? It’s a big state.”

“He needs to be near a major highway,” said Torrent. “But he has to be in very rugged country.”

“Most of the rugged country is on the west side, in the Cascades,” said Cecily. “Which is also the most Progressive part of the state.”

“It fits his recipe,” said Torrent. “Assuming we’re right.”

“But haven’t you already looked at the satellite photos?”

“Of course,” said Torrent. “And there’s nothing. But there’s nothing anywhere in the world. Teams in the DOD have gone over the whole world looking for a place where these things might be built and stored.”

“So you think he went underground,” said Drew.

“We think that one of these mountains is probably riddled with caverns. Aldo Verus is smart enough to learn from Al Qaeda’s tunneling. Only he’ll do it on a larger scale, and totally high tech.”

“What about the dirt?” said Mingo. “I’ve worked construction, man. I’ve dug tunnels. You get a shitload of dirt and it shows up on satellites, believe me.”

“Not if it isn’t on the surface either.”

“You can’t dig a hole and hide the dirt in the hole you dug,” said Mingo. “Then it ain’t a hole anymore.”

“I thought of that,” said Torrent.

“I’m not surprised,” said Cecily.

“You dig the hole and hide the dirt underwater.”

“So it’s on the coast?” asked Arty.

“Somebody would have seen it if he were loading dirt onto boats and dumping it offshore. But Washington has a lot of lakes. Natural ones and artificial ones. Here’s what I think. Verus used his funding of politically active environmental groups to get them to withdraw their opposition to building a dam somewhere. It just sails through. A dam in a canyon is going to form a really deep lake. So what if Verus owns a mountain right by the lake, and while the lake level is rising, his people are dumping rubble from their tunnel-building into the water? From the satellites, it just looks like the water level is rising higher and higher. Nobody’s boating on it because the lake is still being filled. Nobody sees anything.”

“Is Verus that smart?” asked Cole.

“Maybe not. Maybe it all happened in Russia or China. Maybe it isn’t even Verus. But I think it is Verus and he is that smart. He practically owns the whole Progressive movement himself, it can’t be anybody else because nobody does anything on the Left without his fingers in it. He’s like Hitler with Mein Kampf, he announced it all right up front, only nobody believes he’s serious, nobody believes it can be done. But look at what these rebels have accomplished. They’ve got New York, not only our largest city and probably the most Progressive, but the home of most of the news networks including Fox—which, by the way, he’s smart enough not to censor yet. And with New York they have the U.N. And they conducted this invasion in such a way that the city council endorsed it after the fact. These people are now the legally constituted police force of New York City so that technically they aren’t even occupying the city, they’re part of it. You think some committee of really sincere progressives brought this off?”

“I don’t know, we’re a committee,” said Cole. “We’re pretty smart.”

“And we’re thirty feet from the President’s office,” said Torrent. “Smart people don’t form committees and send out mailings. They gravitate toward power so their ideas can be implemented.”

“Brains and money,” said Drew.

Torrent smiled. “One man with brains and money and ruthless ambition, all in service of a cause, so he feels completely justified in killing all kinds of people along the way, from Presidents to doormen. Doesn’t all this sound like the same mind that played us all the way he did with Friday the Thirteenth and Major Malich’s clandestine operations and… everything?”

He didn’t need to mention General Alton’s nearly successful attempt to involve Nielson in declaring martial law. He only had to look at Cole.

“I’m buying it,” said Cole. “At least as a possibility. I assume you’ve already identified all the new dams and new lakes in Washington.”

“Only two candidates for the job,” said Torrent. “Right next to each other, part of the same power and water project. Lakes Chin-nereth and Genesseret.”

“Aren’t those based on the Greek and Hebrew names for the Sea of Galilee?” said Cat.

They looked at him as if they’d never met him before.

“What, a black man can’t study Hebrew?” said Cat. “Army taught me Arabic, Hebrew is the next language over. And I’m a lay minister.”

“The lakes were named for a religious colony that was in the little valley just below where the dams are,” said Torrent. “Nowadays nobody lives anywhere near there. All the surrounding land is national forest, leased by a bunch of lumber companies. I have no idea which of the two lakes was used for dumping dirt. Maybe both. The main thing is, they had no trouble getting their permits. Two lawsuits from environmental groups, but they were dropped.”

“If it’s really where the rebel garrison is, what can we do against two hundred mechs and eight hundred hovercycles?”

“Remember,” said Torrent, “my guesses about what he’s got could be in the wrong proportions. Maybe he’s got twice as much equipment and half as many people. Every person they trained was a possible leak. Maybe Verus never had more than a couple of hundred soldiers. Now they might be scrambling to train volunteer soldiers from New York City. They might have hundreds of mechs lined up against walls with nobody to run them.”

“Or maybe they have weapons we haven’t seen yet,” said Mingo.

“Or an army of thousands armed with standard weapons in addition to the troops that run their new machines,” said Babe.

“I don’t want you guys to make a frontal assault,” said Torrent. “We need surgery here. We need proof.”

“What constitutes proof?” said Cecily. “Half the people in the world don’t even believe we landed on the moon back in ’69. Why would they believe a bunch of pictures of mechs lined up in a cave when Hollywood CGI can create footage of racks of robots or crowds of soldiers?”

“But your video will be grainy and crappy-looking,” said Torrent. “So people will believe it. Besides, what we really want is Aldo Verus and his top people, ready to confess to everything.”

“Why would they talk?” said Cole.

“Are you kidding?” said Torrent. “Verus is a talker. It’s killing him that he’s had to keep this a secret. But he knows that if he’s captured, it’s all over for his particular campaign. No doubt he has visions of the Progressive Movement Worldwide going on without him. But this little war of his, beginning with Friday the Thirteenth, is over. At that point, what’s to hide? He’ll want to brag because he’s a bragger. He doesn’t just love his movement, he loves that it’s his movement. He’ll be eager to sign a book deal with Knopf and believe me, he’ll write every word himself. Verus is the Unabomber—with money.”

“You make it sound so easy,” said Cecily. “But my husband couldn’t even get out of the Pentagon alive. How are these guys supposed to go into an unscouted location and bring back a living prisoner with hundreds of troops shooting at them?”

“That won’t be the situation,” said Torrent. “If I’m right, then when we have possession of either Verus himself or Verus’s dead body, right there in their fortress, the other guys will stop because what’s the point?”

“They’re true believers, that’s why,” said Cecily. “They’re fanatics. They’ll keep shooting.”

“Some of them might,” said Torrent. “But at the point you have possession of Verus and, I hope, his top people, then you call in the Army. You just have to hold out till they finish mopping up resistance and secure the rest of the prisoners.”

“What if we can’t find the installation at all?” said Cole.

“That’s the thing,” said Torrent. “It’s all guesswork. And I certainly have no idea where in the area around the lake this place will be, if it exists. Or where, inside it, we’ll find Aldo Verus.”

“Why do you even think he’s there?”

“Because on this one,” said Torrent, “he’s not going to let anybody else control it. He’s micromanaging it, and he’ll be right at the center of power. Trust me, if the place exists, and it’s his, then he’s there.”

It dawned on Cecily. “You know him, don’t you? You know him personally. You know him well.”

Torrent looked surprised. “Of course. I assumed you all knew that. He’s been to several of my seminars. He hates me, but he learns from me.”

“Why does he hate you?” said Cecily. “You’re no more a Republican than I am.”

“Your example contains your answer,” said Torrent with a smile. “You’re no Republican, yet here you are. When I started consulting for the NSA, Verus accused me of being a whore and we stopped talking. Too bad, because he got it completely backward. Whores give out sex for money. Me, I’d give my advice for free. A chance to play with history? A chance to make a difference?”

Cecily had never seen Torrent be so candid about himself. And it fascinated her. “Good heavens, Dr. Torrent. You think you’re Hari Selden.”

“Who’s that?” asked Drew.

Load and Babe both snorted as if Drew had revealed himself to be a complete idiot. “Asimov’s Foundation trilogy,” said Load.

“Guy who thinks he can shape a thousand years of human history,” said Babe.

“Oh,” said Drew disdainfully. “Science fiction. All those futures, with lots of little green men but no black people.”

“That’s Hollywood,” said Babe. “Because they think black stars won’t open sci-fi movies. The books are—”

“Please, boys,” said Cecily. “You’re preparing for an incredibly dangerous mission and you’re arguing about movies?”

“You brought it up,” said Load.

“Hari Selden,” muttered Babe.

But after the meeting broke up, Cecily could not help but wonder how right or wrong she might be. It wasn’t a bad thing to be Hari Selden, really. A man who manipulated history in order to save the human race from many centuries of misery and chaos. Hadn’t Reuben come home from Torrent’s class full of talk about what the Pax Romana meant to the world, and how miserable the chaos was afterward? And that was what Asimov’s Foundation trilogy was about, too. The Decline and Fall, set in the future.

Now here was Torrent, getting to play in the sandbox of history. Getting to shape events.

Well, that was a good thing, wasn’t it? A good thing he wasn’t on the other side. If Aldo Verus was really the other side’s mastermind, he was making Al Qaeda look like a bunch of Keystone Kops—both for cleverness and ruthlessness. America needed somebody like Torrent to balance the equation.

But it was still guesswork. Maybe it always came down to guesswork.