Empire (13 page)

One of the editors spoke up. “Leighton, it looks to me like these guys are just trying to use us to spin the story.”

“Everybody tries to use us to spin the story,” said Leighton contemptuously. “And when we like them or their cause, we follow their spin. I don't know if I like these guys. But I also don't know but what they're telling the truth. So my story is going to report their claims neutrally. Then we'll see who jumps on it.”

“Or on us,” said the editor. “I don't know if I'm going to be able to let them use us this way.”

“That's honest enough,” said Reuben, getting up. The other soldiers also rose to their feet. “We'll go to the
Washington Times
, then, and hope the truth seeps out somehow.”

Several of the reporters laughed nervously. Leighton grinned. “You're right—telling the
Times
isn't a leak, it's seepage.”

“Thanks for coming back to the office so late at night,” said Reuben. “Now I've got to go wake up the
Times
.”

The editor looked annoyed. “We want the exclusive. That's what you promised us.”

“We wanted a fair hearing,” said Reuben. “You're already planning to spin it against me.” He headed for the door.

Load said, in Farsi, “Can't we bruise them a little bit, as long as we've got them all in the same room?” Reuben's team laughed.

Reuben had to walk past Leighton to get to the door. Leighton winked at him. “You watch,” he said. “You'll have your fair hearing.”

Reuben paused and studied Leighton's face. He didn't know this man. Did the popularity of his column give him so much power at the paper that he could override his editor? Or did he simply trust in his powers of persuasion? Or . . . was he lying right now, to keep Reuben from going to the
Times?

Reuben made his guess, and bet his future on it. When he and Cole and the rest of the team got back to their cars, he told Mingo
the combination to the keypad on the door of his car back in the Reston Town Center parking garage. “The keys are above the visor,” he said. “I need to take your SUV, if you don't mind my borrowing it.”

“I made some modifications,” Mingo answered. It took him only a few minutes to show Reuben where the weapons and ammunition were hidden.

“I hope I don't need this,” said Reuben. “I'll surrender before I shoot at Americans.”

“So you're not going to the
Times?
” said Cole.

“I'm betting on Leighton,” said Reuben. “But in the long run, we know it's going to go against me. Because they'll have evidence. And they'll have some Jack Ruby wannabe waiting for me.”

“That's why I'm coming with you,” said Cole.

“Then we really will look like a conspiracy.”

“We're going to look like one anyway,” said Cole. He glanced around at the other guys. “Heck, we
are
a conspiracy. We're plotting to save your life and your name.”

“I hope what we're doing,” said Reuben, “is working to find out who killed the President and prevent them from hurting America any worse than they already have.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Cole as he got into the passenger seat of Mingo's SUV. “That too.”

“Help me pull him out of there,” said Reuben.

“No way,” said Mingo. “He's Special Ops.”

“He's a bad dude,” said Cat.

“He might hurt me,” said Benny.

Reuben was annoyed. “Why should two careers go down the toilet on this?”

“He's assigned to you by the Pentagon,” said Drew. “It makes sense for him to stay with you.”

“And we need him,” said Babe, “to tell us the truth about whatever danger you might get into. Because we know
you'll
never tell us to come kick ass for you.”

“It all depends on whose ass needs kicking,” said Reuben. He pointed to Cole. “Right now, it's his, and you guys are worthless.”

“Only because he's so strong,” said Load. “And his American accent when he speaks Farsi is so bad.”

“Let's go, sir,” said Cole. “Let's get you to your family.”

It was time, Reuben knew, to accept the fact that his friends might well see things more clearly than he did. He took Mingo's keys and got into the SUV.

“I'll never forgive you for making me drive a Ford,” said Mingo.

Reuben closed the door and drove out of the parking garage.

All the common people want is to be left alone. All the ordinary soldier wants is to collect his pay and not get killed. That's why the great forces of history can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.

For Cole, the bad thing about Reuben Malich having left for New Jersey was that it left him in charge of the office. That had been fine for the first couple of days, before Cole ever met Rube, because even though he didn't know anything, nobody ever called to ask him anything, either. Now he still didn't know anything, but the phone didn't let up.

Most of the people wanted to talk to Major Malich—old friends of his calling to congratulate him on stopping one rocket, at least. Cole would take a message with a promise to give it to him as soon as he saw him.

But the press callers were just as happy to talk to Cole and pump him with questions. The trouble is, Cole couldn't think of anything to tell them that couldn't be spun into an attack on him and Rube. The story in
The Post
had been more or less balanced—though a soldier like Cole was so used to the way the media treated the military that he heard a tone of snideness in everything they wrote. Still, Leighton Fuller had kept his word. Even the headline was balanced.

The questions Cole was getting now, however, were obviously designed to get him to say things that could spin against Reuben. Questions like, “How did you happen to be where you could see the underwater operation unfolding?” and “What exactly are the signs that you saw on the surface of the water? Why did you know to look for them?” and “Didn't you and Major Malich both qualify as
sharpshooters? Why were you able to hit only one of the rocket launchers?”

To all the questions, Cole gave the same answers: “We're still in the debriefing process. We're not authorized to discuss this.” To which they always replied, “But Major Malich talked to
The Post!
”

Like little children—they demanded that Rube and Cole be “fair” to the print and television newspeople, but there was going to be no attempt at fairness to them or the military they served.

Even as he thought this, he also knew that the questions were perfectly legitimate ones. And that the only answers he had were speculative at best. Why did they happen to be at Hain's Point when the terrorists scubaed by? Maybe they tapped into the phone conversation; maybe they'd been watching Major Malich and knew him well enough to predict he'd go there for a private meeting. Why did sharpshooters like them only hit one launcher? Maybe because they were working with unfamiliar weapons. Maybe because they didn't say, You take the left one, I'll take the right, so they both shot at the same one. Maybe because they were distracted by being fired on. Why did you kill all the terrorists so none were left to be questioned? Maybe because we were getting fired on and in the heat of battle it's hard to say, Let's just wound this one. Especially when you fear that they'll try to involve civilians if you let them live.

But the real answer, to question after question, would have been, “I don't know.” The only thing he knew was, Rube was no actor. He had been furious that the terrorists got hold of his plan, desperate to stop them, devastated when the President died. Yet that was precisely the kind of thing that the press would never take seriously. Yeah, yeah, you felt “sure” that Rube didn't know what was going on. Let's have some
facts
.

The President was killed using a plan created by Major Malich. Major Malich was on the scene precisely when the plot unfolded. But you and he happened to hit only one of the launchers, so that the other one was still able to fire.

They weren't there. They couldn't know. All they knew was the collection of “facts” and the video footage from the guy in the car,
and none of those showed the frenzy of being under fire, of being so wired with adrenalin you had no idea of the passage of time. Didn't they get it that it was a miracle they got even
one
of the launchers? Didn't they understand that it was a miracle they were able to get there, with weapons, as quickly as they did? Not for one second had Major Malich done a single thing to delay the operation to make sure the terrorists had time. And the terrorists got that rocket off with less than a second to spare. Nobody could
plan
for that.

Especially because Major Malich could not know that Cole would fail to hit the other launcher. He could not have planned on that. So if Rube had secretly wanted the assassination to succeed, it was a gross mistake bringing Cole along.

Unless, of course, Cole had been part of the assassination plot, too.

Only Cole knew he wasn't part of any plot. And he knew that if Rube really had been part of the assassination, then he screwed up big time letting Cole be present with a weapon when the assassination was unfolding. It was the kind of screwup that a leader like Rube would never, never make.

That's how Cole knew Rube was innocent of any intent to kill the President.

But that knowledge could not be conveyed to the press, particularly if somebody was juicing the process with leaks designed to incriminate Rube.

And me, thought Cole. Incriminate him and me.

Then there were the hang-ups. Ring ring, answer, click. Cole guessed those might have something to do with Major Malich's clandestine work. Phillips and his cronies. Either that or they were just making sure Cole was still in the office.

DeeNee was no help. She let all the calls through to him while
she
was running errands around the building. Cole had no authority to ask her for an accounting, but since Rube trusted her, Cole could only assume she was about Major Malich's business.

Those calls from friends in the Army. Which of them might be the one who passed along Rube's secret worst-case-scenario plan to the terrorists who proved that it was, indeed, the worst case?

Or was it?

Up and down the halls of the Pentagon, television sets were set to CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, C-SPAN. A lot of stuff about the funeral arrangements, sympathetic statements from world leaders who had vilified the President but now were officially regretful, human interest bits about the First Family and the Vice President's wife and children, and the families of the others who died.

But in the cracks there were the real stories: How surprisingly small a blip the assassination of the President made in the stock market. (“Is this a sign that the identity of the President is no longer a significant issue in the market? Or that LaMonte Nielson as President is somehow reassuring to Wall Street?”) The identity of the terrorist group responsible. (“All the assassins identified so far entered the country legally and with no known ties to terrorists or to groups that sympathize with terrorists.”)

And, now and then: “Questions continue to arise about why the two Pentagon officers, Major Reuben Malich and Captain Bartholomew Coleman, happened to be on the scene. According to a
Washington Post
story this morning, Major Malich actually worked on a hypothetical plan for assassinating a President that was eerily close to what the terrorists actually did . . .”

Bad spin. The public didn't like coincidences. They made up stories about coincidences without the media actually having to spell it out. In Europe, the media always told people what to think, and they thought it. In America, the press asked leading questions and framed things to point to what they wanted people to think—but they never actually said it outright.

That was Congress's job. And sure enough, the House Minority Leader was on camera saying, “Just because the dead bodies at the Tidal Pool were all Muslims from Arab nations doesn't mean that this was exclusively a foreign plot. In a White House populated with right-wing extremists, maybe somebody didn't think the late President was extreme enough.”

And there was already a ghoulish online cartoon making the forwarded-email circuit. A drawing of the blown-out West Wing
windows, with two cops looking up at it. One of them says, “At least we know it wasn't the Vice President.” “Oh yeah?” comes the answer. “Maybe they got each other.”

The thing that Cole couldn't let go of was the fact that maybe they were right. Not about him and Rube being complicit, but quite possibly about who the insiders were. There
were
no left-wingers in the White House to finger the President's location. And given the makeup of the military, the odds were in favor of it being a conservative of some kind or another who passed along Reuben's plans.

Meanwhile, Cole couldn't call anybody and actually talk about what was on his mind, since he could only assume that his phone was being monitored. And whom did he have to call? The only people he could trust, Reuben's friends, were not
Cole's
friends, not yet anyway.

He did call his mom, who was so proud of him for doing his best to stop the assassination, he was a real hero, he should get the Medal of Honor. He didn't have the heart to break it to her that he'd probably be hauled in front of a couple of congressional committees and have people accuse him of being part of the assassination plot. She'd find it out in due time.

So he let her talk about how brave and smart he was and how proud she was, and tried to answer in something like a natural way, knowing that the tape of the conversation might well end up being played over and over on the news at some future date. “Listen to how he talked with his mother, saying nothing about the suspicions already in the media. If he could lie to her this way, then how can we believe anything he says?”