Empire (18 page)

“So you think Alton's been planning to move America away from democratic institutions for a while now, and this is just a pretext?”

“You don't build a coup overnight,” said Reuben. “Here's the thing. Cole asked him outright if his group stole my plans and gave them to the assassins. Of course he said no. But Cole believes him. He thinks Alton isn't a good enough actor to sound so genuinely appalled at the thought.”

“Do you know this General Alton?”

“I know of him,” said Reuben. “I never actually served under him. Well, I guess technically I did, but never under his direct command. Layers, you know?”

“So you just have to take Cole's word for it?”

“Cole's a smart guy,” said Reuben.

“But you still can't do anything about it.”

“No,” said Reuben. “But what I'm thinking is, Torrent is smart, he's charismatic. What if, by writing about the great forces of history, he's accidentally changed them? Like he said, they can be manipulated by astonishingly small groups of determined people.”

“Like Alton's coup.”

“Like whoever gave my plans to the terrorists. I don't think it was Alton. But that still leaves us trying to figure out who it is.”

“What we need is the computer guy,” said Cecily.

“Who's that?”

“In every mystery novel these days, it seems like the detective has some friend who can work miracles on the computer and find information nobody else can find. We need that guy. You call him up, tell him what you need to know, and in a little while he comes back with exactly the facts you need.”

“When you say it like that, it sounds like a wizard from one of Nick's novels.”

“I was thinking it sounded more like God,” she said. “You pray, you get answers.”

“Yeah,” said Reuben. “You're right. We need that guy.”

“Don't have him, though, do we?”

“All you got is me, and all I got is you.”

“And Cole,” said Cecily. “And DeeNee. And Load and Mingo and Babe and Arty and . . .”

“And not one of them can grant a miracle.”

“But I know the President, and
he
promised we'll have one.”

“That's why I was so smart to marry you.”

Nothing was actually any better. But Cecily felt like it was better, sitting there on the glider with Reuben. When they were apart, she was perfectly competent and confident, but . . . there was something always at risk. Things could go wrong. When Reuben was there, she simply felt safer. He wouldn't let things get hopelessly out of hand. He'd put it all in perspective for her. The problems would all be somehow outside the walls of the castle, and inside, as long as Reuben was there, she was safe. The children were safe.

“Retire right now,” said Cecily. “Come home and be with us always.”

“Think Aunt Margaret will let us stay here?”

“I can't think why not. We're excellent company, and thanks to J.P. she's going to get a free carpet shampooing.”

“I don't want to hear the story of that one,” said Reuben.

“I don't want to tell it,” said Cecily. “But Nick is involved.”

“Has he taken to the dark side?”

“J.P. does whatever Nick suggests.”

“I wonder,” said Reuben. “Is that how J.P. got toilet trained so young?”

That had never occurred to Cecily before, but it was possible, wasn't it? Nick says something and J.P. uses the toilet forever afterward. “So he can use his powers for good as well as evil.”

“We all can,” said Reuben. “It's telling the difference that gets so hard.”

If you always behave rationally, then reason becomes the leash by which your enemy pulls you. Yet if you knowingly make irrational decisions, have you not betrayed your own ability? The battlefield is not a place for actors, playing the role of this or that style of commander, for you can always imitate a worse commander, but never a better one. You must be yourself, even if your enemy comes to know your weaknesses, for you cannot pretend to have personal abilities and traits that you do not have.

As a soldier, Cole had forced himself to learn to wait until an order was given. It wasn't that he didn't trust his commander to make the right decision. It's that he couldn't stand to do nothing.

As a boy growing up, he couldn't hold still, not even in church. It wasn't ADHD—he didn't fidget, and he could easily concentrate on the task at hand for hours and hours. It's that he couldn't stand not to accomplish something. Why
shouldn't
he clip his fingernails during a sermon? That way he'd hear the sermon
and
accomplish a job that needed doing.

His mother listened to his argument and answered with her typical “Interesting thought.” But she heard him—she always heard him. That night at dinner she brought in a roll of toilet paper and, after taking her first bite, spooled off a section of toilet paper, lifted the back of her dress, and made as if to use the paper. Cole yelled at her to stop, to which she replied, “But this way I can chew my food
and
accomplish a job that needs doing.”

“Not in front of
me !
” Cole said.

Out of his own mouth, he made her point for her.

So he learned to wait. And in the Army, he learned again. Nothing
like live-fire exercises to concentrate the mind. He schooled himself to wait for many hours, for days. He learned to hide even the fact that he was waiting.

But that was war. He knew as soon as General Alton brought him back to the Pentagon that he couldn't do
nothing
.

He didn't even go back to the office. There was too much danger that Alton's reassurances about how nothing would happen to him were a scam. So easy to detain him—soldiers didn't have the rights of civilians against phony arrests. They could say he needed to be interrogated again. Then he'd disappear. When Congress subpoenaed him, the Army would tell them that Cole was on duty somewhere. And then his family would get word that he had been killed in action. His body would be produced with all the appropriate wounds.

How could he consider this kind of thinking paranoid? There was a general openly plotting a military coup. Cole's inclination and his sworn duty as a soldier and a citizen required that he do whatever was within his power to stop it from happening.

So he got in his car and started driving. CNN or Fox News? Atlanta or New York? On the one hand, CNN would be all too eager to hear about a right-wing coup-in-progress. On the other hand, Cole's purpose wasn't to inflame people against conservatives, it was to be heard by soldiers who might be tempted to cooperate with Alton's coup. And
those
soldiers regarded CNN as being almost as much of an enemy to the America they loved as NPR. They'd be watching Fox.

When he called Rube from the car to tell him about Alton, he couldn't quite bring himself to report where he was going and what he intended to do. He knew that was wrong. That it was stupid. Why did I hide that information? he asked himself. The answer was obvious—you didn't have to have a psych degree to figure out that he didn't tell Rube what he was doing because he fully expected Rube to order him not to do it. Or to talk him out of it by persuasion alone.

He thought of all the reasons why he shouldn't do it.

They won't believe it. So they won't broadcast it.

If they do believe it, they still won't broadcast it because Alton's people have already gotten to them.

If they believe it and broadcast it, I'll come across as a complete wacko. Especially if everyone denies everything I'm saying and the coup doesn't actually take place.

If they believe it and broadcast it and the coup happens, at best I'll be out of a job. At worst I'll be dead.

And it won't make a bit of difference to history whether I do this or not. It's a completely futile campaign. I'm wasting myself for nothing. I'm pulling the pin on a grenade just so I can fall on it. Either the coup happens or it doesn't, regardless of what I say now.

Yet he kept driving north, up 1-95 to Delaware and then across the river into New Jersey and its ugly toll road that funneled you to New York City as if you were being flushed down a toilet.

He found public parking, mortgaged his firstborn child to pay for it, and then walked to 1211 Sixth Avenue—no, “Avenue of the Americas,” as if the fancy name changed where it was located—and threw himself on the mercy of Fox News.

Army interrogators were trained never to reveal any reaction to what the person they were questioning might tell them. The reporters and producers who interviewed him tried to do the same, but they couldn't hide their skepticism. Until it finally dawned on somebody that he was one of the two guys in that Tidal Basin video they'd been running for the past twenty-four hours.

Then
they loved him. Only they didn't know what to make of his story. “We can't corroborate,” said one of the producers, finally. “Nobody backs up your story.”

“I'm not surprised,” said Cole.

“The thing is, we can't run it as news unless we know we can stand behind it.”

So it was all for nothing.

“What we
can
do, Captain Coleman, is interview you on the air. You're newsworthy because of what you and Major Malich did yesterday, trying to save the President and nearly succeeding. In that
interview, you can tell the story of your meeting with General Alton. Then the news is not that there's going to be a coup, the news is that you
said
there was going to be a coup. We don't have to stand behind the truthfulness of what you say, we only have to stand behind the fact that you said it on the air.”

“Okay.” Cole knew that their interview shows were largely during the primetime hours. Who would he get? Greta Van Susteren? Hannity and Colmes?

“Bill O'Reilly wants you,” said the producer. “It's the most watched show on cable TV, so that's a good thing, right?”

“Right.”

“Captain Coleman,” she said. “I don't think you're lying. But I sure hope you're wrong.”

“I hope so, too,” he said. “Though if I am, I'll look pretty silly, won't I?”

“You got a lot of hero points yesterday. Even if you get a bunch of nut points tonight, they'll probably balance out.”

“Am I going to be one of the guys O'Reilly goes after? Or one of the ones he treats sympathetically?”

“What, you think Bill tells
us
what he's going to say?”

“Come on,” said Cole. “He talks from a script just like everybody else.”

“Actually,” said the producer, “that's just the talking points. Everything else, he makes up as he goes along. The thing is, Bill likes soldiers. He likes heroes. At the same time, he's going to be pretty skeptical of a claim that the Army's going to stage a coup.”

“A small element within the Army is going to attempt it,” said Cole.

“Like I said, you just stick to your story and tell the truth. I don't think Bill's going to hurt you. But he's going to give you plenty of chances to hurt yourself.” She leaned closer to him. “Captain Coleman, here's the main law of TV interviews. Whoever gets mad, loses. Don't get mad. Don't even
show
anger.”

Cole smiled at her. “Ma'am, you don't survive in the U.S. Army
without being able to listen to stupidity for hours on end without showing the slightest reaction.”

“Good,” she said. “Because we're trying to get General Alton onto the program via a hookup in the Washington studio.”

“He'll just deny everything.”

“That's right,” she said. “And he should have a chance to do it. Fair and balanced, remember?”

It was Mark who told them that Cole was going to be on O'Reilly that night. He came home from a friend's house and charged into the living room, where Reuben was taking something like a nap on the couch. “The other guy's going to be on Fox tonight.”

Still a little groggy, Reuben was sure he must have missed something. “Who's the first guy?”

“You are. The other guy, the guy who was shooting terrorists with you. He's going to be on
The O'Reilly Factor
.”

Reuben made himself alert at once. “Okay. Thanks, Mark. You heard this at a friend's house?”

“His dad was watching Fox News when he got off work.”

“But you aren't supposed to tell people—”

“Dad, I'm not supposed to tell them that you're
here
. They already know that you're my dad. It's too late for me to deny
that
.”

They kept the TV on while they ate dinner—usually against the rules—but the promos for O'Reilly were neutral enough. Tonight Bill talks with one of the heroes of the fight at the Tidal Basin. Only as they got closer to the actual show did the promos start talking about “astonishing revelations” and then, in the last promo, “serious charges” against “high-ranking officers.”

“Sounds like they got some corroboration,” said Reuben.

“Sounds like they're hyping a TV show,” said Cessy.

When Cole's segment came on, Reuben felt like leaving the room. He liked this soldier, he trusted him, but military people were notoriously bad on television. They kept their cool, yes, but they didn't let
anything
show. They usually came across wooden. Scripted, even.

Cole, though, looked like a real guy. With normal human emotions. At first O'Reilly got him talking about the fight at the Tidal Basin. And Cole told it clearly but humanly—it didn't sound memorized. He skipped around a little. And when he talked about how they didn't get the other launcher in time, he choked up and it looked genuine. “People call us heroes but it doesn't feel like that,” said Cole. “It feels like mission failure.”