Executive Treason (2 page)

Lebanon, Kansas
the same time

“Let’s go to the Midwest line. Hello, you’re on Strong Nation.”

“Hey, Elliott. This is Peter in Detroit. Long-time listener, first-time caller,” lied the voice over the telephone. He was in a six-week rotation, either playing up to the audience with an anti-administration rant or throwing in an incendiary left wing comment that would generate an hour’s worth of bitter conservative reaction. He was there, like dozens of others, because Elliott Strong didn’t count on his audience to provide enough controversy. The 52-year-old national syndicated talk show host, broadcasting from his home studio in the geographic center of the country—Lebanon, Kansas—had his ringers. They always helped.

Unseen to his millions of listeners, Strong took a sip of his hot Darjeeling tea and went through a quick set of mouth exercises that he watched in a mirror in front of him. This wasn’t just a physical routine. Strong liked looking at himself during his live broadcast. It added to his performance and inflated his ego.

Strong also always dressed for his shows. Tie and jacket, sometimes a suit. He resisted the urge to install web cameras. He felt that the magic of radio presented more opportunity than television. He held the historic Nixon-Kennedy debates as case in point. Over the radio to an unseeing audience, Nixon was the clear winner—concise, authoritative, composed. To TV audiences, however, Nixon appeared drawn, tired, and evasive. Strong would resist TV, even though he knew the offers would be coming. His ratings were growing too fast to be ignored.

In the control room, Strong’s engineer watched the meters, keeping them in the legal limits. Strong did less to modulate his opinion, openly criticizing public figures, while remaining vague about the details. He had only two other people on the payroll: his wife, who served as his screener, and his web master, who constantly updated the StrongNationRadio.com website with right-leaning polls, editorials that supported his harangues, and links to like-minded Internet sites.

During broadcasts, the studio was off-bounds to everyone. No friends or visitors. No live guests. The shows belonged to Strong and his callers.

“State your case,” the host said.

“What the hell’s going on in Washington?”

Strong recognized the voice and smiled. Last time was on his late night show. Strong had become so popular over the course of the election and the controversial aftermath, that he now occupied two time slots: a three-hour afternoon shift and another four hours overnight. Depending upon the time zone, he was carried live or replayed at a later hour. In eighteen months, Elliott Strong had out-paced his rivals, and Strong Nation had become an extreme conservative mouthpiece for an audience who thought they were getting the news from talk radio.

“What’s going on?” Strong said through a laugh.

“We’ve got a president we didn’t elect and a vice president we voted out, that’s what’s going on. Both are part of the military establishment, which I don’t remember electing. And now they’re running everything. Two people, and as far as I can remember, Americans didn’t give either of them their jobs.”

The caller was pressing a nationwide hot button. Henry Lamden ran hard for the Democratic nomination and probably would have gotten his party’s nod until Vermont congressman Theodore Lodge, clearly in second place, was thrust to front-runner status after his wife was shot on the campaign trail. A gunman fired just one bullet. It appeared to be a bungled assassination attempt. It wasn’t.

Lodge quickly swept ahead of Lamden in a wave of sympathy. Lamden, a decorated Navy commander, became a reluctant number two on the ticket. The Lodge-Lamden team won the November election, defeating the incumbent president, Morgan Taylor. However, minutes before Lodge was to have been sworn in, he was killed on the floor of the Capitol Rotunda. The assassin, presumed to be the same man who killed Lodge’s wife, had disguised himself as a Capitol Police officer. He escaped.

The rules of succession, enumerated in the 25th Amendment, required that the vice president-elect take the Oath of Office. To the surprise of everyone watching, Henry Lamden became President of the United States. He then proceeded to startle the country again with two revelations. The first: Lodge was not really an eligible candidate, but a sleeper spy, posing as an American. Second: former President Taylor, a Republican, would be his nominee as vice president.

The reporters covering the inauguration were as shocked as the millions of people tuned to the ceremony.

Other countries have based their rule on a parliamentary system, where fragile coalition leaderships typically struggle through constant and predictable disarray, until they ultimately implode. This has not been the case with the U.S. Executive Branch. One party controls the presidency, with both the chief executive and the vice president representing the same party, though serving the entire nation. On the state level, there are instances where a governor from one party is elected along with a lieutenant governor from another. The scenario usually leads to infighting, a dubious lack of cooperation, and a recipe for political disaster. But in the case of the Lamden-Taylor administration, the new president made the controversial choice to solve problems, not to cause them.

Lamden sought to lay down the spirit of cooperation with his inaugural speech. The country narrowly averted a constitutional crisis, he told the people. America had elected a Russian-trained, Arab national sleeper spy as president. His ultimate intent: to end U.S. support of Israel and change the balance of power in the Middle East. Lamden explained how proof of the conspiracy was extracted by an American Special Forces team dropped into Libya just hours prior to the inauguration. In a well-orchestrated assault, they took a building in Tripoli that housed the media empire of Fadi Kharrazi, son of the dying Libyan dictator, General Jabbar Kharrazi. Records proved that Fadi had not created the plan. He bought the three-decade-old operation from Udai Hussein prior to the fall of his father’s regime. In Fadi’s mind, the plan would have propelled him into a leadership position ahead of his brother Abahar.

President Morgan Taylor personally oversaw the mission and returned to Washington with hard evidence, minutes before the chief justice was to swear in Teddy Lodge. Taylor confronted Lodge and his chief aide, Geoff Newman, in the Capitol Rotunda. Newman grabbed a gun from a Secret Service agent. Before it was over, two law enforcement officers were dead. So were Newman and Lodge.

Back in Libya, Fadi Kharrazi made indignant denials. One week after the general’s death in March, Fadi’s brother, Abahar, assumed power. A week later, Fadi died in a car accident that no one witnessed.

Congress convened an unprecedented emergency session to begin its inquiry. Thousands of pages of testimony later, Morgan Taylor, on a strangely bipartisan vote, was enthusiastically confirmed as vice president. The United States had its first coalition government in more than a century.

Reporters dove into the history books for precedent. They were surprised it existed. John Adams, the nation’s second president, served as a Federalist. His vice president, Thomas Jefferson, was a member of the unified Democrat Republic party. America’s sixteenth president also ran on a coalition ticket. Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, had Democrat Andrew Johnson as his second VP.

“It’s a jackalope,” the caller continued. “I don’t care if they did it way back when. We’re talking about now. And I can’t tell what kind of government we have. It’s not Republican. Lamden is a liberal Democrat. And it’s not Democrat. Taylor, who got defeated, is a moderate Republican, if you can call him a Republican at all.”

“My friend, you hit the nail on the head,” Strong said, nudging him on more.

“But it’s even worse. They’re moving us toward a military regime. Next thing you know, they’ll be clamping down on our freedoms.” The caller was beginning to sound the survivalist clarion call. “We’re gonna have the army running the police, and the navy boarding everybody’s boats. From the Great Lakes to Tahoe. I don’t care where you live. And you know what they’ll be after?”

“No, what?” asked the radio host in a smooth, soothing, encouraging voice.

“Our damned guns, that’s what. From a governor we didn’t elect president, and his vice president-master who’s really running things…who we voted out.”

“So you’re not happy?” Strong said jokingly.

“How can any American be happy? The election was a total fraud. We should have a new one.”

“But according to the Constitution, there can’t be another election.”

“Then what the hell can we do?”

This was just where Elliott Strong wanted the conversation to go. It would start simply enough. A question. Then a call to action. Then another listener would up the ante. An echo. More callers. A chorus. In the morning, a publicist for Strong’s national syndicator would mention it to a few newspapers. It would make the wire services, certainly Fox News, and after that, the network news, CNN and CNBC. Then an e-mail campaign to the House and Senate, blogs, then…

“A good question. What can we do?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“Yeah. Well, why not another election? We elected a foreign spy, and now we got two losers. There’s got to be something better.”

Here was the moment. The seed needed watering. “The only thing I can think of…and I don’t even know if it’s possible…it would take an amazing effort…a really Strong Nation…” He loved utilizing the name of his show, “…to make it work. I don’t know.” The talk host drew it out. “Probably impossible. Unless…” he stopped in mid-sentence for impact. “Unless we band together.” The operative word was we. It brought his listeners closer to the radio. “Then it could happen.” He hadn’t even hinted at the idea yet, but Strong knew that the truck drivers tuned in were mesmerized. The insomniacs lay in bed with their eyes now wide open. The conspiracy theorists were hanging on his words.

Elliott Strong had his faithful in the palm of his hand when he answered the caller’s question.

Century Plaza Hotel
Los Angeles, California
the same time

“Goodbye, Mr. President,” Lynn Meyerson said as she left the president’s suite at Los Angeles’s Century Plaza Hotel. It had been another tiring day—her fifteenth in a row. But she ate it up. In a very short period of time she had earned access to Henry Lamden and now enjoyed what few others in the entire country could claim: The President of the United States appreciated her advice, and he shared his thoughts with her.

Meyerson was a staffer in the White House Office for Strategic Planning. She typically focused on project research that could culminate in pro-administration policies. This allowed her to be hands-on when it came to developing White House strategies, making her an obvious “inside source” for anyone on the outside. Not that she really touched much that was sensitive. Not yet. But other people didn’t know that. Nonetheless, she had been fully briefed on how they’d try. Reporters would strike up conversations, build on seemingly chance encounters, and pull her into the young Washington social scene. It was all part of the game. And she would make great company. At 25, Lynn Meyerson had exceptional poise, genuine sincerity, great looks, and distinctive curly red hair that made cameras and men turn. She stood out of any crowd—a 5′ 7″, 118-pound beauty.

The FBI had cleared Meyerson into the White House and, even further, into the Oval Office. Each personal reference reinforced the view of the last. She’s dynamic. She has the political know-how to go far. She’s a budding superstar, a natural-born politician. President Lamden clearly liked the young woman’s energy and enthusiasm and her willingness to express unpopular opinions.

Meyerson made it no secret that she wanted to work in government, especially the White House. She’d admitted that to her closest friends at Wellesley College. Her zeal earned her an interview her senior year. But what really counted was how she befriended then-President Morgan Taylor’s secretary, Louise Swingle. It was the number-one rule to crack any company. The White House was no different than Microsoft. Make friends with the boss’s secretary. Swingle took a liking to her and set up meetings with a variety of White House offices. Following the inauguration, she got an offer with the Office of Strategic Initiatives.

Meyerson tried to send Swingle an exquisite assortment of exotic flowers. That’s when she learned that things were as tough to get into the White House as they were to get out. The flowers ended up at Swingle’s home.

President Lamden, nearly forty years Meyerson’s senior, talked with Lynn about her goals, but always kept everything on a business level. He agreed with the written assessments. She would go far. Perhaps make Congress by her mid-thirties. He heard that her friends were already egging her on about going after a Maryland seat in a couple of years.
And she’d probably win
, he thought. She had that much potential.

Meyerson paused for one more look around the suite at the hotel, named for Ronald Reagan. It was impressive. So was the president who now occupied it.

At first she laughed at the Stetsons he wore and the Montana stories he spun for her in their free time. Then she recognized that Lamden, like Lyndon Johnson, used his cowboy charm to make more important things happen. The lanky 67-year-old lawmaker could bring down a calf in a rodeo ring. She trusted that he had done the same with many a political opponent. Lamden was shrewd, tough. She was careful what she said to him. Still, she was impressed by the trappings and the access.

This is good. This is really good. She’d made it. She was traveling with the President of the United States, staying at the Century Plaza Hotel on Avenue of the Stars, and meeting some of the real stars who populated the avenue.

Most of all, she was thoroughly aware of the security measures surrounding the president with Secret Service agents always close by. Marksmen on the roof. The “football"—the attache case with nuclear weapons codes and plans—always within reach. Bulletproof glass in the hotel suite and even the undisclosed evacuation routes through the Century Plaza’s unpublicized secure corridors. When she really stopped to think about it, she truly was on the “inside.”