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“Go ahead.”

“It’s something that’s built into the fabric of this country, and makes it different from any other country. You can’t see it, but it’s there. It’s not a government, it’s not the people. It’s an idea.” He set
his glasses down on the sofa, watching Charlie. “And it’s too important, too valuable to ever be endangered again.

“That’s why we keep a military that’s almost double the size of every other military in the world combined,” he continued. “It’s there to defend and protect an idea.”

“That’s the Covenant.”

“It’s not something that people are meant to understand or think about. Any more than they’re meant to think about how their hamburgers are made.” He seemed about to grin, but didn’t. “With more than three hundred million people, it just wouldn’t be practical. How it works doesn’t matter to the average person, and it shouldn’t. That’s okay. What matters is that it
does
work, and that it takes care of its people. If it’s a deception, it’s a necessary deception.”

Where had he heard this idea before?
He thought of something else, then, something John Ramesh had said to him as he drove to the mouth of the plague pit.
If eight million poor Africans go to sleep one night and don’t wake up the next morning, do you think anybody’s really going to care?

“Covenant Division goes back years, doesn’t it?”

“In name, it goes back to World War II. Originally, it was called the Covenant Project. It was designed, in a nutshell, to make sure we are never vulnerable again, and to look out for allies that are. Our nuclear program was part of Covenant originally.”

“Was it Covenant Division that decided to invade Iraq? To take out Saddam?”

“I can’t comment, Charlie.”

“It failed to stop the attacks of 9/11. It didn’t do so well there.”

He shrugged. “But it’s stopped much worse. There are bigger threats right now than al Qaeda. Much bigger. If someone develops a technology that trumps what the United States government has, then the whole idea can be jeopardized, can’t it? There are a lot of technologies and unorthodox means of warfare that are very problematic right now, Charlie, that the public doesn’t have a clue about. We have to respond.”

Yes
. He had heard the same words from Thomas Trent:
If someone develops a technology more sophisticated than what the government has, and chooses not to sell it to the government, then the government can be undermined and rendered obsolete
.

That’s what Gardner was part of. That was Gardner’s war.
An invisible war to prevent the United States from losing its dominance to shifting demographics. Or shifting technologies
. He had launched what was in effect a hostile takeover of the Covenant Group.
Of the U.S. government
. His was a businessman’s war, the only kind he knew. Run by remote control. That could have taken out eight million people in a single night. But Landon Pine was different. Pine had been a real soldier. A Navy SEAL. He saw the flaws in Gardner’s war. The fatal mistakes.

“The reason Covenant continues and the reason it works is because it’s larger than any individual,” Franklin went on, as if he was beginning to convince Charlie. “This country takes care of its people. But you can’t mess with it. You can’t challenge it. No individual is strong enough or important enough to do that.”

Franklin sat up straighter. He placed his glasses in the pocket of his polo shirt. “Okay? It really has little to do with me, or any of the people who are involved with it right now. It’s written in the DNA of this country. But it’s something even our leaders don’t understand. Our
visible
leaders. That’s why they choose to become leaders. Our brand of democracy fosters imperfect deceptions. And a lot of gridlock, pettiness, and inefficiency. In truth, it doesn’t work. You can see what happens with Congress. It’s a system that by nature is ineffectual. As you once said, there’s weakness in numbers. And that’s okay. But the steering wheel of the country is something else, something that can’t be seen.”

“And right now it’s focused on Africa, isn’t it?” Charlie said. “That’s the next battleground. The jihadists want it. Chinese industry wants it. And we’re having a hard time making inroads.”

He nodded, wouldn’t say “yes.”

But what was really going to happen? Wasn’t the infrastructure all in place to do what they were planning to do? What Isaak Priest had set up. Would the government shut it down, or simply take over and operate it, spreading the idea, the Covenant, to a new continent? Was that the perfect deception? Was that why they didn’t want any of this publicized?

Questions he knew he would answer later, or let his brother answer. There was no point in asking them here, now. Because the questions would be perceived as challenges.

Charlie tucked the gun in his pants. “Okay,” he said. He turned, ready to walk away from Richard Franklin and the Watergate. Knowing that killing him wouldn’t fix anything. And, besides, he had just video-recorded their entire conversation.

“Anyway, it’s over now,” Franklin said.

“Yes. It is.”

Charlie nodded, extended his hand. Franklin stood. The two men shook.

“What are you going to do, Charlie? You ought to take some time off. Think about things.”

“Probably will, yes. Learn to relax a little.”

“Take care.”

“I will.”

CHARLIE HAILED A YELLOW
Cab two blocks from the Watergate, asking the driver to take him to 950 Pennsylvania Avenue. As they rode through the afternoon shadows of the federal buildings, he wondered how long the relay would take: Franklin contacting Gardner. Gardner contacting Hassan. Hassan making arrangements to find him.

The cab stopped in front of the Justice Department building. Mallory got out, tipped the driver generously.

The attorney general worked from a suite of offices on the fifth floor. Charlie had never been here, but he had thought many times about the current A.G. Had pictured her arriving by limousine from her sprawling home in the Virginia suburbs each morning. Being led by a prompt, efficient security detail to the elevator and then emerging on the fifth floor carrying her executive briefcase.

He had thought about visiting her, too, but the timing had never seemed right. Until now.

“I’m here to see the attorney general,” he said to the middle-aged security guard at the visitor’s desk. The man just gave him a look, suppressing a smile. “Tell her it’s Charlie Mallory. We’re old friends.”

“Okay. And do you have an appointment?”

“Sort of. She’ll see me.”

Nineteen minutes later, she did.

Angelina Moore’s eyes momentarily sparkled with recognition. Then she opened her arms and they hugged, clumsily. She looked
pretty good
, Charlie thought. Older, a little heavier, perhaps, but better. More polished and confident. But still vulnerable, in a way he had never really picked up from her television appearances. The same look he’d known when they were at Princeton together.

She quickly recovered, though, becoming the attorney general, a role she played very convincingly.

“Well. Please. Come in,” she said, ushering him into her office.

It was huge. Too posh to be functional, it seemed. Charles Mallory just stood inside the entranceway at first, taking it in. Behind the desk were photos of her husband and children—her second husband—and one with the president of the United States. She had spent a good portion of her career at the Justice Department, he knew, as a federal prosecutor, as U.S. prosecutor for the District of Columbia, and as deputy attorney general.

“Congratulations,” he finally said.

She was watching him, trying to contain her smile. “For what?”

“I mean, you know. You’ve done okay for yourself, I’d say. Kind of like I figured you would.”

“I guess I have.” She shifted to a more businesslike demeanor again. Looked at her watch. It was funny to him, the way a part of her old self was still visible. “Anyway, this is good timing. You caught me between meetings. What brings you here, Charlie?”

“I’ve wanted to visit,” he said, “although I’m here on business today, actually. I have a case for you. A fairly big one. I’m going to leave some evidence with you. Do you know how to make a copy of a memory stick?”

She laughed. “Not me, personally. I’m terrible with computers.”

“Can you ask someone to do it? We can catch up while we wait.”

“Well, I only have five minutes but … okay, sure.” She pressed a button on her phone, signaled an assistant. Charlie sat in front of the giant mahogany desk. As they waited, he told her an abridged version of the story, all that he had time for—not
his
story, but the story of Perry Gardner and Isaak Priest and the Covenant Group.

He had had a thing for Angelina Moore back when they were in college and she had had a thing for him. But their frames of reference were much narrower then, their lives too unformed. It wasn’t the kind of relationship that would have worked well. That was obvious now, even if it hadn’t been then. He had sort of hoped that they might bond again in some way, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen. Before leaving, he had planned to ask her about the tattoos they’d each had inked onto their ankles, but as she told him about her children and her husband, and then segued into the challenges of combating homegrown terrorism, he had a change of heart. The past was the past, and that was okay, too.

She had two copies made of the memory stick, and he left one with her. Then they hugged clumsily again and he left. She was looking at her watch when he turned back.

HIS NEXT STOP
was Georgetown.
Perry Gardner
. Charles Mallory had known for some time that he was going to have to confront Gardner, so he had asked Chidi Okoro to mine everything he could find on Gardner’s habits and personal life. He’d known it would be a challenge. Gardner was a fanatically guarded man who kept layers of protection between himself and the public. He’d installed the world’s most sophisticated security system at his homes and offices in Oregon. When he traveled, a small entourage went with him, including at least one armed guard. When he stepped out for a jog, employees ran on either side, as if he were the President of the United States. Mallory wondered if he asked assistants to join him in the shower.

But Okoro had been able to find chinks that Charlie could use. One of the secrets to Perry Gardner was that in some ways he had never fully grown up. Much of what he had accomplished were the things he had dreamed about as a kid. He was a visionary genius, whose imagination and ambition hadn’t been reined in the way most people’s were. He still indulged his childhood interests in science fiction, comic books, and 1960s television because they had allowed him to dream. And he still dined on hamburgers, French fries, and strawberry milkshakes even though he could afford caviar and Dom Pérignon.

Gardner was a man inspired by large-scale historical Americans, chief among them Lincoln. When he visited Washington, there was one thing he never seemed to do with an entourage. It was to climb the steps to the Lincoln Memorial after dark, where he would read Lincoln’s words on the walls and spend some minutes communing with the giant nineteen-foot-tall statue of the sixteenth president, as if it were a religious icon.

When he traveled to Washington on business, Gardner always stayed in the Presidential Suite at the Hay-Adams Hotel, across the street from the White House. But this business was different. More surreptitious. Okoro had learned that Gardner also occasionally stayed at one of two three-story townhouses in Georgetown.
Townhouses that, according to D.C. property records, were owned by Eliza Parker and the H. Hamlin Group, respectively. Eliza Parker had been the name of Mary Todd Lincoln’s mother. Hannibal Hamlin had been Lincoln’s first vice president.

It was at the H. Hamlin townhouse on Q Street that Charles Mallory spotted a figure walking in front of a light behind the shade of a second-story window as dusk settled on the autumn streets.

Charlie returned to the small park three blocks away and sat on a bench. He plugged the video feed of Richard Franklin into his laptop computer. Watched it once all the way through. Cued it up, then returned to the street in front of the Hamlin townhouse. Sat on a stoop in the next block and waited, pretending to be reading text on his computer screen. Several minutes later, he saw movement again.

There was no Metro station in Georgetown, so if Gardner wanted to travel in the city, he would probably call a cab or a driver. A cab would be less conspicuous. It was fully dark by the time an Empire cab pulled up at the corner.

Mallory walked up to M street and hailed a cab, too. Had it deliver him to a dark stretch of Constitution Avenue near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He walked among the trees, through the night shadows, and sat on a bench across from the Lincoln Memorial. Watched Gardner’s shadow emerge at the top of the steps in front of the giant figure of Lincoln. Gardner turning, looking up, then standing beside a pillar, facing the Reflecting Pool and Washington Monument. Moving with a strange grace, as if he were performing.

Mallory began to walk steadily toward the base of the steps. Lincoln seemed to look down at him. Charlie climbed the marble stairs, but off to the left side. Two-thirds of the way up, he stopped and sat.

He opened his laptop and waited, gazing out toward the Korean War Memorial, the World War II Memorial, the Washington Monument.

The evening air was cool and breezy, refreshing. Traffic was sparse. When he finally heard Gardner’s heels, lightly thunking on the steps above him, Charlie stood. Climbed the steps, moving in a diagonal toward him.

“Mr. Gardner!” he called.

Perry Gardner stopped. Charlie stepped up into his shadow. He
clicked the “Start” button on his laptop. Held it out, letting Gardner see the video feed.

The image on the screen was Richard Franklin. He was saying,
“Don’t you understand? Perry Gardner’s firm
is
a threat. Because technology is a threat. The technology his company has developed
could
make the United States technologically obsolete if we let it. So we chose to bring him in, rather than bring him down. That’s our mission.”