And then the ceremony was over. It hadn't taken very long. There had been no sermons or speeches.
Everyone waited in place as long as Cecily and her children stood looking at the two markers, one with Reuben Malich's name and the other with Mark's. For Mark's rank, he was listed as a private, and his unit was Cole's jeesh.
Since his age would be obvious from the dates, Cecily had asked that there be a nonregulation addition: After his date of death were the words "by enemy fire in the line of duty." This would ensure that anyone who happened to see the marker would not think that Mark was buried there merely because he was a soldier's son, but rather because he had earned that marker himself.
Cecily would one day be laid to rest in that cemetery, but she would share her husband's marker and his grave. Mark got his own because he had earned his own.
When Cecily and the children turned away from the graves, then everyone else moved as well, and began to speak in low voices, if they spoke at all.
Cole watched what Torrent did. He did not rush forward to speak to Cecily first; he did not hurry away as if he had pressing business to take care of. He merely stood and watched Cecily and the children.
Cole almost flinched when he saw Mingo head toward Torrent, followed by the rest of the jeesh. Did they mean it when they hinted at wanting Torrent dead? This was certainly an opportunity. Every man on the jeesh was capable of killing with his bare hands in a sudden, unpreventable movement. Even though none of them was back to full strength, it was where and how you struck, not necessarily the force of the blow, and Cole had a mental image of Torrent suddenly falling over dead as the jeesh walked away, dusting off their hands after a job well done.
No one would believe Cole had nothing to do with it.
Cole walked a little nearer, to where he could see the men's faces as one by one they filed past the President and shook his hand. "Thank you for coming, sir." "Well done, sir." "It means a lot to her, sir."
There was nothing in their expressions to hint at irony, and as they walked away, there was no microexpression of scorn or anger. They seemed quite sincere as they thanked him for being there.
When they had shaken his hand, they left. They apparently felt no need to talk to Cecily or the kids. They would see one another often in the days and weeks to come, everyone knew that. It was enough that they had been there for the ceremony.
Cole did not leave, however. Nor did he speak to the President—he, too, would have a chance to speak to him over the next few days. Torrent was clearly waiting for Cecily, and soon she sent her children back to the car with Aunt Margaret. Cole saw Chinma walk over and stand in front of the headstones, now that no else was there.
Cecily walked up to President Torrent. Cole did not retreat from his position. If they didn't want him to hear and see, they could walk away from him.
"Thank you for coming, sir," said Cecily. "I didn't expect it."
Torrent took her hands in his and said, "If there were anything I could do to undo the circumstances that led to either of those deaths, I would do it." The words sounded heartfelt.
The cynic in Cole thought: He is admitting that there was something he did that led to their deaths.
The believer in him answered: He made recommendations and decisions that put them in place to be killed, but they were all legitimate decisions, and their deaths could not have been foreseen.
Their individual deaths could not have been foreseen, but the fact that somebody would die had been certain. If Torrent really got Aldo Verus to start funding the development of high-tech weapons, he knew that someday those weapons would be used. And was it possible that Torrent had, one way or another, triggered everything else?
After all, Torrent could have brought the four members of the U.S. embassy staff in Bangui home a week before they were taken hostage by people with the handheld EMP. Why did he wait? Was it because he didn't want any assault on the embassy until the EMP was in place, so its effectiveness could be tested?
Had Torrent had anything to do with Reuben being assigned to think of ways to assassinate the president? Did he cause those plans to be given to terrorists? Did he suggest Reuben as the logical fall guy for the assassination, since he had thought up the plans? If he did, there was no way to pretend that it was a coincidence Torrent couldn't help.
At once another part of his mind found the excuse Torrent needed. Maybe he suggested that they find "a good tactical thinker" to develop the plan for them, and somebody else thought of using Reuben Malich. They might even have heard Torrent recommend him for some other purpose, and thought they could use him for this instead. Maybe they were even sticking it to Torrent—not everyone who worked with him was bound to love him, though you'd never know that to listen to the media. Setting up his protege for disgrace or death, just to show Torrent he wasn't as much in control as he thought.
All imaginary. I'm just making this up. Like people who speculate endlessly on the motivations of the aliens who abduct humans; they can speculate all they want, but they don't have any credible evidence that the aliens are abducting anybody, or that they even exist.
But once you start thinking this way it's hard to stop. The human brain, Cole knew, was wired to spin out stories, to assign causality.
Whenever something happened, the brain kicked in and said, This is because … and then the brain itself would fill in the blanks with whatever was available.
It was this propensity for causal speculation that led us to the great achievements of science and technology … and to witch trials and pogroms.
Isn't it enough that Torrent has single-handedly united our deeply divided country, contained a virus that he had nothing to do with causing, broken down the barriers to redrawing the map of Africa, and maintained the general level of peace on Earth that is essential to maintaining a prosperous global economy?
Isn't it enough that he's the best president since Lincoln, maybe the best ever?
But the seeds of doubt had been planted. They had taken root. Because Torrent's own writings showed that he had thought of everything, including the methodology that a man would have to use in order to set himself up as ruler of a country and, eventually, of the world. He had laid it out, not in one place but in this or that essay or article or speech, and then had spectacularly become the President of the United States and head of both major parties in a shockingly short time. If he were following his own plan, and working to become ruler of a global empire, how could it possibly look any different from this?
If he were a great statesman of Churchillian or Disraelian or Lin-colnian stature, and merely did the right thing whenever circumstances required him to act, wouldn't it also look exactly like this?
How, from the outside, could anyone know?
But there was a trail. If the guys on the jeesh were right about Torrent, then he had done more than plant a few seeds. If the seizing of the embassy in Bangui and the Sudanese raid on Calabar had been at Torrent's prompting or at least with his cooperation, someone would know it. Someone could put it together. Someone knew the truth—if Torrent was not what he seemed to be.
Torrent kissed Cecily on the cheek—one cheek, this wasn't France—and then walked back the way he had come. No doubt there was a squad of extremely nervous Secret Service agents at the end of his walk, checking their watches and scanning the view from drones overhead.
What if, unbeknownst to any of them, the greatest threat to Torrent's life had been right here at the ceremony, from men that he had often used to carry out his most difficult, sensitive, or dangerous assignments? Torrent had said it himself, once. Treason only matters when it's committed by trusted men. No one was more trusted than Reuben's jeesh—Cole's now. But not really anybody's. They were their own jeesh now, highly skilled, with access to powerful weaponry and experienced in using it. No one foresaw the danger.
If there was any danger. Because even if Cole were ready to denounce them, what could he say? There was nothing but innuendo, nothing that would
cause the Secret Service to do more than interview the men. And then they would know that Cole had accused them. It would be the end of their friendship.
Well, if they were really plotting to kill the President, there was no friendship. Even if Torrent was as guilty as they thought, the proper course was denunciation and impeachment, not murder. But how would he know if their plot was real until and unless they actually did it?
Cole joined Chinma at the graves and together they walked Cecily back to her car, where Aunt Margaret and the Malich children were waiting.
Meanwhile, Cole had his own observers in place. If the men took some kind of action, he had a decent chance of finding out about it in time to put a stop to it.
It took a week to get permission to go see Aldo Verus, though Cole knew if he had asked the President, he could have had permission in ten minutes. The trouble was, he would have to tell the President why he wanted to speak to him, and for that Cole had no good answer. "Because I want to know if you prompted him to develop the weapons he used in his assault on the United States"—that would not be a smart thing to say, whether Torrent had done it or not. It would be the end of Torrent's trust in Cole—and if Torrent was not the monster of ambition that Reuben's jeesh thought he was, Cole wanted his trust, wanted to be part of his brilliant governance.
The Pentagon was not a pleasant place for Cole these days. While nobody would disparage his achievements in the field, the bureaucratic officers actually hated a man more because of such things. And for Cole to fail to keep his command from becoming infected with the nictovirus had become a matter for a lot of vicious gossip. Coleman was careless, Coleman did not maintain good discipline, so it was his fault his men were incapacitated when danger came.
It was the kind of thing that would effectively put an end to his career in the military. Once Torrent was out of office in five years, Cole would be in his mid-thirties—and unemployable. Too young to retire—he hadn't even completed his twenty. And Cole didn't feel much like marking time till he could retire, accepting the kind of nothing assignments that the bureaucrats would take such delight in devising for him.
Cole toyed with the idea of resigning his commission now. But then he would lose his assignment with the President—he was really only useful to him as an Army officer—and Cole did not want to find himself shut out. Especially since without access to the President, Cole could do nothing to protect him.
So he stayed in and reported to his office in the Pentagon. There were plenty of junior officers—especially the kind who were real soldiers and not bureaucrats—who wanted to associate with him. It's not as if he were a pariah. Even his enemies made a great show of being his buddy. But now that he no longer had the clout of a major general, he was treated with a bit of condescension. Like somebody who flew first class one time, because someone else was footing the bill, but from then on was pointedly seated in coach, while the important guys kept sitting in front of that curtain.
After returning to duty, he had spent a couple of weeks making all his formal reports on everything that had happened under his command in Africa. He could have spun it out into a couple of years of work—but he wasn't interested in going over old ground. He made sure credit went where it was due. He used his few good connections to make sure that the men he had most relied on—like Sergeant Wills—got good, career-helping assignments.
He also made sure that there was a complete list of every American, including the caregivers, who had survived a case of the nictovirus. They were, as of now, the only Americans known to be immune, and that might be important someday.
But then he was done with his clerical work and his network-mending and his polite sucking up to officers who hated him and were trying to destroy him because he had done what they would neither dare nor be able to do in the field.
He sent a note to the President telling him that he was fully available for any duty the President had in mind except physical combat. And then he had nothing much to do except wait. In his position, he served at the President's pleasure, and when the President had nothing for him to do, he might as well sharpen pencils.
He spent much of his time working out, training, trying to restore his body to the level of fitness he had enjoyed before the nicto. But training could only take up so much of the day before his body rebelled.
During the rest of the time, he investigated what he could, trying to find sources to verify or dismiss the points his jeesh had raised in their secret indictment of the President. How do you track down things that might have happened any time in the past fifteen years, ever since Torrent came out of graduate school with two doctorates and a dozen offers from the top universities in the world?
He couldn't even Google Torrent's name—since he was currently President, there were more than a hundred million hits on his name. Googling him with someone else's name, if they had any fame at all, would also turn up far too many links to use. It was better to track through certain meetings and speeches: Who was there? Whom did Torrent have opportunities to know?
The trouble was that Torrent had made it a point to know everybody. Long before he was appointed NSA, he had met more than once with every living politician in America, it seemed—it was one of the reasons his nomination sailed through Congress when others were blocked.
That was when he started trying to get in to see Aldo Verus. Verus had commanded a military force with the large, plane-zapping EMP device. He might be willing to tell—or at least hint—or maybe inadvertently reveal—who came up with the thing and therefore who might have developed the handheld EMP. Or he might be willing to say incriminating things about Torrent, which then could be checked out and expanded on if they turned out to have some basis in truth.
When he got permission to see Verus—which included getting Verus's own consent—he immediately invited Cecily to come with him.
"Aunt Margaret is still in residence, so I can certainly go, unless the President happens to call me in that day."
"Has he called you? Since you came back?" asked Cole.
"No," said Cecily.
"Me, neither. I even dropped him a whiny little note saying, 'You never write, you never call.'"
"I doubt it was whiny," said Cecily. "And I did the same. But … nothing."
"Well, it's nice to know the country can be governed without recourse to us," said Cole. "Meanwhile, let's go meet the man I captured. I never had a chance to talk to him without actually pointing a gun at him or chasing him up a ladder or tackling him."
Nothing had been said about their real purpose, of course. Cole and Cecily both assumed that someone was listening in on all their phone conversations, whether friend or foe. They might not be, but to assume they had privacy would be naive and dangerous.
They went to the prison together. They submitted to the normal prison rigmarole and finally got a chance to sit in a room with Aldo Verus, with a guard watching through a fairly large window.
Verus looked younger than he had when Cole caught him. Maybe being in a Club Med prison had given him a chance to relax.
"My condolences on your son," said Aldo Verus to Cecily, almost as soon as they had sat down.
"Thank you," said Cecily.
"And congratulations to you on yours," said Verus to Cole. "Chinma seems to be a remarkable young man."
"The adoption isn't final yet, but thank you, I'm grateful to have him in my life."
"I'm curious," said Verus, "about the arrangements, though. I understand he's living with Mrs. Malich, even though you're adopting him. What do you do, take him on weekends? It sounds like shared custody after a divorce, without your actually having been married."
Cecily laughed. "My, but you've been keeping tabs on us."
"Not at all," said Verus. "When your request to visit me came in, I had my staff research everything about you. No, Colonel Coleman, I have not been obsessively tracking you since you apprehended me. You were doing your job, I was doing mine."
Cole refrained from askin
g him what "job" it was that required Verus to order the deaths of American cops and soldiers and then try to dismantle the Constitution.
"So why are we having this meeting?" asked Verus. "If Averell wanted to talk to me, he'd come himself."
"The President?"
"He has before," said Verus. "Well, technically, he wasn't President yet. But I was already traitor-in-chief. Didn't he tell you? Oh, yes, Averell and I are great friends."
"Mr. Verus," said Cecily.
"Call me Aldo, please."
"That is not likely," said Cecily.
"Why, because your husband was killed by some nutcase? Whatever you might think, that had nothing to do with our attempt to set to rights the stolen election of 2000 and get the country back on track."
"We're not here because of my husband's murder," said Cecily. "We're here in pursuit of the makers of the EMP device."
"Oh, yes, of course," said Verus. "My people had a really big one that brought down airplanes bent on assaulting the sovereign city of New York, so if somebody has one the size of a submachine gun it must be from the same source."
"Well, was it?" asked Cecily.
"My people developed our EMP device, in-house. We invented it, we built it, we used the only one we ever shipped out of our factory, and no one else got anything from us. We didn't sell the plans, we didn't sell the EMPs. And do you know why? Because it would inevitably be used against soldiers of the United States, and contrary to the lies that have been told about me, I am a patriot and would never do anything to harm American soldiers going about their lawful business." He grinned at Cole. "What you and your boys were doing was not, of course, legal, which made you war criminals and therefore fair game. You see how these things work? It's always lawful to kill the people you want dead—but only if you win the war."