Empire Read online

  “As if brilliant equals good.”

  “Exactly,” said Cecily. “But we still don’t know if he had anything to do with it. And we don’t know who the people who approached

  Reuben and Phillips even were. Phillips doesn’t know, anyway, and Reuben never said and never wrote down anything.”

  “So Torrent may or may not be involved with Verus.”

  “No, that’s not the point,” said Cecily. “I’m almost sure he’s not part of Verus’s operation. Verus was in control of everything about his operation. People reported to him, and he reported to God. Or history. Whatever he believed in. Not to Torrent. And can you imagine Torrent reporting to him?”

  “Maybe. It’s possible.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Cecily. “You met Verus.” “I didn’t see him at his best.”

  “But can you imagine that if Torrent worked for him, Verus would sit still for Torrent being nominated by both parties? Essentially handed the presidency?”

  “Of course he would,” said Cole. “If it means he wins after all.”

  “Okay, maybe,” said Cecily. “But I don’t think so. Because of this.”

  She handed another sheet of paper to Cole. It had only one name on it. DeeNee Breen. Took a class with Torrent as an undergrad at Princeton. Got an A.

  Cole felt sick. “But it was just a class.”

  “From Torrent. At Princeton. Coincidence. Lots of students took classes from him. Not all of them murdered a major in the U.S. Army, but I know I’m reasoning backward. It’s no proof of anything. It’s just . . . I had to tell somebody. I had to show somebody or I’d go crazy, watching Torrent do this—this rocket ride to supreme power.”

  “Who would keep a secret like this?” said Cole. “This conspiracy would be too—”

  “Cole,” said Cecily, “who would believe Verus could bring off his conspiracy? Anyway, I don’t know if it was a conspiracy. It might have been more like some kind of evil Johnny Appleseed. Torrent might just have gone around planting seeds. Who knows what he said to Verus that maybe provoked him. Like, ‘You talk about how committed you are, Mr. Verus, but you don’t do anything. You took the name of a Roman Emperor, but you act like a lobbyist.’ That’s the way he talked. Challenging. Goading. He goaded Reuben. Called him ‘soldier boy’ all the time. It made Reuben all the more eager to prove himself to Torrent.”

  Cole remembered that day when Torrent led them through the reasoning process that pointed to Chinnereth and Genesseret. “You’re saying that he already knew where Verus’s operations were?”

  “No, no, that’s the beauty of it. He goads Verus. Makes him read history books that will point him to certain courses of action. But he isn’t actually in on it. I think he really did figure out where Verus was exactly the way he showed us. Maybe he had some scrap of inside information—after all, he was NSA, he had access to intelligence reports that he wouldn’t necessarily share with us. But he wasn’t in on it, any more than he was directly in on what Reuben and Phillips were doing.”

  “And DeeNee?” asked Cole.

  “That’s different. The men who were waiting to ambush you they’re dead. We can’t question them. Did they know she was planning to kill Reuben? Were they planning to kill him, or just subdue him and get the PDA? Did they work for Verus or Torrent or some third party we don’t know about? It’s all so murky and I don’t know. But she was a student of Torrent’s.”

  “Were the guys who were with her?”

  “No. Nobody else.”

  “I don’t know, Cecily. I just don’t know.”

  “I don’t know either. I’m not accusing him. I’m really not. But this stuff just won’t go away.”

  Cole nodded. “I guess it’s like having a song on your mind. You can’t get rid of it. You hate the song. So you sing it to somebody else, and now we’ve both got the song on our minds.”

  “I’m so sorry!” she said. “You’ll notice that I didn’t call you, you just came over.”

  “Absolutely,” said Cole. “And I’m glad you told me. Really. No lie. I’m glad you told me and nobody else.”

  “Because they’d think I’m crazy?”

  “Because word might get around and somebody might kill you,” said Cole.

  She was rocked by that. “Come on.”

  “If it’s true,” said Cole, “If it’s true. Then you’re just begging to be murdered. To shut you up.”

  She reached over to the papers, turned on the shredder beside the desk, and turned them into confetti.

  “Very dramatic, but they’re on disk, aren’t they?” said Cole.

  “Not for long,” she said. “And yes, I do know how to overwrite files so that they are truly and completely erased.”

  “But you know and I know,” said Cole. “And we’re both going to keep watching, aren’t we?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t think of this as something dangerous.”

  “Yet you didn’t talk about it to anybody.”

  “I thought they’d think I was crazy. Everybody talks about Torrent like he’s God.”

  “The savior of America,” said Cole. “But it might not be assassination. Declaring you mentally unfit and taking your children away would do the same job, wouldn’t it?”

  “You’re scaring me,” she said.

  “I’m sorry. But I’m not joking. You’ve planted the seed in my mind. I’ll watch. I promise you. I love this country. I don’t want a dictator. But I don’t want you to talk to anybody else about this. And I don’t want you to do any more research. You had to call people to get this information. You had to go to websites, you had to write to people, correct?”

  She nodded.

  “So you might already be on a list somewhere. Even if it’s only inside Torrent’s head. For what it’s worth, though, I think there’s a good chance you’re completely wrong. Which means you’re safe. But then it’s just as important not to say these things out loud to anyone else because if Torrent’s innocent, then this is . . . really kind of vicious slander.”

  Cecily nodded again.

  “Cecily, let’s both watch him. Let’s see how things play out. What he does with real power, when he gets his hands on it.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “Meanwhile,” said Cole, “I really have missed you guys. I really do like your kids. Can we be friends? Paranoids together, yes, but also friends?”

  “Mark and Nick adore you.”

  “And vice versa,” said Cole. “I’ll visit now and then, and sometimes we’ll watch Torrent on the news and exchange knowing glances. With any luck, we’ll laugh about what we were thinking tonight.”

  “Were we thinking it? Or was I the only one?”

  “Oh, you’ve got me thinking it, all right. You got the song on my mind, too.”

  They left the office. Cole insisted on rinsing the ice cream dishes and putting them in the dishwasher. “First time I’ve done dishes for anybody who wasn’t my mom,” he said. “I mean anybody I liked who wasn’t my mom.”

  “I’ll have cookies for you next time.”

  “Good, because it’s my life’s ambition to be fat.”

  She gave him a hug at the door and he hugged her back. “I can’t help it,” she said. “I feel better now, because somebody else knows.”

  When he was gone, she locked the door, went downstairs, got all the confetti from shredding those papers, and ran them down the garbage disposal in the kitchen.

  At the Democratic convention, Torrent was nominated for President on the second ballot.

  A week later, at the Republican convention, he was nominated by acclamation.

  He became the first President since Washington to be elected with all of the electoral votes. And the largest popular vote in history, of course, since it was only divided with a handful of fringe candidates. But there was a huge turnout at that election. As pundits delighted in pointing out, if Torrent had gotten only half the votes he got, he still would have had the largest
vote total of any presidential candidate in history.

  People believed in him. They were ready for peace. They were ready to be united.

  And in a house in Potomac Falls, Virginia, the Malich family watched the election returns with Bartholomew Coleman as their guest of honor. There was no suspense. But the TV stayed on, filling the sound clips of cheering crowds and excited newsmen.

  Now and then, Cole and Cessy exchanged knowing glances.

  When the polls closed in California, President Nielson appeared on camera. He had been reelected to Congress from his Idaho district in a landslide of his own. He seemed genuinely happy as he said, “I am pleased to announce my resignation from the presidency, effective tomorrow at noon. I was never more than an emergency President, and the emergency is over. There’s no reason for Averell Torrent not to start right away doing the job you chose him to do.”

  Cecily broke down in tears. Just for a moment. “That’s just like LaMonte. Have we ever had a President who truly didn’t want the job?”

  “Besides Warren Harding?” said Cole.

  “Who?” said Mark.

  “A dumb guy who got chosen to be President once because he looked presidential and all the people who actually wanted the job had too many people who hated them,” said Cole. “But your mom is right. Nielson did a good job as long as he was needed. And he chose his successor.” He grinned at Cecily. “Just like Trajan and Hadrian and Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.”

  “And you claim you’re not a historian,” said Cecily, wiping her eyes, but laughing ruefully.

  Thirty minutes later, Torrent came on the screen.

  “I am honored beyond measure by the trust the American people have shown in me. I’m glad that so many people have come to the polls to show they share my dream of a nation united, a single people who sometimes disagree, but always remain friends and fellow citizens. I will live up to your trust to the best of my ability.

  “I am moved by the generosity and humility of my good friend, President LaMonte Nielson. Not only did he raise me to national prominence, but also he trained me for the job that you have voted to give me. His willing resignation from the presidency is in the spirit of Cincinnatus, the great Roman leader who, having saved his city, resigned all his offices and returned to his farm to continue his life as an ordinary citizen.”

  “A Roman reference,” said Cole.

  “But not an emperor,” said Cecily.

  Torrent was still talking. “There is nothing ordinary about LaMonte Nielson, however. He will continue to serve in Congress, and he will continue to hold a place in the hearts of the American people, in gratitude for his excellent service during our deepest national crisis since the Civil War.”

  “Exactly the right thing to say,” said Cecily.

  “Tomorrow I will be sworn into office as the second appointed Vice President to succeed to the presidency because of the resignation of his predecessor. In January, I will be sworn in again, for the term you just elected me to. But I have not forgotten that last June, on the thirteenth day, foreign terrorists murdered the elected President of the United States, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and other dedicated servants of the American people in the performance of their duties.

  “This was an offense to the entire American people. During the turmoil of the past few months, we have had our minds on problems within our borders. But the outrage committed against us has not been forgotten. Our response will be measured. It will be just. It will be thorough. It will be inevitable.

  “But throughout the world, let every nation look to America for friendship. If you live at peace with your neighbors, if you provide fundamental human rights to your citizens, then we will join hands with you in perpetual partnership. We will show you that America longs for peace. We will have it within our own borders. We will help maintain it wherever it is threatened.

  “And here at home, we will look at ourselves, not as groups arrayed against each other, quarreling over endless divisive issues, but as a single society, linked together by a shared culture, a shared history, and a shared future. Let’s build that future together, day by day, as neighbors, with respect, as you have joined together tonight in this great exercise of democracy.”

  That was it. He was done.

  There was no cheering crowd, because he had not given his speech at election headquarters. There was no election headquarters. He had not campaigned. Instead, he had gone from city to city, state to state, wherever the local candidates would agree to appear with him together, on the same platform, and each pledge to support their opponent if he should win. It was as if he were running an anti-campaign.

  And now, his acceptance speech was given quietly, while sitting in his living room, with a single camera crew. Behind him, shelves of books. Beside him, his family. The perfect image of what Americans would like to think their Presidents are—intelligent, loving, kind, modest, and surprised by their good fortune.

  “I wonder,” said Cole, “if he’ll remember that Cincinnatus speech four years from now.”

  “He won’t have to,” said Cecily, “if he’s reelected.”

  “He seems like exactly the President I’ve wished for,” said Cole.

  “Me too,” said Cecily.

  “Hope it’s true.”

  “Me too.”

  Cole got up from the sofa and stretched. “Let’s have cookies.”

  AFTERWORD

  The Originating premise of this novel did not come from me. Donald Mustard and his partners in Chair Entertainment had the idea for an entertainment franchise called Empire about a near-future American civil war. When I joined the project to create a work of fiction based on that premise, my first order of business was to come up with a plausible way that such an event might come about.

  It was, sadly enough, all too easy.

  Because we haven’t had a civil war in the past fourteen decades, people think we can’t have one now. Where is the geographic clarity of the Mason-Dixon line? When you look at the red-state blue-state division in the past few elections, you get a false impression. The real division is urban, academic, and high-tech counties versus suburban, rural, and conservative Christian counties. How could such widely scattered “blue” centers and such centerless “red” populations ever act in concert?

  Geography aside, however, we have never been so evenly divided with such hateful rhetoric since the years leading up to the Civil War of the 1860s. Because the national media elite are so uniformly progressive, we keep hearing (in the elite media) about the rhetorical excesses of the “extreme right.” To hear the same media, there is no “extreme left,” just the occasional progressive who says things he or she shouldn’t.

  But any rational observer has to see that the Left and Right in America are screaming the most vile accusations at each other all the time. We are fully polarized—if you accept one idea that sounds like it belongs to either the blue or the red, you are assumed—nay, required—to espouse the entire rest of the package, even though there is no reason why supporting the war against terrorism should imply you’re in favor of banning all abortions and against restricting the availability of firearms; no reason why being in favor of keeping government-imposed limits on the free market should imply you also are in favor of giving legal status to homosexual couples and against building nuclear reactors. These issues are not remotely related, and yet if you hold any of one group’s views, you are hated by the other group as if you believed them all; and if you hold most of one group’s views, but not all, you are treated as if you were a traitor for deviating even slightly from the party line.

  It goes deeper than this, however. A good working definition of fanaticism is that you are so convinced of your views and policies that you are sure anyone who opposes them must either be stupid and deceived or have some ulterior motive. We are today a nation where almost everyone in the public eye displays fanaticism with every utterance.

  It is part of
human nature to regard as sane those people who share the worldview of the majority of society. Somehow, though, we have managed to divide ourselves into two different, mutually exclusive sanities. The people in each society reinforce each other in madness, believing unsubstantiated ideas that are often contradicted not only by each other but also by whatever objective evidence exists on the subject. Instead of having an ever-adapting civilization-wide consensus reality, we have become a nation of insane people able to see the madness only in the other side.

  Does this lead, inevitably, to civil war? Of course not—though it’s hardly conducive to stable government or the long-term continuation of democracy. What inevitably arises from such division is the attempt by one group, utterly convinced of its rectitude, to use all coercive forces available to stamp out the opposing views.

  Such an effort is, of course, a confession of madness. Suppression of other people’s beliefs by force only comes about when you are deeply afraid that your own beliefs are wrong and you are desperate to keep anyone from challenging them. Oh, you may come up with rhetoric about how you are suppressing them for their own good or for the good of others, but people who are confident of their beliefs are content merely to offer and teach, not compel.

  The impulse toward coercion takes whatever forms are available. In academia, it consists of the denial of degrees, jobs, or tenure to people with nonconformist opinions. Ironically, the people who are most relentless in eliminating competing ideas congratulate themselves on their tolerance and diversity. In most situations, it is less formal, consisting of shunning—but the shunning usually has teeth in it. Did Mel Gibson, when in his cups, say something that reflects his upbringing in an anti-Semitic household? Then he is to be shunned—which in Hollywood will mean he can never be considered for an Oscar and will have a much harder time getting prestige, as opposed to money, roles.

  It has happened to me, repeatedly, from both the Left and the Right. It is never enough to disagree with me—I must be banned from speaking at a particular convention or campus; my writings should be boycotted; anything that will punish me for my noncompliance and, if possible, impoverish me and my family.