Empire (Empire 1)

“I shudder to ask, but with what?”

“It was still partly open,” said Cole. “I was joking.”

“Not much to do in West Windsor, New Jersey, at 0515 on a Sunday.”

“You know what I want?” said Cole.

“For Christmas?”

“For this moment. I want to get in a car and drive to the city and look at Ground Zero. It’s Sunday, it’s five in the morning, there won’t be traffic. We can be there and back before church, right?”

“Easily,” said Reuben. “But I don’t think you’ll see what you want to see. It’s not a rubble heap or even an excavation anymore. They’re building something appalling on the site, aren’t they?”

“I don’t know how far they’ve gotten,” said Cole. “But even if it’s a Starbucks now, I want to tread that ground. Or at le

ast look at it. Imagine the towers. Remember them. The media has forbidden us to remember the falling towers—they don’t allow us to see the footage. It’s like their slogan is, Forget the Alamo. I’m tired of being obedient to their decision to keep us blind.”

“Let me get the keys to Mingo’s SUV.”

“Not my trophy car?” asked Cole. “Oh, wait—Mingo’s has been mod-oh-fied.”

“Mingo’s isn’t registered to you or me,” said Reuben. “For all we know, there’s an APB out on our vehicles.”

“It has nothing to do with his arsenal?”

“If we hadn’t had to scrounge up weapons at Hain’s Point,” said Reuben, “the President would still be alive. So maybe yeah, maybe I want to have the weapons with me. But if somebody does try to arrest us, I’m not fighting. I didn’t train as a soldier so I could kill Americans.”

The Holland Tunnel took them into the city not far north of where the World Trade Center used to be. The traffic was heavier than Cole had expected, and the city was already full of life.

“How does anybody sleep here?” asked Cole.

“Air-conditioning,” said Rube. “It lets them close their windows and it makes white noise to help them not to hear the street. Plus, you get used to it.”

“So you’ve lived in the big city?” asked Cole.

“Not this big city, but I’ve spent a lot of time here, and a lot of other big cities, too.”

“In your real life, or on that secret assignment from the White House?”

“Which I now doubt had anything to do with the White House,” said Rube. “I think they’ve been playing me all along. I don’t know why I set off their use-this-guy alarms, but I think they marked me years ago.”

“And probably had a GPS on your car already, eh? So they didn’t have to tail you to find out if you went to Hain’s Point?”

“I’m more paranoid than that,” said Rube. “You think I didn’t scan my car regularly? I was doing weird stuff. Weapons systems. Parts delivery. Working out financial transactions in remote locations.”

“Laundering money?”

“I didn’t think of it that way, but probably, yes.”

“But you’re not going to tell me anything specific.”

“There’s still a chance I was working for the good guys, and this stuff is so classified it can’t be classified.”

“They trusted you.”

“To be a world-class fool,” said Rube. “But it’s nice to be trusted.”

There was actually on-street parking here and there. Rube took a spot and parallel-parked forward. “NASCAR trained,” said Cole.