Empire (Empire 1)

“You, too, sir,” said Arty.

Drew was waiting up top. He made a point of turning off his cellphone. Cole held up his cellphone and ended the call, too.

“Does Cecily know?” asked Load.

Cole nodded.

Then he staggered to the railing and stood there, leaning on it, and trembled from the spent adrenalin, and then found himself crying, and he decided that it wasn’t for the ordeal he’d just been through, and it wasn’t for the fear, and it wasn’t from killing a bunch of guys in Rock Creek Canyon and back on the Maryland side of the park.

“I only knew him for three days,” he said.

“He makes an impression,” said Load softly. One by one they each touched his shoulder. And the kind touches were enough to revive him. Calm him. He walked back with them along the path, around the ranger station, ignoring the civilians and rangers who were being watched over by a heavily-armed Benny.

“Thank you for your cooperation,” said Benny. “I’m happy to tell you that the operation was successful. You can resume your normal activities.” Then he joined them on the walk to their cars.

SIXTEEN

FINDING THE ENEMY

They also serve, who only sit and type.

It was Reuben’s PDA that got Cecily through the first month of widowhood. Recording the shipments and financial transactions, following the trails, searching for patterns, tracking corporate entities, passing along names and leads to FBI and DIA agents: It was a vast spiderweb, with Reuben’s notes like dewdrops that reveal where the otherwise invisible strands must be.

It was an urgent task. And they were Reuben’s notes. Reuben’s words. It was his trail that she was following. All those days when he traveled on assignments he couldn’t tell her about, all those trips abroad and in America, all those nights when she could see that he was troubled and yet knew he couldn’t talk about it. Now he was telling her.

Meanwhile, Aunt Margaret brought the children down to Gettysburg and stayed with them. “I’m an old widow myself,” she said. “I know how hard it is. You need the children near, and you also need to lose yourself completely in something that isn’t your family. So here I am and here I’ll stay while you save the world.”

It wasn’t the world Cecily was saving. It might be America. It might be herself.

But one thing was certain. It was not going to save Reuben’s reputation. There was no way that he could have helped but see that something wrong was going on. Too much of what he did was within the borders of the United States. Most of the shipments seemed to go from port city to port city, so some illusion could be maintained that these weapons shipments were going overseas. But who would bring weapons from China or Russia to the United States in order to ship them to pro-U.S. partisan groups in Iran or Sudan or Turkmenistan? Reuben had to at least wonder if some or all of these weapons were meant to be used domestically.

Which was why he kept these notes on the PDA—and why he was so reluctant to give it into anyone else’s hands. Because he knew something dangerous was going on and he was helping with it—yet he believed he was doing it for a President that he admired and trusted, and so he acted the good soldier and did the jobs he was assigned to do.

Yet if it turned out to be wrong, he would have the paper trail—well, the digital trail—that someone could use to track it all down. Reuben never needed records like this. He had trained his memory like a Jesuit. So he was deliberately creating evidence.

He knew he was only guessing about the integrity of the people he served. If he guessed wrong, then he was serving traitors, and he could not claim that it had never occurred to him. All he could do was make sure that the full confession was here. The evidence to unravel what he had helped them do.

If only he had talked to me, she thought again and again.

And most of the time she answered herself: What did I know? What would I have counseled? Of course, caution, yes—I’m the woman who set aside the political career to raise a family. I choose safety. That’s what I do. But I also loved Reuben. Still love him. And I knew how unhappy he would be, to walk away from something that might have been in service of a cause, a President, he believed in.

So few seemed to believe in that President, and yet Reuben was sure that he was pursuing the right course. So would she have counseled him to give it up? To denounce it?

And . . . could he have given it up? It was clear now that he had been working for and with murderers and traitors. Would they have let him walk away, even if she had advised him? No. There was too much danger that he would then denounce them—they would have killed him. And she would have spent the last year or so consoling her children about their father’s apparent suicide. Or traffic accident. Whatever method they used.

Things happened as they happened. Reuben accepted the hand dealt to him, and bet on it. Bet his life on it.

Whatever others may think of the choices he made, I know his heart. I know that he would and did sacrifice anything for the cause of freedom, in support of those he believed also fought for it. He took the long view of history. He cared about the world their grandchildren would inherit. He despised those who thought only of themselves, their immediate advantage. Whatever I might have advised him, he would have done what he did. I could not have changed him.

I wouldn’t have tried.

So she shed tears over her work, but

she kept working.

Reuben’s jeesh came in and out of the Gettysburg White House, as the media were calling it now. She knew them all by their noms de guerre now: Cole, not Coleman; Load, not Lloyd. Mingo, Benny, Cat, Babe, Arty, Drew. Very young men when they first trained to be soldiers, but now men, seasoned veterans.

LaMonte knew an asset when he saw one. Eight extraordinarily good soldiers whose loyalty had already been tested. He turned them over to his National Security Adviser, and Averell Torrent used them for missions that required deftness, quickness. Seize this. Destroy that. In twos and threes they went out, sometimes in uniform, sometimes in civilian clothes, sometimes heavily armed in attack choppers, sometimes on domestic flights with no weapons at all.