Empire (Empire 1)

“Not if it isn’t on the surface either.”

“You can’t dig a hole and hide the dirt in the hole you dug,” said Mingo. “Then it ain’t a hole anymore.”

“I thought of that,” said Torrent.

“I’m not surprised,” said Cecily.

“You dig the hole and hide the dirt underwater.”

“So it’s on the coast?” asked Arty.

“Somebody would have seen it if he were loading dirt onto boats and dumping it offshore. But Washington has a lot of lakes. Natural ones and artificial ones. Here’s what I think. Verus used his funding of politically active environmental groups to get them to withdraw their opposition to building a dam somewhere. It just sails through. A dam in a canyon is going to form a really deep lake. So what if Verus owns a mountain right by the lake, and while the lake level is rising, his people are dumping rubble from their tunnel-building into the water? From the satellites, it just looks like the water level is rising higher and higher. Nobody’s boating on it because the lake is still being filled. Nobody sees anything.”

“Is Verus that smart?” asked Cole.

“Maybe not. Maybe it all happened in Russia or China. Maybe it isn’t even Verus. But I think it is Verus and he is that smart. He practically owns the whole Progressive movement himself, it can’t be anybody else because nobody does anything on the Left without his fingers in it. He’s like Hitler with Mein Kampf, he announced it all right up front, only nobody believes he’s serious, nobody believes it can be done. But look at what these rebels have accomplished. They’ve got New York, not only our largest city and probably the most Progressive, but the home of most of the news networks including Fox—which, by the way, he’s smart enough not to censor yet. And with New York they have the U.N. And they conducted this invasion in such a way that the city council endorsed it after the fact. These people are now the legally constituted police force of New York City so that technically they aren’t even occupying the city, they’re part of it. You think some committee of really sincere progressives brought this off?”

“I don’t know, we’re a committee,” said Cole. “We’re pretty smart.”

“And we’re thirty feet from the President’s office,” said Torrent. “Smart people don’t form committees and send out mailings. They gravitate toward power so their ideas can be implemented.”

“Brains and money,” said Drew.

Torrent smiled. “One man with brains and money and ruthless ambition, all in service of a cause, so he feels completely justified in killing all kinds of people along the way, from Presidents to doormen. Doesn’t all this sound like the same mind that played us all the way he did with Friday the Thirteenth and Major Malich’s clandestine operations and . . . everything?”

He didn’t need to mention General Alton’s nearly successful attempt to involve Nielson in declaring martial law. He only had to look at Cole.

“I’m buying it,” said Cole. “At least as a possibility. I assume you’ve already identified all the new dams and new lakes in Washington.”

“Only two candidates for the job,” said Torrent. “Right next to each other, part of the same power and water project. Lakes Chinnereth and Genesseret.”

“Aren’t those based on the Greek and Hebrew names for the Sea of Galilee?” said Cat.

They looked at him as if they’d never met him before.

“What, a black man can’t study Hebrew?” said Cat. “Army taught me Arabic, Hebrew is the next language over. And I’m a lay minister.”

“The lakes were named for a religious colony that was in the little valley just below where the dams are,” said Torrent. “Nowadays nobody lives anywhere near there. All the surrounding land is national forest, leased by a bunch of lumber companies. I have no idea which of the two lakes was used for dumping dirt. Maybe b

oth. The main thing is, they had no trouble getting their permits. Two lawsuits from environmental groups, but they were dropped.”

“If it’s really where the rebel garrison is, what can we do against two hundred mechs and eight hundred hovercycles?”

“Remember,” said Torrent, “my guesses about what he’s got could be in the wrong proportions. Maybe he’s got twice as much equipment and half as many people. Every person they trained was a possible leak. Maybe Verus never had more than a couple of hundred soldiers. Now they might be scrambling to train volunteer soldiers from New York City. They might have hundreds of mechs lined up against walls with nobody to run them.”

“Or maybe they have weapons we haven’t seen yet,” said Mingo.

“Or an army of thousands armed with standard weapons in addition to the troops that run their new machines,” said Babe.

“I don’t want you guys to make a frontal assault,” said Torrent. “We need surgery here. We need proof.”

“What constitutes proof?” said Cecily. “Half the people in the world don’t even believe we landed on the moon back in ’69. Why would they believe a bunch of pictures of mechs lined up in a cave when Hollywood CGI can create footage of racks of robots or crowds of soldiers?”

“But your video will be grainy and crappy-looking,” said Torrent. “So people will believe it. Besides, what we really want is Aldo Verus and his top people, ready to confess to everything.”

“Why would they talk?” said Cole.

“Are you kidding?” said Torrent. “Verus is a talker. It’s killing him that he’s had to keep this a secret. But he knows that if he’s captured, it’s all over for his particular campaign. No doubt he has visions of the Progressive Movement Worldwide going on without him. But this little war of his, beginning with Friday the Thirteenth, is over. At that point, what’s to hide? He’ll want to brag because he’s a bragger. He doesn’t just love his movement, he loves that it’s his movement. He’ll be eager to sign a book deal with Knopf and believe me, he’ll write every word himself. Verus is the Unabomber—with money.”