Empire (Empire 1)

Of course, everything depended on how well Torrent stood up to the scrutiny the media would now put him through. His life would be researched and dissected. It helped that he was married to a shy but lovely woman and had two attractive sons and a pretty daughter, all in their teens—the family would be splendid as an image of stability. Even though Torrent had long traveled the country lecturing and giving seminars, there had never been a breath of scandal about sexual peccadilloes. He had inherited a little family money but lived rather simply and while his speaking and teaching fees were respectable, they were not exorbitant. He was not, by any modern standard, rich. It would take fifty Torrents to make an Oprah, by Cecily’s rough estimate.

Cecily liked LaMonte, and felt a great loyalty to him. So she was also a little sad. This appointment made it absolutely clear that LaMonte had no desire to run for President himself. He would go down in history as a caretaker President. And Cecily knew that was exactly what he hoped for—he would want to be remembered as a man who executed the office faithfully, and walked away from it as soon as he had done his job.

In all likelihood, he would probably return to the House. The new laws of presidential succession did not necessarily require that he resign his House seat, and Cecily tried to remember if he had or not. She didn’t think so. In such a time of crisis, nobody was agitating for a by-election in Idaho yet. Or maybe he had already quietly let it be known that his name would be on the ballot in November—running again for Congress. Nobody would dare to run against him or try to replace him.

So everybody was happy, really. The country was better off. LaMonte had quite possibly changed the momentum and the direction of the national mood.

Now all that was needed was for Rube’s jeesh to find the smoking gun—the place where all these Progressive Restoration weapons had been made, where their soldiers had been trained. And maybe, just maybe, proof that the rebels had been ready to take advantage of Friday the Thirteenth because they had planned it. Right now that charge was a staple of the far-right pundits, but it was dismissed as absurd by nearly everyone else. Cecily knew that because the traitors obviously had to have contacts inside the White House and the Pentagon, it was easy to assume that the treason came from the Right, not the Left—the opposite camp from the Progressive Restoration.

But she knew better. The lurid details of Reuben’s murder by his secretary had gone through the normal media nonsense—claims that his secretary had probably killed him because they were having an affair, or because he had backed out of their treasonous conspiracy at the last moment and tried to save the late President. Cecily did her best to ignore such things because they would only make her crazy and she could do nothing to stop them.

She knew that the FBI had turned up the fact that while DeeNee had never done anything illegal or even questionable—or she could never have been cleared to work where she did in the Pentagon her friends from college remembered her as being a fervent radical of the Left, even by the standards of American university English departments. The FBI found no links to any particular movements—DeeNee had not been a joiner—but there was no way to pretend that there was much chance that whatever conspiracy she had been a part of was of the Right. But since the report on Reuben’s murder was now tied up in the report on the Friday the Thirteenth assassinations, nothing had been made public. She had found out only because LaMonte told her.

“I’m not going to make it public and I hope you’ll respect that decision,” LaMonte had said. “If it leaks that she was a campus leftist, it will be interpreted as an attempt by my administration to blame the Left, which means the Democrats, for Friday the Thirteenth. It would only be more divisive. When we get the full answer, then we’ll publish it and damn the consequences. But until then, Cecily, let them babble on the television and don’t let the nonsense bother you. The truth will come out in due time, and your husband will be recognized as the hero and patriot and martyr that he was.”

But LaMonte would probably not be in office when the final report was ready. Someone else would be. If it was the Democratic candidate, Cecily had little faith in her letting a report that implicated anyone from the Left ever see the light of day. Maybe it would be Torrent. But would he allow a divisive report to be issued, given that he would be trying to hold the factions together?

Then again, he was bold enough to use Reuben’s jeesh as a fighting force to make surgical strikes to work against the rebels wherever one of their minor strongholds had been found. Maybe he would be wise enough to regard the provable truth as the best road toward reconciliation.

Cecily pinned her hopes on Cole and Reuben’s friends. If Torrent was right, and these lakes in Washington were the stronghold of the rebels, maybe they would find there the proof that would reveal who was responsible for Friday the Thirteenth—and for Reuben’s murder. Reuben would be completely exonerated. Their children could grow up without a taint of treason attached to their father, but could take pride in him.

The press conference was over. But Cecily’s thoughts had taken her down an emotional road she usually stayed away from. All she could think about was Reuben.

Sandy came up to her after the reporters rushed out to file their stories or do their standups in front of the “Gettysburg White House.” She saw Cecily’s attempt to hold back tears and said, “My dear, I know you aren’t moved by Torrent’s appointment.”

“No, no,” Cecily said. “It’s Reuben, that’s all.”

“You’ve hardly given yourself a chance to grieve.”

“Work is the cure,” said Cecily. “I was just thinking about our kids and how the world would view their father as they grew up.”

“The world will honor him, or the world can go hang,” said Sandy. “Meanwhile, give yourself a break. Nobody’s going to get any serious work done today anyway, it will all be buzz and whisper and speculate. It’s a field day for the pundits, in and out of the President’s staff. Go home and come back tomorrow.”

It was good advice. But when Sandy said to go home she meant one thing. To Cecily it meant another.

She could hardly go “home” to the little house where Aunt Margaret was looking after the kids—the last thing they needed was to see their mother as an emotional wreck.

So she got in her car and drove out of the secured area and drove down U.S. highway 15 to Leesburg, and then down Route 7 through the familiar sights of Loudoun County. She had been so immersed in the war they were fighting that she had almost forgotten that most of America didn’t know they were fighting a war. People might be keenly aware of and troubled by the fact that New York City and the state of Vermont were not under the active authority of the U.S. government, that Washington State was neutral at best, that other states might join the rebellion—or the “restoration”—and they no doubt had strong feelings about it. But they were still going to work and doing their jobs, shopping at the malls, eating at the restaurants, watching the phony reality shows of summer, or going to the summer blockbuster movies. Cecily wondered briefly whether current events had helped or hurt one of her and Reuben’s favorite series, 24. Did it now seem too close to painful reality for people to enjoy it? Or was its sometimes far-fetched plotting now completely vindicated by events that were even less probable than the conspiracies on the show?

By the time 24 went back on the air, people would no doubt have calmed down about Friday the Thirteenth. The show would still be a hit. American Idol would still find hordes of people waiting to humiliate themselves for a chance to be on television. The World Series would still be more important to a lot of Americans than the presidential election. One of the great things about democracy was that you were also free to ignore government if you wanted to.

The house was locked. Undisturbed. She had arranged for her mail to be forwarded to her office in Gettysburg and she had paid all the bills—the air-conditioning was running and the water was still connected.

No, not undisturbed after all. The bedroom had been entered by someone who—no, she knew why the closet and several drawers were open. Cole told her that the Secret Service agents had sent people here and to Cole’s apartment to get uniforms and underwear and toiletries for him and Reuben that last night of Reuben’s life. The Secret Service agents who had been willing to die to protect her husband, and who nearly had—both severely injured in the fighting, but both now out of the hospital and, presumably, back on the job, at a desk no doubt until their recovery was complete. She had visited them in the hospital once and thanked them for trying to save her husband, and for saving Cole, but she could see that they were still ashamed of having been caught flat-footed by DeeNee and her .22.

Cecily pulled down the covers of the bed, took off her shoes, and crawled between the sheets. She had heard that sometimes the scent of a loved one would linger in their sheets, their clothing, but either time had erased any smells or they were simply too normal for her to recognize them. She had a good cry over that. But she would have had a good long cry if the smells had still lingered there, too. It was about time she cried, she told herself even as she wept.

And then she was done with weeping, for the moment, anyway. She got up and went downstairs to the kitchen and began cleaning out the dead food in the fridge. Here there was no shortage of odors, and she got the garbage bags out of the house and into the big plastic cans behind the garage. She expected the cans to be full of reeking garbage, too, but some neighbor must have taken them to the curb on garbage day and brought them back. She hesitated to put these bags in the cans because she had no intention of being here on garbage day—but maybe the neighbor would check. Or maybe not. Better to leave the garbage here than stinking up the kitchen.

Hadn’t the children’s bikes been out on the lawn? No, she made them put them away in the garage before they left. Didn’t she? She checked, and they were there, so she must have—the neighbors didn’t have keys to get in and put things away. It wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. Cecily had been one of the few mothers who was home during the day.

I want to be home with my children again, she thought. And then whispered it. “I want to be home again.”

But not yet. Not until she had finished with the work she was doing. There was still more evidence to gather. More pieces to fit into the mosaic.

Which made her think of the “office”—a room in the finished half of the basement where they kept their financial records and all of Reuben’s books and papers from school. Nothing classified or secret, not in print and not on the family computers. The laptop in the office was more hers than his. It’s where she kept track of the family finances and paid bills online.

She walked into the room and switched on the light. Someone had been in here, too. The laptop was gone.