Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

"I know about that. It's never been a secret," said Cecily. "Reuben talked to me about that back when he was getting his doctorate and Averell was one of his professors."

"Yes, but it's one thing for him to theorize, and another thing for him to put the whole thing into play."

"He didn't cause the plague."

"Of course not," said Cole. "But he's used the plague. What he's doing in Africa? It's like everybody's been working from his script. Did you know that in 1997 he wrote a paper on boundaries in Africa? How they needed to be redrawn to fit with languages and tribes?"

"A lot of people have been saying that for years."

"But he actually drew the lines. And then he ended it by saying that it couldn't happen until some kind of crisis broke down the old colonial system. Broke the back of the crime lords running all these countries and profiting from them as they were. He specifically said that an epidemic in Africa might be the broom that would sweep clean. Because it would hit every country instead of just a few, the way other disasters and crises do."

Cecily had to think about that for a moment. "All it means is that he was right. And it was a good thing that when the crisis came, a man who had already thought it through was President and happened to have the boldness to act."

"Exactly what I tell them. Told them. And it always comes back to the same thing. The handheld EMP device."

"What does that have to do with it?"

Cole sighed. "They had it in the CAR. And those Sudanese had the exact same model."

"Maybe it was Sudanese testing it in the CAR," said Cecily.

"Do you really think the deep scientific tradition in Sudan developed a handheld electronic interference device?"

Cecily chuckled. "Okay, so they got it from somewhere else."

"But where, where, where was that?" asked Cole. "I'll tell you. I think it was Aldo Verus."

"Well, then, it was not President Torrent."

"Not so fast," said Cole.

"Because Aldo Verus is in jail?"

"Partly. And because Aldo Verus did not get into the business of developing high-tech weapons on the sly until he attended a symposium for responsible leaders of industry—which in that context meant politically-correct billionaires—at which Torrent gave a really interesting presentation in which he said that as long as national governments had a monopoly on weapons development, the best weapons would always be in the hands of the kind of people who chose the military as a career."

"Ah," said Cecily. "I wonder what he meant by that."

"I'm sure you're wondering. But Aldo Verus knew exactly what it meant. I'm betting that's when he started hiring people to develop his little toys. And because he's a wacko, it all looked like it came out of the CGI department of sci-fi movies. But the point is, Torrent went to the people who could make it happen, and he said the words that needed to be said, and then it happened."

"But that was years ago," said Cecily. "You say it like it's a conspiracy, when it's really just a very smart man full of ideas, who has always talked a lot."

"Or planted seeds, depending on how you look at it," said Cole. "But it's not me talking. Pretend you're hearing this from Drew, which is in fact where most of the talk comes from, because he's the one actually doing the research."

"You and I had our suspicions, too," said Cecily. "Remember? Right after the civil war. We thought it looked awfully convenient that everything had somehow worked so that Torrent went from Princeton to NSA to vice president to president in, what, five months?"

"Yes, and whatever happened to our suspicions?"

"I translated all of Reuben's papers and I never found—or, rather, he never found a smoking gun."

"That's what Mingo says. No smoking gun, because Torrent is too smart for there to ever be a gun that was held in his hand. But he is always prepared to step in and take advantage of the situations that come up. And they always come up. And when they do come up, he seems always to have a connection, deep in the background, with the source of the problem."

"Torrent always says that only fools make plans, and really complicated, longterm plans come from madmen."

"He doesn't plan," said Cole. "Any more than a spider plans. He just lays a web out there and waits for something to hit it, and then he pounces and makes it his own."

"Nothing you're saying sounds evil to me," said Cecily. "I know this man. So do you. And he's been a good president. Not conservative enough for Rusty Humphries, of course, but then, neither am I."

"And there you are," said Cole. "You come to the same place where I am. The evidence shows a really smart, bold, ambitious, opportunistic guy who is president now and deserves to be. But my jeesh—Reuben's jeesh—they go beyond the evidence. They aren't lawyers, they're soldiers. They make battlefield judgments. On the battlefield you never have enough information, not even with drones and satellites watching over you, because you can never know the enemy's intentions. And yet you still have to make decisions. So you learn to make guesses. Flying leaps. Reuben was brilliant at it. If he'd lived long enough, he would have been a four-star for real, not a temp like me, and he would have been brilliant at it, because he had good instincts, he could leap to a decision based on fragments of information, and he'd be right."