Hidden Empire (Empire 2)

Well, if they were really plotting to kill the President, there was no friendship. Even if Torrent was as guilty as they thought, the proper course was denunciation and impeachment, not murder. But how would he know if their plot was real until and unless they actually did it?

Cole joined Chinma at the graves and together they walked Cecily back to her car, where Aunt Margaret and the Malich children were waiting.

Meanwhile, Cole had his own observers in place. If the men took some kind of action, he had a decent chance of finding out about it in time to put a stop to it.

It took a week to get permission to go see Aldo Verus, though Cole knew if he had asked the President, he could have had permission in ten minutes. The trouble was, he would have to tell the President why he wanted to speak to him, and for that Cole had no good answer. "Because I want to know if you prompted him to develop the weapons he used in his assault on the United States"—that would not be a smart thing to say, whether Torrent had done it or not. It would be the end of Torrent's trust in Cole—and if Torrent was not the monster of ambition that Reuben's jeesh thought he was, Cole wanted his trust, wanted to be part of his brilliant governance.

The Pentagon was not a pleasant place for Cole these days. While nobody would disparage his achievements in the field, the bureaucratic officers actually hated a man more because of such things. And for Cole to fail to keep his command from becoming infected with the nictovirus had become a matter for a lot of vicious gossip. Coleman was careless, Coleman did not maintain good discipline, so it was his fault his men were incapacitated when danger came.

It was the kind of thing that would effectively put an end to his career in the military. Once Torrent was out of office in five years, Cole would be in his mid-thirties—and unemployable. Too young to retire—he hadn't even completed his twenty. And Cole didn't feel much like marking time till he could retire, accepting the kind of nothing assignments that the bureaucrats would take such delight in devising for him.

Cole toyed with the idea of resigning his commission now. But then he would lose his assignment with the President—he was really only useful to him as an Army officer—and Cole did not want to find himself shut out. Especially since without access to the President, Cole could do nothing to protect him.

So he stayed in and reported to his office in the Pentagon. There were plenty of junior officers—especially the kind who were real soldiers and not bureaucrats—who wanted to associate with him. It's not as if he were a pariah. Even his enemies made a great show of being his buddy. But now that he no longer had the clout of a major general, he was treated with a bit of condescension. Like somebody who flew first class one time, because someone else was footing the bill, but from then on was pointedly seated in coach, while the important guys kept sitting in front of that curtain.

After returning to duty, he had spent a couple of weeks making all his formal reports on everything that had happened under his command in Africa. He could have spun it out into a couple of years of work—but he wasn't interested in going over old ground. He made sure credit went where it was due. He used his few good connections to make sure that the men he had most relied on—like Sergeant Wills—got good, career-helping assignments.

He also made sure that there was a complete list of every American, including the caregivers, who had survived a case of the nictovirus. They were, as of now, the only Americans known to be immune, and that might be important someday.

But then he was done with his clerical work and his network-mending and his polite sucking up to officers who hated him and were trying to destroy him because he had done what they would neither dare nor be able to do in the field.

He sent a note to the President telling him that he was fully available for any duty the President had in mind except physical combat. And then he had nothing much to do except wait. In his position, he served at the President's pleasure, and when the President had nothing for him to do, he might as well sharpen pencils.

He spent much of his time working out, training, trying to restore his body to the level of fitness he had enjoyed before the nicto. But training could only take up so much of the day before his body rebelled.

During the rest of the time, he investigated what he could, trying to find sources to verify or dismiss the points his jeesh had raised in their secret indictment of the President. How do you track down things that might have happened any time in the past fifteen years, ever since Torrent came out of graduate school with two doctorates and a dozen offers from the top universities in the world?

He couldn't even Google Torrent's name—since he was currently President, there were more than a hundred million hits on his name. Googling him with someone else's name, if they had any fame at all, would also turn up far too many links to use. It was better to track through certain meetings and speeches: Who was there? Whom did Torrent have opportunities to know?

The trouble was that Torrent had made it a point to know everybody. Long before he was appointed NSA, he had met more than once with every living politician in America, it seemed—it was one of the reasons his nomination sailed through Congress when others were blocked.

That was when he started trying to get in to see Aldo Verus. Verus had commanded a military force with the large, plane-zapping EMP device. He might be willing to tell—or at least hint—or maybe inadvertently reveal—who came up with the thing and therefore who might have developed the handheld EMP. Or he might be willing to say incriminating things about Torrent, which then could be checked out and expanded on if they turned out to have some basis in truth.

When he got permission to see Verus—which included getting Verus's own consent—he immediately invited Cecily to come with him.

"Aunt Margaret is still in residence, so I can certainly go, unless the President happens to call me in that day."

"Has he called you? Since you came back?" asked Cole.

"No," said Cecily.

"Me, neither. I even dropped him a whiny little note saying, 'You never write, you never call.'"

"I doubt it was whiny," said Cecily. "And I did the same. But … nothing."

"Well, it's nice to know the country can be governed without recourse to us," said Cole. "Meanwhile, let's go meet the man I captured. I never had a chance to talk to him without actually pointing a gun at him or chasing him up a ladder or tackling him."

Nothing had been said about their real purpose, of course. Cole and Cecily both assumed that someone was listening in on all their phone conversations, whether friend or foe. They might not be, but to assume they had privacy would be naive and dangerous.

They went to the prison together. They submitted to the normal prison rigmarole and finally got a chance to sit in a room with Aldo Verus, with a guard watching through a fairly large window.

Verus looked younger than he had when Cole caught him. Maybe being in a Club Med prison had given him a chance to relax.

"My condolences on your son," said Aldo Verus to Cecily, almost as soon as they had sat down.

"Thank you," said Cecily.

"And congratulations to you on yours," said Verus to Cole. "Chinma seems to be a remarkable young man."