But that didn’t mean that there weren’t substantial numbers of Congressmen acting to slow down any kind of military action. Part of that was to hold up approval of President Nielson’s appointments.
They approved George Sarkissian as the new Secretary of State, though with a battle; Averell Torrent sailed through as National Security Adviser. However, there was such virulent opposition to former Secretary of State Donald Porter as the new Vice President—it was called a needlessly provocative action—that the acting Speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate refused to push through a vote on his confirmation even though they were of the President’s party.
And there was no chance of getting a new Secretary of Defense through, regardless of who it was. The Republicans threatened to name one of their most radically right-wing members as Speaker of the House to replace LaMonte Nielson, making him the next in line for the presidency. But this was abandoned when legal experts in the law schools howled that even though it might be technically legal, the effect would be an end run around the Constitutional requirement that the new next-in-line to the presidency be approved by both houses of Congress. “It’s just what you’d expect,” said one of the sound bites, “given the reckless disregard for the Constitution shown by the Republicans from 2000 on.” Once that became the story, the maneuver became politically impossible and the House continued with an Acting Speaker.
International reaction was predictable but maddening. The sworn enemies of the United States were quick to recognize the Progressive Restoration, declaring their U.N. ambassadors to be ambassadors to the United States as well, downgrading their ambassadors in
Washington to mere consular status. But that sort of thing was expected from those nations, hardly worth noticing.
It was the wait-and-see reaction from supposed allies in NATO and elsewhere that infuriated LaMonte and Sarkissian. As Sarkissian said in one meeting, “Do our allies really want an armed rebellion controlled by unknown persons to get their fanatical little hands on the nuclear button?”
The worst was that President Nielsen’s inner council was divided as well. Sarkissian and Porter argued for military action. Torrent argued for them to wait. And so far, at least, LaMonte was deciding things Torrent’s way.
“You’re right,” LaMonte said to Sarkissian and Porter, more than once. “Our inaction is practically inviting other states to attempt to join with the rebels. But their resolutions have no legal force whatsoever. Passing a resolution doesn’t give them military power. When we decide to take action, we’ll take that action.”
The longer we wait means the larger the portion of the country that will have to be treated like an occupied enemy when the war is over, they said.
But always LaMonte would say, “It’s a struggle for hearts and minds. They want us to use military might. In their view, it proves that they’re right about us. So we’ll limit ourselves to very small military actions while we find out who these people really are. When we find out who’s funding all this and who’s giving the orders, then we can treat it as what it is—a police matter. We’ll arrest the perpetrators, seize their military and financial assets, and then welcome everybody back to constitutional government with open arms and no grudges. That can only happen if there’s no invasion, no bloodbath.”
Cecily attended some of these meetings, though not as a participant, merely as an observer and a resource if someone should need her to answer a question. She knew that LaMonte did not come up with this plan himself. His adamant stand in favor of investigation-before-invasion was Torrent’s plan.
But it was the right one. There was a reason why Reuben had respected the man so much. He was brilliant. He was completely nonpartisan. He always reasoned from practical principles: This might work, this certainly won’t. And as he sent Reuben’s jeesh out on missions that always worked, his stock rose higher and higher in the administration—and in Congress. He could speak the language of liberals to liberals and conservatives to conservatives, and yet his words to one group never antagonized the other. He was a living exemplar of what it might mean to be a moderate, if there were such things in American politics anymore.
It was also Torrent who heard from everybody working on the investigation. So it was hardly a surprise when he was the one who put it all together into some clear answers.
Not clear enough to announce anything, though. Because what he didn’t have was proof of the kind that would overwhelm the media and the opposition in Congress.
“We can’t build this like a legal case in corporate law,” he explained to Cecily and the jeesh. “It isn’t a judge we have to convince, it’s the very people who are most committed to disbelieving everything we say.”
“So who is it?” asked Cecily.
“We’ve known from the start who the most likely person behind all this is,” said Torrent. “Aldo Verus.”
“He’s a clown,” said Babe. “His birth name was Aldo Vera. A joke, like Armand Hammer.”
“He’s a straw man,” said Drew. “The favorite bugbear of conservatives.”
“Which is why we’ve worked so hard to find somebody else,” said Torrent. “But Verus has been using his uncountable fortune to fund ultra-left-wing movements for years. His avowed purpose has always been to bring down the late President. He closely monitors every dime he contributes to front organizations to make sure it’s being effectively used. He requires them to raise matching funds so he can husband his resources. He’s a smart guy, he’s grimly determined, and just because he announced his goal doesn’t mean he can’t be the one who’s accomplishing it.”
Torrent proceeded to enumerate the business holdings Verus had divested over the past two years. “He had plenty of money out of ordinary profits to fund the design of these weapons. But our weapons experts say that to get them from prototype to production, the big expenditures would have begun about two years ago. And that’s exactly when he started selling off these companies.”
“He can’t outspend the Defense Department,” said Cat. “Nobody has that much money.”
“He’s a better manager of his money than the Defense Department,” said Torrent. “He doesn’t have to maintain bases or pay the salaries of thousands of soldiers in Korea and Germany. He doesn’t have to please Congressmen. And he doesn’t have to match our military strength—he only has to have a credible enough force to cause us trouble.”
Torrent gave them copies of the report on the probable cost of manufacturing the mechs and the hovercycles. “We’ve run the numbers. Assuming he pays his soldiers comparably to U.S. soldiers, and assuming that only one out of five of the mechs is internally manned, while the others are controlled by a computer operator at a remote location, and comparing that with the money we know he got from the sales of directly-owned assets, our estimate is that a possible force configuration is 250 mechs, a thousand hovercycles, and an additional thousand soldiers who run the focused EMPs and handle routine foot patrol.”
“Don’t forget that he might have plenty of funding that isn’t his own money,” said Cat. “There’s all that Hollywood cash.”
“That all had to be put into tax-deductible organizations. The only American money he can spend without public accountability is his own,” said Torrent.
“But he might have tapped into Iranian money,” suggested Benny.
“Possibly. Or Russian or Chinese. But I don’t think so. If Verus accepted even a dime of foreign money, and it became known, then he’d lose vast amounts of his support. His cause can’t look like it’s sponsored by foreigners, period.”
“Okay,” said Cecily. “Let’s just say if it’s Verus, and he has the force you estimate, what then?”
“Satellite photos of the forces deployed in New York City indicate fewer than fifty mechs and only a couple of hundred hovercycles.”
“A fifth of your estimate,” said Drew.
“Exactly,” said Torrent. “Where’s the rest of it?”
Arty immediately said,
“He’s got stashes all over the country. Look how fast mechs and hovercycles popped up when they were chasing Cole.”
“Six mechs and a dozen hovercycles,” said Torrent. “Near the nation’s capital, at a time when they were needed to keep Major Malich’s PDA from getting into our hands. But I don’t think there are stashes all over, and you know why.”
“Secrets are hard to keep,” said Drew.
“Don’t divide your forces,” said Cole.
“Both,” said Torrent. “Verus can’t afford to have lots of hiding places, because these things are hard to hide. Especially the soldiers. It’s hard to disguise garrisons, especially if you’re training them to keep them in top form. And he doesn’t want tiny forces scattered around where he might never need them. He needs to have most of them in one really terrific hiding place. A place from which he can disperse them as needed.”
“Where?” said Cole.
“I don’t know,” said Torrent.
They all showed their disappointment.
“But you don’t know it’s Aldo Verus, either,” said Cecily. “So where do you think it is?”
“That’s why I had you bring in your map,” he said. “Just as Verus is the obvious guy, the place is obvious, too.”
Cecily lifted up the map and propped its frame on the end of the table. “I’ve been looking at it for weeks now, and it’s not obvious to me.”
“First, let’s look at what he needs,” said Torrent. “Rough terrain. A place where big things can easily be hidden. Which means forest or mountains. Or both. Iowa need not apply.”
The soldiers nodded.
“Then he needs it to be close to where he’ll need it. He isn’t planning to conquer the whole U.S., he’s going to try to win over and protect territories that are largely sympathetic to his cause.” “Blue states,” said Drew.
“No,” said Torrent. “Because you know that ‘blue states’ and ‘red states’ are a lie. Most of the blue states are blue because the city vote overwhelmed the rural vote. But he can’t hide these things inside a city, can he?”
Again they agreed with his reasoning.
“Then he needs isolation. Unsettled territory. Few neighbors. That practically rules out the whole East and Midwest, doesn’t it? The land is too heavily settled, too constantly observed. Even in the wildest part of the mountains of New York State—ignoring how Republican those areas are—there are thousands of overflights and too much traffic on the roads.”
“So he goes west,” said Cole.
“Not California. Again, too populated and too many conservatives. There are only two states with wide open spaces, Progressive political dominance, and conservatives who feel so hammered they’ve practically given up.”
“Ecotopia,” said Mingo.
“Washington and Oregon,” said Torrent. “That’s right. Now look at Mrs. Malich’s map.”
Until that point, Cecily had seen it all as a web of shipments crisscrossing the country. But if you looked only at Oregon and Washington, Oregon was practically empty of endpoints. “It has to be Washington,” she said. “But where? It’s a big state.”
“He needs to be near a major highway,” said Torrent. “But he has to be in very rugged country.”
“Most of the rugged country is on the west side, in the Cascades,” said Cecily. “Which is also the most Progressive part of the state.”
“It fits his recipe,” said Torrent. “Assuming we’re right.”
“But haven’t you already looked at the satellite photos?”
“Of course,” said Torrent. “And there’s nothing. But there’s nothing anywhere in the world. Teams in the DOD have gone over the whole world looking for a place where these things might be built and stored.”
“So you think he went underground,” said Drew.
“We think that one of these mountains is probably riddled with caverns. Aldo Verus is smart enough to learn from Al Qaeda’s tunneling. Only he’ll do it on a larger scale, and totally high tech.”
“What about the dirt?” said Mingo. “I’ve worked construction, man. I’ve dug tunnels. You get a shitload of dirt and it shows up on satellites, believe me.”
“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.”