Orson Card: Empire

“Of course he would,” said Cole. “If it means he wins after all.”

“Okay, maybe,” said Cecily. “But I don’t think so. Because of this.”

She handed another sheet of paper to Cole. It had only one name on it. DeeNee Breen. Took a class with Torrent as an undergrad at Princeton. Got an A.

Cole felt sick. “But it was just a class.”

“From Torrent. At Princeton. Coincidence. Lots of students took classes from him. Not all of them murdered a major in the U.S. Army, but I know I’m reasoning backward. It’s no proof of anything. It’s just… I had to tell somebody. I had to show somebody or I’d go crazy, watching Torrent do this—this rocket ride to supreme power.”

“Who would keep a secret like this?” said Cole. “This conspiracy would be too—”

“Cole,” said Cecily, “who would believe Verus could bring off his conspiracy? Anyway, I don’t know if it was a conspiracy. It might have been more like some kind of evil Johnny Appleseed. Torrent might just have gone around planting seeds. Who knows what he said to Verus that maybe provoked him. Like, ‘You talk about how committed you are, Mr. Verus, but you don’t do anything. You took the name of a Roman Emperor, but you act like a lobbyist.’ That’s the way he talked. Challenging. Goading. He goaded Reuben. Called him ‘soldier boy’ all the time. It made Reuben all the more eager to prove himself to Torrent.”

Cole remembered that day when Torrent led them through the reasoning process that pointed to Chinnereth and Genesseret. “You’re saying that he already knew where Verus’s operations were?”

“No, no, that’s the beauty of it. He goads Verus. Makes him read history books that will point him to certain courses of action. But he isn’t actually in on it. I think he really did figure out where Verus was exactly the way he showed us. Maybe he had some scrap of inside information—after all, he was NSA, he had access to intelligence reports that he wouldn’t necessarily share with us. But he wasn’t in on it, any more than he was directly in on what Reuben and Phillips were doing.”

“And DeeNee?” asked Cole.

“That’s different. The men who were waiting to ambush you—they’re dead. We can’t question them. Did they know she was planning to kill Reuben? Were they planning to kill him, or just subdue him and get the PDA? Did they work for Verus or Torrent or some third party we don’t know about? It’s all so murky and I don’t know. But she was a student of Torrent’s.”

“Were the guys who were with her?”

“No. Nobody else.”

“I don’t know, Cecily. I just don’t know.”

“I don’t know either. I’m not accusing him. I’m really not. But this stuff just won’t go away.”

Cole nodded. “I guess it’s like having a song on your mind. You can’t get rid of it. You hate the song. So you sing it to somebody else, and now we’ve both got the song on our minds.”

“I’m so sorry!” she said. “You’ll notice that I didn’t call you, you just came over.”

“Absolutely,” said Cole. “And I’m glad you told me. Really. No lie. I’m glad you told me and nobody else.”

“Because they’d think I’m crazy?”

“Because word might get around and somebody might kill you,” said Cole.

She was rocked by that. “Come on.”

“If it’s true,” said Cole. “ If it’s true. Then you’re just begging to be murdered. To shut you up.”

She reached over to the papers, turned on the shredder beside the desk, and turned them into confetti.

“Very dramatic, but they’re on disk, aren’t they?” said Cole.

“Not for long,” she said. “And yes, I do know how to overwrite files so that they are truly and completely erased.”

“But you know and I know,” said Cole. “And we’re both going to keep watching, aren’t we?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t think of this as something dangerous.”

“Yet you didn’t talk about it to anybody.”

“I thought they’d think I was crazy. Everybody talks about Torrent like he’s God.”

“The savior of America,” said Cole. “But it might not be assassination. Declaring you mentally unfit and taking your children away vould do the same job, wouldn’t it?”

“You’re scaring me,” she said.

“I’m sorry. But I’m not joking. You’ve planted the seed in my mind. I’ll watch. I promise you. I love this country. I don’t want a dictator. But I don’t want you to talk to anybody else about this. and I don’t want you to do any more research. You had to call people to get this information. You had to go to websites, you had to vrite to people, correct?”

She nodded.

“So you might already be on a list somewhere. Even if it’s only nside Torrent’s head. For what it’s worth, though, I think there’s a good chance you’re completely wrong. Which means you’re safe. But then it’s just as important not to say these things out loud to anyone else because if Torrent’s innocent, then this is… really kind if vicious slander.”

Cecily nodded again.

“Cecily, let’s both watch him. Let’s see how things play out. What he does with real power, when he gets his hands on it.”

“All right,” she said.

“Meanwhile,” said Cole, “I really have missed you guys. I really do like your kids. Can we be friends? Paranoids together, yes, but also friends?”

“Mark and Nick adore you.”

“And vice versa,” said Cole. “I’ll visit now and then, and sometimes we’ll watch Torrent on the news and exchange knowing glances. With any luck, we’ll laugh about what we were thinking tonight.”

“Were we thinking it? Or was I the only one?”

“Oh, you’ve got me thinking it, all right. You got the song on my mind, too.”

They left the office. Cole insisted on rinsing the ice cream dishes and putting them in the dishwasher. “First time I’ve done dishes for anybody who wasn’t my mom,” he said. “I mean anybody I liked who wasn’t my mom.”

“I’ll have cookies for you next time.”

“Good, because it’s my life’s ambition to be fat.”

She gave him a hug at the door and he hugged her back. “I can’t help it,” she said. “I feel better now, because somebody else knows.”

When he was gone, she locked the door, went downstairs, got all the confetti from shredding those papers, and ran them down the garbage disposal in the kitchen.

At the Democratic convention,Torrent was nominated for President on the second ballot.

A week later, at the Republican convention, he was nominated by acclamation.

He became the first President since Washington to be elected with all of the electoral votes. And the largest popular vote in history, of course, since it was only divided with a handful of fringe candidates. But there was a huge turnout at that election. As pundits delighted in pointing out, if Torrent had gotten only half the votes he got, he still would have had the largest vote total of any presidential candidate in history.

People believed in him. They were ready for peace. They were ready to be united.

And in a house in Potomac Falls, Virginia, the Malich family watched the election returns with Bartholomew Coleman as their guest of honor. There was no suspense. But the TV stayed on, filling the sound clips of cheering crowds and excited newsmen.

Now and then, Cole and Cessy exchanged knowing glances.

When the polls closed in California, President Nielson appeared on camera. He had been reelected to Congress from his Idaho district in a landslide of his own. He seemed genuinely happy as he said, “I am pleased to announce my resignation from the presidency, effective tomorrow at noon. I was never more than an emergency President, and the emergency is over. There’s no reason for Averell Torrent not to start right away doing the job you chose him to do.”