Robert Sawyer - Triggers

“No,” said Seth. “I mean the terrorists are here. In the United States, and London, and elsewhere. They’re already here; that’s how these attacks can happen.”

“Foot soldiers. The leaders are back there.”

“In the Islamic world?” Seth said. “This isn’t a war against Islam.”

“No, it’s not,” Muilenburg said. “There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, and fifty countries in which Muslims are the majority of the population. Pakistan is just a tiny part of Islam.”

“This is horrific,” Seth said. “Abominable.”

“What’s been done to us is horrific,” replied Muilenburg. “And it will go on and on unless we force them to stop, unless we show them that we will not tolerate it. We’re the last remaining superpower. It’s time we used our superpowers and put an end to this.”

Darryl listened intently as Bessie recounted the meeting between Secretary of Defense Muilenburg and the president. “And Jerrison bought into this?” he said when she was done.

Bessie nodded. “And it’s going ahead on Monday. Tomorrow.”

Darryl looked around the luxurious cottage—but a gilded cage is still a cage. “I guess there’s nothing we can do about it, is there?”

“Well,” said Bessie, “there’s not much.” She searched the president’s memories to see if he had received her letter yet; it didn’t seem so. “But,” she added, looking out the window at the snow-covered forested ground, “at least I’ve given it my best shot.”

Seth Jerrison was still lying on the bed in the presidential residence at Camp David. The First Lady—Jasmine Jerrison, tall, sophisticated, refined—was sitting nearby, working on her laptop computer, which was perched on a little desk. With the exception of Agent Susan Dawson, Seth had dismissed the Secret Service from providing his protection here; he was now relying on Navy and Marine officers who had been screened by Peter Muilenburg’s staff.

There was a knock at the door. Jasmine got up and opened it. One of the Marine guards saluted her crisply. “Ma’am, an envelope for the president.”

Seth couldn’t see her face from here, but he imagined she was narrowing her green eyes. “Who’s it from?”

“Ma’am, Mrs. Stilwell insisted that it be delivered to your husband.”

“I’ll take it.”

“I promised Mrs. Stilwell that it would go to the president.”

“I’ll give it to him. Thank you.” She took the envelope. The young man saluted and left, and Jasmine brought the envelope over to Seth. He nodded, and she got the ornate letter opener off the desk and slit the flap, put on her reading glasses, and pulled out the single sheet.

“It’s gibberish,” she said.

“What?”

She held it so he could see. He was already wearing his Ben Franklin glasses, and he tipped his head so that he could look through the lenses at the paper. It was a piece of Camp David stationery with a long message written on it in a shaky hand. The letter began:

5-2-6

IJFXK XVXJY DIJLZ…

“What’s it mean?” Jasmine asked.

The First Lady was privy to all his secrets—personal and professional—although he’d never had cause to explain the 13 Code to her before. He did so now. It took only a few seconds for her to write up a decryption table for the key 5-2-6, but converting the message was tedious—just as, Seth imagined, it had been tedious for Bessie to write it out.

He dictated Bessie’s note one letter at a time, and Jasmine typed the corresponding decoded characters into her laptop. She then put in the proper spacing and added punctuation.

“ ‘Dear Mr. President,’ ” Jasmine read aloud. “ ‘You’ve kidnapped me and are preventing me from seeing my ailing son.’ ”

“ ‘Kidnapped’ seems a bit strong,” Seth said.

Jasmine, who, he supposed, had taken in the gist of the letter while typing it up, lifted her eyebrows. “It gets stronger. She writes, ‘I believe in God. I read the Bible every day. I do believe in an eye for an eye. But what you’re planning is a million eyes for one. I can’t hold with that.’ ”

Seth shifted a bit on the bed. The fire continued to crackle. “ ‘I prayed to God for advice, and discovered that you had no similar memories, that you’d never prayed, that you don’t believe in the Lord. I’m shocked and saddened. It’s another thing you lied about on the campaign trail. But I also know, because you discussed it with your campaign director Rusty, that you think it’s possible to be moral without God, that you believe an atheist can be a good person.’ ”

Seth closed his eyes but continued to listen.

“ ‘I can’t argue politics or national security with you. I don’t know enough about them. But I do know this. You told Rusty that after you leave office, you’re planning to come out as an atheist. Your political career would be over, anyway, but you wanted to show the world that an atheist had successfully led a democratic nation. You wanted to strike a blow for the acceptance of atheists in American society. But if you do what you’re planning to do, you will hurt the cause of atheism, Mr. President. People will say only someone who didn’t fear God could have done something so monstrous.’ ”

Jasmine scrolled her screen, then went on. “ ‘It’s a small argument, I suppose—but it’s the best one I can give you. If you go ahead with Counterpunch, you will damage your cause beyond repair.’ ”

Jasmine looked up. “And then she closes with, ‘God bless the United States, and God bless you, too, Mr. President.’ ”

Jasmine put the laptop back on the desk and came over to sit on the edge of their bed. She took her husband’s hand, the back of which had a little cotton ball taped to it, covering where Dr. Snow had inserted a needle a short time ago.

President Jerrison and the First Lady sat in silence for a time. “No,” said Seth at last.

“Pardon, dear?”

“No. I can’t do what Bessie wants. Sweetheart, something happened while you were in Oregon.”

“I’ll say.”

“Yes,” said Seth, “but there was something else.” She’d been briefed by her staff about the memory linkages, of course. Seth went on. “A young Army vet made me experience something. He’d been with Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Seth knew all the facts and figures, of course. The war had begun under George W. Bush on March 20, 2003, in large part as a response to the 9/11 attacks; it had ended, more or less, under Barack Obama, on August 31, 2010—except that for Kadeem Adams, and thousands like him, it had never ended.

“Yes?” said Jasmine.

“He made me share a flashback to that war, to Iraq.”

“God,” said Jasmine.

“It was horrific. I can’t put our soldiers through anything like that ever again.” He looked into his wife’s eyes. “We have to end this. We have to stop it, once and for all. Counterpunch is going ahead.”

Dogwood, the cottage at Camp David that Darryl and Bessie were being held in, had two well-stocked bathrooms. Darryl had shaved, removing the stubble from his face and head, and he and Bessie were now eating the elegant dinner that had been brought to them.

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t keep from being inundated by her memories—after all, there were so many more of hers than of his own. He knew now what it was like to be white, as well as to be a little girl, a teenaged girl, a grown woman, a middle-aged woman, a woman of a certain age, and, yes, at last, what it was like to be old. The being-old part was worse than he’d ever imagined it would be: constant pains, fading vision, failing hearing, a melancholy sense that one had once been so much more vigorous, more acute, more attractive, more everything —and, always in the background, a haunting awareness that time was running out.