“It begins tomorrow.”
“How will I know you’ve done it?”
“You won’t be able to miss it, I promise.”
“I’ll hold you to it. Otherwise, Fiero’s dead. Diele, too.”
“There’s a bigger picture here, Troy. And killing those two dirt bags will only ruin it.”
“If you start lecturing me about political compromise, I’ll start shooting.”
“We’re beyond compromise. But violence isn’t the answer, either. You’ll only be helping them in the long run.”
Myers explained her plan, filled in the big picture.
Pearce was stunned. He wanted bloody revenge, but she was right.
Her plan was better.
64
Pearce didn’t pull the trigger on Fiero, but Myers did. Pulled it on Diele, too. She released Bath’s secret audio of them plotting the illegal drone strike against Mossa and Pearce, which would have resulted in Pearce’s death, an innocent American citizen and a war hero.
The story first leaked on Fox News, a network Fiero had targeted for punishment over the years. Payback was a real bitch. So was Fiero. Fox News was happy to toss her into the wood chipper of public opinion.
Bath had recorded virtually everything Fiero had ever done as a form of protection against her wily employer. It was also a form of leverage. Fiero was one of the most powerful politicians on the Hill. If any law-enforcement agency ever decided to take Bath on, she knew Fiero would be forced to protect her in order to protect herself.
What Bath hadn’t counted on was Ian McTavish, the hacking genius that penetrated her defenses and stole everything she had before she destroyed it. Of course, what Bath possessed wasn’t limited to Fiero. CIOS held the entire Hill hostage, whether they knew it or not. Bath had hacked everybody, never realizing that Ian had hacked her. Now Myers and Ian had all of Bath’s data at their disposal.
The first recording they released was Fiero’s conversation with Diele, suggesting an illegal drone strike on Mossa and Pearce. To any political insider, there was hardly anything startling about the audio. It was a typical closed-door conversation, cold-blooded and calculating—standard Washington fare. But the Fox News morning anchors ate it up. So did the public. It was House of Cards for real. By noon, the talk-radio personalities were running with the scandal. By the end of the day, most evening news shows—local, national, broadcast, cable—led with it.
Harry Fowler, Fiero’s campaign manager, was in damage-control mode the minute the story first broke that morning, calmly placing a few phone calls to network presidents on his speed dial to quell things down and keep the contagion from spreading. It didn’t work.
The Fiero scandal had serious legs, and the dying broadcast networks couldn’t afford to be left holding Fiero’s bag. Audience share was everything. Like the Great Powers in World War I, the networks and cable news outlets were willing to shed buckets of blood for a scant few percentage points of gain. By the end of the day, Fowler and his team were in full panic mode, leaping into raging news infernos everywhere on the horizon, smoke jumping without parachutes. And that was just the first day.
Now that Fiero and Diele were a major news item, the networks were hungry for more revelations. Ian chummed the waters carefully, ladling out the juicy chunks in digestible, quotable bites, not only to the media but to party organizations as well. Why not turn the sharks on each other?
The Sunday-morning talk shows were crammed with Republican and Democratic legislators jockeying for position, trying to seize the moral high ground from their opponents, each concentrating their verbal volleys on either Fiero or Diele according to party affiliation. Neither had any true defenders. The best either party could hope for was that the other party would get the most blame.
But the public was outraged at both parties. Even the venerable Howard Finch, an old ally of Fiero and a lifelong Democrat, gave an impassioned plea at the end of his show, Meet the Nation, urging Fiero to reconsider her decision to seek the presidential nomination.
Fiero’s election hopes evaporated, and Diele’s future was suddenly questioned. Greyhill pushed him off of the ticket, fearing the vice president’s scandals would ruin his own reelection chances, hoping to hide behind the paper-thin shield of plausible deniability.
Myers felt no guilt breaking her agreement with Diele and Greyhill to keep the incriminating audio under wraps in exchange for the pardon and release of Ian, Rao, and the others. Both men had committed a federal crime by agreeing to the deal in the first place. It would only add to Diele’s time in prison and put Greyhill in the center of the firestorm. Her calculation was dead-on. Both men kept their mouths shut. And they didn’t renege on the pardons—You can’t unring the bell, Diele told Greyhill—because Myers would release that audio conversation, too.
Myers reveled in the ruin of Diele and Fiero. But as far as she was concerned, it was only the beginning.
Myers feared for her country. It had been seized decades before by career politicians, an entrenched class of professional extortionists skilled in the art of the shakedown, and worse, of stealing money from future generations to buy votes. They enriched themselves and their families at the expense of the country. The greater crime was that their self-serving policies contributed to America’s rapid decline. Chronic unemployment, failing schools, endless wars, massive trade deficits, and crumbling infrastructure could all be laid at their feet, and yet, they were never held accountable.
Knowledge was power, but secret knowledge was the most powerful. The permanent political class continued to rule virtually unopposed despite the fact that the majority of Americans held them in contempt, as every public opinion poll confirmed year after year. What voters lacked were specifics. Regarding flagrant violations of the law, prosecutors lacked evidence. Myers was determined to change all of that.
Every member of the House was up for reelection in 2016, and one-third of the Senate. The Fiero and Diele exposures were an earthquake, but Myers wanted to create a political tsunami that would wreck the permanent political class that had bankrupted the nation and betrayed the Constitution.
Fiero and Diele were quickly pushed off the front-page headlines as fresh sacrificial goats fell victim to the media knives. The new revelations were bigger than WikiLeaks, the Watergate tapes, and the Pentagon Papers combined. Dozens of veteran politicians suddenly found the urge to “be with their families” rather than continue in public service before any incriminating data was released against them, hoping to avoid expulsion or conviction in order to maintain their lucrative, full-salaried retirement packages.
The ones that didn’t quit were clean, because they had nothing to hide. Men like Rep. David Lane, the only Democratic presidential candidate still qualified to run in all fifty states.
The data dump continued. So much quality information was released that newsrooms had to rehire entire staffs previously let go. Those newsrooms and editorial boards that tried to protect political favorites were quickly bypassed by the New Media outlets willing to tell the truth. Federal, state, and local prosecutors geared up for a series of high-profile trials.
Myers couldn’t be certain where all of it would lead, only that the power of entrenched incumbents might soon be broken.
Everything was about to change.
65
Galápagos Islands