“When Tower learned what had happened, he put a gun barrel in his ear and pulled the trigger,” Rodgers said.
“Because he was used?” Hood asked.
“No,” Rodgers said, “because he thought he’d screwed up.”
“I’m still not getting this,” Herbert admitted.
“Paul, you said the president was pretty upset when you spoke with him,” Rodgers went on. “And when you met with the First Lady, she described a man who sounded like he was having a breakdown.”
“Right,” Hood said.
“That may not mean anything,” Herbert said. “He’s president of the United States. The job has a way of aging people.”
“Hold on, Bob. Mike may be onto something,” Hood said. There was something gnawing at Hood’s stomach. Something that was getting worse the more he thought about it. “The president did not look tired when I saw him. He looked disturbed.”
“I’m not surprised,” Herbert said. “He was being kept out of the loop and made an apparent faux pas about the UN. He was embarrassed.”
“But there’s another component to this,” Hood told him. “There’s the cumulative psychological impact of disinformation. What if plausible deniability and bureaucratic confusion aren’t the reasons the president was misled? What if there’s another reason?”
“Such as?” Herbert asked.
“What if disinformation isn’t the end but the means?” Hood said. “What if someone is trying to convince Lawrence that he’s losing his grip?”
“You mean, what if someone is trying to gaslight the president of the United States?” Herbert declared.
“Yes,” Hood replied.
“Well, it’s going to take a lot of convincing before I buy that,” Herbert said. “For one thing, anyone who tried that would never get away with it. There are too many people around the president—”
“Bob, we already decided that this is something Jack Fenwick would not, probably could not, do on his own,” Hood said.
“Yes, but to make it work, he’d need a small army of people who were very close to the president,” Herbert said.
“Who?” Hood asked. “The chief of staff?”
“For one,” Herbert said. “He’s privy to most of the same briefings the president receives.”
“Okay,” Hood said. “Gable’s already on my list of unreliables. Who else? Who would be absolutely necessary for a plan like this to work?”
Before Herbert could answer, his phone beeped. He answered the call and was back in less than a minute.
“Don’t tell me, ‘I told you so,’ ” Herbert said.
“Why?” Hood asked.
“A high-level official at the CIA in Washington got the intel about the Harpooner from the NSA,” Herbert told them. “The NSA didn’t have anyone in Baku, so they notified the CIA. The CIA sent David Battat.”
“Whom the Harpooner knew just where to find,” Rodgers said. “Instead of killing him, the Harpooner poisoned him somehow. And then Battat was used to bring out Moore and Thomas at the hospital.”
“Apparently,” Herbert said.
“Paul, you asked a question a moment ago,” Rodgers said. “You wanted to know who else would be necessary for a psy-ops maneuver to work against the president. That’s a good question, but it’s not the first one we need to answer.”
“No?” Hood said. “What is?”
“Who would benefit the most from the mental incapacitation of the president?” Rodgers asked. “And at the same time, who would be in a perfect position to help make some of the disinformation happen?”
Hood’s stomach was growling now. The answer was obvious.
The vice president of the United States.
THIRTY-TWO
Vice President Charles Cotten was in the ground-floor sitting room of the vice presidential residence. The mansion was located on the sprawling Massachusetts Avenue grounds of the United States Naval Observatory. It was a twenty-minute drive from here to the vice president’s two offices: one in the White House and the other in the neighboring Old Executive Office Building. It was just a short walk from the mansion to the National Cathedral. Lately, Cotten had been spending more time than usual at the cathedral.
Praying.
An aide knocked and entered. The woman told the vice president that his car was ready. The vice president thanked her and rose from the leather armchair. He entered the dark, wood-paneled hallway and headed toward the front door. Upstairs, Cotten’s wife and children were asleep.
My wife and children. They were words Cotten never thought would be part of his life. When he was a senator from New York, Cotten had been the ultimate lady’s man. A new, gorgeous date to every function. The press referred to these younger women as “Cotten candy.” There were regular jokes about what went on below the Cotten belt. Then he met Marsha Arnell at a Museum of Modern Art fund-raiser in Manhattan, and everything changed. Marsha was twenty-seven, eleven years his junior. She was a painter and an art historian. She was telling a group of guests about late-twentieth-century art and how the work of commercial artists like Frank Frazetta, James Bama, and Rich Corben defined a new American vision: the power of the human form and face blended with landscapes from dream and fantasy. Cotten was hypnotized by the young woman’s voice, her ideas, and her vital and optimistic view of America.
They were married four months later.
For nearly ten years, Marsha and their twin girls had been the foundation of Charles Cotten’s life. They were his focus, his heart, and their future was never far from his thoughts.
They were the reason the vice president had conceived of this plan. To preserve America for his family.
The fact was, the United States was at risk. Not just from terrorist attacks, though more and more those were becoming a very real threat. The danger facing the United States was that it was on the verge of becoming irrelevant. Our military could destroy the world many times over. But other nations knew that we would never do that, so they did not fear us. Our economy was relatively strong. But so were the economies of many other nations and alliances. The Eurodollar was strong, and the new South American League and their SAL currency was growing in power and influence. Central America and Mexico were talking about a new confederacy. Canada was being tempted to join the European economy. Those unions, those nations, did not face the kind of suspicion and resentment that greeted America the world over. The reason? America was a giant everyone wanted to see brought down. Not destroyed; they needed us too much for international policing. They simply wanted us humbled and humiliated. We were a meddling thug to our enemies and an overbearing big brother to our supposed allies.
These were not concerns that bothered other nations during times of international depression or world war. It was all right to invade France to free the French of Hitler. But it was not okay to fly over France to bomb Libya, the home of a different despot. It was all right to maintain a military presence in Saudi Arabia to protect the nation from Saddam Hussein. But it was not all right to fly jets from Riyadh to protect American troops in the region.
We were not respected, and we were not feared. That had to change. And it had to change long before Michael Lawrence was scheduled to leave the White House in three years. That would be too late to act.
The problem had not been caused by Michael Lawrence. He was simply the latest bearer of the torch of arrogant isolationism. When he was in the Senate, Cotten had felt that there needed to be a United States that was better integrated with the world. The one that Teddy Roosevelt had described. The one that carried a big stick and was not afraid to use it. But also one that knew how to speak softly. An America that knew how to use and exert diplomacy and economic pressure. One that had the resolve to use quiet assassination and blackmail instead of mounting very public and unpopular miniwars.