This Chantul, his wily cat, came from another great lion. But as he sat and listened to Ira Wurlin recite the day’s bad news, one thought continued to occupy his mind.
Who were the rats? He struggled over the same answer his American counterpart came up with. Everyone.
“Hello, Duke,” Morgan Taylor said, when the Speaker of the House entered the White House Situation Room.
“Mr. Vice President,” Patrick replied in kind. “I see we’ve got a little excitement.”
“Excitement we don’t need.” The comment served to deflate the Speaker’s enthusiasm.
“Perhaps a poor choice of words.”
Taylor affirmed the admission with a nod. He then sat at the head of the long table and dialed the National Intelligence chief. “This is Taylor. Get me Evans. He’s expecting my call.”
Twenty seconds later, he was connected.
Duke Patrick looked on. He was 45, stocky, but not overweight. His one-inch heels lifted him to six feet. But it was his head of hair that made him appear even taller as well as distinguished. At the top and sides, thick fire-red locks, close to his ears, a band of gray. He was someone who caught the camera’s attention in the way Teddy Lodge had the year before. Patrick was obviously annoyed to hear only half the conversation. He took the seat opposite the vice president and raised an eyebrow.
“What do we know, Jack?” Taylor swiveled the chair away from the speaker.
“The Australians have things locked down. They’re working on getting the device out. It’s not the kind of thing you hurry along.”
“Understood. Are we getting one of ours there?” It was the kind of thing he used to order, not ask. The election had changed things.
“On the way,” Evans stated. “The top explosive forensics guy from the FBI. But the SASR is a tight bunch. They know what they’re doing.”
Taylor was grateful that cooperation among the intelligence services had increased in recent years. “I’ll give Foss a call.” David Foss was the prime minister.
Evans agreed, then added, “I don’t like this one bit. It’s pure luck how the damned thing was found. And if it had gone off when expected…” He didn’t finish the thought.
“Do you think we’ll learn anything from the bomb itself?”
“We always do. Everyone who assembles one has a signature. Sometimes it’s in the wiring, other times the marking on the C-4. It could be the casing, the type of electrical tape, or the solder. We’ll be examining for anything and everything. And then there’s the off chance we’ll lift some clean fingerprints.”
Taylor felt Patrick’s eyes boring into the back of his head as Evans began to explain the chain of events. “Hold on a second.” Taylor decided that Patrick should hear what made the situation deadly, not exciting. He turned back to the congressman. “Duke’s with me. I’ll put you on the box.”
Patrick smiled, thinking he had won something. Taylor enabled the speaker phone. “Go ahead, we’re both on.”
“Hello, Congressman.”
“Hello, Mr. Director. Nice to talk with you.”
Nice? Taylor glared. Another faux pas. “Mr. Director,” he said, reestablishing the seriousness, “this is a good chance for the Speaker to get a crash course in international terrorism.”
Vice President Morgan Taylor effectively cut the third most important man in the United States government down to size.
Chapter 7
The radio talk host potted up the cut of the Beatles’ “Revolution.” He had adopted it as something of an anthem right after the election, and unabashedly used it to keep his audience fired.
“Good morning, good evening, good night, America. It’s been six hours since I last talked with you. Six hours since the Strong Nation gathered yesterday afternoon. Has your life gotten any better in six hours? No,” Elliott Strong said in the rambling soliloquy that opened his late-night talk show. “It hasn’t gotten any better because you haven’t done anything. Have you written your congressman? No. Have you faxed the nightly news shows? No. Have you complained about their liberal reporting? No. Have you gotten off your butts? No, you haven’t. So tonight you get to hear me. No open phones. At least not now. If we go to the phones, I don’t want to hear, ‘Maybe,’ or ‘I’ll try,’ or ‘I’ll get to it soon.’ And definitely not, ‘Oh, Elliot, I have the carpool, my day is jammed, I wish I could.’ I only want to talk to people who are willing to tell me what they’re going to do to take back the country. If I don’t get any calls, then you’re just going to have to endure me for four unending hours. Except for a few important breaks for commercials,” he added jokingly. “Like right now.”
The fact that Elliott Strong broadcast from the geographic center of the contiguous forty-eight states was no accident. He wanted to visibly channel American opinion from an appropriate location. What better place than the epicenter? The site was marked by a limestone sign along Kansas Highway 191, a mile-long road that existed only for the purpose of leading visitors to latitude 9′0″, longitude 8′5″.
Actually, taking Alaska and Hawaii into account, the geographic center was in an even more remote area, near Rugby, North Dakota, but Lebanon, Kansas, was good enough for him. He had his satellite uplink, a web manager to run his dot-com, and a helicopter that could quickly get him to Hastings Municipal Airport in Nebraska, some fifty-six miles away.
Lebanon, Kansas, was not really representative of America as a whole. As of the last census, the population was 97.7 percent white, 1.3 percent Hispanic, 1.0 percent Native American. There were no African-Americans. Out of 312 inhabitants, Elliott Strong was the most famous. That’s just the way he liked it.
“So what’s it going to be? Me or you?” Strong looked at the phones. They were already lit up, but he wasn’t going to give in that easily. The audience couldn’t see. They deserved a good kick in the butt, and they were going to get it tonight.
“Okay, while you think about whether or not you’re going to dial the phone, let’s review what’s happened in the world today. What you won’t read in the New Yuck Times” — his joke — “and the rest of the liberal press.”
Strong used the usual wire service copy, but his primary sources were the most right wing members of Congress and their aides, who briefed him on legitimate legislative issues and fed him outright political lies they wanted spread.
Strong would lay it all out — some as fact, some as rumor designed to undermine moderates and liberals, and some as plain malarkey. Each subject helped stir up the audience and make for a good show. Strong played the part of an increasingly fierce attack dog for the extreme right. They thought they had the better of him. He knew they didn’t.
“The New Yuck Times reports that ninety-eight nuclear devices from the former Soviet Union are still missing.” He emphasized former in such a way as to suggest Russia was to be regarded as the enemy it was decades ago. Americans needed enemies to hate, and it was still far easier to wrap his message around the need to depose nations with un-American ideologies than attack faceless terrorists.
“Where do you think they could be?” he asked snidely. “Afghanistan? Chechnya? Iran? How about San Diego or St. Louis?” The thought hung in the air, silently, powerfully. The message was clear: Don’t trust foreigners in your neighborhood.