“You?”
“CIA.”
“They tortured him.”
“I think Ulrich would have called it ‘enhanced interrogation techniques.’”
“What about everything you said, about how torture is always about something else?”
“I didn’t do it, and I wouldn’t have done it. Regardless, I never said torture could never work. Hell, it worked for the French in Algeria.”
“But they lost the war.”
“True. But if losing a war isn’t your concern, and if you know for certain the subject has the precise information you’re after, and if you can immediately test the quality of what you get from the subject without wasting your time on wild goose chases because torture produces a hundred times more chaff than wheat, and if the subject dies afterward so he doesn’t spend the rest of his life on a personal jihad against the nation of the people who did it to him, and if no one ever knows about it so the practice doesn’t recruit thousands more terrorists, sure, it can work. Now, the conditions I just described are almost entirely theoretical and have nothing to do with the program Ulrich and company designed, authorized, and implemented. Unfortunately for Ulrich, he seems to have been the rare exception to the rule that torture isn’t worth the cost. At least, that’s what the CIA thinks.”
“And now someone’s going to try to set me up for what happened to him.”
Hort didn’t answer. Ben thought, You want to see a jihad? When I’m done with you, Larison’s going to feel like your best fucking friend.
“The CIA has the security tapes from Ulrich’s building,” Hort said. “Clements generously offered to hand them over to me. Professional courtesy and all that. But I imagine he made copies. By now I’m sure you’ve noticed, that’s the way it works.”
Ben felt sick. “Then I’m compromised. Permanently.”
“No more so than most of the people in this town. It can be managed.”
“Managed how?”
“I’ve bailed you out before, son. I think you can rely on me to do it again.”
“In exchange for what?”
“I told you. I want you to work with me.”
“I already work with you.”
“I’m talking about a different capacity.”
Ben didn’t answer. If he understood what Hort was saying, he couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it.
The waiter brought their steaks and moved off. Hort picked up his knife and fork, cut off a juicy chunk, put it in his mouth, chewed, and swallowed.
“Damn,” he said. “That’s good.”
“What capacity?”
“I think you need a little context first.”
“I’m listening.”
Hort took another bite of steak and washed it down with some wine. “The most important thing is this. America is ruled by an oligarchy. If you want to understand America, you have to understand the oligarchy. And if you don’t understand the oligarchy, you can’t understand America.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean a small group of people having de facto control over a country.”
Ben thought of what Larison had said. “You’re talking about a conspiracy?”
“Not at all. Conspiracies are hidden. The oligarchy is right out in the open. It’s just a collection of people in business, politics, the military, and the media who recognize their interests are better served by cooperation than they would be by competition. There aren’t any secret handshakes. Most of the people who are part of the oligarchy don’t even recognize its existence. If they recognize it at all, they think of it as just a benevolent, informal establishment. They tell themselves it selflessly serves the country’s interests rather than selfishly serving its own.”
Ben was equal parts intrigued and horrified. “How does it work?”
Hort chuckled. “Arthur Andersen was examining Enron. The credit agencies were examining the subprimes. That alone ought to tell you everything you need to know about the way the oligarchy works.”
“But it doesn’t have-I don’t know-rules?”
“There are a few unwritten ones. Number one, above a certain pay grade, a politician can never be prosecuted or imprisoned.”
“What about Nixon?”
“Nixon would never have been prosecuted. He was told that if he resigned, he would be pardoned. And that if he didn’t, he would be assassinated.”
Ben shook his head. It seemed too outlandish to be true. “What about Clinton? He was impeached.”
“Sex is the exception. Because it doesn’t offer a patriotism defense.”
“What about the Caspers? Ecologia? People wouldn’t go to prison for that?”
“Some would have. After all, we know from Abu Ghraib that it’s all about the pictures. No pictures, no proof. No proof, no scandal. No scandal, no convictions. But even with video proof of the Caspers and what was done to them, the real architects would never have suffered. The oligarchy wouldn’t be able to whitewash it the way they did Abu Ghraib, but they’d just scapegoat a slightly higher-level target. The midlevel bureaucrats, the Ulrichs of the world, would be the sacrificial lambs. You see, when the oligarchy looks in the mirror and says, ‘The State is me,’ it’s not inaccurate. It’s not hubris. They’re just describing reality. They’ve made it so.”
“Hort… I don’t understand. You just accept this?”
“I’m a realist, son.”
“You don’t want to fight it?”
“Maybe I would have if I’d been born fifty or seventy years earlier. But the establishment is bigger now, more entrenched. The Roosevelt and Truman expansions were ratified by Eisenhower. Kennedy’s and Johnson’s abuses were ratified by Nixon. Bush Jr.’s extraconstitutional moves have all been ratified by Obama. It’s a ratchet effect. There hasn’t been a federal law in the last sixty years that’s done other than increase the government’s power and influence, and the power and influence of the corporations that manage the government by extension. The leviathan only grows.”
“You’re saying it can’t be beaten?”
Hort laughed. “You can’t beat the oligarchy. You can’t beat it because the oligarchy has already won. The establishment is like a virus that’s taken over the organs of the host. Now it acts as a kind of life support system, and if you remove it, the patient it battens on will die. Remember the scene in that movie Alien? Where the creature attaches itself to John Hurt’s face, runs a tentacle down his throat, and puts him in a coma, but if they cut it off, it’ll kill him? That’s the oligarchy. The establishment is a creature whose first priority is ensuring that if you try to remove it, you’ll wind up killing the host.”
“So there’s nothing that can be done.”
“No, there is, and that’s where you come in. The only possible solution is to manage this fucked-up system from the inside. That’s why I wanted the diamonds. And the tapes, if Larison comes around. They give us leverage. Then, if someone within the oligarchy is abusing his position so much that it’s creating a problem for national security, we can quietly remove him, one way or the other.”
“You mean Ulrich.”
“For example.”
“Sounds like the mafia. With me as an enforcer.”
“You can call it that. I prefer to think of it as good management. Would you rather have to clean up another mess like the Caspers, a mess caused by a bunch of fools? I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of being the cleanup crew. I’m tired of the board of directors being composed of dimwits and ideologues. The Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers… that’s all just window dressing now, the artifacts of an ancient mythology, the vestments of a dead religion. We need something different now, something suited for the modern world. We need realists, men like us. We are the change we’ve been waiting for.”
He took another mouthful of steak and chewed, nodding appreciatively.
“I don’t buy it,” Ben said. “You could blow it up if you wanted to.”