CHAPTER 4
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
The red and orange dahlias already clipped and in water, Jacob Edward Trask lifted one of the galvanized-steel flower containers that Robinson had filled and set out for him. He carefully checked that the water level wasn’t too high, then moved down the greenhouse aisle toward the gerberas. It would be another half hour or so before his visitor arrived from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson, assuming light airport traffic on Interstate 20. That the roads would be clear seemed almost a given; everyone would be watching the news on whatever devices one watched the news these days. He was no longer sure.
That’s part of the problem, the sixty-four-year-old man thought, his thin lips tightening. News comes from networks, from cable, from newspaper Web sites, from amateurs on the scene, from bloggers who turn fact into opinion, and then from other bloggers who transmit that opinion as fact. It’s the game of telephone with pathetic results.
It was another component of the continuing fragmentation of America. Disinformation and misinformation were an extension of the misbegotten hyphenates-the African-Americans, the Muslim-Americans, the Gay-Americans, and the latest absurdity, the Single-Mom-Americans. Nearly one hundred years ago, Theodore Roosevelt had warned about the carving of the nation. “A hyphenated American is not an American at all,” he’d said. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”
Dressed in a gray sweat suit, the tall, lanky, still-athletic man continued to move down the line. Reaching the trays of potted daisies, Trask began clipping them with his floral shears, cutting the stems at an angle to give them more surface area for water absorption. He would place each flower in the container, one at a time, after pinching the dead cuttings off their stems. Then he would give them to the executive housekeeper to have them displayed around the mansion, where he could see them and be comforted by them. They were like children, except that they didn’t fight over the estate.
Trask enjoyed his horticulture, particularly at dusk, when the wafting fragrance was at its peak. And especially now, when his mind was consumed with all that needed to be done. The physical activity and sensory input helped him to relax, to forget the awesome burden he had taken on.
He smiled inside when he thought back to all the times he had heard himself referred to as a dabbler, a dilettante. That had not happened so much in recent years. There was a benefit to seeing one’s youth recede farther and farther. On the one hand there was wisdom accrued and insights formed. On the other, the insatiable paparazzi, who had once fixated on him, had long since moved on to newer, younger heirs, men and women who knew how to play the media rather than duck it. That was not a skill he had ever mastered. His methods had been pointlessly confrontational, since only that fed the beast.
Even his own child was largely immune. Industrialists’ heirs were out of favor, along with the scions of tobacco, steel, and auto-industry families. They were toxic by association, too twentieth century, too American. While U.S. consumers were still passively fixated on young celebrities in rehab for drugs or drink or sex or food addictions, the international gossip trade wanted to know about the youthful tech titans, not from Silicon Valley, but from Japan’s Fukuoka City and India’s Bangalore. They wanted more about the “green teens,” the youthful champions of clean energy in Birdsville, Queensland, and Jesmond, British Columbia. Outside of the United States, visionaries were the new idols. Other nations were producing the next generation of Fords and Carnegies, of Jobses and Gateses. Their lives were followed and actively emulated.
They were on track to shape the future.
While we are marginalized, he thought, our carcass picked apart by speculators and gloaters, by the third-world mouths we continue to feed and protect to maturity so they can spit in our eye.
The glass door opened silently behind him. Trask knew it from the faint whisper of cool air that brushed his neck. He also knew, without turning, the angel-light tread of his valet, Peter Robinson.
“Sir?” said Robinson.
“She’s here?” Trask asked without turning.
“Yes, sir,” the young man replied.
“Take her to the sunroom. I’ll be there when I am ready.”
“Yes, sir.” There was a catch in his voice.
“Mr. Robinson, what’s the latest on Baltimore?”
“The situation is still very chaotic,” Robinson replied. He seemed pleased to have been asked, allowed to react. “No one seems to know whether this is an isolated incident or part of a larger-scale event. Homeland Security has promised a press conference at seven p.m.”
“Thank you,” Trask said. “It’s horrible, but we will survive this, Mr. Robinson.”
“Yes, sir,” he replied.
The door shut, and Trask placed the daisy he’d just clipped into the container. He’d never thought he would treat such delicate things with care. As a boy, he would take pleasure in kicking up the moist soil in his mother’s garden, unearthing the thin, spirally roots of the freshly planted flowers of the month. He’d hated how she bragged about them. Her hands never even touched the dirt. It was always the gardener. Never her. That was his small way of getting back, taking some of her unearned credit away. Too bad the dog had to take the fall.
Setting the shears on a towel-covered tray at the end of the aisle, he walked to the small locker beside the door. He changed into a leisure suit, then paused to mop the perspiration from his face and brush back his full head of gray hair. He checked his appearance in the mirror before closing the locker and heading out.
You never cared how you looked until there was no one around to take pictures, he thought ironically. Yet it wasn’t vanity that drove him. This was no different than the maestro who tugged the hem of his swallowtail jacket before heading onstage or the on-deck batter checking his helmet. He was preparing to put something in motion. Every man in every field had a moment of reflection, of self-examination, before setting out. The physical manifestation of that was just an excuse to pause, to steel oneself.
He was ready. Great events were about to transpire. History was not just going to be made.
It was going to be directed.
It was with rage and a sickening sense of deja vu that Jessica Muloni watched the events in Baltimore play out on the large flat-screen TV. It reminded her-as it would anyone of a certain age-of the attacks on September 11, 2001.
She had been newly arrived in Washington then, recently graduated with a master’s degree from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where she had been recruited to work at the CIA. She was outside at Langley, having arrived at the office later than usual, when she heard the distant explosion at the Pentagon, saw the black smoke curling upward.
Those attacks in New York and Washington were many things, but most of all they were a bookmark. Thereafter, like so many other people, whenever she heard a siren or smelled tart smoke that lodged in the throat-even at a barbecue or passing a car fire on the highway-the entire event came back.
As it did now.
No one knew yet whether these new attacks were homegrown or the efforts of a foreign network, whether they were an isolated occurrence or the first part of a wave. Just like on September 11, Langley and the White House and the Capitol and other buildings were evacuated, because no one was sure what was happening.
But there was one difference between 2001 and today. Now Muloni was an agent and she had a mission. And it was clear that her mission was suddenly more significant, more urgent, than it had been when she left D.C. ninety minutes before.
She turned from the TV at the gate and headed to the baggage claim area to rent a car. There must be no record of her destination; indeed, only her supervisor and Jacob Trask knew about it.