by Mike Maden
The building’s sole design virtue, in Zhao’s opinion, was that it was now the tallest building in the city by far. With any luck, the sunlight gleaming off of the soaring mirrored-glass skyscraper would blind the American ambassador or, at the very least, annoy him to distraction, reminding him daily of China’s rising dominance on the continent.
Zhao’s luxury suite on the top floor was proof of his dominance as the new head of the corporation. Mossa’s death and the resulting collapse of the Tuareg rebellion had guaranteed China’s acquisition of the new REE deposits and cemented Zhao’s reputation as the man who could always be counted on to complete the most difficult missions. Vast new economic and military resources were now flowing into Mali and the region. Zhao’s political future was assured and his family wealth enlarged, thanks to his success.
Zhao ordered his voluptuous Ukrainian secretary to alert his limousine driver to start the vehicle. His private jet would be leaving from Bamako Airport shortly. Zhao entered his private express elevator, one of the fastest in the world, built by the Japanese firm Toshiba. By virtue of its computerized lift and braking system, it rocketed him directly between his penthouse suite and his exclusive parking area in the subbasement at nearly forty miles per hour. It took only 7.27 seconds to travel the forty floors—a distance of four hundred feet.
Zhao was scheduled for a meeting in Beijing tomorrow with the president of China himself, first among equals on the ruling Standing Committee. It was the greatest honor of Zhao’s life. A new, broader Africa initiative was under way and Zhao was rumored to be the man to head it up. No doubt this was the next logical step in his progression toward leadership in the CPC. His meteoric rise to the pinnacle of national power might soon make him the youngest president in China. The elevator doors shut as Zhao’s spirits soared.
Just 7.27 seconds later, the entire building shook with an explosion as the elevator doors in the subbasement smashed open. It sounded like a plane had crashed in the elevator shaft.
The limo driver ran to the wreckage and tried to pry open the bent stainless-steel doors. He couldn’t. The concrete structure surrounding the elevator shaft had cracked on impact. Tons of concrete wedged the crushed doors in the frame. All the driver could do was peer inside. The flickering LEDs inside flashed like strobe lights on the blood-drenched interior. Zhao’s body had been pulverized by the high-speed impact, then shredded by the shards of shattered glass that had lined the interior walls.
Ian’s virus had worked perfectly. Penetrating the Toshiba mainframe had been relatively easy, putting the elevator completely in Pearce’s control. He recorded Zhao’s brutal demise on the elevator cameras.
Pearce watched the video on his transatlantic flight. He only wished Mossa could have seen it, too.
63
Fiero residence
Washington, D.C.
15 July
It was the party of the year. If you weren’t there, you weren’t anybody.
Senator Fiero was practically the president-elect, or so it seemed, though the election was still over a year away. Greyhill’s “do nothing” governing style was wearing thin, while Fiero rode higher and higher in the polls thanks to a carefully orchestrated and well-funded advertising campaign, aided by the willing compliance of a Democrat-dominated media.
Early on, Fiero had amassed so much cash in her campaign coffers from all of the big donors that no serious challenger within her party rose up to campaign against her. The only other Democrat in the primary race that was registered in all fifty states was Congressman Lane. He may have been rising in the polls, too, but he was woefully underfunded and lacked any credible endorsements from party leadership. Thirteen members of the Kennedy family denounced his use of JFK’s inaugural Ask not phrase as unbecoming and, possibly, actionable in a court of law. Five Kennedys had publicly announced their support of Fiero’s candidacy, and the three most powerful among them were here at the party tonight.
Pearce centered the crosshairs squarely on Fiero’s upper lip. She had floated like a butterfly between guests all night—foreign ambassadors, Hollywood celebrities, hip-hop artists, and media pundits had all passed through the glass in his scope as he tracked the senator from room to room. Fiero hadn’t stood still long enough to take a clear shot.
Until now.
Pearce’s fingertip rested lightly on the trigger. It required less than two pounds of pull to fire. He slowed his breath, counted his heartbeats. Sent the signal from his brain to his finger to begin the smallest contraction, building pressure slowly, not allowing a jerked finger or a ragged breath to alter the shot trajectory. The pressure in his fingertip built. It was nearly sexual. The climax would be a solid thud from the tip of the suppressed sniper rifle; the release a spiderwebbed windowpane three hundred yards away and a spray of blood pluming from Fiero’s Botoxed face.
The expectation tingled the length of his arm all the way down to his index finger. Any moment now.
And then a woman stepped into view.
Margaret Myers.
The former president stood in front of Fiero, completely blocking his shot. The hand-loaded .300 Winchester Magnum round was powerful enough to tear through Myers’s skull and plow into Fiero’s. But that wasn’t an option.
He and Myers hadn’t spoken in over a month, but she had communicated her opposition to his killing spree through Ian. Myers knew Fiero was on his list. You can’t just go around murdering politicians you don’t like. The rule of law protects all of us. If you shoot Fiero, who’ll shoot me?
He ignored her. Johnny, Early, Mossa, Balla, Moctar, Mano. The rule of law didn’t do them any good. Why should a lawbreaker like Fiero benefit from the law?
Damn it.
He withdrew his fingertip from the trigger completely, glanced away from the scope. He nearly vomited. Myers had escaped death by the slimmest possible margin. One more heartbeat and she could have been Jackson Pollocked all over Fiero’s stainless-steel Sub-Zero refrigerator.
“Ian,” he whispered in his mic.
“She made me do it,” Ian replied.
“Who made you do what?”
“Don’t blame him,” Myers said. Her voice was in his earpiece.
Pearce put his eye to his scope again. She wasn’t in the kitchen. He moved the scope around, window to window. Found her in the second-story bathroom glancing out of the window, searching, but not in his direction. He watched her lips move. Her voice arrived a split second later, the briefest of time delays.
“I can’t see you out there, Troy, but I know you can hear me.”
“How?”
“Sorry, old man. But I owed her one,” Ian said. Clearly, he had told Myers what Pearce planned to do that night.
“You’re fired,” Pearce said.
“You’re hired, Ian,” Myers countered. “And I’ll double your salary.”
“You think this will stop me?”
“No, Troy, I don’t. But I’ve notified the Secret Service that there might be a problem. They’ll be on you as soon as I give the order.”
“Give it.”
“I’d rather not.”
“What do you want?”
“A word.”
“Shoot.”
“Nice punning, former employer.”
“Shut up, Ian.”
“I understand you want justice, Troy. I can give it to you. But not at the end of a gun.”
“I’m listening, but I’m also aiming.” Fiero had wandered back into his scope. She stood in the living room now, laughing too hard at something Alec Baldwin was saying.
“A bullet through the brain would be far too painless of a death, and far too quick, for someone as loathsome as Barbara Fiero,” Myers said.
“I like the way this is sounding.”
“I have a better way to make her suffer. She’ll be tormented every waking breath.”
“Tell me what to do.”
“Stand down. Do nothing. I’ll take care of it,” Myers said. “You have to trust me on this.”
Silence.
“Troy?”
“Trust issues, remember?”
“If I’m not telling the truth, you can always kill her later, right?”
More silence.
“How soon?”
“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
Pacific Ocean
18 October
Jasmine Bath had a long bucket list. That was part of the reason she had
needed to amass so much cash for her permanent retirement. She hadn’t quite reached her ultimate goal, but twenty-eight million dollars would go a long way, particularly the way she had invested it, spread out over twenty hedge funds in ten countries under as many different aliases.
She arrived in Ecuador under one of her many false identities, in this case a Swiss passport, and paid for everything in cash, including the hotel where she was staying, the air flight out to the islands, and the private Galápagos snorkeling tour—item number one on her list.
—
The October water around the archipelago was brisk but more than manageable in her wet suit. She had snorkeled and dived on numerous occasions in Hawaii, the Caribbean, and Fiji, but these ancient, pristine islands in the middle of the vast Pacific held a particular allure for her, thanks to Darwin. In her mind, this place was the origin of species. That wasn’t true, but no matter. It was her dream, and she was finally here.
Jasmine knew all about the wide variety of marine species she was likely to encounter. Seafaring iguanas, gentle whale sharks, and eagle rays were particularly interesting to her, but she was most excited about the sea turtles. She had a lifelong love of the magnificent, gentle creatures. She had swum with green turtles all over the world, and had recently donated a large monetary gift to a Florida turtle habitat—anonymously, of course. Swimming with the turtles in the Galápagos would be the ultimate experience.
Her private guide boat took her out to a favorite turtle haunt off of Roca Redonda, one of the smallest islands that made up the volcanic archipelago. The tiny western island was actually the top of a volcano. Deepwater marine life as well as mammals flourished in the nutrient-dense dark blue waters on this side of the archipelago thanks to the Humboldt Current. Captain Girondo—a young, muscular Argentine—would remain on the yacht to fix a gourmet lunch and, if her plans worked out, take a deep plunging dive into her unexplored regions later in the afternoon. There was one other boat in the area. Captain Girondo said it was a research vessel. No fishermen were allowed in these waters.