Confession, at this late date, is advantageous to the soul, or so I am led to believe. I confess great perplexity on the whole business of the Glory Warriors, of which the General wrote, then entreated me to reconsider the publication of said pages. I was obliged to hastily correspond with Webster and have him remove the pages from the book. What Webster did with the pages, I do not know. The General passed from this life within days, and of course Webster himself met his own end not long thereafter.
A perplexing business, indeed, and quite unlike the General. At first I had thought the General to be spinning a yarn, amusing himself at the end of the manuscript, perhaps distracting himself away from the horrors of his disease. But General Grant never joked about matters of war, so I can only surmise this unexpected coda to the memoir is a matter that confounded the General himself. As the conditions he described never came to pass, the notion must have faded from consciousness. General Lee was deceased many years by then, and Grant elected not to include the business in his memoir. It all seems to have been left with the dead, and as my own passage is imminent, so it shall stay.
A computer-printed note was appended to the bottom of the file, declaring that Samuel L. Clemens died on April 21, 1910, thirteen days after composing this letter. The letter was never sent, and the Leon to whom it was addressed remained unknown. The letter was found by the author’s surviving daughter, Clara, among his other papers after his death, and finally came to the archive at Berkeley in 1962, on Clara’s death.
Journey sat back, his heart pounding. Suddenly feeling closed in, he said, “I have to get out. I have to move around.” Tolman tossed money onto the table, and they left the restaurant. Journey walked around the edge of the parking lot and onto a grassy area between the truck stop and the highway service road. He paced up and down the grass, in and out of the lights that ringed the parking lot, limping on his left foot.
“What are you thinking?” Tolman finally asked him.
A truck went by on the service road, and Journey waited for the sound of the diesel engine to pass. After another pace, he stopped, turned to Tolman, and slapped the knuckles of his left hand into the palm of his right. “Grant wrote about the Glory Warriors. He did. Up until now, all we’ve had are these documents in a third person’s writing, presumably Samuel Williams. But Mark Twain, practically on his deathbed, says that Grant himself wrote about it.”
Tolman walked beside him for a few steps. “But then Grant changed his mind and told Twain he didn’t want it published in his memoir.”
“So Twain wrote to his nephew Charles Webster, who actually ran the publishing company, and had him remove those pages.”
“And you say the Grant memoir is well known?” Tolman said.
Journey glared at her.
Tolman raised both hands. “I didn’t study history, Nick. You have to remember that not everyone is as into this stuff as you are.”
“Yes, yes, Grant’s book is considered a classic military memoir.”
“And you’ve read it?”
“Of course I’ve read it.”
“Never saw anything in it that remotely sounded like the Glory Warriors? Nothing that would point to it?”
“No, nothing.”
“What about Lee’s writing?”
Journey shook his head. “Lee wasn’t a writer. He never did a memoir, and really only left behind a few letters. After the war he was president of Washington College. But no, he never mentioned anything remotely resembling this, in the few writings that did survive and have been accessible to historians.”
“Okay, so Grant’s publisher—who just happens to be one of the most famous authors in the world—writes on his own deathbed, years and years after Grant’s death, that Grant mentioned this, then pulled it from the book. Twain also says that the nephew … What was his name?”
“Charles Webster.”
“Right, that Webster died not long after that, and Twain didn’t know what Webster did with the pages.”
“Right.”
“Is the publishing company still in business? Even as a subsidiary? I’m thinking of Samuel Williams’s bank, still doing business after all this time, even though under a different name.”
Journey sighed. “No. I can tell you that much. The company published a few more books, including Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, but none of them were as successful as Grant’s. It folded a few years later.”
Tolman stopped in a circle of light and leaned against a pole, transferring her laptop bag from one shoulder to the other. “Those pages have to exist somewhere. Come on, you can’t seriously tell me that what amounts to outtakes from a bestseller didn’t find their way into someone’s hands. A collector, a treasure hunter … Hell, Nick—” Tolman waved an all-encompassing hand. “—they could be sitting in a museum somewhere for all this time, with no one knowing what they had.”
“They’re not in a museum,” Journey said. “Someone in the history community would have uncovered something by now if they were. If the pages are that explosive and outlined the fact that the two most beloved generals in America had at one point put their names on something like this, well, that would have come to light by now, even if the other puzzle pieces, the ones we uncovered, weren’t in place. No, they had to have stayed hidden.”
“Okay, they’re not in a museum,” Tolman said. “I wish you didn’t know so goddamn much about all this stuff. Half the time, I feel like I should be getting course credit when I’m talking to you.”
“Occupational hazard. I’m always a teacher, even when I’m not teaching.”
“My, that’s profound. So the pages have stayed underground somewhere.” They both turned back toward the parking lot, to the old Toyota. “God, I really need a piano. And I really need to get to a secure phone so I can call Rusty and tell him what’s happening.” She slapped her hand against the car door. “And we need those fucking pages and those fucking signatures.”
Journey stood beside her, taking his weight off his bad foot.
Tolman glanced sideways at him. “They’re going to try to kill the president,” she said in a low, resigned voice.
Journey nodded. “Yes.”
“What’s their timetable? I mean, let’s say they kill the president. Now there’s this huge power vacuum that activates the Glory Warriors. They have to have weapons, wherever they are around the country. They think they have a right to do this, because of what Lee and Grant signed. But Jesus, Nick, these people think they have a legal right to suspend the Constitution and basically overthrow our government! I mean, our government’s not very efficient, I realize. Hell, I work for it and I know that. But we don’t have coups in this country. Russia, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Chile, maybe, but not here.”
Journey shook his head. “Why do governments anywhere get overthrown? There’s instability, people are restless. Look at us now. Yes, we have the best government on the planet, and things are still a mess. When a fanatic or group of fanatics steps into a mess and promises to make things orderly, it will get the attention of some people.”
“And that’s when you get a Hitler or a Lenin or the Taliban.”
“Or a Glory Warrior invoking the names of two American heroes.” He thumped the car door. “But I still don’t understand why Grant and Lee would agree to it in 1865. It doesn’t seem in character for them.”
Tolman scuffed a foot on the pavement. “Okay, I’m not the historian here, but as you’ve told me, it was a different time. Can anyone alive now really, truly understand what the Civil War was like? You couldn’t tell if someone was a spy, because he might look just like your brother. He might be your brother. There’s no way we can understand. As logical and practical and strategic as people like Robert E. Lee and U. S. Grant were as soldiers, they were also people, and they were just as susceptible to emotions as anyone else. They may have felt, as least for a time, that they had no choice but to join together at the end of the war to create this contingency plan. They weren’t thinking about the fact that
it would stand the entire Constitution on its head. Maybe they were thinking a lot of people had died, and by then, they were sick of people dying, and just wanted to find a way to deal with all the blood. And this thing, however it came about, gave them an out, gave them a way to prepare.”
Journey was staring at her. The look was intense, the lines on his forehead deepening into slash marks. Then they slowly softened.
“Sorry,” Tolman said. “Now I’m the one who’s lecturing.”
“But you’re right,” Journey said. “Especially in that time, men didn’t write their deepest fears and feelings into memoirs. It just wasn’t done. Grant’s book is a great recounting of his life up through the end of the war, and of his thinking as a military man. But it’s hard to tell how he—or anyone—felt.”
“We need to see those pages that Grant asked Twain to take out of the book.”
“Yes. But in the meantime, we know they’re going to go after the president, and we still can’t prove any of this. What if we get the evidence, but it’s too late?”
“I’ll be able to talk to my boss when we get where we’re going,” Tolman said.
“And that would be where?”
Tolman shook her head. “Later. We may have to go at this a different way, as far as the threat against the president.”
“What do you mean?”
“I happen to have a contact in the Secret Service.”
“Someone you trust?”
Tolman thought of her father, crying in the ER after the car crash fifteen years ago, and of him a few days ago, sitting at the wedding reception in Chevy Chase, applauding her performance while everyone else ignored her. “With my life,” she said.
CHAPTER
42
When the members of Dallas Four drove up the mountain to the Judge’s retreat at just past midnight, they didn’t know what to expect. None of them had ever met the Judge face-to-face. Few of the rank-and-file Glory Warriors had. But Dallas Base, and later Chicago Base, had confirmed their orders: Take the pages to the Judge. They’d received directions to his house as part of their briefing.
When Gold rang the Judge’s bell, he felt surreal. It seemed an anticlimax, driving up this mountain in the dead of night and simply ringing a doorbell. It took several minutes, but lights came on and the Judge opened the door. Gold felt even more off-balance then: The Judge was old, but even in the middle of the night and wearing pajamas with red stripes under a faded terry cloth robe, he had a certain bearing. The dignity of a soldier, the charisma of a born leader, Gold thought. Even without saying a word, the man communicated strength and leadership and power. Gold had seen video of the Judge in his younger days, at a time when he was in the public eye, and he seemed to have lost very little of his presence.
“Dallas Four, sir,” Gold said. Glory Warriors didn’t salute, but the members of the team stood at attention.
“Come in, come in,” the Judge said. “You must be tired. Would you like coffee?”
Again, there was the faintly ridiculous sensation. The Judge made coffee for all of them and positioned them in the large, open living room. It was rustic, with an abundance of pine and deep leather furniture under a wrought iron chandelier. “The pages,” the Judge said at length as they drank coffee.
Silver handed him the backpack and gave him a precise verbal report on what had transpired in Louisville and at Falls of the Ohio. The Judge acknowledged her with a nod, opening the backpack and slipping the pages into his hands.
He read, a look of knowing and understanding on his face. He smiled; then he sifted through the papers.
“Where’s the other page?” he asked.
“Sir?” Silver said.
“The signature page. It isn’t here.”
Silver looked at Gold. They both looked at Bronze. No one spoke.
“We must have the signature page,” the Judge said. “It isn’t here.”
“Sir,” Silver said, “these are what Journey had with him.”
“No,” the Judge said.
“She’s correct, sir,” Gold said. “We recovered all the pages he had.”
The Judge slapped the pages onto the wooden coffee table. The sudden motion startled Dallas Four. “Then he’s fooled you! He’s put it somewhere else.”
“Sir—”
“Do you understand?” the Judge said, shouting now. “All of this is useless without Lee and Grant’s signatures. It says as much on the first page. All must be here for the treaty to have the full weight of the law.” He leaned forward, a vein throbbing in his neck. “Do you have any idea how many have sacrificed their entire lives for this? Do you know what I have sacrificed for the Glory Warriors? It is within our reach … right now! We are two-thirds of the way to satisfying the conditions on page one. We’ve always known what to do, but we must have the signatures! The people will not accept us if we don’t!”
The team members sat rigid, eyes fastened on the Judge.
The Judge stood and backed away from his chair. “The professor—where is he now?”
“I shot him,” Silver said. “He fell into the river. There were witnesses, and there wasn’t time to clean the scene. We had to—”
“Journey has that page!” the Judge screamed. “He’s alive and he knows where it is. We have to be ready when all three of the conditions of page one are met. As soon as it happens, we must be ready, and that means the signatures. They need to be where people can see them. When I go on TV and radio and the Internet to explain to the American people, they need to know we are real. The cameras must do a close-up of Lee and Grant’s signatures.”
The team members looked at each other.
“Are you completely ignorant of history? America’s history—our history? In 1865, Lee and Grant gave us our authority. With the Lieber Code as the point of legal reference, and with their agreement at Appomattox, the provisions are law. If the people don’t see this and understand it, they won’t accept us. They’ll view us as glorified terrorists. They’ll think we’re some sort of silly militia group. No, the treaty is our legal authority, and the people must see it! Do you understand?”
They were all quiet for a time; then Bronze said, “Sir, we should call Dallas Base to check in.”
“No!” the Judge yelled. His terry cloth robe fell open, and they all saw his chest heaving, as if he were laboring for breath.
“Sir, are you all right?” Gold said.
“Get out of my house!” the Judge bellowed. “You are relieved of duty! Go back to Dallas and do nothing! Do you hear me? You are relieved. Now, get out!”
They left, and the Judge stayed behind, breathing hard. After the taillights of their car had faded down the mountain, he made his way to his study, slammed the door, and picked up the phone.
It took ten minutes for the Dallas duty officer to locate the Dallas Base commander. When he came on the line, the Judge said, “Your team failed. They didn’t get the signatures, and I’ve relieved them of duty. Nick Journey and the woman have the page, or they’ve put it somewhere.”
“We’ll find them,” Dallas said.
The Judge ran his hand through his thin white hair. “See that you do. Team Four will not be involved. Put them on arsenal guard duty or something equally humiliating. They failed.”
“All right, sir,” Dallas said. “I’ll put my Team One on them. We have a new Gold, and Silver is anxious to be a part of this.”
The Judge nodded, feeling his heartbeat begin to slow. He thought he felt a flutter in his chest. “Call the other base commanders. Have each of them put their own Team One on alert. Have all your Bronzes do what they can to track every possible way to find Journey and Tolman. I’ll call my Washington people.”
The Judge hung up, then called Washington Three, who answered with a sleepy “Yeah?”
“You have a green light,” the Judge said.
“What?”
“Wake up! I’m telling you to move forward. You are cleared to move into the operational part of your m
ission.”
“Sir?”
“Yes.” The Judge planted a closed fist on his desk. “Start looking for your opportunity to enact the third provision.”
The Judge hung up, his heart still pounding, hands shaking. He should not have raised his voice to his subordinates. It accomplished nothing. Showing temper to underlings only displayed weakness.
Now was the time for strength, for control. Soon after President Harwell was dead and the Glory Warriors had secured Washington, he would be addressing not only his troops, but all the American people. Control was paramount. Calm was essential. There could be no more outbursts.
They would find the signatures. They would find Journey and the woman. There would be no more mistakes.
Don’t fail.
The Judge sat back down behind his desk and closed his eyes. But an hour later, his heart was still thundering and his hands were still trembling.
CHAPTER
43
Tolman fell asleep before they crossed into Tennessee. Journey’s fingers hurt from where he’d clawed at the rocks, and his left foot was sore, but he held his leg as straight as he could with his right foot on the accelerator. He kept the old Camry pointed south through the night, then turned west on I-40 at Nashville, per Tolman’s scrawled instructions. Just past two thirty in the morning, he coasted into a truck stop in Jackson, Tennessee.
Tolman woke, and they both washed up in the trucker-sized bathrooms, then walked into the restaurant to order coffee. The layout was typical American truck stop: booths along three walls, tables in the center, a counter with stools. Homemade pies sat under glass at the counter. Classic rock played over the speakers.
“How do you feel?” Journey asked as they settled into a booth.
“Head still hurts, but not too bad. You?”
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