I FIND REUBEN SITTING ON A BENCH AMONG THE TREES IN FRONT of the West Colonnade. He’s leaning forward, staring at the ground, smoking a cigarette, something I haven’t seen him do in years.
He looks up and attempts a smile. I pull my jacket closer. It’s almost freezing, and Reuben is just in a suit. His hand trembles slightly.
For a second or two, neither of us says anything. My head is filled with the rudiments of an assault plan. In ten minutes, Hetta and I will leave for Reagan, where the Vomit Comet is being readied for a departure under a false-file flight plan to Salt Lake City. A second jet is being prepared for rapid egress out of Baltimore for the ten members of the Presidential Protection Division’s Counter-Assault Team, known as ‘the CAT’, who are being briefed by Graham at their training ground in Beltsville, MD.
Nothing we do may be communicated in any form, as we have to assume that the people listening to us will be tuned into our phones, our emails, our Internet searches, everything.
And if I’m right about the Kaufmann/Schweizer surveillance system, it will have picked up on the fact that Hetta and I have been to the contracts office of the Army Research Lab and followed the HITS thread as far as our conclusions about the holosphere.
Reuben, Hetta and I have taken the opportunity to lay a few false trails in our communications traffic to give the impression we are still deeply immersed in the investigative phase: Hetta at PIAD; me, post-release in my office; Reuben in his. To get around the communications ban, Graham has driven to Beltsville to brief the CAT. He has put a small team of agents on my desk and Hetta’s, who, between them, will work to a script – emailing each other, exactly as we would – to make them believe we’re in D.C.
‘Wish I was coming with you,’ Reuben says between drags.
‘Bullshit.’ I sit on the edge of a white wrought-iron table, at which, in better times, I’ve seen the President, his wife and kids smiling in publicity shots. ‘He needs you here. We need you here.’
‘You think they know? I mean, really know? About everything? Our every move?’
‘Yes, I do.’
He stares at the smoke curling from his cigarette. ‘So, all his fears really did come home to roost.’ He lets the stub fall and stares back across the Rose Garden toward the Oval Office.
‘This may be something or it may be nothing, but the trail that led Hart to the INSCOM science program also led to your former boss, Tod Abnarth. He was the Minority Leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee when he learned the Bush presidency had duped him over the resurrected remote viewing program. All this was before your time, but only just. I’m telling you because Hart is onto it and, as you once told me, when she gets her teeth into something, she doesn’t let go.’
‘Abnarth knew about the science program that led to this?’
‘More. He threatened to go public about the Executive Branch breaking all the oversight rules. Abnarth’s quid pro quo was that INSCOM should place the science in the public domain, on the grounds there was never any need to classify it.’
‘That’s what I don’t understand. Why did INSCOM comply?’
‘I don’t think they believed the science would ever work. They just wanted the committee’s funding approval for the classified part – using psychics to support the Activity’s hunt for WMD-toting terrorists.’
Reuben sits back and thinks about this for a moment.
‘Abnarth and the President have history,’ he says.
‘I know.’
‘Abnarth was the first politician to endorse Thompson for the Democratic nomination.’
‘I know that too. So, let’s not get blindsided. Talk to the President. He’s a lawyer. He’ll understand. There’s got to be an explanation. Cabot’s onside, but it won’t take much for that to change if he believes we’re hiding something else from him.’
I wait a beat.
‘Listen. Back there, what Hart was saying—’
‘What is it with her?’
‘She’s a good agent.’
‘She was taking Thompson to task, Josh.’
‘So there isn’t a probe?’
‘No. If there was, I’d know about it.’
‘And you don’t.’
‘Fuck’s sake, man.’
I’ve known Reuben long enough to tell when he’s hiding something from me, and he isn’t.
I hesitate. ‘Do something else for me, would you?’
‘Sure,’ he says. ‘Name it.’
‘When they come for Johansson, the INSCOM leadership team, and Triple Z in Herndon, they’re going to pull in Ted van Buren. I can’t begin to guess how Ted’s mixed up in all this, but I don’t want Cabot and his goons putting him through the wringer. He’s old and this will terrify him. Keep him safe until I get back. Then I’ll handle it.’