Stanhope had aged well except for his eyes. They had sunken into their sockets a little, which made the man behind the chiseled face look wearier and also somehow gentler. They sat on the bench along the bike path.
“It took me a long time to recover,” Stanhope began. Rena’s expression told him he had used the wrong word; “recover” was not Stanhope’s to use. He was the aggressor, not the victim. “I spoke to them all,” Stanhope said, meaning the women he had wronged, “every one of them. And apologized.”
“I heard that,” said Rena.
That was how the story had been told. After his fall, Stanhope had done what he imagined he could to help fix the problem he’d created. Stanhope was a systems thinker. He had made a list of the women he had worked with, the ones he’d made advances toward and the ones he had not, and he had tried to talk to all of them, admitting he had crossed a line, created an unhealthy environment, and was sorry for it.
According to the story, Stanhope was trying to become a better man and help the women he’d harassed. The general had even told a version of that story to Rena’s boss, Senator Llewellyn Burke. An ugliness in him had gone, he told Burke, and he had been reminded of his better self.
Rena had never spoken to Stanhope again. Never seen him again. Until now.
“Are you behind what’s happening to me?” Rena asked.
Stanhope was looking straight ahead. “You denied me due process. You blackmailed me, with my daughter there. It was an ambush. You should have let the process play out. Not taken matters into your own hands.”
This was a different narrative than the one Stanhope had shared with people like Burke. In this version, he had not been redeemed; he’d been denied justice. Rena saw the logic of it. It was true, Rena had taken matters into his own hands. The military had already turned a blind eye to Stanhope’s past, and Rena thought it would again. Rena decided that wasn’t okay, but he told himself he had done it in a way that had warned Stanhope, respected his achievements and given the general the choice of whether to fight the allegations publicly or not.
“Those lies people are saying about me online, are you behind them?”
“I forgave you, Rena. I understood. Not everyone felt the same way,” Stanhope said.
Some of Stanhope’s friends and staff, their own careers tainted, were enraged by what had happened.
“Yes, they told you that a man’s life should be judged in full. That you should be remembered for all you accomplished, not the mistakes you made. Convenient for them, too.” Stanhope turned his head to look at Rena finally. “And as the years went by, you began to see their point.”
“Not exactly.”
“Are you behind these attacks?”
“No.”
“But you knew they were coming.”
Stanhope stood up.
“I think we’re done here.”
Rena stood, too, and positioned his body in a way to stop the older man from leaving.
Stanhope said, “This is the second time you’ve ambushed me in my life, and I’m tired of it.”
“I ambushed you?” Rena said “Is that your story?”
“Go to hell.”
The file Wiley had given Rena had offered him the first clues leading him here. She had discovered that the cyberattacks had actually begun a year ago, during the presidential campaign, around the time Peter and Randi had helped Upton. They had not gone viral the way they had on the eve of Traynor’s presidency in December, when they were part of a more sophisticated and orchestrated campaign. But they had already involved Katie. And, most importantly, they had named Stanhope. Who would have known about that? Only people close to Stanhope. They were unlikely to have used his name without his consent. When Wiley had shown Rena the file two days ago, he knew he would be coming here—before heading back to California.
“When you were commandant at West Point, they still taught cadets about accountability didn’t they?”
Stanhope didn’t move.
“You didn’t do this. But you gave it your blessing.”
“You are arrogant and out of control,” Stanhope said. “You always were. Always going according to your own code of justice.”
“Who approached you?”
The most likely person was Ted Jericho, Stanhope’s longtime aide. He was the person most damaged by the general’s fall—other than Stanhope. But Rena doubted that Jericho had had the technical knowledge to mount a cyber campaign this sophisticated. Someone had come to them with the idea.
Stanhope glared at Rena, but Peter knew he had the advantage. He had studied this man closely once. He’d known almost everything about him. He could easily imagine what thoughts were banging around the general’s mind now.
The world also looked more harshly today than it did a decade ago at Stanhope’s brand of sexual harassment. And while the general had rebuilt his reputation, he could just as easily lose it.
Something else was probably going through Stanhope’s mind, too. Rena had caught him a second time.
“I’m not sorry,” Stanhope said.
“It’s time to put an end to it.”
For a long moment Stanhope said nothing. Then, ever so slightly, he nodded his head.
And without another look the former general walked across the small bridge back into town.
ON THE PLANE BACK TO CALIFORNIA RENA TOOK OUT THE BOOK James Nash had given him. The Irony of American History, written by Reinhold Niebuhr. As Katie had remembered two days ago, Rena had been enamored once of the theologian-philosopher’s writings, but Rena had not opened one of these books in a long time. Had Nash known? Niebuhr was both a liberal and skeptic of liberals. He believed in the goodness of people but was suspicious of groups.
Rena began to read, and the last three days—the last months even—seemed to connect. The conversations with Randi, Katie, Nash, Stanhope, the concerns of his friend Burke, his self-doubts.
“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. . . . Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.”