Jack seemed to spend the next twenty-four hours on planes and in airport terminals. Only a couple of the news channels mentioned the addition of Libya to the upcoming World Summit, and those two only in crawls at the bottom of the screen. It wasn’t big news, except to Jack. But he didn’t take the pleasure in it he would have if he’d done it on his own, as he’d planned.
He no longer sensed pursuit, and by the time he reached LAX he felt as secure as anyone could in that place. Jack continued to exercise habitual caution, though, catching a flight to Salt Lake City and renting a car to drive to Denver.
The drive through the beautiful, nearly empty landscape helped clear his head. He gave a great deal of thought, of course, to why he had been attacked in Malaysia. Had they intended to capture him or kill him? The latter, he thought. Those two attackers hadn’t appeared to be holding back. They could easily have used a tranquilizer dart or a spiked drink in that crowd if they’d just wanted to take him hostage. No, someone had hired them to kill him. Jack had no idea who would want him dead, although he was very much afraid it was one of his best friends. Maybe all his friends.
His shoulders relaxed as he drove and no one pursued, but another sort of tension began to build in him, the kind a child feels in the days before Christmas. The group meeting. Jack couldn’t help grinning.
The medium-sized old hotel had been built a few miles east of downtown Denver, in what turned out to be a bad location. The hotel had changed hands several times in the last few years, and was now called The Lamplighter Inn, for no good reason at all. It had a spacious lobby that was usually empty, and a comfortable semi-hidden shabbiness. The gift shop was always closed. A large meeting room on the second floor could be used for receptions or speeches, but usually stood empty. Most groups would not book a meeting in this out-of-the way spot.
The hotel didn’t have the high-tech security of newer hostelries, which was one reason the group had chosen it. The group’s own team had swept the place a day earlier, making sure there were no recording security cameras in the meeting room and no one else’s bugs either.
Starting in the early afternoon people began arriving, some in cars, some in cabs from the airport, a couple on bicycles. These latter two wore hiking boots and khaki shorts and didn’t bother to change for the meeting that started at five o’clock. They didn’t stand out in their appearance. A handful of men wore suits, some women wore nice dresses, jeans were common, and one couple in their late fifties wore a tuxedo and evening dress. “We have an important function after this one,” Alicia Mortenson said, and her husband Craig laughed.
These people trickled into the spacious meeting room from about four-thirty on. There were two self-service bars at either end of the room and a few uninspired hors d’oeuvres, but no bartenders or other servers. The members were of all ages from late teens up almost to a hundred. They wore no buttons or lapel pins, and there was nothing to identify their common interest. On the hotel’s register this was called a meeting of stockholders of Western Amalgamated, a name chosen to be both uninformative and too boring to provoke curiosity.
Some greeted each other with nods, others hugged enthusiastically. A man and woman who hadn’t seen each other in three years but kept in near-constant e-mail communication stood side by side, their shoulders touching, and didn’t say a word, just watched the others together and communicated completely by smiles and body language. Two men in their seventies, on the other hand, chattered like jays even though they had had lunch nearly every week for fifty years.
Jack sidled through the door at about five-thirty, looked over the crowd of several dozen people, and smiled gently. Janice Gentry waved at him from across the room. Janice had been his history professor at Yale and one of his early mentors in this group. She had helped teach him the Real History. She looked more like a retired fashion model than a grandmother and professor. She looked a question at him, glancing at the empty space beside him, and Jack shrugged. Thirty yards away, Professor Gentry laughed as if he’d said something witty.
Jack edged around the group, seeing people he’d known for years, but he wasn’t yet ready to dive in. He couldn’t stop smiling, though.
A rotund young man in an expensive suit stopped on his way to the bar, looked Jack up and down and said, “How’s the kiddie porn business?”
“Awesome. Wicked good.”
The young man looked at the goatee Jack had started growing in Asia, made his mouth small, and said, “It’s so sad to see a chronological adult captured by a teenage fad. Or more pathetic yet for a grown man to want to appear to have the intellectual capacity of a baseball player.”
Jack took out his baseball cap, the one with the company logo on it, and put it on backwards.
They both burst out laughing.
“Hi, Jack.” “Hey, Ronald.” Ronald hugged him one-armed, holding his drink glass out to the side. “I’m headed to a convention in Vegas after this,” Jack explained his appearance. “Got to appear. There was a rumor I was going to be named Gamer of the Year this year, but at the last minute a bloc of east coast votes swept it away from me.”
Ronald knew exactly what this meant. Jack had engineered his own defeat. The primary rule of this group was not to become high-profile enough to get noticed. “I’m sorry, man.”
Jack shrugged. “I’ll have to give up this role pretty soon anyway. Been at it long enough.”
“That will be a relief, I’m sure,” Ronald said. He had a smooth, preppy-sounding east coast accent which no one was quite sure was phony. But he could do other voices as well, in any of four languages. Jack had heard many of them, starting when they were at school together years earlier.
“No, I’ll miss it,” Jack said of being a gamer. “It’s fun. I could just quit for a while and come back. In three years it’ll be a whole new generation. No one will have heard of me.”
“Yeah, man, but then you’ll be, like, thirty.” Ronald was doing a Valley Boy voice now.
“What about you? You rich again yet?”
A few years earlier Ronald, or rather a few of his companies, had made an enormous fortune in some dot-com startups. He had funneled most of the money into this group’s secret coffers, then, when he was in danger of making Fortune’s list of billionaires, had “gone broke” in a quiet way. In answer to Jack’s question, he looked sideways around the room, as if fearing eavesdroppers, and said in a completely fake voice, “Me? Nah. Nah. Just a working man. Up at dawn, milking the computers, collecting the eggs.”
They both laughed again. God, it was a relief to be here.
Jack circulated, hugged old friends, genuflected to respected elders. One asked, “Did you suggest a caterer for the affair to your friend the ambassador?”
Without asking how the man knew, Jack shook his head. “No, sir. Can you recommend someone?”
The man was ready with advice. “I think you should go through Italy rather than Paris. Everyone should be more comfortable than that. And of course now you can’t have a Swiss presence.” Jack knew what he meant. The semi-rational dictator the American ambassador had invited to the peace conference had declared a jihad against Switzerland a few years earlier; no point in provoking him needlessly.
The man scribbled a name, and Jack took it gratefully before moving on.
A few minutes later Jack was back standing with Ronald, chatting quietly along with three other old friends, when the door opened and Arden Spindler entered. Arden wasn’t particularly well-known here, having been recruited into the group only a year or so ago. But Ronald knew her, as did two other people in their small conversational group, and they all stopped talking, staring at the young woman with fascination, the way a prairie dog stares at a snake.
“What? Who?” said the fifth person. “Her? The one who just came in?”
“Don’t say anything,” Jack whispered.
“Don’t look at her. Erase her from your thoughts,” Ronald added. “Keep talking. What about this new National Security Advisor? Oh, shit, she’s coming this way.”
The group suddenly scattered, leaving Jack and the woman who didn’t know Arden to face her alone, as the friendly young woman made her slow way across the room toward them.
Exit Interview
Three months later, after everything was smashed to pieces, the Circle destroyed and all Jack’s friends gone, he began to talk to his fifth interrogator. To the first four he had said nothing, not even his name, though they knew a great deal about him already. But Jack didn’t tell them anything, even after they dropped any pretense of civilized rules and began torturing him.
The interviews took place in a small windowless room that felt as if it were deep inside a much larger space. The prisoner had been interrogated many times over the last week by several different interrogators who had run the full range: best friend, bully, torturer, wheedling promiser. He hadn’t given any of them anything. It was morning, but he was already tired, when he looked up to see a woman walking into the room holding a large black notebook. It matched her large black-rimmed glasses. The glasses either hid or emphasized her slightly crooked nose, and obscured rather than enlarging her mud-colored eyes. In spite of her thinness above the waist she had rather lumpy hips, looking as if she spent most of her life sitting. She also had the no-nonsense air of a woman who had spent most of her life in the company of men who resented her, so she had managed to turn off her personality as well as any sexual subtleties.
Jack thought at least she’d be a nice change of pace from the wrestler who had punched him on every third question, no matter what his answer, but after a few minutes he wasn’t so sure.
We know all about your Circle. You may fill in a few gaps, but you probably have no primary information we don’t already know. We know this “secret society” has operated for many years, coming to have some influence on some administrations. Currently out of favor, we believe. You were recruited by your—sixth grade teacher?
Jack didn’t speak for a long minute, while the interviewer waited. Then he looked up at her and said, Fifth. His voice was hoarse from lack of use.
She nodded and made a note in her notebook. An exceptionally early recruit, I understand. Congratulations. And I’m sure this organization gave you a sense of importance, the thought that—
Jack laughed. I never felt less important than when I was with the other members. That’s what was so lovely about it. His eyes were moist, and his voice had grown nostalgic.
The interviewer seemed to take no notice. Her voice remained clipped. Sort of like Mensa, I suppose. Get together once a month and bolster each other’s sense of superiority.
No one ever mentioned what they were doing, unless someone else needed to know. We found out, of course. That was the one skill everyone in the group shared, gathering information.
Still sounding bored, the interviewer said, And they were extraordinary people, certainly. What was the highest rank in government any of them had achieved?
She sat poised with pen, mud-colored eyes focused on him. Silence reigned for a minute. Then Jack suddenly leaned across, grabbed her notebook, and tore a blank page from it. He held out his hand and after a long moment the interviewer passed him a pen. Jack wrote three figures near the top of the blank sheet: “PQ3.”
The interviewer barely appeared to glance at what he’d written. But as the silence continued she began doodling on the paper that lay between them. Her doodles formed the characters “PB4.”
Jack kept his eyes down as if contemplating. Then he looked up and said, The highest political rank any of us had achieved? None.
None?
No appointed positions and certainly no elected ones. None of our members has held elected office in more than two hundred years. Not even a local school board. Actually, two of our members were First Ladies of the United States, but not the two you would think. Very few of us were CEOs, either. More commonly we were the assistant to the Human Resources Director. These were the people to whom presidents and CEOs turn in times of crisis. Mycroft Holmes, not Sherlock.
And once in a while you got together to share information, such as at the meeting shortly before this crisis began.
Yes. Now a tear trickled down Jack’s cheek. God, he would miss the gatherings.
So these amazing people would get together—
And you didn’t have to keep up an appearance. You didn’t have to dumb down or smarten up. It was such a relief. You could be yourself, even if you’d forgotten who your self was. You didn’t have to put up any kind of front. It would have been useless. Everyone there had been the valedictorian of her class—or the rebel so bored he dropped out and invented a new computer language. What I mean is, you gave up that advantage here. Everyone could see eight moves ahead. Forget it. You could talk to each other like normal people. No one could impress anyone else.
She was the exception.
Jack glanced up sharply at the interviewer. She had no gleam in her eye. Her pasty white skin didn’t glow with the excitement of giving away secret information. She was just doing her job.
She? Jack said. He began doodling on the blank sheet again.
The woman whose name you’ve been muttering in your sleep. Arden.” The interviewer pronounced the name very precisely. She was the exception.
After another long pause Jack nodded. She was the exception. She was a step beyond. Maybe several steps beyond. Half a dozen people I know sincerely believed she was the product of genetic manipulation. Or possibly an alien being. “Imagine being her parents,” someone once said, and we all shuddered.
Was she so frightening?
She was perfectly charming. That was part of it. We all lived by manipulating other people, to one degree or another, so that wasn’t what was scary about her. Her ability to insinuate herself into a group was extraordinary, but not unprecedented. That wasn’t why she scared people. It was because she did things that had nothing to do with intelligence. After talking to you casually for one minute, she could tell you that you hated your older brother, and she would always be right. She wasn’t just smart, she was a mind-reader. But somehow you knew it wasn’t ESP, it was her picking up signals you didn’t know you were giving. Desperately you would try to stop, but be helpless. If you were having an affair, God forbid she should see you and come across the room. Within thirty seconds she would be giving you that slow smile, and you would know she knew.
Maybe she wasn’t so smart, maybe she just had a very good network.
She would have had to have satellite coverage. And x-ray vision.
As Arden came across the room in Denver Jack tried to keep his thoughts absolutely blank, and succeeded. He’d gotten good at this since knowing her. Arden stopped and chatted with two or three people, but he knew she was coming his way. And his lone remaining conversational partner, a young woman named Elizabeth Rayona, was hurting his concentration.
“Who is she? When did you first meet her?”
“Last year. Her grandmother introduced us. I said how do you do and she just looked at me for a long few seconds, then said, ‘I’m sorry.’”
Elizabeth turned to him. “What was she sorry for?”
After a long pause, Jack said, “For me. I was sad. I hadn’t told anyone, but an old friend of mine had just gone missing. Not one of us. No one anyone in the circle would know.”
Elizabeth’s voice was growing more concerned. She was facing Jack so she was in profile to Arden, and Jack could tell that Elizabeth was trying to stand straight and not glance aside, but she couldn’t help herself. Neither could he. “And she knew about your missing friend?”
“No one knew!” Jack burst out. “I hadn’t talked about her and I wasn’t giving anything away. But she read me. How I was feeling. And I didn’t want to be read! You know? I didn’t want to be—comforted.”
“So did she—?”
“Hello, Jack,” said a low, luminous voice. Yes, luminous: her voice gave off a soft glow, illuminating the features of her listeners so they seemed to stand apart from the others in the room, in a subtle spotlight. Or possibly that was only in Jack’s imagination.
“Hello, Arden. Do you know Elizabeth Rayona?”
That was a cruel thing to do, after the build-up he’d given Arden, to unleash her immediately on the new girl. But Elizabeth had annoyed him a little by making him talk about Arden.
Arden did not turn her attention immediately to the introduction. Her blue eyes stayed on Jack. He stood perfectly still, neither smiling nor frowning, but looking back at her as if curious about her. “It’s all right,” Arden said to him, then turned to his companion. “Hello, Ms. Rayona. What school did you go to in Phoenix? Private, right? Let me think, was it—?”
“Briarcliff,” the two women said together. Arden laughed. Elizabeth did not. “Do you know anyone who went there?” she asked. It didn’t take mystical powers to hear the anxiety in her voice.
“Let me think, do I?” Arden said, and kept the young woman on the hook as she turned back to Jack. “I waited for you at Heathrow. By the time I got here people knew about your work with the ambassador. Of course, some people around here are a little peeved about your independence—”
“Meaning your grandmother?”
Arden nodded. “—but I’ve told her I thought it was a great idea.”
Arden had a gentle smile, a professional sort of smile, that seemed to have nothing to do with what she’d been saying. Surely enough, she then changed the subject completely. “Did it help?”
Jack stiffened. “Help what?”
“Jack, Jack, there’s no need to be hostile. The day you were in France was an anniversary for you. Did what you did there help?”
Jack turned and walked quickly away. He passed friends, some of whom spoke to him, and several raised their eyebrows, but he didn’t stop walking until a hand grabbed his arm. “Jack!” a hearty voice said, while the meaty hand insistently turned him toward the speaker.
“Hello, Mr. Mortenson.”
“Since you look near death I think you’re old enough now to call me Craig.”
“Take it easy on him, dear,” Alicia Mortenson said. “He’s just had a session with our resident psychic.”
“Someone’s giving her information!” Jack said. “She cannot just read these things from my posture and my face. Someone’s feeding her.”
“God, I hope so,” Alicia said. “Otherwise she’s a mind-reader, and I don’t like that idea.”
She and her husband glanced at each other and chuckled, without an exchange of words. Craig Mortenson was in his late fifties and looked older, with a fringe of white hair around a large bald head. Often he looked sleepy and bored, often irritable, but when he was at his genial best, as he seemed to be now, there was no more convivial host.
Alicia, to whom he’d been married for many years, was probably his age but looked much younger. Thin, elegant, with a firm chin and lively eyes, she looked perfectly at ease in her dark blue evening gown, while Craig looked as if he’d been forced into his tuxedo with a shoehorn.
“The trouble is,” Jack said in a more thoughtful voice, “I don’t know who would know the things she knows to give them to her in the first place. It’s as if—”
As if someone were keeping a file on him, and had been for a long time. Jack didn’t say the words aloud, but Craig Mortenson shook his head gravely. “We don’t do that, Jack.” He was speaking of the Circle.
“By the way,” he added, changing back to his hearty tone, “great work in France. Just what the summit needs. A little precipitous, perhaps—”
“You know very well you’d been saying something exactly like that needed to be done,” Alicia said. Craig shrugged agreement.
“So then I can say I had your approval?”
“Of course, dear,” Alicia said, laying her hand on Jack’s, while Craig only grunted thoughtfully, staring into Jack’s eyes.
But Jack had had enough of having his eyes stared into meaningfully. Abruptly he excused himself. As he walked he saw Elizabeth Rayona crying, shoulders slumped, while Arden hugged her and spoke soft words of comfort. At the bar Jack made it a double.
Exit Interview
I’m sure this circle was quite extraordinary, wielded more than their share of influence over key political figures, made significant contributions that won them favors. Some were even in the diplomatic service, correct? Or had ties there? But now they’re gone, Mr. Driscoll, and I’m quite sure history will proceed without noticing.
Jack closed his eyes boredly. But the landscape behind his eyes was so barren, stretching over the horizon without relief, as his future stretched friendlessly. Only he held the Circle’s legacy now. Over two hundred years of the Real History, never written, never recorded, and over now.
He knew the interviewer was challenging him so he would try to impress her, but he wanted to say something anyway. The reason for secrecy was gone now, since there would be no more secret intrusions into American history.
We brought down Communism, he said quietly.
The interviewer chuckled. Your group, by itself, ended Communism?
You’re right, I’m exaggerating. One of us put an end to the Evil Empire. Well, two. Craig Mortenson woke up grumpy one morning, read his morning Times, and said, “This is draining valuable resources that could be used elsewhere.”
His wife, knowing exactly what he was talking about, said, “It provides a good training ground for some of our people.”
“That’s not reason enough any more. Plus they’re annoying me.”
So he set about bringing down the Soviet Union. As he sat musing on how to begin, his wife said, “I’d start by getting a list of the College of Cardinals.” “Hmm,” he replied.
That was the first step, rigging the election of John Paul II. I mean, a Polish Pope? Didn’t anybody get the joke? How many Poles does it take to bring down Communism?
It took him more than a decade, and he did recruit a few of us to help, but it was primarily Mortenson’s doing when Mikhail Gorbachev announced the dissolution of the Evil Empire. Mortenson was toasted quietly at the next meeting.
Jack shrugged. Well, that’s Craig Mortenson. And the amazing Alicia Mortenson, of course. One of these days the trade imbalance is going to piss him off, and then China better watch its ass.
The interviewer’s voice showed its first trace of humanity as she cleared her throat and said, Well, China can proceed without alarm for now. Mr. Mortenson—
I know, Jack said. Craig Mortenson had been one of the first to die, even before the final cataclysm.
The interrogation continued quietly, the interviewer politely ignoring Jack’s tears. He doodled more on the paper.
Denver
A group of the younger members, including Jack and Ronald, was having a good time near the bar, telling anecdotes about their jobs and recent lunches. People already knew the important facts, but got a kick out of hearing the details that couldn’t be included in an e-mail, the small signals passed when a mind had been turned.
“He’d been drumming on the tabletop ever since he got there,” Bill Wong was saying of a recent lunch with an undersecretary of state who had been his college roommate. “Just happy with nervous energy, you know, and as I talked about how sick I was of people stealing my ideas, or worse yet stealing them but changing them, leaving out the best parts, he was drumming more and more slowly until he stopped. Then a minute later he was just tapping on the tabletop, with his fingers like this.” Bill made both his hands into the shapes of pistols, the kind small pretend cowboys make as they say, kew, kew, his index fingers pointing like barrels. Everyone laughed.
Some older members had joined the small crowd too, and Jack was startled to find Arden Spindler at his side. She smiled at him and didn’t say a word.
“You know,” a young man in a suit spoke up. The young man had been a recruit of a few years’ standing, since early in college, and he had some remarkable abilities in computers, electronics, and surveillance, but in this crowd his people skills sometimes seemed limited. “I’ve been wondering, and maybe one of you older members can tell me, doesn’t this group have a name? I mean, an organization like this, that’s been around so long, you’d think at some point people would start, at least among themselves, referring to it as something. I realize there’s not much structure, and, and we like it that way, I know, but still it would be nice just to say to one of us quietly, ‘Are you going to the meeting of the—you know, the Foundation, or something.”
Most of the people hearing him looked amused, but a couple nodded thoughtfully, and even the amused ones shot some looks at each other, as if maybe they already had their own secret name for the group.
“I believe Aaron Burr wanted to call it the Council,” one older member said quietly, “but others, I think, thought that sounded too much like a secret governing council with tentacles in—well, just not an image we wanted to cultivate, even among ourselves.”
Jack said, “Professor Gentry told us that during the Civil War it was sometimes referred to as the Interdiction Committee, because of course it was intruding into both camps in order to—”
“Too many syllables,” Elizabeth Rayona protested. She had apparently recovered from her brief session with Arden, though there was still a bright sheen to her eyes. “I can tell why that one didn’t catch on.”
The first young man said, “But it does have the weight I think this group deserves. The gravitas, if I don’t sound too stuffy—”
“How about the Hornets?” Arden interrupted. Several people chuckled, and the young man looked offended.
“I’m serious about this, names—”
“So am I,” Arden protested. “I went to school in Europe, I never got the American high school experience, and I always wanted to belong to a team called the Hornets.” She shook her hands as if holding imaginary pompoms. “Go, Hornets!”
Several people echoed her cheer, laughter became general, and the stuffy young man turned away angrily. But a woman old enough to be his mother drew him back in and stood with her arm around him, looking fondly around the group.
“I’ve always thought of us as the Circle,” she said.
Her voice was warm and binding and they realized that’s how they were standing, in a circle. Some nodded, a few put their arms around each other, and the stuffy young man looked comforted. Jack gazed around at their faces, some of them known so well to him, others only familiar from nods or legends. It may have been only in retrospect, when he remembered this scene later, but he didn’t think so: looking around at their small band, he realized he was home.
The feeling was only diminished slightly by his near-certainty that at least one of these people had tried to have him killed.
Ronald clapped his hands together and said, “Let’s sing favorite camp songs! Jack, lead us off!”
People chuckled, and the circle broke apart, but Jack knew the others had felt it too. There was a slight sense of embarrassment as he and Ronald stood together, so that one of them was glad to point and say, “Oh, look, here comes the Chair.”
It was a joke. America has had 44 presidents. The Circle had had twelve Chairs in two hundred and twenty years. The current Chair was 87 years old, rolling across the room in a wheelchair, but that was only temporary, because of hip-replacement surgery. She could still beat any two people in the room at simultaneous visualized chess while reading a novel, and all of them knew it. This group had very little formal structure, and meetings were not called to order, but when Gladys Leaphorn rolled in they all either straightened their posture or self-consciously did not do so. Jack remained stiff-faced as she rolled right up to him. He nodded, clicking his heels together.
“Knock it off, Driscoll,” she growled. “Next time you have a whim to alter the whole dynamic of a meeting of world leaders, you might check with some of us first.”
“Would you have given me your approval, Madame Chair?”
“I don’t know. We would have had to think about it.”
“That’s what I didn’t think there was time for.”
“There’s always time for thought,” she growled.
If she had ever played Halo 2, and been surrounded by hostile aliens, she would have known otherwise, Jack thought. Sometimes you just had to act. “So what do you think now?” he asked casually.
Looking as if she were just now thinking about the idea, Gladys sat for a moment, then shrugged. “Probably didn’t do irreparable damage.”
Jack fluttered his hands over his chest as if his heart were going pitty-pat at her praise. Across the room, his former college professor laughed again.
“But seriously, Driscoll, all of you.” The Chair raised her voice. Gladys Leaphorn was a heavy woman with dark skin and the sharp cheekbones and nose of her Cherokee ancestors, and surprisingly delicate hands. She drew attention without demanding it, and even in her wheelchair somehow dominated the room. “Our primary concern right now is the President’s new National Security Advisor, one Dennis Wilkerson. Do any of you know him?”
They all looked at her, not even a murmur going around the room. The Chair sighed. “That’s what I thought. This is ridiculous, unheard of. Alicia, tell us about him.”
Without hesitation, Alicia Mortenson began, “Dennis Wilkerson, age 38. Raised in the midwest, attending several public schools as his father changed jobs as a salesman, finally graduating in Bloomington. Attended Wilkes-Barre College in Pennsylvania, degree in history, then entered the Air Force, where he worked in computers and digital surveillance, serving in Desert Storm but only on the very fringes.”
“Nothing but fringes in Desert Storm,” someone muttered.
“He did achieve a security clearance, but whether he ever saw classified documents is unknown. Released from service with the rank of captain, he worked in the security field in Cleveland for two years, and by security I mean of office buildings. Then he returned to college, at a small school in Virginia that apparently had an accelerated program—”
“—diploma mill,” someone else muttered. “Download it from the ‘net and print it yourself on your home computer.”
“—because he achieved a Ph.D. in only two years, this time in political science. For the last several years he has taught a couple of unpopular courses at Williams College in Missouri. Until Sophie Cohen, a good friend of several people in this group, abruptly resigned as National Security Advisor and the President plucked Mr. Wilkerson from his well-deserved obscurity to take her place.”
“And no one here has ever had so much as a cup of coffee with him!” the Chair said. “It’s intolerable.”
One member, whose contacts in academia numbered in the thousands, apparently took this personally, stepping forward to say, “Gladys, be fair. The man came out of nowhere. For God’s sake, he doesn’t even have tenure at that podunk college where he teaches. Apparently he wrote one paper, not even published, which he sent to the President, which so impressed President Dimsky that he lit on him for the NSA job when Sophie unexpectedly resigned. I think the President liked the fact that no one’s ever heard of this Wilkerson character. You know he thinks himself a great judge of diamonds in the rough.”
Several people, a couple of whom had known President Jefferson Witt since college, rolled their eyes. This group had helped him get elected, but not because of a high opinion of his intellect or abilities.
“Let me just be sure,” Ms. Leaphorn insisted. “Not one person here or elsewhere in our group has ever met this man face to face?”
Jack scanned the group carefully. No one appeared to be hiding anything, but that didn’t mean no one was.
He felt lucky that Arden was standing beside him, not looking at him.
“Why don’t we approach it from another angle?” Alicia Mortenson said helpfully. “Why did Ms. Cohen resign so abruptly?”
“Again without our having a clue,” the Chair muttered.
“Family health problems. Her husband.”
“That’s what they always say,” Ronald observed.
“Oh, he has a genuine health problem,” Arden smiled. “Sophie’s going to kill him because she caught him cheating on her. She resigned because she was afraid the scandal was going to go public and in order to devote more time to making his life miserable.”
The Chair from her seated position looked all around the room, and no one seemed to be looking down at her when they made eye contact. They knew what she was demanding now: learn everything about the Cohens’ marital history, whether the husband had indulged himself this way before, and most of all learn everything there was to know about his paramour. After a moment of silence the Chair said, “I’m glad we had this chat,” and rolled toward the bar.
“God, I love these meetings,” Ronald said.
So did Jack. He didn’t know yet that this would be the last enjoyable one, but he still enjoyed it to the fullest, still liked reminiscing about it.