Rubicon, page 21
But before Townsend could answer, Hart threw up his hands in frustration.
“Don’t even bother. It doesn’t matter. Just tell us this: The company - the company your agency hired - is it the same company that three years ago - which means close to the time that photograph was taken - hired H.L. Harrison?”
Hart asked more questions, narrowing the circle.
“Where is H.L. Harrison now?’
“I’m sorry, senator, we don’t know.”
“You don’t know, or you haven’t looked?”
“We only found out Harrison’s potential involvement this morning, senator - when you sent over that photograph.”
“But you do know that he disappeared, that no one has seen him since the night of the break-in and murder at my house?”
Townsend gestured toward the file on the table in front of him.
“That’s what the police report says.”
“Yes,” said Hart dryly, “thank God for the police.”
Hart questioned the director for nearly three quarters of an hour. When he was finished, Charlie Ryan took over. He was even more aggressive.
“The last time you were in front of this committee, I told you that this was serious, that Rubicon involved more than a single assassination, that what happened in Los Angeles might be only the beginning of what Rubicon was about. And yet you have to wait to find out from Senator Hart and the D.C. police that a man who worked for your agency - directly or indirectly, it doesn’t matter - a man who worked for your agency interrogated Mohammed al Farabi at Guantanamo and was later involved in the murder of one man and the attempted murder of a United States Senator.”
“I’m sorry, senator - is there a question in there somewhere?” asked the director with a thin, caustic smile that nearly brought Ryan out of his chair.
“A question? I have a question. Either you’re the most incompetent person ever to head a federal agency or someone has told you not to look into Rubicon at all. Which is it, Mr. Townsend? Is the job too big for you, or are you part of a deliberate cover-up, an attempt to protect certain people, certain high officials, involved in murder and assassination?”
Townsend clutched the edge of the table, trying to hold himself back.
“No, senator, I’m not trying to do any such thing! And I resent....”
The door at the side of the hearing room swung open. A young staff assistant rushed over to the chairman and whispered frantically in his ear. The chairman’s face went ashen. He sat straight up and pounded the gavel. The room had already gone silent.
“There has been another attack,” he announced, his voice quivering with emotion. “Another suicide bomber. The reports have just started to come in. We don’t know how many people may have been killed. It happened outside a hotel in Atlanta, just a few minutes ago. The only thing they know for certain is that Arthur Douglas is dead!”
No one moved, no one said a word, the immediate reaction a kind of paralysis. Then the committee room was bedlam, everyone talking at once. Townsend scooped up the file from the table and turned to go. Several members of the committee were out of their chairs. The gavel struck again.
“The committee is still in session,” the chairman reminded them. “All we know is what I have just told you. I suggest that we stand in recess, but that we reconvene either later tonight or first thing tomorrow morning.” He looked at Townsend, standing at the witness table, clutching the file folder in his arms. “At which time, Director Townsend, we will expect a full briefing on everything you have been able to learn.”
Reminded by the chairman’s slow deliberate manner of the responsibilities that went with their position, members of the committee left the room in an orderly fashion. They returned, most of them, to their own offices to find out more about what had happened in Atlanta.
Charlie Ryan caught up with Bobby Hart in the hall. He knew what Hart was thinking.
“We don’t know anything yet. Another suicide bomber, another assassination - that’s all we know. Don’t jump to any conclusions.”
“We were wrong!” cried Hart. He was angry, angry with himself. “I was so certain, so convinced, that this was a conspiracy to change the outcome of the election! I was so certain the vice-president was behind it - but now Douglas?”
Ryan grabbed him by the arm and forced him to stop.
“Listen to me! We don’t know anything yet, except that Douglas is dead. But whatever happened, all the other facts remain the same: all the murders, Lattimore, Harrison - all of it!”
“The facts may not have changed, but they don’t mean what they meant before. If Rubicon was what we thought it was – an attempt to keep the presidency in the hands of someone who would not change policy - killing Arthur Douglas is the last thing they would have done.”
They started walking again, moving quickly. Ryan shook his head in partial disagreement.
“After Los Angeles, after the first attack - what did we think it was about? An assassination, but not to take out one candidate so the other could win - to create a sense of uncertainty, of fear, so that everyone would think that we were under siege, that we had to strike back, that we really were in an endless war on terror. What better way to do that than to have the next attack, the next assassination, the candidate who kept promising to be the terrorists’ worst enemy?”
When they reached Hart’s office, he switched on the television set as David Allen quickly brought them up to date.
“Douglas had just finished giving a speech. It happened when he came outside. He was just getting into the limousine. A car, packed with explosives, drove right into it.”
Allen nodded toward the images flickering on the television screen. Live pictures from Atlanta showed the charred wreckage of the limousine and numerous other vehicles. The front of the hotel was a tangled mass of twisted steel and chunks of concrete. The ground was ankle deep in glass.
“How many...?” asked Hart, stunned by the devastation.
Allen could only guess.
“They’re saying dozens; it could go higher.”
“Douglas and everyone who was with him....?” Ryan started to ask, but the question seemed a kind of obscenity, a too graphic reminder of death.
The television coverage moved away from the carnage in Atlanta to a scene in Washington. Allen turned up the volume. Standing in front of the White House, a reporter read the first few lines of a statement put out under the president’s name.
“‘The enemies of freedom have for a second time assassinated a candidate for the presidency. Arthur Douglas was a courageous public servant and a good and decent man. His death will not go unavenged. The terrorists will be brought to justice.
‘Everyone should now understand, - there is no longer any room for disagreement - that America faces an enemy who will do anything to destroy us. The time for discussion and debate is over. No one understood better than Arthur Douglas that America is in a war, a war we have to win. We would dishonor his memory were we to fight it with anything less than everything we have.’”
Hart and Ryan exchanged a glance. They both understood what would happen next. Los Angeles had been traumatic, a blow to the national psyche; but it was still comprehensible as a single, isolated, though tragic, event. No one could think that way about Atlanta; no one could take comfort in the belief that what had happened once could not happen again. Terrorists had murdered first the Democratic, and now the Republican, candidate for president; murdered two men both of whom had been given all the protection the secret service could provide. If terrorists could do that, no one was safe.
“I’ll tell you one damn thing we better not do,” insisted one of the more influential talk radio personalities. “We better not waste any more time listening to people like Bobby Hart. I mean, here’s a guy who can’t even figure out that a suicide bomber is a real terrorist. This man sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee and what does he do? Does he look to find out who might be threatening the country, who might want to bring us down? No, because he kept insisting that this was all some kind of conspiracy - secret organizations - groups within the government - some bizarre CIA plot - God knows what. And what has happened as a result? How many lives have been lost because the Senator was more interested in publicity than in doing his job? We shouldn’t have to deal with people like that in this country, and maybe after what’s happened now we won’t have to.”
Even the mainstream media thought that enough was enough. Editorial writers in every part of the country, including New York and California, suggested that whatever may have been the truth about the break in at Senator Hart’s house and the murder of Dieter Shoenfeld, the attacks in Los Angeles and Atlanta were clearly the work of Al Qaeda or some other terrorist organization. It was impossible to think they could be anything else.
Quentin Burdick was not so sure.
“I knew H.L. Harrison,” he explained. “In my dealings with him he was usually fairly honest. He would tell me when there was something he could not discuss, but he was often willing to explain in great detail the thinking within the administration on some national security issue, though I don’t believe he even once allowed me to quote him by name. Always ‘someone within the administration,’ that kind of thing.”
Burdick looked at Hart, sitting across from him in a restaurant on Manhattan’s upper east side. At three o’clock in the afternoon it was a quiet place to talk. Hart seemed worried. Leaning forward on his elbow, Burdick played with the edge of his bow tie.
“You remember President Truman’s line, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog’?”
For the first time in days, Hart cracked a smile.
“There are a couple people left who haven’t turned on me.”
“Senator Ryan, for one?”
“Charlie Ryan, for one.” The smile grew a shade larger. “It isn’t his fault, you understand. I think he’d like to turn on someone once, just to know how it felt, but it isn’t in him, he doesn’t know how. But you were about to tell me something about H.L. - what does that stand for, anyway?”
“Hannibal Lawrence.”
“Hannibal.” Hart shook his head. “What about him? What about Harrison? No one has found him, have they? I don’t imagine now that anyone is really looking. Except the D.C. police.”
Burdick reached inside his jacket.
“I dragged this out. It’s a speech he gave a couple years ago at a conference sponsored by that think tank he was with. I didn’t think much about it at the time. It was the kind of complaint that had become fairly common in those circles. The only difference was the context in which he tried to put it.”
Hart looked at the front page, the date and location of a speech that perhaps two hundred people had listened to and most of them had then forgotten. The title of the speech seemed not just generic but dull: “American Democracy, American Empire: A Choice for the 21st Century.”
“The complaint,” continued Burdick, “was that government had become too cumbersome, too complex, to meet the challenges of the new century; that with interests and responsibilities around the world, the executive could not respond to each new crisis with the kind of energy the framers of the Constitution intended, if it was constantly having to do things the way that Congress insisted. I remember most distinctly- and the reason I pulled it out - ” He pointed to the text. “I marked the passage, on the last page. He makes the remark that in the age of terror, any interference with the ability of the executive to decide what has to be done is a threat to national security, and that an empire has to act like one.”
Hart did not see the point.
“That argument has been made before. Lopez, the attorney general, testified a couple of months ago in the Judiciary Committee that there is no limitation on the power of the president in a time of war. None. He can do whatever he decides is best for the country. The argument doesn’t stand up, but so long as people in power believe they have that authority, the only way you can stop them is either to refuse to appropriate the money they need or take them to court. The argument, if you take it seriously, is nothing short of a claim to a kind of elected dictatorship.”
Burdick searched his eyes with an intensity that Hart at first did not understand. Slowly, it dawned on him.
“You don’t really think...?”
“Why not?” asked Burdick. “Start with the name: Rubicon. What did it mean - when Caesar crossed it?”
“That a decision had been made, that there was no turning back.”
“It also meant that the republic was finished, that whatever forms were kept the new reality was that Rome was now going to be ruled by one man.”
“They could never get away with it,” insisted Hart. “We have an election coming up in less than a month. We have....”
“An election with only one candidate?”
“The Republican National Committee is meeting this weekend. They’ll pick someone else. The election will still take place.”
“They pick another candidate, less than a month to go. Are you sure that’s going to happen?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t it?”
“That isn’t much time. There has already been talk about delay, pushing the election back so that the new candidate - whoever it might be - has a chance to campaign.”
“Even if it were pushed back, that still doesn’t bring about what you’re suggesting.”
Burdick seemed relieved that Hart did not think it possible. He signaled to the waiter to bring them another drink.
“But it does make sense, doesn’t it?” said Hart, suddenly intrigued. “The parallel would then be exact: What Gunther Kramer wrote, the passages he marked, all about what happened in Rome after the Rubicon was crossed. I wonder how many people then thought it could happen, that what they had known all their lives, what went back generations, four hundred years, could change, and change that quickly?”
Burdick sat hunched over his empty glass, a pensive expression on his narrow face.
“I’ve been hearing rumors that the White House has been discussing the possibility of martial law, declaring a state of emergency until every terrorist involved in the attacks has been rounded up. I’m also hearing rumors that the Pentagon has been given orders to begin planning an attack on Syria and Iran.”
“Because Syria and Iran are responsible for what happened here?”
The waiter brought the second round. Burdick took a sip and then held it in front of his eyes, watching the way the scotch and water changed color in the shaded light.
“H.L. Harrison,” he mused aloud, “was not, so far as I know, one of those religious types, but there was that same kind of inner certainty in his eyes. He believed in what they were doing, believed quite fervently that it was America’s mission to remake the Middle East.”
Burdick took another, longer sip. With a kind of nervous excitement, his eyes fastened on a single point directly below him. He seemed to concentrate on it, a way to help him see more clearly what was going through his mind.
“The strange thing,” he said presently, “is that I always had the feeling that he didn’t know anything. That isn’t quite right. He obviously knew a great deal, but all about current things: facts, figures, the various arguments used by each side in whatever debate was going on within the administration. But ‘democracy,’ ‘empire,’ ‘what the founders intended’ - just words; phrases he had picked up to make what he had to say seem more important, more historical. That speech - read it when you have the chance - it really doesn’t say anything except that we know what we’re doing is right and there should not be any limit on our power to do it.”
“Even if it involves the murder of a few dozen innocent people,” said Hart, shaking his head at the blind and brutal arrogance of it all. He was about to say something else when Burdick’s cell phone rang.
“Sorry,” said Burdick after he checked the screen. “It’s the paper.” He raised the phone to his ear. Seconds later the color had gone out of his face.
“What?” asked Hart as Burdick put the phone away. “What’s happened now?”
“What we were talking about: Rubicon. You better get back to Washington right away.”
“Why? What...?”
“Another attack, another suicide bomber. Jeremy Taylor is dead. In Philadelphia, just outside Independence Hall. There isn’t going to be an election. That’s what this was all about,” said Burdick, anger in his eyes. “Rubicon. You’ve got to stop it.”
Chapter Twenty One
The third attack killed more people than the first two put together. More than a hundred were wounded. That it happened just outside the birthplace of American independence only added to the feelings of frustration and rage that swept over the country.
Jeremy Taylor had just finished giving a speech, a speech in which he had insisted that no matter how many times terrorists might attack the country, America could never be defeated so long as it did not give up on the principles that had guided it from the beginning and given hope to the world.
His words died with his death. A state of martial law was declared. The national guard began to patrol the streets, authorized to arrest anyone on suspicion and to shoot on sight anyone breaking the law. All commercial aircraft were temporarily grounded so that the military could take over major security operations at the airports. The White House announced that the president would address a special joint session of Congress the following night.
“Burdick thinks it’s what?” asked Charlie Ryan, intensely interested in what Hart had told him.
“He thinks Rubicon is more of a parallel than we thought.”
