The Days to Come, page 1
Dedication
For my mother and all her friends on the hill
Epigraph
In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.
—FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS
Frantic orthodoxy is never rooted in faith but in doubt. It is when we are unsure that we are doubly sure.
—REINHOLD NIEBUHR
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Cast of Characters
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part II
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part III
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Tom Rosenstiel
Copyright
About the Publisher
Cast of Characters
RENA, BROOKS & ASSOCIATES
PETER RENA, partner
RANDI BROOKS, partner
ELLEN WILEY, head of digital research
ARVID LUPSA, digital researcher
HALLIE JOBE, investigator
WHITE HOUSE
DAVID TRAYNOR, president of the United States
WENDY UPTON, vice president of the United States
QUENTIN PHELPS, White House chief of staff
STERLING MOSS, political counselor to the president
GIL SEDAKA, chief of staff to the vice president
KIM MATSUDA, counselor to the president for environmental affairs
THE SENATE
TRAVIS CARTER, Senate majority leader
AGGIE TUCKER, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee
LEWELLYN BURKE, senior senator from Michigan
BATTERY COMPANY EXECUTIVES
KUNAI SREENIVANSAN, founder, Ignius Corp.
BILL STENCEL, founder, Helios Corp.
VENTURE CAPITALISTS
JAMES WEI, partner, GCM Investments, investor in Helios Corp.
ANATOL BREMMER, founder, Global Partners, investor in Ignius Corp.
OMAR ABBAD, partner, BFP Investments, investor in Tolle Industries
OTHER CHARACTERS
VICTORIA MADISON, friend of Peter Rena
JASDEEP BHALLA, FBI Special Agent in Charge, Palo Alto Office
DAVE POLANSKY, FBI Deputy Special Agent in Charge, Palo Alto Office
KATIE COCHRAN, former wife of Peter Rena
MATT ALABAMA, friend of Peter Rena
STEPH MEYER, a seventh grade teacher
JAMES NASH, former president of the United States
JEFF SCOTT, governor of Michigan
Prologue
SOMEWHERE IN THE NEVADA DESERT NEAR CALIFORNIA
Kunai Sreenivansan liked to visit the farm in the last fading minutes between night and morning. Astronomers call that moment civil twilight; the sky is lightening, but the desert is still asleep. The sun is six degrees below the horizon.
In summer, the valley at this hour was still a gentle enticement, not yet the angry mystery it would become a few hours later. By midday, temperatures would exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and after a few minutes the searing desert would become uninhabitable for humans. In winter, the same valley was a frigid moonscape. Last winter, the earth’s temperature below the cactus here registered the same Celsius as it did in the Arctic—a new alarming record.
Kunai knew only that these changes were unnatural. To be precise—and Kunai was always that—for each of the last fifteen years, the hundred acres he had just leased in this part of Nevada were hotter than any years recorded before 1950. And every one of the last five summers had been the hottest ever.
The desert flowers had begun to bloom at the wrong time of year; then they would stop and slip back under the earth again because they recognized they had come too soon. Everything was confused: the lizards, the plants, the Earth itself.
Kunai’s meticulous crop of shiny flat silicon panels—sand converted by heat into crystalline silicate—jutted out into the desert farther than he could see. The panels were canted at forty-five degrees so they would smile into the rising sun. He checked a few each morning, but he was not really here for them. The panels themselves were simple, self-monitoring devices and rarely failed. He was here for the boxes that sat behind each panel.
Sreenivansan was dark skinned and broad shouldered, especially for a Maithil Brahmin from Northern India. He wore dirty blue jeans and a black tee shirt, and he was often mistaken for a student, which he hadn’t been for many years since he had moved out of his crammed apartment with his doctorate from MIT.
And though he was young, he thought his face was blighted by a strange crease, a worry line that ran from his eyebrows to just above his nose. The mark had appeared one day when he was sixteen. He wondered if he had dreamed something terrible while asleep and that the nighttime terror had left a scar. He wondered what it portended about his life. He worried he had committed a sin against God for which he was being punished. Fifteen years later, the crease was unchanged. Time had neither softened nor deepened it, though now he was more worried about the Earth than about religion.
His English was more American now than British or South-Asian. He credited that to his grandfather, an ascetic monk. Grandfather had wanted Kunai to be a monk, too, and a singer of sacred music, and he had made the boy wade into winter lakes to practice singing in the belief that the cold water would improve his voice. Instead, the freezing water and the family’s looming demands drove Kunai away from Grandfather’s asceticism toward science. But singing while his twelve-year-old body was rapidly dropping in temperature also had the effect of somehow changing his English public-schoolboy accent. The only way to sing the words to the spiritual songs with his body so tense was to flatten and quicken them out, like an American pop star.
He looked at the boxes connected to the panels. There were thousands of them, each a little bigger than the size of two car batteries. He opened up five of them, just for a glance. Then he stacked those five on the hand truck he had brought with him and rolled it to his pickup. He would look at them more closely back in the city. But he already knew what closer examination would show.
They hadn’t lasted. The liquid metal had failed after four days. That was eight times better than the lithium-ion battery the world used now. But it isn’t what he’d theorized. It wasn’t good enough.
Part I
Defining the Problem Is Half the Solution
1
ASPEN, COLORADO
Wednesday 16 December
PETER RENA
The quarrel started in the hotel. Now it was continuing in the car.
“That is exactly what you said, Peter. You should listen to yourself.”
Peter Rena felt like a swimmer knocked backward by the surf, head suddenly underwater, feet thrashing above him. Vic was right. That is what he’d said. He’d forgotten—not quite believing he had said something so thoughtless—and then denied it.
Vic was staring straight ahead, driving. Now she turned to look at him.
Her eyes, the color of smoke flecked with gold, were the first thing Peter had noticed about Victoria Madison when they met three years ago, the first thing about her he had fallen in love with. Now they were filled with accusation.
“You need to say something, Peter. This is not a time for one of your deep silences.”
But Rena didn’t know what to say. His mind was flooded, the swimmer scrambling to regain purchase. The woman he loved had just asked for his true feelings. Why did he not know them?
A few minutes earlier they’d been laughing. They were at the hotel getting ready and Vic was talking about how strange the evening was going to be. She was looking in the mirror, putting on earrings, using her free hand to pull her hair away from her face. Her hair, which was straight and dirty blond and which she always wore short, reminded him of summer.
Her reflection in the mirror looked back at him. He needed to make his mind up about something, she said. About whether he had to work t
Tomorrow? He’d forgotten to tell Vic: the vice president-elect wanted to meet with him.
Rather than answering, he’d tried to lighten the mood. “It isn’t fair to give me ultimatums when you look so good.”
It was a joke, but Vic’s expression had frozen.
“Make up your mind for once in your life,” she’d said sharply.
Her vehemence had surprised him.
“Babe, I don’t understand what the problem is.”
That was the truth, but he wasn’t thinking—and in an instant this had become serious. She had never given him an ultimatum, not once in all the time they’d known each other.
IN THE CAR ON THE WAY TO DINNER VIC WANTED TO TALK MORE about why she was angry.
“This isn’t just about tomorrow.”
A year earlier Vic had asked him to move to California to be with her, or she could move to Washington with him. This afternoon she’d brought up having children again. He had missed that cue, too. And tonight he had made a joke about ultimatums.
He watched himself being stupid, hurting her.
She was crying as she drove. “Go to hell, Peter.”
This was Vic, who never lost her temper, who helped everyone else manage their moods, who Randi Brooks, his friend and business partner, said made everyone around her better at life.
Rena was supposed to be good in tight spots; that’s how he made his living, helping people in trouble. A cool head and a slow heartbeat, even in combat. But he was this person, too. A fuddled man in a car having a fight with the woman he loved, understanding nothing and making it worse.
He and Vic had flown in that morning from different ends of the country, Rena from Washington and Vic from California. They had come to Aspen for dinner at the home of the next president of the United States. The evening would be “a small personal and professional gathering,” they’d been told. “About a dozen people. A semi-working dinner.” The invitation had come only a few days before, a surprise.
Rena only glancingly knew president-elect David Traynor, the tech entrepreneur and Democrat who a month ago had won the presidency on an improbable bipartisan ticket. He and Randi had done work for Traynor’s running mate, a Republican senator from Arizona named Wendy Upton. Someone had threatened to destroy Upton if she accepted Traynor’s supposedly secret offer to join his ticket. Rena, Brooks, and their small consulting firm of background investigators found the person behind the threat and ended it. The episode had probably pushed Upton toward accepting the offer to run—not away from it.
In the months that followed, Upton by most estimates helped tip the razor-thin election to her running mate. While Americans wanted change, a good many had doubts about Traynor—a new-economy billionaire turned populist outsider—just as they did about his Republican opponent, a charismatic, ultraconservative war hero from Michigan named Jeff Scott. Having to choose between two macho disruptors, a growing number of voters found something reassuring about the shy, tough, western woman senator who crossed party lines. In the odd alchemy that happens between TV screen and voter, Wendy Upton made the daring David Traynor feel more trustworthy.
The mysterious dinner invitation was not the only odd element of the day. There was also the magazine story. A Washington policy publication called The National had published a lengthy profile that morning about Rena and Brooks as Washington fixers. The headline had been embarrassing: WASHINGTON’S SECRET PRIVATE EYES: THE ODD COUPLE BOTH PARTIES TURN TO WHEN THINGS GO WRONG. Peter and Randi had only cooperated because The National would have done the story without them—and it was safer with them. But the article struck a sensitive chord with Vic. A year ago, in the middle of the whole Upton probe, she’d asked Peter flat out: How can you keep doing what you do when politics has become so grotesque? He had answered in a way he thought at the time persuasive. All the things wrong in Washington were a reason to stay, he said, not leave.
In the year since, he saw more clearly their relationship had drifted into a state of suspended animation. They talked every day, saw each other often—one or the other making the trip across the country each month or so. But they had fallen into a pattern avoiding all difficult questions, until tonight. Vic was thirty-eight and Rena forty-three. It was time they decided where they were headed.
The magazine article talked about Rena’s “detective’s intuition,” about how—when he developed a theory about a case—he could fall into deep silences, pondering what the article called “thought experiments”: What if? His mind would drift into the if, and he would mull by himself, until all the pieces in a case were examined against the possibility of the if.
Detective’s intuition? Vic was the most important person in his life. And he had no idea what she was thinking. He was the master of oblivion.
What was frightening him? Failing at marriage a second time? Failing Vic?
She had stopped crying. “I told myself I wasn’t going to bring this up tonight,” she said. “I was going to wait until tomorrow.” She wasn’t looking at him. “I’ve started to see someone else.”
Rena thought he hadn’t heard her right.
Not Vic. She wouldn’t do that. He tried to process the words. He looked through the windshield at the dark night. There was little moonlight and clouds masked the peaks of the jagged snow-covered mountains, as if the tops had been cleaved off by the sky. What remained looked like white elephants.
His phone rang.
Don’t answer it.
Then a text message. Then the phone rang again.
He stole a glimpse at Vic. She was reading his mind, sensing his panic, understanding everything better than he did. She was still angry.
Then came another text. “Look at it,” Vic said.
It was from Arvid Lupsa, one of the computer experts in Rena and Brooks’s office. Urgent. Read this! Something from the social platform Y’all Post had been copied into the message:
Peter Rena is a liar and a fraud. He is a wife beater and a baby killer. He is no one to judge others. Or investigate anyone.
I have the proof.
It was signed by someone using the screen name Out of the Past.
“I’m sorry,” Rena said to Vic, “for being an idiot.”
2
DAVID TRAYNOR
Everyone kept eyes on David Traynor and pretended not to. Traynor could feel it. He swept the two dozen faces seated around the long table set up for the night in the great room of the Aspen house. Then he rose. He was more nervous than he would have liked.
“I promised Mariette I would wait till after dinner before I did this. But I can’t wait. Sorry, Mar.” A sheepish grin at his wife. Her sky-blue eyes looking up at him, her broad swimmer’s shoulders, that confident Stanford smile, they gave him strength.
He didn’t crave attention, not the way sneering strangers on cable and social media thought he did. They’d be shocked if they knew the truth, the talking heads who had never met him but made their living opining about him. He’d read about how basketball master Bill Russell suffered paralyzing migraines before NBA games; how the most famous actor of the twentieth century, Laurence Olivier, would feel his throat constrict so tightly from anxiety before walking onstage he couldn’t breathe. Though Traynor had been famous most of his life, and had profited from that fame, the attention still at times made him ill.
David Merrill Traynor, the president-elect of the United States, “the bro billionaire,” who had risen in a blink to the top of American politics, kept his secret terrors to himself. Never show weakness: that had been his vow to himself, ever since his senior year in college when he founded his first company—custom-made personal computers sold online for less—and the marketing people found that photo of him in his dorm room clowning around with the computer boxes and put the picture in the TV ads. He hadn’t wanted to be the face of the company. He despised those idiot CEOs who starred in their own commercials for pillows or electric shavers. But marketing said the picture told the story—how a kid dreamed up a better way to sell the one thing everyone wanted. “You are the story.” He had Dumbo ears and thick curly hair that wouldn’t comb, and he was loud even though he was shy. One of the ad people called it “awkward authenticity,” and someone said “that’s the thing,” and it became the thing.
