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Especially because Major Malich could not know that Cole would fail to hit the other launcher. He could not have planned on that. So if Rube had secretly wanted the assassination to succeed, it was a gross mistake bringing Cole along.
Unless, of course, Cole had been part of the assassination plot, too.
Only Cole knew he wasn’t part of any plot. And he knew that if Rube really had been part of the assassination, then he screwed up big time letting Cole be present with a weapon when the assassination was unfolding. It was the kind of screwup that a leader like Rube would never, never make.
That’s how Cole knew Rube was innocent of any intent to kill the President.
But that knowledge could not be conveyed to the press, particularly if somebody was juicing the process with leaks designed to incriminate Rube.
And me, thought Cole. Incriminate him and me.
Then there were the hang-ups. Ring ring, answer, click. Cole guessed those might have something to do with Major Malich’s clandestine work. Phillips and his cronies. Either that or they were just making sure Cole was still in the office.
DeeNee was no help. She let all the calls through to him while she was running errands around the building. Cole had no authority to ask her for an accounting, but since Rube trusted her, Cole could only assume she was about Major Malich’s business.
Those calls from friends in the Army. Which of them might be the one who passed along Rube’s secret worst-case-scenario plan to the terrorists who proved that it was, indeed, the worst case?
Or was it?
Up and down the halls of the Pentagon, television sets were set to CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, C-SPAN. A lot of stuff about the funeral arrangements, sympathetic statements from world leaders who had vilified the President but now were officially regretful, human interest bits about the First Family and the Vice President’s wife and children, and the families of the others who died.
But in the cracks there were the real stories: How surprisingly small a blip the assassination of the President made in the stock market. (“Is this a sign that the identity of the President is no longer a significant issue in the market? Or that LaMonte Nielson as President is somehow reassuring to Wall Street?”) The identity of the terrorist group responsible. (“All the assassins identified so far entered the country legally and with no known ties to terrorists or to groups that sympathize with terrorists.”)
And, now and then: “Questions continue to arise about why the two Pentagon officers, Major Reuben Malich and Captain Bartholomew Coleman, happened to be on the scene. According to a Washington Post story this morning, Major Malich actually worked on a hypothetical plan for assassinating a President that was eerily close to what the terrorists actually did . . .”
Bad spin. The public didn’t like coincidences. They made up stories about coincidences without the media actually having to spell it out. In Europe, the media always told people what to think, and they thought it. In America, the press asked leading questions and framed things to point to what they wanted people to think—but they never actually said it outright.
That was Congress’s job. And sure enough, the House Minority Leader was on camera saying, “Just because the dead bodies at the Tidal Pool were all Muslims from Arab nations doesn’t mean that this was exclusively a foreign plot. In a White House populated with right-wing extremists, maybe somebody didn’t think the late President was extreme enough.”
And there was already a ghoulish online cartoon making the forwarded-email circuit. A drawing of the blown-out West Wing windows, with two cops looking up at it. One of them says, “At least we know it wasn’t the Vice President.” “Oh yeah?” comes the answer. “Maybe they got each other.”
The thing that Cole couldn’t let go of was the fact that maybe they were right. Not about him and Rube being complicit, but quite possibly about who the insiders were. There were no left-wingers in the White House to finger the President’s location. And given the makeup of the military, the odds were in favor of it being a conservative of some kind or another who passed along Reuben’s plans.
Meanwhile, Cole couldn’t call anybody and actually talk about what was on his mind, since he could only assume that his phone was being monitored. And whom did he have to call? The only people he could trust, Reuben’s friends, were not Cole’s friends, not yet anyway.
He did call his mom, who was so proud of him for doing his best to stop the assassination, he was a real hero, he should get the Medal of Honor. He didn’t have the heart to break it to her that he’d probably be hauled in front of a couple of congressional committees and have people accuse him of being part of the assassination plot. She’d find it out in due time.
So he let her talk about how brave and smart he was and how proud she was, and tried to answer in something like a natural way, knowing that the tape of the conversation might well end up being played over and over on the news at some future date. “Listen to how he talked with his mother, saying nothing about the suspicions already in the media. If he could lie to her this way, then how can we believe anything he says?”
And then there was a man standing in front of his desk. A two-star general.
Cole leapt to his feet and saluted, saying to his mother, “Got to call you back, Mom, I’ve got a general in the office.”
“General Alton,” said his visitor. “I don’t think we’ve ever met, Captain Cole.”
“Major Malich is out, sir,” said Cole.
“I know,” said Alton. “But I came to see you.”
Generals don’t come to your office to escort you to a court-martial—MPs do that. So what did he want? To hear the story in his own words?
“Interesting article in The Post. Your picture was in it, but not a single quote from you. All Malich’s show?”
“It was Malich who wrote up the plans that the terrorists used, sir,” said Cole. “I only got here a few days ago.”
“And yet your ass is going to go through the wringer just like his,” said Alton. The general looked Cole up and down like he was sizing up the prototype of a new weapon. “Do you eat, Captain Cole?”
“Yes, sir.”
