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"Okay. But are you really saying that my best political outcome is for the plague to spread disastrously through all of Africa?"
"Sadly, that's the ugly political truth. The worse it is in Africa, the smarter you look for having confined it to that one place. And you can't keep it there forever."
"I don't have to," said Torrent. "I only have to keep it there until the CDC comes up with a vaccine that isn't as bad as the disease."
"Which could take decades," said Cecily.
"Or six months," said Torrent. "Hold it in Africa till we find a vaccine, and then we'll share it with the whole world."
Torrent always had an answer. Torrent always had a plan. The trouble was, Torrent always had more plans than he had answers, and no one could ever hope to see all of them.
"If I find out that your administration has done a single thing to encourage the spread of the plague through Africa," said Cecily.
"You know me better than that," said Torrent. "Besides, if I were that kind of president, then I'd just have you killed."
"If anyone would obey such an order."
"If I were that kind of president, then I'd surround myself with men who would welcome orders like that. But I'm not that kind of president, and I don't have that kind of executive branch under me, so you have nothing to worry about."
But Cecily was thinking again of her old suspicions—that Torrent, with his huge network of connections, had somehow been behind the whole civil war from the start. That both Aldo Verus, who ran the Progressive Restoration that took over New York City, and General Alton, who threatened the supposed military coup that provided the Progressives with their pretext, were really set into motion by Torrent himself, one way or another.
After all, that was the idea that first brought Torrent to her attention. Reuben had studied with Torrent in graduate school, and came home to her with the ideas from Torrent's classes.
Torrent had the theory that people who compared America with the Roman Empire always missed the point—we weren't an empire yet, we were still a republic. By this view, America was not going to fall, it was going to change, from republic to empire. And then it would be in a position to last, as Rome had lasted, for four centuries of world domination and another thousand as a successful power among powers.
After the civil war ended, Cecily and young Captain Bartholomew Coleman had gone over Reuben's old class notes, which were written in Farsi as a way of keeping them from prying eyes. And it became clear that Torrent regarded a civil war in America as a necessary prelude to Americans being willing to endure the rule of a benign emperor like Augustus, who kept the republican forms but ruled with an iron hand.
She and Cole had decided that all they could do was watch and wait, to see if Torrent really thought of himself as the new Octavian, the nephew and adopted son of Julius Caesar who emerged from the civil wars to become the emperor Augustus.
It was convenient, for their purposes, that because of their vital roles in helping to bring the little civil war to an end, they remained in Torrent's confidence. Cole was still Torrent's go-to man for small clandestine military o
perations, while in the open he was an NSC staffer and in that capacity went all over the world gathering and sharing information for the National Security Adviser. And Cecily, of course, was a political consultant. Both of them had plenty of opportunities to watch what Torrent did and to see the way he thought.
And as far as they could tell, this man had no imperial ambitions. He was working the system to make sure he got reelected—but nothing in his actions suggested that he intended to violate the Constitution at any point. Or at least, no more than any of his predecessors had done.
But it was disturbing to know, from his semi-lighthearted remark about not being the kind of president who would have her killed, that he still had a clear idea of what a dictator would look like and how he would operate. In fact, if she were just a little more paranoid, she would interpret his remark as a serious threat to her: Whatever I do, don't turn against me, or you'll just be killed.
And yet there was no history of Torrent's opponents disappearing, except politically. As far as anyone could tell—and Torrent did have enemies who would certainly have noticed and spoken up if there were any pattern of convenient suicides or fatal illnesses—Torrent was a politician, not an emperor in the making.
That might just mean that Torrent was such a good historian that he had learned the lessons of such vicious dictators as Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim II Sung, and Mao Zedong. They were all hated and feared, and their iron fists were covered with blood that all the world could see.
If Torrent was determined to be Octavian, he would maneuver so that his dictatorship came as the fulfilment of the dreams of the people. Save us! they would cry, and he would modestly and reluctantly accept the laurel leaves they forced upon his head. "Just call me 'first citizen,' Octavian had said, as he carefully preserved the Senate of Rome. But only after making sure that all its members were obedient to him.
Cole and Cecily had agreed that there were certain markers they'd watch for. One was if Torrent tried to get the Constitution amended to allow him to serve more than two terms. Another was if Torrent seemed to be laying the groundwork for the presidency to become a puppet show, as Putin had done in Russia back in the first decade of the century. Elect somebody else, but Torrent still pulls the strings.
Either way, it would probably be the beginning of the end for the American republic. Like most of the dictatorships in the world, America would still have a lovely constitution, and there would be an active show of preserving it. But it would mean nothing, because the real power would flow through different channels. Torrent had long been a man with wide networks of influence. Could he turn it into the real government behind the facade? Of course he could.
But was he doing it?
The man who threatened that he could have her killed might very well be doing it.
"I see the wheels turning," said Torrent. "What are you thinking?"
"That I hope you never have occasion to use this quarantine plan. Because it really would apply only to Africa. There's no way to quarantine Asia, if we get a really ugly new flu out of Hong Kong or Singapore or India."
"But we could quarantine Australia or South America—"
"Neither of them has a history of originating worldwide epidemics."
