The Profession (29 page)

Ariel tells Tumulty (a total fabrication) that she’s just had a report that the body of Montana congressman Jake Fallon has been found at the base of a cliff in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

“That’s not true,” says the reporter.

“You mean he’s alive? I have the story from a reliable—”

“It’s not true.”

“Then he’s dead? From a different cause?”

The reporter says he knows nothing. He has dropped the story. He says he’s going to hang up.

Ariel won’t let him. She threatens to write her own story, naming Mr. Tumulty as a source and suggesting that he knows who murdered Congressman Fallon. “What aren’t you telling me, Andrew? Is Fallon dead by some other cause?”

The reporter says he has to get off the phone.

“Why? Is it bugged? Are we being recorded?”

Why, Ariel asks the young newsman, has he pursued this story on his own if he doesn’t believe there’s something to it?

“I changed my mind.”

“Who got to you, Andrew? Did your editors order you off? Who got to them?”

“Nobody talked to me and nobody got to my editors. I dropped the story because it was going nowhere.”

“Horseshit. Show some balls! Tell me something.”

“What’s your problem, bitch? You want the story yourself? Take it!”

Rain beats down. A.D. is tugging at Ariel, to get her to hang up. I crane closer to the speaker. The reporter’s voice pipes, high pitched:

“Stop calling me, you got it? Quit bothering me!”

The phone clicks dead.

Ariel turns to A.D. “Still think this is nothing?”

“I’m going home.”

A.D. stalks toward her car. I chase her. Her phone rings. Ariel tramps behind me. “Gent,” she says. “You have to tell me what you know.”

A.D. answers her phone, still striding. She pulls up, pressing the phone to one ear and covering the other with two fingers. “What? Say that again.”

Ariel and I come up beside her. We’re all drenched.

“Are you sure?” A.D. says into the phone. “There’s no mistake?”

She clicks the phone off.

“That was my office,” says A.D. “Calling with real news.”

Ariel and I wait.

“Salter and Maggie Cole are getting married.”

THE LION SUITE IS THE
premium crib at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai—summit floor, twenty-eight hundred feet up, tallest building in the world. The suite comes with three pairs of Zeiss binos to watch the peregrine falcons soaring a thousand feet below.

Salter has installed himself in this aerie, but I don’t get to see the digs till a day after I arrive. In-flight newscasts are bumper to bumper with stories of the upcoming Salter-Cole nuptials. Two handlers, a man and a woman, pick me up at Dubai International; they zip me through Customs in about forty seconds. Chris Candelaria is waiting with Chutes and Junk Olsen. They look like kids at Christmas. “Welcome to the rocket ship,” says Chris.

“Where’s el-Masri?”

“In Mosul, making deals with the
peshmerga.
”

“What about Hayward?”

No one knows. I’ve tried him twenty times, by phone, Skype, and AKOP. I’ve even phoned Agocopian, the FBI guy. Hayward has gone invisible.

Chris tells me the political scuttlebutt. A hot wire has just arrived
from Salter’s law firm in D.C: the decisive votes are in hand. “The Emergency Powers Act. The amendment’s gonna pass.”

Dubai is the Miami Beach of the Arab world. Right now it belongs to Salter. CSPs, concentric security perimeters, ring the Burj at three thousand yards. Passing the Karama Center I note four I-SAMs, mobile surface-to-air missile launchers, and count a dozen more as we approach the tower itself. Antimissile drones swarm above the summit like hornets. I hear the thwack-thwack of Apache rotors, juking along the urban canyons, and the whine of F-35s high above. Every corner seems to sprout a colony of security contractors, mostly Arabs, packing AK-47s with Russian PKM machine guns behind sandbagged emplacements. Primary checkpoints are blocked by MRAPs and other armored vehicles, parked sideways, with troopers on .50 cals topside.

Entering the Burj’s defensible space, our Suburban, which is bristling with security IDs and clearance freqs, is shunted through three additional checkpoints. First,

where we are inspected to be sure the vehicle’s electronic counter-measures—a humming pod that takes up the entire rear luggage compartment—have been disabled, as well as searched by thermal scan and bomb-sniffing dogs; then

where we dismount, eject all rounds from chambers, remove all magazines, then hand over our weapons entirely; and finally

where we are individually retina scanned and argon IDed, and at last patted down by hand.

“And this is for friends!” says Junk.

Inside, our foursome is met by other new faces, who greet us politely but professionally and escort us to a belowground level of the lobby. From there we ride a freight elevator to the third subbasement, where another phalanx of security men processes us again, including a second patdown.

Stairs and two passageways take us even deeper into the skyscraper’s bowels, to a blast-proof bunker that, inside, looks like a convention suite at the Holiday Inn in Topeka. Steel folding chairs are arrayed in a U around two military-style tables. A buffet spreads along two walls: coffee in industrial urns, stale turkey and roast-beef wraps, wilted Caesar salad served with plastic forks, and bowls of M&Ms for dessert.

Salter enters, preceded by Petrocelli and Cam Holland and his old combat team leader, Gunnery Sgt. Dainty, with Col. Klugh, the security chief, and four other gunslingers that I don’t recognize. They’re all in cammies, dirty, coming straight from the desert, Salter as always with his M9 in a shoulder holster. Next in the door is Jack Stettenpohl. He looks as trim as ever, in a gray business suit and modified Semper Fi haircut. Three Lowther Schapiro & Bloom lawyers accompany him, whose names I can’t recall but whose faces I’ve seen a dozen times at capital evenings in the past couple of weeks. With them are a half-dozen young Saudis in tribal robes. The senior, Chris tells me (the prince can’t be older than thirty), has been the kingdom’s ambassador to China but will now fill that post to the United States. Present via satellite, displayed on a battery of flatscreens and holos, are two dozen Euro, Asian, and North and South American power players. Finally, on a video screen set up just east of the M&Ms bowl, shimmers Maggie Cole, in jeans and Western-cut shirt, via satellite from her farm in Virginia.

Champagne toasts are drunk out of paper cups, saluting the wedding. Cigars are broken out. Petrocelli lifts his Dixie cup, addressing Salter.

“Do you realize, sir, that as we stand here at this hour, you’re not only the happiest man on earth but also the most powerful!”

The confab’s subject is how to get Salter home. He’s trepidatious; he trusts no one in the U.S. government. A homebound plane can be shot down at the push of a button, he says, and he believes his enemies are more than capable of such an act. He feels no more confident about his personal security, even after safely arriving home. “I’m not stepping down onto the tarmac at Andrews or Dulles to find myself being zip-stripped and arrested.”

On cue, a “breaking news” story appears on Trump/CNN: demonstrations are being held in twenty-one cities, calling for Salter to be brought up on charges of treason. A motion before Congress calling for the revocation of Salter’s citizenship has not been rescinded, nor has its companion proposal stripping citizenship from all Force Insertion operators and their subcontractors.

While Salter’s brain trust debates, I find a quiet corner and try to get through to el-Masri. Channels bounce me from one link to another; it takes twenty minutes to determine that the Egyptian is in the field and unreachable. I leave word that I’m in Dubai and will try to get north to see him before I fly home.

When I return to the group around Salter, they’ve got Marty Bloom, the lawyer, and a couple of his associates on video teleconference from D.C. Apparently the vote tally for the passage of the Emergency Powers Act amendment is shakier than the firm had believed. Bloom names a specific congresswoman from Indiana, who is being negotiated with as we speak.

“Her vote is everything,” says one of the partners on-screen, adding that he’s confident that the lady’s requirements can be met. “One last hurdle, Jim, and you fly home with F-35s on each wing.”

Marty Bloom addresses Salter, cautioning against premature self-congratulation. “When the amendment passes, the gloves really come off. Your enemies will hit you with everything they’ve got.”

“I don’t blame ’em,” says Salter. “I would too. In their eyes, my return equates to tyranny.”

I hear myself speak up. “Then why do it?”

Every pair of eyes swivels in my direction. Salter smiles.

“Because if Force Insertion sits tight in Arabia, Gent, we’re dead meat in ninety days. The troops starve. The U.S. gets a president it despises. We lose the oil. In four years there’s nothing left of the United States but a damp spot by the side of the road.”

I ask Salter why he can’t simply link with the new president, whoever he is, and put Force Insertion under U.S. command.

“Because I won’t,” he says.

Cheers fill the room. I’m caught by surprise.

“I’ve done that before, Gent. I’ll never do it again.”

Approbation swells from every man in the suite. As this emotion crests, one of Salter’s aides cues up a video that has apparently just appeared on Trump/CNN. The scene is a Pentagon press room. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Harley Spence, reads a statement. He is flanked by his colleagues in full dress before a wall of Stars & Stripes.

More cheers from the room. I’m thinking, can Spence and the chiefs be making such an extraordinary statement on their own? Surely they have conferred with both the president and his challenger. Is this a ploy by the chiefs to position themselves for a future dominated by Salter or is it a signal by them and the next president that the city gates have been opened, the besieger is free to enter?

Later, I pull Chris, Chutes, and Junk aside. What do they think of this shit?

“Whatever the man wants,” says Junk.

“It ain’t by the book,” Chutes says. “But what other choice is there?”

Jack Stettenpohl comes up. He tells us excitedly that it looks like the Emergency Powers Act will pass—and that some sort of unity government will be formed, with Salter at its head.

“What’s a unity government?” asks Chutes.

I want to hear this myself.

“A wartime apparatus,” says Jack. “Like Lincoln had, or Churchill, or the Israelis during their wars of survival.”

“Meaning what? No Bill of Rights? No vote?”

“Meaning the people who count will be in power. Meaning the country can finally get something done.”

“Jack,” I say. “This is bullshit.”

He stares at me as if he’s never seen me before. “Gent, don’t scare me like this.”

“What the fuck, bro. Do you hear what you’re saying?”

Jack glances to Chris, Chutes, and Junk, as if to confirm that they’re with him and I’m crazy.

“What do you think has been going on, Gent? Whose side did you think you’ve been fighting on? Since East Africa we’ve all seen how fucked this country is—and we all agree there’s only one man who can unfuck it.”

I try to reach A.D., then Ariel when I can’t find her, but all channels are coming up goose eggs.

Around midnight, a text comes in from el-Masri. I shuttle to the comms room and get him on a secure line. He bitches for twenty minutes about getting screwed on pay and bonuses and thanks me (he has sources, he says) for my efforts on his family’s behalf. Unprompted, he gives his dish on Salter and the Emergency Powers Act.

“Let me tell you something, my friend. When a man has lived under a police state like I have and, worse, been part of the apparatus himself, he appreciates the hell out of a Constitution. New Jersey is heaven. Get me back there, dude! I pray to wake up again in that shithole, where at least a man can say what he thinks without some motherfucker in a uniform kicking down his door in the middle of the night.”

Hanging up, I try for another two hours to wangle a ride home for my Egyptian brother. Still no luck. I don’t get off till two in the morning. My handheld has a message from Salter—find him and report. He wants me in on the current discussion.

Salter has settled now in the Lion Suite on the summit floor. He’s working on a room-service Cobb salad when I enter. A Steelers game is on TV. Petrocelli and Holland perch in separate corners, pecking away on secure text lines. Half a dozen security men man the room, including Dainty and Col. Klugh, with a dozen more covering this floor and the one below. I note two ATAs, Airborne Threat Assessors, coordinating the various satellite defenses, AWACS
planes, choppers, and fighters screening the sky for the surrounding 240 miles. Against one wall stands a pair of dry-erase boards full of notes and a wad of PowerPoints and printed leavebehinds. Four official-looking suits exit as I come in.

“Know who those guys are?” Salter asks. He passes me a room service menu and points me toward the bar to make myself a drink. “That was the A.G. of the State of California. He’s here to offer me forty thousand early-release inmates.”