The Profession (27 page)

“By me? Zero. I’m going home to start on the article.”

The piece on Salter, she says, will take five days. She already has her assistant cranking out research—and two freelancers on the way to her office as we speak.

“What’s the hook?” I ask.

“Alcibiades.”

I get it. The unwilling exile. The misunderstood patriot.

“Your idea or Mrs. Cole’s?”

A.D. pulls a single sheet of buff-colored stationery from her laptop bag. On it, in a woman’s handwriting that is not A.D.’s, is a subject-head outline, start to finish.

“I didn’t think cut to measure was your style.”

A.D. cracks the window and flicks her cig into the night. “It is now.”

The limo drops me at Maggie Cole’s town house in Alexandria. The driver will take A.D. to a separate soiree at
Apple imPress
, then return to Mrs. Cole’s and wait for me.

I ask A.D. if she herself has come over to Salter’s side.

“Let’s say I’m riding the story wherever it takes me.”

This bothers me.

I step out; the limo creeps forward. I rap the driver’s glass to make him stop. A.D. rolls down her window.

“One last question, babe. Where does the Constitution stand in all this revolution?”

“The Constitution,” my wife says, “is a living document.”

I STAY UP TILL FOUR
,
AKOPing friends still with Salter in the kingdom—Chris and Chutes, Tony, Q, Mac, Junk, and Pete Petrocelli—asking them what they’ve heard about this stuff. Grunts and operators never know shit, and care even less. I wind up phoning Ariel Caplan, waking her at dawn in her Manhattan condo. She doesn’t seem to mind.

“Have you heard,” she asks me, “of the Emergency Powers Act?”

I have not.

“I shouldn’t be blabbing over a satline that’s almost certainly being pinged by both sides, but the merest cupcaking would bring this out anyway, so what the hell?”

The Emergency Powers Act of 2024, Ariel tells me, was passed by Congress and enacted into law in the aftermath of the nuclear attack on Long Beach.

“Under the Act,” says Ariel, “Congress, in circumstances of immediate national peril, may vest extraordinary—some would say dictatorial—powers in the president as commander in chief. The Act gives the chief executive power, under his own initiative, to
declare martial law; impose military conscription; employ wiretaps and electronic surveillance without the supervision of the courts; arrest and detain individuals without trial; nationalize the banks and all air, sea, rail and truck transport, as well the oil, coal, steel, and auto industries; order forced internment and deportation of individuals and groups; suspend habeas corpus and freedom of the press and a lot more. That’s nasty enough, wouldn’t you say?

“Well, now, today, before several committees in the House and Senate are measures that would amend this Act, so that the aforementioned commander in chief need not be the president. He or she may be a military person. The precedent being cited is the run-up to the Six-Day War in 1967, when the Israeli democracy, believing the state’s existence to be in jeopardy in the face of imminent invasion by the armies of Egypt and Syria backed by the Soviet Union, created a ‘unity government’—which basically meant that Prime Minister Levi Eshkol stepped aside while Moshe Dayan was brought in as defense minister and took over.

“Clearly this current American measure is being brought by partisans of your friend General Salter and is designed for one purpose only—to bring him home in a position that places him beyond the law and, by the way, reverses 245 years of constitutional checks and balances.”

Ariel tells me that private poll numbers, which she has accessed through her own independent databases, indicate that somewhere between 66 percent and 73 percent of the electorate would support such an amendment if it would result in bringing Salter home with sufficient powers to deal with the current crisis.

“This is not nothing, Gent. This is tyranny on its face. It’s Roman. And I’ll tell you something else.”

I can hear Ariel dragging on a cigarette. The tinkle of cubes in a glass comes over as well.

“I have it from an unimpeachable source,” Ariel says, “that the
Republican presidential candidate, Senator Dodd, has privately intimated that he will cede this power. If elected, he’ll voluntarily surrender C in C to Salter. Why? To get elected in the first place! If he’s saying this, you can bet that President Murchison will make the same deal. Remember what Osama bin Laden said once about people wanting to follow a strong horse? That’s your friend Salter. He’s the horse
and
the rider.”

I sleep all day, tossing with fever dreams, then go to work that evening.

Can what Ariel said be true? And if it is, does it mean what she says it does?

“Evening” in Beltway-speak means business. Evening is when things get done. The meetings and conferences that take place during working hours, I am learning fast, are only for exercise. It’s not till after hours that deals are actually struck.

Nor does anything happen in the District at the hour it’s announced. By the time a decision hits the press or the blogs, it’s been a done deal for days. And the decision maker is never the one to tell you. You find out from some nobody three and four levels down.

That’s what I am. I have been sent here as a nobody to do business with other nobodies.

It’s the nobodies, I come to understand, who get things done. Change happens at the nobody level. The nobodies craft the memos and prepare the policy papers. It is the nobodies who stuff a page of notes into a senator’s hand, which he then reads cold for the cameras as if he had penned every syllable himself.

Why has Salter sent me to Washington? To serve as a back-channel conduit between him and the third- and fourth-tier representatives of power who want or need to talk to him but either can’t risk the consequences of overt contact or who wish to sound out a situation
unofficially or even—this is the tricky part—to conduct, or initiate, actual negotiations. Does Salter trust me to do this? Hell no. I report to Maggie Cole, who then confers with whomever she must confer with. After that, I get my instructions.

What sort of Deep Throat shit am I doing? Here’s one. TataLux, the giant Indian CNG car company, is threatened by the proposed Takhar Valley–Karachi pipeline that, if completed, would be able to deliver vast quantities of liquefied natural gas by sea to Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, and Korea (their second-most-profitable market) and, more critical, to China, their number one. The primary selling point of these compressed natural gas vehicles, which cost peanuts and get over a hundred miles per gallon while polluting at near zero, is that when you purchase the car you also sign a contract to buy three years’ worth of CNG from TataLux. If the new pipeline delivers the same juice for half the price, TataLux is hosed.

The company wants to come to an understanding with Salter. If he will torpedo the pipeline (which he can do with a single phone call to any of fifty players in Central Asia who are now dependent upon his good graces), TataLux will put a hundred mill in his pocket, give him a seat on the board, and cut him in on the action. TataLux can’t communicate this directly to Salter because (a) he’s not a businessman; he has no apparatus of commercial representation by which he can be approached with deniability; (b) the situation is so fluid (and Salter’s hold on power so precarious and impossible to evaluate) that there are no precedents to establish price or compensation for influence; and (c) if they get caught, the company loses credibility big-time as a reputable force in the industry. So they have to work in the shadows. They have to operate through nobodies. Nobodies provide deniability.

I sleep at Maggie Cole’s town house in Alexandria. Each morning at six thirty I teleconference with Mrs. Cole, who works out of
her horse property in Middleburg. The connection is encrypted by Force Insertion’s domestic security firm, Rhinehart Norton International. As I make coffee, a day sheet containing my appointments scrolls out of the printer. Maggie or her staff update this via my handheld every thirty minutes.

I am not allowed to phone A.D., or anyone else not on Maggie’s secure list. I have a “correspondent” named Deeana (no last name) who travels with me to every meeting, to act as a witness both to what I promise (which is always nothing) and what is pledged by others (which is often something) and to record officially all exchanges for Salter and his network; a Lebanese-American driver/bodyguard named Tomas who speaks Arabic, Farsi, and Dari; and a stylist named Gerri who cuts my hair, orders my meals, and both buys and lays out for me my shirts, shoes, and jackets. When I ask her to articulate her job description, she says, “I’m here to accessorize you.” She is also here to fuck me, thank you Maggie, to keep me out of trouble, running around town, but for some reason I never take her up on it, though she is very cute and very willing. I’m being faithful to A.D.

While I’m doing this, my own self-imposed priority is to get el-Masri and his family back to the States. Salter can’t pull strings yet; there’s still too much fear and uncertainty within the bureaucracy, not to mention he’s got ten thousand items higher up on his to-do list. No one knows if the general will be escorted home in triumph or tried for treason. I’m trying to work in the cracks. Every time business puts me in the way of someone connected to Immigration, I pump him for the inside track. Simultaneously I’m working with Maggie and her people, rolling bones, and calling in favors. It’s incredible how difficult it is. El-Masri knows nothing of what I’m doing; I don’t want him to get his hopes up.

Here’s a typical day, reconstituted from memory and notes on matchbooks and cocktail coasters, because Maggie’s minders shred each twenty-four hours’ schedule as soon as it scrolls by.

At the same time that I myself am meeting with agents and representatives of corporate, political, or governmental interests, other operatives working for Salter are doing the same thing. How many are there? I’m guessing several hundred, though, from my worm’s-eye view, there is no group planning and no sharing of intelligence. Each of us is a law unto himself. I report to Maggie and others above me, but have no official contact with peers on my level. The only people I know are the reps of interests who conspire with me.

Who are these guys? I meet them in tapas bars, at ball games, and in locker rooms at health clubs. We take a steam. We ride around in taxis or on the metro, always someplace loud to defeat audio surveillance or self-bugging. I confess I’m impressed by these players. They are not goons or boiler-roomers; they are hip young hotshots—Americans, Brits, Japanese, South Africans, Brazilians, Dutch, Russians, Arabs, and Indians. They all went to Harvard or Sloan/MIT and they all get picked up, when the pitching is over, by five-foot-ten Stanford-grad blondes driving Daimler biodiesels or fuel-cell Fiats. “Have we got a deal?” they ask.

“I’ll get back to you.”

I record everything in after-action reports and shoot it up the line. But the real work happens past midnight in Maggie Cole’s
home gym, which has had the Stairmasters and Cliff Climbers removed and replaced by two big war-room tables, wall maps, and carrels for multilingual tech jockeys who are tapping out encrypted dispatches to Hong Kong, Seoul, Riyadh, and fifty other capitals of finance, while Maggie and her staff of whiz kids wheel and deal with an ever-mutating cavalcade of shape-shifters—corporate, tech, military, financial, governmental, and nongovernmental actors. The latter category includes such unsavory entries as warlords and tribal chieftains, exiled businessmen and royalty, scholars and clerics, rebel and faction leaders (demarked in communiqués as GIWs, governments-in-waiting), gangsters, narcotraffickers, even the odd celebrity and media titan.

All are supplicants seeking Salter’s favor.

Salter himself remains in Arabia. Neither Mrs. Cole nor any member of the kitchen cabinet dares serve as his official channel of communication. That role is performed by the lobbying firm of Gershater/Kahn/Valentino, who represent in addition to Salter not only the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia but four of the top eleven energy giants, including Russian Lukoil and Chinese Sinopec. GKV’s law firm is Lowther Schapiro & Bloom, on whose board sit four former senators and two ex-Speakers of the House, as well as Maxwell “Marty” Bloom, secretary of state under Jack Cole and secretary of defense under the incumbent Murchison. Bloom was the Jedi knight who restored the Supreme Court’s credibility after the electoral scandal of 2016 and whose half-hour speech in prime time as a private citizen, paid for out of his own pocket, single-handedly quelled the panic on Wall Street during the crash of 2019. Arrayed around Bloom is an unofficial but fully functioning network of current and former cabinet members, senators, congressmen, and long-ball hitters in the corporate, legal, financial, and military universes.

In other words, Salter possesses his own government-in-waiting.

Where were all these sonsofbitches, I ask Maggie, when Salter needed them?

“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “They’re here now.”

A few nights later I witness firsthand a sample of this GIW.

Adm. Harley Spence is chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He drives to Maggie’s farm by back roads at one in the morning and meets with her in the kitchen with all the shades drawn. I’m sitting beside Maggie on a banquette that runs along one wall of the breakfast nook while Adm. Spence, who is suffering with back spasms and can’t sit in a chair, perches across on a low-rise stool, leaning forward with his elbows on the tabletop like an old man desperately trying to take a crap.