The Good Lie

by Tom Rosenstiel

  The Americans will be better trained, but there are supposed to be only a few of them. One of them will be a brigadier general.

  An alarm blares, bellowing over and over inside the compound. Then everything goes dark.

  The Americans have shut off the lights to give their night-vision equipment the advantage.

  He sees flashes of tracer bullets puncturing the dark. He listens to the gunfire and watches the flashes and has to imagine the rest.

  Baah waits for his trucks to reappear.

  Quarter to two in the morning.

  Any minute.

  Then the air begins to look like water, the world blurry and moving in waves. Baah is knocked from his feet.

  The sound comes a moment later, louder than any he has ever heard.

  Everything is black and all the sound is muffled, as if he is lying under blankets.

  He staggers to his knees. His ears ring. The field glasses have broken free from his neck. He spots them across the rooftop, crawls to them, picks them up, and manages to stand. One of the lenses is cracked.

  He orients himself and finds the view into the compound.

  Half of the Manor House is gone. What remains is ablaze.

  Something has gone terribly wrong.

  Three

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 6:30 P.M.

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Peter Rena exits the elevators of the Washington Hilton and looks down at the rented red carpet. A cordon of photographers in tuxedos glance his way, but they don’t train their motor-driven cameras on him. After his moment of fame from the Supreme Court nomination last year, Rena has evidently returned to his place among the vaguely familiar but not-quite-recognized of Washington.

  Maybe he didn’t need to be here tonight after all, he thinks. His friend, the TV correspondent Matt Alabama, had persuaded him he would be inundated with invitations after the nomination fight. If he didn’t accept Alabama’s invitation, he would have to say yes to someone else. The unreliable SOB.

  The blue backdrop behind the photographers reads White House Correspondents’ Association in white letters over and over. Tonight is the organization’s ghastly annual dinner.

  Rena finds a safe observation point on the side of the hotel’s large foyer to wait for Alabama.

  Rena stands slim and tall in his tuxedo—if nothing else, a West Point education teaches cadets how to wear formal dress. Italian by birth, he is copper-skinned, black-haired, and at forty-one still lean and strong. Most people, however, are struck by his eyes, which are so dark they seem liquid. He has a stillness about him that, depending on circumstance, can seem menacing or sympathetic.

  Rena recognizes Secretary of Defense Daniel Xavier Shane entering the hotel lobby with a four-person security detail in rented tuxedos. Shane is a former Republican senator who bolted from his party, then from the Senate, and finally joined the administration of Democrat James Nash to make a statement about the need for foreign policy bipartisanship: “We cannot win the war on terror abroad if we use that war as a partisan issue at home.” Now he is a potential dark horse presidential candidate.

  Shane steps around the red carpet and pulls a BlackBerry from his jacket, the device still used in government. He reads a message, and a shadow of concern sweeps across his face.

  Rena watches Shane maneuver to a quiet spot in the lobby and compose a response. At least two more messages seem to pass back and forth between Shane and whomever he is communicating with. Then Shane looks up—jaw tight—nods to his detail, and together they head down the hotel escalators.

  It is a reflex to have watched Shane like this: young officers learn early to keep an eye on superior rank, to anticipate moods and spot trouble. Something in Shane’s exchange strikes Rena as beyond the ordinary stressful messaging that goes with power. Watch tonight, he thinks, half-consciously.

  Then, while waiting for his friend, Rena loses himself in the oddness of the correspondents’ dinner.

  The cable anchorman Jack Anthem is posing on the red carpet with the actress from the superhero film series the Spectacular Seven.

  She turns on a lithium ion smile and angles her body forty-five degrees, right hand on hip, and the photographers bathe her and Anthem in strobe. Her sparkling maroon dress fits like skin. Something in the middle-aged anchor’s smile makes Rena uneasy.

  In his decade in Washington, first as a soldier, later a Senate aide, then a consultant, Rena has seen the correspondents’ dinner metastasize from an evening banquet into a weekend of Washington grasping excess. Media companies invite Hollywood celebrities, who come to witness a different kind of power. And corporations throw lavish parties for lawmakers, who come hoping to meet celebrities. It is a weird celebration of yearning: everyone seems out of place.

  Last year, Senator Mullen of Ohio was caught on video asking for an autograph from the reality star of Dumpster Divers. This year’s event has been postponed from spring to winter because of a terrorist attack in Philadelphia the day before the event’s original date.

  Anthem and the actress step to their right and begin interviews with E! Entertainment Network and Vice Media. Rena can’t quite remember the actress’s name. The interviewer calls her Ursula. Yes, Ursula Carver.

  “Jack, are you expecting fireworks from Kenny Winn?” Winn is the comedian performing tonight.

  “It should be quite a night!” Anthem says vaguely.

  For many people Jack Anthem had become the symbol of American journalism by sheer ubiquity. He appeared as himself in movies, TV dramas, and for three hours each weekday on the BNS program Focal Point, in addition to anchoring the network’s election and special events. He did all of it at a half shout, as if he were trying to be heard in a crowded restaurant.

  Rena takes in more of the strange scene. TV actors being interviewed by newscasters from their own networks. Ordinary people either avoiding the red carpet altogether or hurrying across, smiling sheepishly as the photographers ignore them.

  At last he sees the salt-and-pepper mane of Matt Alabama crossing the crowded foyer. Twenty years older than Rena, the senior Washington correspondent of the ABN broadcast network is his friend and guide in the unexpected world of Washington politics. The correspondent has a craggy handsomeness that projects on camera as witty gravitas. The image is accurate.

  “You look ill,” Alabama says with a grin.

  “Not my kind of evening,” Rena says.

  “You’ve survived war.”

  “I trained for war.”

  Alabama’s grin widens and they make their way down escalators to the hotel’s cavernous underground. The Washington Hilton is best known to longtime residents of the city as the Reagan Hilton. For it was here in 1981 that John Hinckley fired six shots, wounding Reagan with a ricochet off the presidential limousine, paralyzing his press secretary, and wounding two officers.

  At the bottom of the second escalator, they find Randi Brooks, Rena’s partner.

  “Been gawking starlets on the red carpet, boys?”

  Rena gives her a scowl. Brooks looks elegant in her evening dress, though she would never believe it. At forty-two, she is tall and, though she would never discuss it out loud, sad about the way she thinks she looks. Her round, intelligent face is intimidating until she smiles. Then it becomes a sun enveloping everyone in its warmth.

  “We have time for one reception,” says Alabama.

  “Then once more,” Brooks says, “into the breach.”

  Four

  They choose the reception of the Washington Tribune, the city’s main newspaper. Whatever its challenges, the Tribune was still the most important publication in the capital of the free world.

  The place is full of elected officials. “It looks like the green room to a primary debate in here,” says Brooks.

  The midterm elections ended a month ago. A month from now, in January, the first presidential candidates are expected to announce, twenty-two months before election day. A half dozen people in the room are already lining up d
onors and consultants—the so-called “invisible” primary.

  David Traynor is here talking to Vice President Phil Moreland, the former governor of Tennessee, a hot-blooded southern progressive, a rarity in itself, even more so in the cool moderation of the Nash administration.

  A few feet away Rena sees Republican senator Wendy Upton of Arizona, a member of the Judiciary Committee whom he and Brooks came to respect during the Madison nomination. Some think Upton, an independent-minded Republican, could sweep into the White House if she could survive her party’s primaries, but it is hardly clear she has the desire for the fight.

  Rena is surprised to see her laughing with Kentucky Republican Dick Bakke, the Senate’s most ambitious conservative. Bakke has surpassed his mentor, Senator Aggie Tucker of Texas, as champion of the hard right, in part because, unlike Tucker, he wants to run for president. Bakke is a lightning rod who delights in angering liberals and likes to tell cheering crowds about the four things that make official Washington hate him: “I’m against open borders, open trade, and open marriages, and the only endangered species I care about is jobs.”

  For all his bluster, however, the Kentuckian is smart. He was chosen as a Supreme Court clerk despite graduating from a no-name law school in Kentucky. And he has the backing of the Grantland family of Las Vegas, owners of the country’s largest private natural resources company.

  Behind them, Will Gordon, executive editor of the Washington Tribune, notices Alabama and starts to head their way. He is accompanied by a tall woman with a severe expression and a thin runner’s body.

  “Who is that with Will Gordon?” Rena asks.

  “Jill Bishop,” says Brooks. Bishop is the Tribune’s national security correspondent and a feared figure in town for the scandals she has unearthed—secret prisons, illegal wiretapping, fake intelligence scams. She has nearly gone to jail more than once to protect her sources. Rena knows her by reputation but not by sight.

  She is carrying what appears to be a scotch the size of a movie soda.

  “She looks unhappy,” Rena says.

  “She abhors the correspondents’ dinner even more than you do,” Brooks says. “But they’re giving her a prize tonight.” Rena’s partner seems to know all things about everyone.

  Even in a tuxedo Will Gordon looks a little unkempt. He must be six five and has the sloped posture of a very tall man who has spent too many years at a desk. His curly graying hair looks like a patch of steel wool and he peers over half glasses in a way that makes him appear to be squinting. The tuxedo, however, is expensive, and below the pant legs, Rena notices red socks. The editor’s shabbiness, he thinks, is from inability, not lack of effort.

  Gordon and Alabama exchange a greeting that hints of old friendship and then handle the introductions.

  “Hello, Peter,” Gordon says, turning to Rena.

  “You know each other?” Alabama asks.

  “Iraq, 2003. I was an embedded correspondent,” Gordon says, pronouncing the word embedded as if he meant it ironically. “Peter was,” he pauses, “an officer in Special Forces.” Rena nods. “You look the same,” Gordon says, recalling Rena’s quiet, almost unsettling watchfulness and his budding reputation as a skilled interrogator. “I wish I could say that about myself. How’s life as a fixer?”

  Rena doesn’t like that term. The consulting firm he and Brooks run, which provides research, backgrounding, and strategic advice, is thriving, but it is also controversial. The reason: they take clients from both parties.

  “It’s fine,” Rena answers.

  “Are you fully recovered?” the reporter Bishop asks, speaking for the first time.

  Rena looks at her uncertainly.

  “We put in our paper you were shot,” she adds.

  The man Rena killed in the Potomac, who had already murdered three people, also shot Rena during their struggle.

  “All good now,” says Rena. He tries never to say anything memorable to journalists.

  Sensing two strong personalities about to clash, Alabama decides to rescue the conversation. “Who’s your guest tonight, Will?”

  “Apparently these parties are evaluated by how many celebrities you attract. I would have liked Julia Roberts. But most of the Hollywood types turned us down for Y’all Post.”

  Y’all Post is a giant social media company that relies entirely on its customers to generate its content.

  “So I went with Dan Shane instead.” Shane is the secretary of defense Rena had seen checking his BlackBerry in the hotel foyer. “And, Jill, we’ve probably left our guests alone too long.” Gordon offers apologies, and he and Bishop drift back toward the bar.

  “You known Gordon long?” Brooks asks Alabama.

  “We were babies together at the New York Times,” he explains. Gordon moved from reporting to editing, then from the Times to papers in Minneapolis and Dallas. He’d come to the troubled Tribune two years earlier and had shifted the narrative about the place from free fall to the unlikely notion of a newspaper improving. He had the benefit of the Tribune’s being bought by two brothers who had figured out the dominant system for bill paying on the Web and then created the largest data integration company in the world.

  “What’s he like?” Brooks asks.

  “Gruff, passionate, brutally honest.”

  “How’d he ever get to the top?”

  Alabama laughs. “It’s apparent pretty quickly if he’s not the smartest person in the room, it’s probably a tie.”

  Rena watches Gordon across the room talking to Shane. The secretary of defense seems to be making apologies. Then he signals his detail and leaves the room.

  Something, Rena thinks, is going on.

  Five

  They negotiate the metal detectors into the ballroom, and Brooks heads for her table while Rena and Alabama look for the one assigned to Alabama’s ABN News network.

  Anchorman Alan Tessier is standing with Diane Howell, the president’s national security advisor. They are talking with Cary Allison, the actor who plays a villainous senator in the television series Master of Deceit. A baritone voice speaking through the public address system announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, would everyone please take their seats.”

  Rena recognizes the cue. Secret Service can more easily scan a crowded room when everyone is seated.

  A moment later, most of the room down, the voice returns: “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.”

  With that, everyone in the room rises. President James Nash appears from behind a blue curtain and navigates his way to the center of the head table, shaking hands as he goes.

  The room fills with the uneven, complex applause of political Washington, some polite, some enthused, some forced.

  The president waves, smiles, nods, raises his hands to quell the crowd, and repeats the sequence until the applause finally fades, and he takes his seat. Then fifty waiters emerge through side doors balancing salads on trays on their shoulders.

  Twenty-five months earlier James Barlow Nash defied nearly all prognosticators and won a second term to his enigmatic presidency. Tall, ruggedly handsome, and gracefully athletic, the fifty-seven-year-old Nash had built his career being underestimated. The heir to a pioneer Nebraska dynasty, he’d been dismissed for thirty years as too good looking, too ideologically suspect, too shallow, and too privileged to go very far. “He has the roguish charm of Harrison Ford and the rectitude of Gregory Peck,” an early profile gushed, “but what does he believe in?” As he moved to national prominence in an era of political alienation, the condescending distrust of both party establishments turned out to be one of Nash’s strongest political virtues. He had never lost an election.

  As they turn to their salads, Rena notices one of the guests at his table, National Security Advisor Diane Howell, glance inside her purse. She is reading her BlackBerry. She looks up, face filled with worry. When the next message arrives, she says to her host, anchorman Tessier, “I’m so sorry. I am afraid I’ve got to respond to this.�
�� She navigates her way to the side of the ballroom and tries unobtrusively to leave.

  Rena scans nearby tables and locates the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, head down, reading a message of his own. Two tables away, Secretary of State Arthur Manion is conferring with an aide, Aaron Rubin, who is kneeling at his feet. The elderly Manion rises stiffly, and he and Rubin leave the room in opposite directions.

  That’s three.

  At the head table, the president is still sitting undisturbed, no aide whispering in his ear.

  Rena looks back for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but the admiral’s chair is now empty. Then he sees the director of the CIA, Owen Webster, trying to stroll out discreetly as well.

  WILL GORDON OF THE WASHINGTON TRIBUNE has noticed the same departures as Rena.

  His own guest, Secretary of Defense Shane, never made it to the ballroom. He excuses himself and at the next table whispers in the ear of reporter Jill Bishop to wait thirty seconds and then meet him in the back of the room.

  “Something’s up,” he says when she arrives. “Dan Shane never came in. Now Diane Howell has left. Along with Arthur Manion, Owen Webster, and Admiral Hollenbeck. That’s DOD, NSC, State, CIA, and Joint Chiefs.”

  “News breaking out at the correspondents’ dinner? How ironic,” she says.

  “Run traps,” Gordon says, his parlance that she should check with her sources. She glances around the room for signs of other reporters moving and, seeing none, slips out. Gordon follows a moment later. He finds an alcove to hide in and touches the name of a contact on his cell, the home number of Steve Packer, his Pentagon correspondent.

  “Stevie, Will Gordon. What ya doin’?”

  “Watching football.”

  “Not anymore.”

  * * *

  When National Security Advisor Diane Howell reaches the limousine pickup area, Defense Secretary Daniel Shane and CIA Director Owen Webster are already waiting for their cars.

  “What do you know?” she asks.

  “The U.S. mission in Oosay, Morat, is under attack,” says Shane.