He goes on for several more minutes, mostly outlining how he hopes the committee will run and what questions it needs to answer. But the message is unmistakable. Beyond even the most cynical expectations, the Oosay Committee after only a few minutes has become a partisan mess.
Dick Bakke is up next. Since the committee is newly formed, with no length of tenure on the panel, they’ve drawn lots on each side to determine the order of questioning. Bakke stares at Blaylish.
“Mr. Chairman, in response to the ranking Democrat, I feel we need to remind our friends across the aisle why we are here. I fear, Mr. Chairman, that the Nash administration is not only incompetent—which may be inferred prima facie from the death of General Roderick and his men. I am also here to find out if the Nash administration has lied about what happened and is now engaged in a cover-up to hide those lies. If that requires holding back some information from the Democrats, who in turn will leak it to the White House, so be it.”
Senator David Traynor of Colorado suddenly twists in his chair to look at Bakke. The sound and the sudden motion, in turn, catch the attention of the network cameras. Several push in for a close-up on Traynor’s expression, which is one of unmistakable disgust. In TV parlance, it is a terrific reaction shot.
Sitting in his studio across town, BNS anchorman Jack Anthem exclaims to his producer, “You see that? Make sure to mark that.”
In the press section, a number of reporters begin to frame the day’s story in their minds—Traynor versus Bakke, two men considering running for the presidency. Some older hands among them wonder if Traynor’s reaction was spontaneous or calculated, and they are eager to hear what Traynor will say in his own statement.
They aren’t disappointed. “Less than twenty minutes, Mr. Chairman!” Traynor snaps when it’s his turn to speak. He pauses, waiting for every other member of the committee to turn his way. “That’s all it took. Before these proceedings, the work of the U.S. Congress, went full DC Comics.”
He pauses dramatically.
“You got senators here accusing the administration of murder. Others accusing the committee of being a fraud. And we haven’t heard from our first witness yet.”
Traynor shakes his head. “I may be new to Congress, but good Lord. I wonder what American citizens looking for us to help solve the country’s problems think of us now?”
A pause. “What do we think of ourselves? We say we want to honor the dead. Let’s do ourselves a little honor.”
“Are we rolling on this?” Jack Anthem yells to his producer. The anchor is on set now, waiting to do a live shot during an expected break in the hearings. “Because I sure as hell want to play that tonight.”
THE NEXT STATEMENT IS FROM SENATOR WENDY UPTON, the Republican from Arizona whom Stroud had begged to join the committee. Given that reporters already have begun to frame their stories, a number of them are not paying close attention.
“Mr. Chairman, I’ll be brief. We are public servants. Our job on this committee is to learn what we can from this incident so that we can limit the chances of similar tragedies occurring in the future. The more we focus on politics, the less likely we are to do what citizens require of us. We honor the dead by doing our job. Not scoring political points, either by denouncing this committee or by abusing its power.”
That was it. She yields the rest of her time and pushes the microphone away from her face, with just a hint of disgust.
One person who does not miss Upton’s statement is Dick Bakke, three seats away. He is still smarting from what he considers the obnoxious antics of David Traynor. But he is surprised that it is Upton’s remarks he will remember. They were impressive, even lofty, if as Upton suggested one were to remove politics from the equation. But, then again, what is the point of removing politics from the equation?
THE HEARING WILL GO ON SIX HOURS MORE. There will be testimony from the FBI forensics team about the explosion at the gates. Secretary of State Arthur Manion will testify about fortifications at the complex and the diplomatic situation in Morat. Diane Howell will carefully refuse to admit she did anything wrong, frustrating Republicans and delighting Democrats. But the story of the day is already written.
From his network TV office on Nineteenth and M Streets, Matt Alabama has decided to watch the hearings on his computer on Y’all Post Live, the way many Americans will watch it now. He sees emoji sweep by on his screen, the little hearts and evil faces as people worldwide register their instantaneous feelings about every word uttered by each senator, House member, and witness.
The universe, Alabama thinks, has become a Rorschach test.
PETER RENA DIDN’T USUALLY WATCH TELEVISION. While a lot of political Washington fixated on the story of the day, Rena finds it can often pull you off course. History suggests the news media’s narratives are often ephemeral, a kind of misdirection driven by groping for public attention. Though it can be hard to do, he tries to look for deeper patterns and counsels his clients not to be distracted by what won’t matter.
But today he had the hearings on in his office in the background, and he is nagged by clinging unease about national decline. The Oosay hearings were cartoonish and unprofessional, demeaning to the institutions of government and the public they are supposed to serve. He knows those institutions have operated in shame and chaos before and survived. They are designed to reflect popular passion, and it is a mistake to read too much into one event. But if you look hard and closely enough, history also teaches that no institutions made by humans last forever. And when change happens, it is rarely clear in the moment—only recognizable years later. Still, it is hard to watch the institutions of government function so poorly and not worry.
Thirty-Two
That afternoon, still unsettled, Rena walks home, feeds Nelson, gets into the Camaro, and heads to Dulles Airport. Vic Madison is coming for the weekend.
Dulles International Airport was designed by the architect Eero Saarinen in 1959 to suggest the freedom of flight. The white steel and glass terminal, built at the end of a special access road deep in the Virginia countryside, was supposed to look like a bird gliding in the air. When people drove that road to their flights, or to pick up arriving passengers, Saarinen wanted them to see the serpentine lines of the terminal appear and disappear over the tree line and golden hills, like a bird in flight. It was a remarkable feat of engineering and imagination and a delight to see. But in the sixty years since, the land along the road has been fully developed. The tree line is gone, replaced by high-rise office buildings. And Saarinen’s bird no longer flies.
One sees the terminal now only at the last minute, the bird perched motionless on a concrete slab.
Vic, tired from the trip, says she prefers to go to Rena’s rather than out for dinner. He cancels their reservation. At the house, Nelson meets them at the door.
“You’ve grown in a month,” she says, kneeling down to greet him.
Nelson examines her and then nuzzles her face.
“I’m being vetted,” she says. It is a reference to the job Rena and Brooks were hired to do on her father’s nomination to the Court.
Rena carries Vic’s bag upstairs and then makes them a quiet dinner. They eat at the small table overlooking Rena’s walled brick patio. They talk about her work, a case where she is trying to protect a nonprofit client being sued by a Silicon Valley company for defamation.
“I know you can’t talk about the Oosay investigation,” she says.
“It depends. Some things . . .”
“Let’s avoid it.” She sounds irritable, and Rena is surprised. Vic is usually unflappable.
He thinks about bringing up the conversation he’d had with Brooks about working for David Traynor. He wants Vic’s counsel about it. But he senses the timing is wrong, her mood off. Asking her advice, he worries, might seem patronizing. Or worse, she would think he was asking her permission to get more involved in politics when she wanted him to be less.
That night, they make love with a fiercenes
s that is unfamiliar, passionate in a way that seems almost angry, and as he lies in the dark afterward, Rena feels even more unsettled. There seemed something urgent in their lovemaking, some insistence that he worries is a signal of farewell. He isn’t sure. When it is quiet, Nelson arrives from downstairs, hops onto the bed, and settles in between them.
Saturday is the first true day off Rena can remember in weeks. He and Vic see Washington as tourists might, visiting city museums—the African American and an impressionist exhibit at the East Wing of the National Gallery—and presidential monuments.
They have dinner with Vic’s father, Roland Madison, now in his second year on the Court. Brooks is joining them, but she is running late.
They eat at Kinship, a new place on Seventh, where boarded-up buildings and the homeless are not far from the newest, most interesting restaurants in town. They are seated in the back so Justice Madison will have privacy. But an anonymous diner buys drinks for their table, declining to be identified. Madison writes a warm note of gratitude on a menu and asks it be given to the secret benefactor.
“This doesn’t happen to me a lot,” he says. “Only a small number of people in the country can recognize a Supreme Court justice out of their robe. And most of them live within a five-mile radius of this spot.”
Vic doesn’t laugh. Her mother died when she was a child, and she and her father are unusually close. He had raised her, a single parent and an only child—or perhaps, as Rollie says, they raised each other. So she has been looking forward to seeing him tonight.
Instead of responding to her father’s joke, however, Vic speaks to Rena. “I know you can’t talk about it, Peter, but I want to anyway. I want to hear Dad’s opinion.”
“About what?”
“Oosay. That hearing yesterday, it was terrible. It started out like a show trial from Russia, and then we heard the pathetic whining by the Democrats. I was embarrassed. These people, members of Congress, they’re supposed to be our leaders. They act like children.”
He knows it will only make Vic angrier, but she is right: he cannot say anything.
Vic presses her case anyway. “How can the Republicans possibly believe anyone in the Nash administration wanted the Oosay tragedy to happen? That’s absurd. And why do they think there’s a cover-up? What’s the evidence? It’s self-destructive and cynical. Don’t these people know they’re tearing the country apart?”
If he could tell her what he thought, it would only make it worse. On the one hand he agrees with Vic that the hearings were embarrassing. But he also thinks that while some of Nash’s critics are cynical and opportunistic, some are sincere, and he has little sympathy for most of the Democrats, who he thinks are blindly trying to help Nash.
At the same time, he thinks there is a cover-up involving Oosay. He just doesn’t know what it is yet. And he cannot say anything about any of it.
Vic finishes her drink and waves the glass at the waitress for another.
“Rollie, don’t you agree with me?” she asks, using the nickname she’s used for her father since her mother died. During the battle over his nomination to the Supreme Court, Roland Madison often expressed dismay and bafflement at the cynicism of the capital city. Now, glancing at his daughter, Madison seems unperturbed by it, or at least unsurprised. “We’re entering a presidential election season,” he says simply, as if the rest were obvious. “So what do you expect?”
“I know that, Rollie. That’s my point,” Vic says.
In her expression—something between anger and sadness—her feelings are suddenly plain to see. She is worried that her father, a man who for so long has been a tower of intellectual honesty and candor in the law, is being changed by the jaded ethos of his new city.
Vic’s next drink arrives. She looks at the two men, raises her glass in silence, and takes an unhealthy swig.
“The only point of investigating Oosay should be to make sure it doesn’t happen again,” she says, looking at Rena.
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” he says.
“Are you, Peter? How would I know?”
Then she takes a breath and pushes her drink away.
“Look, this isn’t about James Nash. We have taken a long time to get into this mess. But I blame the people who work in politics, who raise the money, who bring lawsuits, who work in campaigns, and the people they elect. I worry they’re all getting so good at working the system they’re destroying it. I just don’t want it to corrupt you two.”
“Vic,” her father begins.
“No, Dad. Please. I feel like you’re both wrapped up in the bullshit now so much you don’t see it. Now that you’re a justice, oh my, you can’t talk about any issue that might appear before the Court. And, Peter, you can’t talk about anything.”
The silence is terrible.
Finally, Vic says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have begun this. Not here.” But she isn’t taking it back. She doesn’t mean to.
And then they are rescued.
The hostess arrives, guiding Randi Brooks to the table. The rest of the evening is fine, thanks to Brooks’s ebullience. The idea that Randi, with her candor and wit and high-wattage energy, has been changed by “the bullshit” seems impossible to consider.
As they drive back to Rena’s row house, he and Vic say little. They do not make love that night and are polite but careful the next morning. Then, after an interminable hour trying to read in Rena’s den, Vic breaks the silence between them.
“Why not come to California?” she says. “Why be part of this? You work for people you’re not sure you trust, doing investigations you’re not sure they want. You always feel that way. Don’t you think it’s cynical?”
Rena looks into Vic’s smoke-gray eyes. Something about the way she has put it just now, as a question of cynicism, is clarifying. He has wondered about this himself, of course, about whether he should spend his life as a “fixer,” an “apparatchik,” ever since he wandered without meaning to from being a soldier into being an operative of the political city. Listening to Vic, the way she described it last night and the way she has asked him this morning, the answer that has nagged but eluded him for so long seems to come to him now with a sureness he hasn’t felt before.
“Do I think what I do is cynical? I guess I think it would be more cynical not to be part of it. To stop trying. To give up and walk away.”
Vic looks at him, considering what he has said. She nods but doesn’t smile. She takes a long time to respond.
“That gives me something to think about.”
They don’t speak of it again, or the argument the night before. The day passes more normally, the pressure lessened if not gone, and late that afternoon Rena takes Vic to the airport for her flight home.
But they have touched some nerve, Rena knows, entered a new place in their relationship they had been unable to get to before. Vic had gotten them there, he recognizes, not him.
She has given him something to think about, too. And she deserves his honesty. She above all people. He doesn’t know what his honest answer will be and whether this is the beginning of the end for them or the real beginning.
When he gets home from the airport there is a text from Brooks.
“Check the Tribune.”
Thirty-Three
Two days after the drone story was published, Will Gordon had headed toward Jill Bishop’s desk.
She saw him coming at fifty feet. With his shambling tall-man walk, head bowed, moving slow as if it were hard to stay balanced. It was her own damn fault, she thought. She should never have invited him into her thinking on the drone story. She now believed she had rushed that piece into publication. She should have held off on it until she’d made her source show her the video. Now she might never see it. That video had vanished. It had been two and a half weeks. Everyone in town wanted to get their hands on it, including Congress.
And when Congress announced it was moving the Oosay hearings up as a result of the story, she figured Gordon
would want the paper to have something new to influence the conversation during the hearings.
Well, she sure as hell wasn’t going to talk to him about it in the middle of the newsroom. She got up and met him halfway to his office. Out of the corner of her eye she could see one of her newsroom rivals, Gary Gold, watching them. Gold was a good reporter, but he was absolutely the kind of person who had gone into journalism for the pure, feral rush of it—if he wasn’t involved in some big story, he felt a kind of death. He probably itched to get involved in the Oosay story.
“Your office,” Bishop commanded when she reached Gordon.
The editor half grinned. “Yes, ma’am.”
“And for chrissakes,” she said, “don’t call me ma’am.”
They found space on the wreck of a sofa.
“I’m trying to get the drone video,” she began, “but the problem—”
Gordon crossed his long legs and, before she could finish her sentence, said, “The problem is if someone gives you a copy of the video, it would have a digital signature and be traceable. The government would go to court to ask for it. We would have to fight that. Even though we would, your sources would be frightened, and that would make you even more dangerous to work with. If the government filed papers, your picture would be all over the Internet, which would only make your work harder.”
“Right,” Bishop said.
“And every other reporter in town is trying to get that video right now. So is the Oosay Committee. Which puts about ten times more pressure on anyone in the intelligence community who has it.”
“That’s right,” said Bishop.
“And if everyone in town wants to know what’s on that video, if anyone does find out, it will be easy to confirm the first story because all these sources have been asked about it already. Which means the video is a lot of work for a story that will remain exclusive for about an hour.”
“That is also right.”
The Good Lie Page 18
