“Liaise with the local cops. I want traffic cameras, banks, everything. Get eyes on this fantasy van; map out a search grid. If they give you shit, bypass to the FBI. A lot of people in this town owe me a lot of favors.”
He leaves them there, working their devices. It’s important to put some distance between yourself and the help, so they don’t get too familiar. That’s part of what’s wrong with the youth of today, Gabe thinks. Too much familiarity. Too many expectations. Entitlement. No wonder they’re knocking themselves off in record numbers. Mommy and Daddy cut up their fucking string beans for eighteen years and then send them off to college, where suddenly they have to do their own work and nothing’s handed to them.
Indulgence makes us soft. But Gabe Lin isn’t soft, and his goblins certainly aren’t soft. They’re killers who hunt at night. Meat eaters who ninja-train day in, day out. Gotta live up to the code name.
We’ll run this kid to ground, thinks Gabe. One day, two max.
Margot
She has dinner her first night in Washington with the president’s chief of staff, Chuck Malcolm, and Jay Bryant from the Liberty Society. She’s wearing a black dress bought for her by Malcolm’s assistant. It needs to be taken in under the arms, and it hits her right above the knees, but she pairs it with a scarf and blows out her hair, determined to power through. They eat at a French bistro on K Street, in a dark corner away from other diners. Margot has known Jay Bryant since her law school days. He is a genteel sixty-five-year-old man committed to what he calls God’s work, systematically converting the judicial branch of the American government to a body of conservative will. Margot first met him in 1996, through her Constitution Law professor at Notre Dame, one of a dozen conservative teachers across the nation who kept an eye out for promising young students. And Margot, who came from loyal Reaganite stock, who believed that America was God’s country, who had been captain of her debate club and valedictorian at Yale, might as well have been built in a Liberty lab.
Chuck Malcolm is the last one there, rumpled and soup stained. He is on two calls at once, an iPhone to one ear, a Samsung Galaxy to the other.
“No, you tell him—no, I’m talking to Rene—I said—what? Rene, God damn it just—call me after dinner.”
He hangs up both phones, drops them into sagging jacket pockets, sits as Margot stands, hand outstretched.
“What?” he says, confused, then stands again, his manners catching up to him. “Sorry, my brains are in my other pants.”
He shakes her hand, hi-fives Jay. They sit.
“First off,” says Malcolm, “how’s your daughter? Did they find her?”
“No, sir. Not yet. Remy, my husband, talked to the FBI, which thank you again. He gave a description and as clear a picture as he could of her routine, her boyfriend.”
She puts an exasperated smile on her face. “She’s probably just—at Coachella or camping or something. You know, twentysomethings these days.”
“Do you think,” says Jay, “with what’s happening right now—the unfortunateness, that—I mean, she’s a bit out of the demographic, so that’s—I won’t say good, but—”
He stops talking, aware how he must sound. Margot picks up her menu. Suicide. They’re talking about suicide. It’s not how she wanted the evening to start.
“Are we eating or drinking?”
The two men relax, freed from the burden of unpleasant thought.
“Try the confit,” says Malcolm. “And a glass of the Pinot. Are you a drinker?”
Margot smiles. Both she and Jay are Drinkers, and she’s beginning to suspect Chuck Malcolm is a Drinker pretending to be a Cook.
“Even Jesus drank wine,” she says, closing her menu.
Malcolm waves the waiter over, orders for all of them.
“Bring us two bottles of the pinot and then fuck off except to clear the plates,” he says.
After he’s gone, Malcolm exhales. He’s slept three hours in two days.
“Here’s the deal,” he says, “this is heady stuff, I’m sure. History of the nation. Highest court in the land. You want it. I want you to get it. Blah, blah. So let me lay things out for you. This president, my boss, is a moderate, and he’s tried to govern as a moderate. Hell, he’s even got a secretary of defense from your side. I got picked for chief of staff because I did time running campaigns for evangelical figures in the Bible Belt. That’s his motto. He’s the Compromise President, and he believes we’re in a war for the soul of the nation. And that the only way to win the war is to relearn the art of cooperation. To focus on our similarities, not our differences. But what is the war for a human soul, and who do you fight against? The devil. And we all know there can be no compromises with the devil.”
“Amen,” says Jay.
“It’s a fight to the death,” says Malcolm. “So we’ve sold you to our president as an agent of compromise. Just look at your family, for Chrissake. It’s a goddamn rainbow coalition. You’re young. You’re attractive. You’re warm. And on paper you don’t look like a zealot.”
“I’m not a zealot.”
“That’s good,” says Jay. “Say that.”
Malcolm’s iPhone beeps. He ignores it, leans forward.
“When you sit down with the president tomorrow, tell him you want to heal the wounds of the nation, that you will lead this divided court toward unity. And you will, but it’ll be our unity. An alignment of the like-minded, a conversion of the nonbelievers, until this country gets back to its proper destiny as a God-fearing Christian nation.”
For some reason Margot thinks of her daughter at nine, standing on a stage in Brooklyn singing our national anthem, and how the whole room rose to its feet.
“I’m not an originalist,” she says.
“We know,” says Jay. “That’s fine. Your rulings for the last ten years have all been well reasoned, your opinions sound. It’s clear your heart’s in the right place.”