The Detachment - Barry Eisler [46]
“Who?”
“Are you interested?”
“I can’t answer that if I don’t know who.”
He paused, then said, “Have you heard of Jack Finch?”
“No.”
“He keeps a low profile for a man in a powerful position.”
“Which is?”
“The president’s counterterrorism advisor.”
Dox laughed. “You sure do pick some hard targets. I’m afraid to ask who the third one might be.”
Horton said, “Let’s just keep talking about them one at a time for now.”
“What’s Finch’s role in the plot?” I asked.
“Finch,” Horton said, “is what you might think of as an information broker.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning he is the modern incarnation of the illustrious J. Edgar Hoover, who as you might know maintained his position as head of the FBI for nearly half a century by amassing incriminating files on all the important players in Washington, including every president he served under.”
Dox laughed again. “Sounds like old Murdoch and Fox News.”
“In a sense,” Horton said, “it is. But more focused. And more extensive.”
“What does any of that have to do with the coup?” I said.
“The first step is the provocation, which was Shorrock’s department. After the provocation, though, the plotters need to ensure that certain key players in the government—the president, highly placed military and law enforcement personnel, and the judiciary, if there’s a challenge—support the president’s assumption of emergency powers in response to the crisis. You can see why this is critical. America is a big, fractious place. There are a number of people who want things to be run more efficiently, as they might put it. But not enough of them to guarantee success in the face of opposition.”
“He’s got dirt on the president?” Dox said.
Horton chuckled. “He has dirt on everybody. I told you, like Hoover. But Hoover didn’t have much more than phone taps and surveillance photos. Finch has intercepted email, Internet browsing histories, copies of security video feeds, records of hacked offshore bank accounts—everything you can imagine in an interconnected digital age. We’re talking about dossiers documenting financial corruption and sexual depravity, in such detail they’d make Hoover weep with envy.”
“I’m not buying it,” I said. “I don’t care how many people Finch controls. The president can’t just suspend the Constitution and get away with it.”
“Ah,” Horton said, “but he won’t call it a suspension. He’ll simply ask for certain emergency powers to deal with the crisis, and he’ll ask Congress for these powers for only ninety days, the powers to expire unless Congress agrees to renew them. Very serious and sober people will talk about the unprecedented nature of the threat, and how the Constitution isn’t a suicide pact, and other such things, and they’ll show how independent and level-headed they are by telling the president he can have only thirty days, renewable, they’ll be damned if they agree to ninety.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s say you’re right. Let’s say it could be done. Still, what’s the point?”
“What do you mean?”
“The point of all of it. These people…don’t they already have enough? Power, money…they’re already running things. Why upset the apple cart if they’ve got all the apples?”
“The people behind this don’t care about apples. They’re doing this because, in their misguided way, they care about their country.”
“They’re going to destroy it to save it?”
“They don’t think of it as destruction. In their minds, America’s democracy is suffering from a fatal disease. Legislative gridlock, capture of the government by special interests, a war machine that’s become like an out-of-control parasite on the economy.”
“Are they wrong?”
“They’re not wrong, but their means of redress are. Their plan is to take the reins of power, set things right, and then return power to the people.”
Dox laughed. “Yeah, that