12:02 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
São Paulo to JFK
He knew the land beneath him carried scars, but when observed from such a height those scars appeared to vanish. The geometric partitions of farmland, the crowns of pure snow on distant mountains, the rebuilt cities studding the vague horizon, all of it evidence of how the nation had seemed to heal itself. It was as if the events of 20 years past had never occurred. Those events—that war—had driven him from this place, but he’d decided to return, to the nation of his birth, to his true home. That morning, once on board his Gulfstream, he’d asked the pilot about their planned route north into JFK. From the flight console a holographic scene sprang into view. Their route had them passing over Florida. He’d asked if they might divert west a bit, over Galveston. “Whatever you say, Dr. Chowdhury,” the pilot had answered. “It’s your plane.”
The flight out of São Paulo was the final leg of a farewell tour that had begun nearly a month before, in New Delhi, as Chowdhury had hop-scotched between the headquarters of his many portfolio companies. He had relinquished his long-held position as chairman of the Tandava Group to enter a self-imposed retirement. Peace, quiet. He had wanted to reenter the United States through Galveston, to see for himself all that a people could rebuild. When they’d flown over the Gulf of Mexico, he could see the freighters lined up to enter the port, like a message written in a string of Morse code. Breaking waves ribboned the coastline in white. When they crossed over the beach, and American soil was beneath him, his sense of relief was palpable; he was a mariner who had found his shore.
For the rest of the flight from Galveston to New York, Sandy Chowdhury remained fixed in his seat, his face framed in the aircraft’s porthole as he considered the country unspooling beneath him. There was, he thought, an innocence to the United States, one it perennially reclaimed despite its past—despite its wars, disease, and even crimes against its own citizens. In America you could forget, and if you could forget you could again be innocent: this was America’s promise, the reason Chowdhury had returned. He felt a slight lurch in his stomach and a tightness in his chest as the plane bled altitude on its approach into JFK.
Chowdhury wasn’t returning to America for only sentimental reasons. Before departing, he had installed his daughter, Ashni, as his successor at the Tandava Group, placing her at the helm of the private equity empire he’d created, with its hundreds of billions of dollars under management. There were now practical considerations to attend to. Life had dealt Chowdhury a weak heart. He was dying.
12:14 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
The White House
This was her last chance. That was the message the White House chief of staff delivered to Marine Major Julia Hunt, who stood at attention, heels hinged together, flagpole-straight, having placed herself at 6 feet and center in front of his desk. Her boss, Retired Admiral John “Bunt” Hendrickson, sat with one palm kneading the front of his bald head as if warding off a migraine. Hunt had once again stuck her nose where it didn’t belong. She’d fulfilled a request for an intelligence assessment that should have remained unfulfilled. That assessment, titled “Advances in Remote Gene Editing Among State and Non-State Actors,” never should have left Langley, let alone the White House.
“I don’t care that he’s the vice chair of the committee,” said Hendrickson, speaking to Hunt as if she were an obstinate child, a tone that felt familiar to them both. In addition to being Hunt’s boss, Hendrickson was also her godfather, and had been a steady—if not always steadying—presence throughout Julia’s life. “I need to know this won’t happen again, that you understand what you did wrong.”
“It won’t happen again, sir,” she said.
“But do you understand what you did wrong?”
She struggled to look him directly in the eye. Her gaze instead fell over his shoulder, where the news was streaming live on his computer screen. Hendrickson was familiar with this posture of avoidance. Since Julia’s adoption at 9 by his old friend Sarah Hunt, Hendrickson had been a mainstay, the person Sarah called when Julia broke curfew, mouthed off to a teacher, or, on one occasion, accused her adoptive mother of being the one responsible for her parents’ deaths two decades before, in San Diego, where they—along with thousands of other migrant workers—had vanished in a flash of nuclear light, leaving no trace.
Hendrickson repeated his question. He wanted an assurance that Julia understood what she had done wrong. Except that Julia knew she’d done nothing wrong. Senator Nat Shriver was vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, or SSCI, which everyone in DC pronounced “sissy.” Shriver had a right to read the report.
12:16 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
The Ritz‑Carlton, Tysons Corner
Lily Bao sat on the edge of the mattress, buttoning her white silk blouse. One at a time, she picked the scattered pillows off the floor. She made the bed, retucking the swirl of mussed sheets into neat hospital corners, flattening out the duvet. She’d learned to do this as a girl in Newport, helping her mother, who’d worked as a maid in dingy hotels when they’d first immigrated to the US. No matter how wealthy Lily became, she always made the bed herself.
He had just left—she so rarely said his name; it was as if he existed in her life only as a pronoun. They’d gotten less than an hour together, a working lunch, as he’d referred to it in his text the night before. It had been, admittedly, one of many such “lunches,” always in a hotel room that she booked. She didn’t mind. She understood his constraints, even though he was single. Like a sailor married to the sea, he was married to his profession, which was politics, and just as a sailor both loves and fears the sea, he loved and feared the people he served, and so kept his relationships out of view. Because who knew how his enemies could use her against him?
Nat Shriver had plenty of enemies. She’d known this about him before she’d known anything else. A great-grandnephew of Maria Shriver, he was equal parts Shriver, Schwarzenegger, and Kennedy … also equal parts California and Massachusetts. He was everything to everyone, a best friend, a worst enemy. The only thing he wasn’t was boring, neutral; it didn’t matter who you were, you had an opinion about Nat Shriver. This senator who a growing number of Americans believed might eliminate the tyranny of one-party rule.
He was also, to Lily Bao’s great surprise, her lover.
12:17 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
São Paulo to JFK
As Chowdhury gazed vacantly out the window, the flight attendant, a middle-aged, heavily lipsticked brunette who appeared to be from another era of air travel, placed her hand on his arm, startling him, so that he felt a slight tremor in his chest. “My apologies,” she said. “Is there anything I can get you before we land?” He asked for some water. Beads of sweat had begun to gather on his forehead, and before he could calm himself with a sip, he felt a minor and not entirely unpleasant vibration in his left wrist, the work of a cardiologist in New Delhi who had installed a serotonin dispenser near his radial artery. Chowdhury took a couple of deep breaths, sipped his water, and turned on the news.
The US president, Ángel Castro, appeared onscreen before a crowd. Square-jawed, with a pompadour of thick black hair, which had hardly grayed in his 10 years in office, Castro stood at a dais with a flotilla of gray-hulled warships behind him at anchor. The chyron read: Twentieth Anniversary of Wén Rui Incident Commemorated in San Diego. It was no coincidence that Chowdhury had chosen today to return to the United States. What surprised him was that the president had decided to mark the anniversary as well. Castro had never before, in the three terms of his administration, wrapped himself in the events of that disastrous war.
Today’s speech was a striking departure. “Reinvention is the soul of our nation,” Castro began. “Only the American people could elect a president named Hussein and then two generations later elect another named Castro …” This was a familiar laugh line. He delivered some well-worn tropes about the country rising out of the ashes of war to overcome social unrest and economic dysfunction, before coming to the crux of his remarks: “We’ve gathered here today to commemorate a dark hour. For too long, those events have resided in a shroud of silence when they should instead stand as a source of national pride, akin to a Pearl Harbor, a September 11, a moment of tragedy that births an eventual triumph.”
Castro gripped both sides of the dais, its front emblazoned with the seal of the president of the United States, as he extolled the virtues of those whose “sacrifices are woven into the firmament of our nation,” mentioning names familiar to Chowdhury: Rear Admiral Sarah Hunt, Commander Jane Morris, Major Chris “Wedge” Mitchell. Praising the sacrifices made in a bygone war would be of little note for a president, except that Castro had distinguished his political career by disparaging the people behind the calamity that had begun on this day. His sudden reversal left Chowdhury wondering what Castro was playing at. A fourth term, he assumed, which would require shoring up his coalition. The veterans of that war made up a sizable bloc that Castro had neglected.
This clinging to power had begun to erode Castro’s popularity. His supporters in the American Dream Party—the self-proclaimed Dreamers—claimed he was the most consequential president since Washington, but his opposition in the Democratic-Republican Party had countered with the line, “Because he can’t leave Washington, he will never be Washington.” When faced with criticism, Castro and his allies often pointed to the country’s still-precarious recovery as an excuse for “stable leadership.” He seemed on the cusp of trotting out that alarmist excuse again today. “Although we’ve descended the mountain of catastrophe,” he said, raising his hand like a preacher with his Bible, “we still walk in the foothills of decline …”
Foothills of decline … Jesus, who writes this crap? thought Chowdhury. He laughed and noticed the flight attendant standing behind him. She had stopped in her tracks. Stone-faced, she was watching the president intently. “You think he’ll run for a fourth term?” Chowdhury asked over his shoulder.
“Who knows?” said the flight attendant. Her jaw was clenched.
Castro leaned deeply over the dais, his elbows nearly resting on its surface. “We honor the veterans of this war and their families,” he said. “The bitter devastation of that conflict …”—his voice trailed off; he coughed and then reached for a glass of water in mid-sentence, as if he’d caught a frog in his throat—“has forced them to live in the shadows of our society for too long …”
Castro paused. Chowdhury could see sweat beading against the president’s forehead.
The Gulfstream was descending sharply now. The flight attendant still stood in the aisle. Chowdhury asked her opinion of the speech.
“My opinion?” she asked, a hint of indignation in her voice. She folded her arms across her chest. She spoke to the screen. “My big brother was killed with the Seventh Fleet at Mischief Reef … 20 years ago …” she said, as if she herself could not believe the passage of time. Then she stopped and lifted her hand slightly, as if the memories had come so thick and fast she might have to brush them away from her face. “He was 19.”
Castro continued with his remarks, but his voice had become weaker, his face noticeably redder. He was struggling to finish. “Which is why today … I wish to announce … that …”
“My brother’s body never came back,” the flight attendant said, her voice sounding distant and dreamlike, as though she were somewhere else. Castro reached for his glass of water and descended into another coughing fit. “My opinion?” she asked again. “I hope our president chokes up there.”
12:18 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
The White House
Julia Hunt couldn’t bring herself to concede to her godfather that she’d done anything wrong. Even though he was a Democratic-Republican, Shriver had the authority and clearances to read the intelligence assessment.
Julia was muscular and petite, with a sweep of black hair cut short as a boy’s. In Quantico they’d called her Napoleon, a nickname that had followed her throughout the Corps in her career as an intelligence officer, which had been promising but for one unfortunate incident. When a colonel named Dozer, her superior at the barracks at 8th and I Streets, had observed her at-times chilly demeanor, he’d lecherously remarked that she might “do better” if she lightened up and got herself a boyfriend. They’d been drinking in the officers’ club and Hunt had responded by breaking his jaw with a beer mug swept off the bar top. Hendrickson had managed to get that incident swept under the rug, and he’d brought Julia onto his personal staff, where he could keep an eye on her. Brilliant though she was, it was a decision he was increasingly beginning to regret.
“It isn’t that simple,” Hendrickson said to his goddaughter. “You’re assuming that Shriver will abide by the rules—”
“Sir, it’s just—”
“I’m not finished,” Hendrickson shot back.
As he continued to enumerate the many problems Julia had caused him, she shifted her gaze ever so slightly to the screen behind him. The president was giving a speech in San Diego, but he was bent over at an odd angle, coughing, and struggling to finish his sentences. His face appeared red, as if he’d quickly blown up a bunch of balloons. Then he toppled forward from the dais, clutching his chest.
Julia gestured toward the news playing behind Hendrickson. “Sir—” she said.
Hendrickson would not be interrupted. “… The intel on remote gene editing in that briefing is highly sensitive and remains single-source, but do you think Shriver will mention that when he leaks it to the—”
“Sir …” she said again. Now the president wasn’t moving. The Secret Service had rushed the stage, forming a dark-suited canopy over his body.
“Goddammit, Julia, will you just listen to me! I don’t care that Shriver has the clearances. You don’t show up to a basketball game wearing your football pads. You have to play by the rules of the game you’re in—”
“Uncle Bunt!”
This got his attention. Hendrickson swiveled around in his chair, just in time to see the Secret Service agents hoisting the president from the stage and out of view of the cameras.
12:20 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
The Ritz‑Carlton, Tysons Corner
Just before Shriver rushed out the door, he told Lily that he loved her. He was struggling with his tie when he’d said it, the knot not quite coming together in his hands. She always liked to watch him dress. He’d seemed nervous throughout their hour together, something she’d at first attributed to an intelligence assessment he’d mentioned, one he had convinced a junior staffer at the White House to share with him. “When you were at the Tandava Group,” he’d said, “did you ever come across anyone doing work on remote gene editing?”
They weren’t even in bed yet when he’d asked, so she’d been brief with her answer. Lily had, in only the past two years, broken out on her own into private equity, but before that she’d risen through the ranks at the Tandava Group managing a merry-go-round of its portfolio companies, several of which had, in one way or another, been developing remote gene editing. This holy grail of biotech promised that, with the ease of a software update, entire populations could be made resistant to any number of the ubiquitous plagues that had tyrannized this globally integrated 21st century, to say nothing of its other potential applications. Although she knew the scientific terrain and a few of the players who had come close, to her knowledge no one had yet achieved such a breakthrough. She’d told him as much as they slipped beneath the sheets.
But an hour later, when he said that he loved her as he stood half-dressed in front of the mirror, his eyes had lightened as a smile raised a stubborn line on his mouth. It was as if by making this confession a burden had been lifted. She had stepped naked in front of him, grasping the two ends of his red tie in her hands. He reached his hand tentatively for her hip, but Lily pushed it away. He was a politician, and a successful one, so by definition a skilled manipulator. Perhaps she did love him, but he had the capacity to deceive her. She couldn’t admit similar feelings to him, whether she had them or not. At least not yet. She simply said, “I know.”
“You know?”
“Yeah,” she answered, pulling the running end of his tie through its loop and cinching it into a perfect half Windsor. “I know.”
He kissed her on the mouth, and she kissed him back. Then he left. As she dressed, she replayed the scene in her mind. I know … I know … I know …
The words kept rattling around.
The only thing she really knew was that she didn’t know anything. She sat on the edge of the perfectly made bed and turned on the news.
12:57 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
JFK International Airport
The pilot stepped into the back of the plane while it auto-taxied toward the arrivals terminal. Chowdhury skimmed the news on his headsUp, which emanated from a bracelet he wore. When the cardiologist in New Delhi had implanted the serotonin dispenser in his wrist, he’d told Chowdhury that he could also install a microchip that would project a headsUp on his retina, if he wanted—that way Chowdhury could avoid wearing the bracelet. Chowdhury had a hard time reconciling himself to the idea of implanting any more technology into his body. When he mentioned his reluctance to Ashni, she’d told her father that many of her friends were getting the chip in their wrist. “Who wants to wear that ugly bracelet all the time,” she’d said, “and you have to have a headsUp. You can’t function without one. It’s practically an extension of your body anyway, so why not pop that microchip in your wrist? Microchips, molecules, it’s all the same.”
Maybe so, thought Chowdhury.
Aside from the social media accounts of several notorious Truthers, who insisted the president had suffered a major health crisis, the general media consensus was that Castro was fine and resting comfortably at his hotel after suffering what the hastily assembled experts agreed was “exhaustion,” the result of an overaggressive travel schedule. “He pushes himself too hard in the job …” said one expert. Another observed, “His hands-on leadership style, while benefiting the American people, could impinge on his health …” That soft sycophancy was everywhere these days, a far cry from Chowdhury’s time in the White House, when the media was quick to inflate even the most benign misstep into a full-blown constitutional crisis.
The pilot stepped back into the cabin. He offered the typical pleasantries, confirming that Chowdhury’s car and driver awaited him outside the terminal. The pilot did apologize for one inconvenience: The private arrivals terminal for VIPs, with its separate customs and immigration services, was currently closed. “They just announced it, sir. I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to taxi into the commercial terminal.”
Chowdhury didn’t mind. It was equally fast. Unlike the old days, with the endless immigration lines and platoons of Homeland Security agents stamping passports, the commercial terminal now required you to simply step onto an auto-walk, which trundled you through a concourse the length of a couple football fields. Signs lined the concourse, gentle but insistent reminders to watch the screens, which imaged your face. Advances in quantum computing and facial recognition had made passports obsolete. A one-way mirror ran the entire length of the auto-walk. Armed Homeland Security agents lingered behind it, out of view.
Today, though, the agents were out in plain sight. On high alert, they paced the length of the auto-walk, wearing body armor and gripping assault rifles with gloved hands. Chowdhury couldn’t recall ever seeing such robust security at immigration. It was as if they were looking for someone.
Chowdhury inadvertently made eye contact with one barrel-chested agent, his gaze concealed behind aerodynamically shaped sunglasses. He stepped over to Chowdhury, his palm on the grip of his assault rifle. “Sir,” he snapped, “eyes up on the screen.”
13:22 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
The White House
The sharp drilling sound of the old-fashioned telephone rang in Hendrickson’s office. Despite multiple and redundant systems of secure communication, he preferred to discuss the most sensitive matters over his red line, a technology not meaningfully updated since the 20th century. Julia Hunt continued to watch the news while the secretary of press, Karen Slake, the only cabinet-level official who maintained a West Wing office, hurried into Hendrickson’s office and stood beside his desk. Nearly 6 feet tall, she leaned down to try to hear as Hendrickson received the latest from the White House physician in San Diego.
“Uh-huh … uh-huh …” Hendrickson paused. “So he’s stable.”
The White House physician responded at some length. Hendrickson gave a thumbs-up to Slake. She told him to ask how long it would be until they could get the president on camera so people could see he was OK. Hendrickson muffled his palm over the receiver. “Do you really need to know that right now?” he asked. The man had just suffered a near-catastrophic heart attack, according to his physician.
“Yes,” said Slake, pressing down on the word. “I do.”
So Hendrickson asked. From the volume of the expletive-laden response that spilled out of the receiver, Slake didn’t need to be told what the White House physician’s medical opinion was on holding a press event.
After Hendrickson hung up, Slake explained her contingency plan. Her team at the federal government’s recently established Department of Press had already pulled footage, which they were in the process of selectively editing, digitally altering, and feeding to social networks and legacy news media. They had, quite swiftly, begun an algorithmic scrub of any narrative of the president suffering a health emergency, burying those stories. Slake said she could do one better: within a few hours—with the aid of a few loyal evening news anchors—they could overwhelm any conflicting narratives and reduce today’s incident to little more than the president stumbling at the lectern after delivering a rousing speech on the anniversary of the Wén Rui Incident. Slake had already called Homeland Security, asking them to push her any interesting information about detentions at the border, anyone suspicious that they might have pulled from the immigration lines, so that Slake could amplify those stories as a way to deflect from the current crisis—terrorism and immigrant criminality being reliable distractions.
Hendrickson listened patiently. “But what if he dies?”
“If who dies?” answered Slake.
“Castro … the president … what if the White House physician is wrong … what if people find out you’re just feeding them a story … ?”
Slake stared back at him vacantly, tilting her head to the side as though she’d been asked to solve for x and now had to solve for y. “Well …” she began, in a bit of a false start. She found her footing. “If that happens, we simply tell them another story.”
A phone rang, this time the old-style encrypted smartphone that Julia Hunt carried for work. When she glanced down at the caller ID, the color went out of her face.
“You going to take that?” her godfather asked.
Hunt held up her phone so Hendrickson and Slake could see who was calling: Senator Nat Shriver.
13:26 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
JFK International Airport
“Sir,” snapped a woman’s voice from behind him, “we’re going to have to ask you to step off here.”
Chowdhury turned around. He’d nearly traversed the auto-walk. He could see the daylight of the arrivals terminal ahead, the twin automatic doors opening and closing as travelers passed through immigration. He had kept his eyes fixed on the screens above as they played the news and scanned his face. Why was he being asked to step off the auto-walk? He felt harassed, and at this point in his life he felt like someone who shouldn’t have to suffer such harassment.
“Is there a problem, Officer?” he asked.
A compact immigration officer, built solid as a gymnast, with small, cruel eyes, held open an exit gate. “No problem, sir,” she said. The auto-walk had come to a halt. “But you need to come with me.”
“I have several appointments in the city,” Chowdhury said. Which wasn’t untrue. He was hoping to meet with his cardiologist that evening, a house call at his suite in the Carlyle, where he’d be staying until his apartment on an upper floor was finished; however, as he said this, he realized his tone was haughty and clearly did him no favors. One of her colleagues, a powerlifter to her gymnast, approached them, asking if there was a problem.
“No,” said Chowdhury. “No problem, I just need to get into the city.” Behind him the other passengers on the auto-walk crossed their arms and shifted their feet. A few sighed impatiently.
“Exit here, sir,” said the woman more forcefully. The heel of one palm shifted onto her belt, which held handcuffs and pepper spray. Chowdhury was escorted around the two-way mirror and into an interrogation room. As the door was shut behind him, he heard the news continue to drone from the screens above the auto-walk: one of the anchors was discussing reports of an uptick in security incidents at the border.
13:42 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
Capitol Hill
Julia Hunt had taken Shriver’s call while Hendrickson and Slake hovered over her shoulder. Shriver had asked Hunt to come to his office in the Capitol for a meeting. She knew her godfather didn’t quite trust her to handle a meeting with Shriver on her own, but he couldn’t afford to step away from his desk, not in the middle of this crisis. And so he’d told Hunt to go.
On her way out the door, Hunt glimpsed the vice president, the third who’d served under Castro, as he came up on a video call with Slake and her godfather. An elementary school math teacher turned politician named Smith, this vice president was forgettable by design. Smith was so forgettable that Castro’s last campaign had distributed an internal memo that the administration would simply be known as the Castro administration, not the Castro-Smith administration. Hunt was glad to avoid the call.
Outside, she stepped into an auto-taxi beyond the last barrier of White House security and spoke her destination into its self-navigation system. Hunt’s mother had told her that when she was a child, traffic passed directly in front of the White House, and you could drive the entire length of Independence and Constitution Avenues, right up to the Capitol, without passing a single checkpoint. The city had since become difficult to navigate, with road closures and new, not particularly thought-out security protocols interrupting the flow of the city as Pierre Charles L’Enfant had envisioned it more than 250 years before.
The gridlock felt to Hunt like a fitting metaphor. Castro’s consolidation of power after his victory in 2044 had led to a decade of single-party rule that he’d codified with sweeping electoral reforms at the federal and state levels, as well as ushering three new states—DC, Guam, and Puerto Rico—into the Union.
The Democratic and Republican Parties, which had been bleeding members for years, had proven a weak opposition. What remained of these two legacy populist parties—the percentage of Americans claiming affiliation with either having plunged into the teens—merged for their own survival. With a nod to Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, they reconstituted themselves into the Democratic-Republican Party, though they quickly came to be known as “Truthers” for their fanaticism in grinding down anyone who challenged their version of the “truth.”
In much the same way Southern segregationists and Northeastern liberals had once coexisted uneasily within the Democratic Party, the far right and far left of American politics now coexisted as Truthers, united by a brand of populism and desire for self-rule that made unlikely allies of Texan secessionists and urban agitators in coastal megacities who demanded that Castro’s government grant them autonomous city-state status. Above all else they agreed that Castro’s consolidation of political power had become an urgent threat to democracy, one that needed to be monitored and dealt with, occasionally through violence but primarily by obstructing ever larger portions of his legislative agenda.
The most hawkish of these obstructionists was the speaker of the House, Representative Trent Wisecarver. It was Wisecarver who, much to Hunt’s surprise, was waiting for her when she arrived in Shriver’s office. “The senator’s running a few minutes late,” he said. “But please, sit down.” Wisecarver gestured to a leather tufted sofa. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back as he studied the room’s oak-paneled walls, crowded with mementos of Shriver’s family. “He’s got a killer instinct, you know …” Wisecarver’s voice cracked dryly and then trailed off. “I’ve often said he’s bound to end up on one side of a firing squad … The only question is which side.”
Wisecarver was north of 80 years, but age had not yet diminished or mellowed him. A cunning spark still resided in the old man, bright as ever. Political necessity had paved the way for Wisecarver’s congressional career after the calamitous events of two decades past, when he’d served as national security advisor during the war with China. After the twin catastrophes in San Diego and Galveston, Wisecarver left Washington in disgrace, returning to his family home in a military town right outside Fort Tubman. When the veterans of that war returned, finding their nation in ruin and their service questioned and derided, Wisecarver discovered fertile political soil in their grievances. He ran for a seat in Congress and never looked back.
He stood at Shriver’s bookcase, glancing over the titles. He pulled out a volume. “You ever read this one?” He handed Hunt the book, The Nightingale’s Song, whose cover image was a photograph of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Not the black granite wall—that sea of sacrifice—but the sculpture of three soldiers who stand their vigil by the wall, as if on the shore, staring out to that sea. Wisecarver explained that the book was about a scandal nearly 70 years before, the “so-called Iran-Contra Affair,” as he’d put it, which upended the Reagan presidency. Hunt had, of course, heard of Iran-Contra. But she didn’t understand how the title of the book related to its subject. “The central characters—John McCain, Jim Webb, Bud McFarlane, Ollie North—all overlapped at the Naval Academy and served in Vietnam,” Wisecarver explained. “You see, a nightingale will only ever sing its song if it hears another nightingale singing it first. After Vietnam, so many veterans were told that their war was wrong, shameful, a stain on their country. Reagan was the first president to tell Vietnam veterans that they should be proud of their service, that they’d fought nobly for a worthy cause. He sang that song. And they sang it back. But often in destructive ways, like Iran-Contra. Vietnam vets, like North and McFarlane—determined not to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam by abandoning their allies in Central America—began laundering money and running illegal arms to them. While other Vietnam vets, like McCain and Webb, eventually had to hold their onetime comrades to account.”
When Hunt opened the book, its spine creaked as if Shriver had yet to read it. The black-and-white photos inside—of McCain beside his A-4, of Webb in the jungle, of North in his midshipman’s uniform—stared back at her across the decades. Different players in the same game. Wisecarver told her that she was welcome to borrow the book, which Hunt thought was odd, seeing as it wasn’t his to offer; but then again, it seemed there was little in the Capitol that Wisecarver couldn’t offer as his own. Castro’s overreach had bred a growing strain of resentment in the electorate, one that Wisecarver had used to catapult himself from an obscure House district to the speakership.
The senator arrived, and Hunt tucked the book into her briefcase.
“So sorry to keep you both waiting,” Shriver said as he perched next to Julia on the sofa. “I was tied up at a lunch that ran late.” In front of him, on the coffee table, was a dish of peanuts. He dug into them like a starving man.
17:07 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
JFK International Airport
Hours had passed and Chowdhury’s patience was wearing thin. No one had yet explained why the Homeland Security officers had placed him in secondary detention. According to the pair watching him, he and nearly a dozen other detained travelers were “awaiting questioning.” They had confiscated his headsUp bracelet, so he had no way of communicating with the outside world, and he couldn’t help but think of the advantages of having a piece of technology embedded in his body, the unpredictable ways it might free you, as it would have now. Instead, his only connection to the outside world was the television overhead, switched to a cable news channel sympathetic to the Castro administration, with one of its evening anchors droning on about the threat posed by the Truthers and their obstructionist agenda, particularly now that they held a majority in the House.
One of the immigration officers meandered past. “Ma’am,” said Chowdhury with all the politeness he could muster, “could I please place a call?”
“What did the other officer tell you?”
The other officer had told Chowdhury that he could place a call as soon as he’d been processed; however, Chowdhury wasn’t certain what that processing would entail, or if it would occur anytime soon. This didn’t garner any sympathy from the passing officer, who returned to her desk while Chowdhury was forced to return to watching the news. The anchor announced that after the break Vice President Smith would join for a live interview. It struck Chowdhury as odd that the vice president would appear alone on an evening news show, particularly on a day when the president had delivered a major speech.
The show returned from break and Vice President Smith was beside the anchor at the news desk. The anchor asked if the vice president would like to address the malicious rumors that the president had suffered some sort of health crisis. The channel went split-screen, with footage of Castro stumbling at the dais but now quickly recovering, next to the live feed of Smith. “Clearly, this was a minor incident,” he said. “What’s unfortunate is the way the president’s political enemies are trying to take advantage of it.” Smith continued, explaining that these allegations exposed how desperate the Truthers had become, further insinuating that other media clips—in which the president topples to the ground—were heavily doctored and likely the result of a foreign disinformation campaign. “Disinformation by which countries?” the anchor asked, to which Smith responded, “Due to classification, I’m not at liberty to say.”
Smith made a convincing case. His blue eyes bored into the camera. Just as Chowdhury felt ready to believe him, a strange thing happened: A fly appeared. At first Chowdhury stood, thinking it was on his own screen. He motioned to swat it away and then realized that this fat black fly was on set, tiptoeing through the vice president’s toupee-thick gray hair.
The anchor, who was staring at the vice president, pretended not to notice.
When the fly stepped onto the vice president’s forehead, Smith didn’t flinch. He might have acknowledged what everyone could clearly see by simply swatting the fly away. No one would have thought less of him for it; after all, these things happen, even to great men. But he chose not to. Rather, he continued with his message, pretending that what everyone could clearly see wasn’t happening at all. He expressed his concern for the republic, his contempt for his enemies, and said in the most strident of tones, with furrowed brow, “Our president is strong. Any allegations to the contrary are nonsense, malicious rumors, not worthy of refuting.”
17:42 March 12, 2054 (GMT‑5)
Capitol Hill
Shriver and Wisecarver got right to the point. Only a few days before, a sequence of code, unmistakable as a fingerprint, had popped up on a website called Common Sense. The code was incomplete, a sequence of programming phrases that bracketed a partial map of nucleic acids, amino acid chains, and proteins. But it matched segments of code in “Advances in Remote Gene Editing Among State and Non-State Actors,” the highly classified intelligence briefing Hunt had shared with Shriver.
Where had the leak occurred? How did that code get onto an obscure website?
Hunt didn’t know, and she said as much.
This answer far from satisfied Wisecarver, who kept asking different versions of the same question: “What is the administration doing to shore up this leak?” Hunt didn’t have an answer, mainly because she didn’t—and couldn’t—speak for the administration.
While Wisecarver grilled Hunt, Shriver kept one eye on the television in the corner of his office, where the vice president was finishing an evening blitz of interviews. “Aww, c’mon,” groaned Shriver as the vice president made some earnest point. He turned toward Julia, speaking directly to her: “You can fool the fans. You can fool the referees. But you can’t fool the players. He is lying through his goddamn teeth.”
Wisecarver placed his hand lightly on Julia’s arm. “We know the president has suffered a major medical emergency. Denying it is counterproductive, both for his administration and the country. We also have concerns about …” Wisecarver paused, his eyes turned upward, as if searching for the correct word to pluck from the air, “contributing factors.”
“Contributing factors?”
Wisecarver leaned deeper into the sofa, crossing his arms. “Major Hunt,” he began, “your mother was Rear Admiral Sarah Hunt, correct?”
“Adoptive mother,” Julia replied.
“Apologies,” said Wisecarver. “Adoptive mother. The last time a foreign adversary attacked this nation, she played a central role in our defense. What I’d ask you to consider is that our nation is again under attack.”
“By whom?” asked Hunt.
Shriver interjected, “We thought you might know, or be willing to share what the administration knows, given you’ve already shown a willingness to be transparent with us.”
“You think this has something to do with the intel assessment I shared?”
A beat or two passed in silence. Wisecarver answered, “Is that the opinion of the administration?”
“Is what the opinion of the administration?” Hunt asked.
Their conversation stalled. Hunt wouldn’t speculate on behalf of the administration, and neither Shriver nor Wisecarver would explicitly voice their concerns. As politely as she could, Hunt excused herself, mentioning a nonexistent meeting at the White House to which she was already late. As Hunt gathered her things, Wisecarver stood, saying, “Your mother is one of this nation’s great heroes. Some people might have forgotten what she was called upon to do, but I never have. It’s an honor to finally meet you.”
Hunt sat in the back of the auto-taxi in a daze. Of course, she knew the president had suffered a health setback, but this was hardly unique. Roosevelt had died in office. Eisenhower similarly had suffered a heart attack. Modern presidents had proven fitter, but eventually a health crisis was bound to emerge. Did the speaker of the House and the vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence really believe this was the work of a foreign adversary? If so, how? Through remote gene editing, through a sequence of code they’d read in an intel assessment that she never should’ve shared, even though technically she was obliged to? Hunt dreaded the idea of explaining this meeting to her godfather, who, no doubt, would become even more incensed on learning that her misjudgment had led to a new, virulent conspiracy theory among senior opposition lawmakers.
Hunt badged into her office and proceeded through security. When she arrived at her godfather’s door, it was open a crack. She knocked and stepped inside, to find Hendrickson, Slake, and two other staffers gathered around his desk. Like in a baroque painting, each was frozen in an expression of ecclesiastical grief, faces contorted, while the receiver to the red line lay in Hendrickson’s limp, upturned palm. Muted on the television behind them, the vice president was finishing another interview.
“He’s dead,” said Hendrickson, blinking several times.
“Who’s dead?” asked Hunt. She already knew the answer.
Slake began to shake her head. “We’re so fucked … we’re so fucked …”
“Karen …” said Hendrickson.
Hunt sat down in a free chair.
“… we’re so fucked … we’re so fucked …”
“Karen …” Hendrickson said again, more sharply. Still, she kept on. Then Hendrickson slammed down the receiver in its cradle. Slake’s eyes snapped toward him, as did Hunt’s. “I just have to think,” said Hendrickson, his hand still gripping the phone. “Let’s take this one step at a time.”
Then the phone rang. It was the vice president calling in from the studio. His voice was upbeat, energized by the spotlight. He had a single question: “How’d I do?”
05:02 March 13, 2054 (GMT‑5)
Walter Reed Medical Center
The president’s body lay on a steel table in the bowels of the hospital, in a small and windowless gallery with raised seating that held a dozen people. Hendrickson was included in that dozen, as was Julia Hunt, whom he’d asked to accompany him. On the floor of the operating room, the chief internist, who would preside over the autopsy, was flanked by a squad of accompanying physicians, which included Walter Reed’s chief medical examiner, an Army colonel who wore her hair in a tight bun, as well as the senior nurse on staff, a warrant officer whose hands never stopped moving as he checked the instruments spread across several steel trays. The commander of the hospital, a brigadier general, hovered two paces behind the body.
Two screens hung suspended above the examining table. One displayed the results of the president’s most recent physical and the other a close-up of a dark, cloudy image that, to Julia, appeared like an exposure from the Hubble Space Telescope. Hendrickson seemed to sense his goddaughter’s confusion. He leaned close and explained that the image was a CT scan of the president’s heart. Hendrickson had himself undergone this exam in a recent checkup: the physicians had administered an intravenous dye before passing his body through an ultrafast scanner. The purpose was to detect plaque in the heart, of which Hendrickson had a distressing amount. When Castro heard about Hendrickson’s poor result, he’d mentioned that he’d recently had the same test and made a competition of it, declaring that his test had shown no plaque at all.
The nurse removed the thin sheet that covered Castro’s body and unceremoniously tossed it into a medical disposal container under the table. Castro was a fit man, slim, with good muscle tone, in his late fifties. The internist spoke for the recorder: “Beginning standard autopsy on Ángel Cordoba Miguel Castro, zero-five-seventeen, March 13th, 2054. Subject has been deceased for roughly 14 hours, body arrived at Walter Reed from San Diego six hours ago and presents normally for a recent death …” He went on for several minutes, logging a description of the body’s parts and their general condition. “We’ll now proceed to the vital thoracic organs.” Grasping a number-10-blade scalpel, he leaned over the body and began a Y incision. The blade sliced cleanly, the first stroke starting behind the left ear, flowing down the side of the neck, before curving around the collarbone, and terminating at the sternum. The internist repeated the same incision on the right side, joining the two at the center of the chest. This was followed by a single vertical incision from the sternum toward the pelvis. Everyone in the room seemed to lean toward the table at once.
The internist narrated his findings: “No external punctures to the cadaver … stroke appears unlikely … can’t rule out a pulmonary embolism … or the ingestion of a poisonous substance …” The internist glanced up at the CT scan on the monitor overhead, studying the image of Castro’s heart a final time. “Cardiac failure seems even less likely—”
The nurse interrupted. “What about a fatal dysrhythmia?”
“His physical shows no risk factors that would’ve caused such an event, but let’s take a look inside.” The internist’s back was to Julia, and she noticed his shoulders, how the muscles labored and flexed as he opened the chest cavity. He made one last effort and then, after a few moments of expert scalpel work, he turned slightly, and Julia could see in his gloved hand he held a wet, glistening mass.
The nurse casually offered a steel pan as though passing a dish at the dinner table. The internist was about to place the heart on the pan, so it might be weighed, when he startled, as if an insect had bit him. He made a curious expression, like a jeweler examining a suspicious stone as he brought the president’s heart to eye-level. His hands remained full, so he asked the nurse to adjust his close-view spectacles. The internist gripped the heart with his right hand while caressing its bottom with his left. The more his left fingertips probed, the more alarmed his expression became. The internist looked from the president’s heart to the CT scan and back to his heart.
“This can’t be right …” The internist turned to the other physicians behind him. “This can’t be the same heart.”
COMING SOON
2054, Part II: Next Big Thing
“If molecules really were the new microchips, the promise of remote gene editing was that the body could be manipulated to upgrade itself.”
From 2054: A Novel, by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis, USN, to be published on March 12th, 2024, by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis.
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