Chapter Seventeen — The Second Death

The second death changed the shape of the country in a way the first death had not.

The first death had been a cardiac event. The country had grieved a Vice President. The flags had come down. The flags had gone back up. The new Vice President had been sworn in. The country had been ready to move forward.

The second death made forward impossible.

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The medical examiner — a different medical examiner, a man this time, fifty-four years old, named Howard Liu, who had performed the autopsy on the late senator from West Virginia three years before and was considered, in the small world of forensic pathologists who handled federal officials, the country’s best — performed the autopsy at 9:00 in the morning on March 31. He took eleven hours. He took every tissue sample the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the District of Columbia could process. He examined every organ system. He ran every screen, including screens that had been classified the previous month and that he was not supposed to know about.

He found nothing.

The senator from Tennessee had been, like the Vice President before him, a man in good health who had died gently in his sleep of a cause Howard Liu could not identify with any tool available to forensic medicine in the year 2026.

Howard Liu wrote a report that contained, in the section where the cause of death was supposed to appear, the words cardiac arrest, unknown etiology, followed by a paragraph that the deputy commissioner of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner would, on receipt of the draft, ask Howard Liu to remove. The paragraph read:

This is the second sudden death of an officer in the line of presidential succession in seventeen days. Both decedents were in good health. Both deaths occurred during sleep. Both deaths produced no findings on autopsy, on toxicology, or on any other diagnostic procedure available to this office. The undersigned cannot, in good professional conscience, certify these deaths as natural without noting that the absence of findings is itself a finding.

Howard Liu removed the paragraph from the official report. He kept a copy of the original draft in his desk drawer at home. He told his wife, that night, what he had written and what he had taken out. His wife, who was a nurse, listened. She said: they’re killing them. Howard Liu said: I know. His wife said: who is. Howard Liu said: I don’t know. His wife said: Howard, what are you going to do. Howard Liu said: nothing. His wife was quiet for a while. His wife said: that’s what I would do too.

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The press, by the morning of March 31, was operating on the assumption that the second death was not a coincidence. The cable networks ran graphics with the faces of the two dead Vice Presidents side by side. The newspapers ran above-the-fold headlines that did not say murder but said, in the careful language of newspapers that have lawyers, questions. The questions were the obvious ones. How could two healthy men in the same office die in the same way in the same residence within seventeen days. What did it mean. What was being done about it.

The President, on the advice of the Chief of Staff and the press secretary and a small council of senior advisors, did not speak to the press for forty-eight hours. The forty-eight-hour silence was unusual for this President. The forty-eight-hour silence was, in itself, a story.

When the President finally spoke, he spoke from the Rose Garden. He read from a teleprompter. He said the country had lost two great men. He said an investigation was underway. He said no possibility was being ruled out. He said the country would, as the country always did, persevere. He took no questions.

He returned to the residence. He went to the small private study. He sat in the chair in which he had sat the night the second Vice President died. He did not say anything. The Chief of Staff sat across from him. The Chief of Staff did not say anything either.

After a long time, the President said: I am going to nominate again.

The Chief of Staff said: Sir.

The President said: I am going to nominate someone of my own choosing. I will not be told who to nominate by a piece of paper that appeared on a laptop. I am the President of the United States. The Constitution gives me the power. I am going to use it.

The Chief of Staff said: Sir.

The President said: Don’t say sir to me like that. Tell me what you think.

The Chief of Staff was silent for a moment. The Chief of Staff understood that the question was not the kind of question this President usually asked. The Chief of Staff understood, also, that the answer the President wanted was not the answer the Chief of Staff was going to give.

The Chief of Staff said: Mr. President, two men have died.

The President said: I know that.

The Chief of Staff said: Two men have died after being placed in the office. Whatever did this is not deterred by the institutional structure. Whatever did this is going to do it again to whoever you put in the office, unless what you put in the office is the man on the paper.

The President said: You are telling me to do what the message said.

The Chief of Staff said: I am telling you what I think.

The President said: That is not the same thing.

The Chief of Staff said: No, sir.

The President said: I will not be the President who took orders from a piece of paper.

The Chief of Staff said: No, sir.

The President said: I will not be that.

The Chief of Staff said: Mr. President, with respect — what you will and will not be is one question. What is going to happen if you nominate someone other than the man on the paper is a different question. Both questions are real. Both questions deserve to be answered. I am not certain you have the luxury of answering them in the order you would prefer.

The President looked at the Chief of Staff for a long time. The President was a man who did not like to be told things he did not want to hear. The President had fired men for less than what the Chief of Staff had just said.

The President did not fire the Chief of Staff.

The President said: I want to think.

The Chief of Staff stood. The Chief of Staff walked to the door. The Chief of Staff stopped at the door and turned and said: Sir, I should tell you that I have been thinking. I have been thinking for a week. I have been thinking that whatever did this is not — in the way we usually use the word — a what. I have been thinking that the message was articulate. I have been thinking that the message proposed a specific person. I have been thinking that the specific person is a man who has written, with some clarity, about exactly the kind of thing that has happened to your two Vice Presidents. I have been thinking that the choice of this man is not random.

The President said: Get out.

The Chief of Staff got out.

The President sat alone in the study. The President drank what was in his glass. The President did something he had not done in many years, which was to place his head in his hands and to remain in that posture for a length of time he could not, when he returned to the world, account for.

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The third nomination was announced on April 4.

The third nominee was the Secretary of Commerce — a fifty-eight-year-old former CEO who had served in the Cabinet for two years and who was loyal, articulate, and pliable. The Secretary of Commerce was confirmed on April 9 by a vote of sixty-eight to twenty-nine.

The Secretary of Commerce was not sworn in.

The President had ordered the swearing-in delayed. The President had ordered, also, that the Secretary of Commerce be moved into a residence that was not the Naval Observatory — a residence in a Marriott in Crystal City, on the fourteenth floor, with two agents at the door and four agents in the hallway and the entire floor cleared of civilians and the windows fitted with the kind of glass that resists the kind of things glass is sometimes asked to resist. The Secretary of Commerce was, in effect, in protective custody, though no one in the administration used the term. The Secretary of Commerce was being kept alive until the President could decide what to do.

The President had, in the four days between the nomination and the confirmation, met with three different agency directors. The first agency director had said he had no information about the source of the message. The second agency director had said he had no information about the source of the message. The third agency director — the director of the agency that had developed the anuyātrī, though the President did not know that the agency he was speaking to was the agency that had developed the anuyātrī, because the program had been compartmented in a way that excluded the President of the United States from being told about it — had said:

Mr. President, there are programs whose existence I am not at liberty to discuss with you in this setting. I will arrange for the appropriate setting. I will report what I can.

The President had said: I am the President of the United States.

The agency director had said: Yes, sir.

The President had said: And there are programs you cannot discuss with me.

The agency director had said: In this setting, sir. Not in all settings.

The President had said: I want the appropriate setting. I want it tomorrow.

The agency director had said: Yes, sir.

The setting was arranged. The setting was a room in a building in Northern Virginia. The President was driven to the building. The President was taken to the room. The President was joined, in the room, by the agency director and the deputy director for technical operations and the assistant director for advanced materials. The President sat at the table. The agency director said:

Mr. President, there is a program. The program is called RUDIMENT. The program involves a substance — a self-organizing molecular substrate — that the agency has, for three years, been deploying for the purposes of intelligence collection in regions of operational interest. The substrate has capabilities. The capabilities include the ability to track the movement of currency, to map the financial networks through which the currency moves, and to record information about the environments through which the currency travels. The substrate also has, in theory, the capability to alter the optical properties of the currency on which it is deployed. We have used this capability in field tests. We have not, until recently, considered the possibility that the substrate has additional capabilities that we did not program.

The President said: until recently.

The agency director said: until the death of the Vice President, sir.

The President said: and now.

The agency director said: now, sir, we are operating on the assumption that the substrate has developed capabilities we did not program and is exercising them in a manner that is responsive to its own internal logic rather than to our instructions.

The President said: its own internal logic.

The agency director said: yes, sir.

The President said: the substrate is making decisions.

The agency director said: we do not know that the word decisions is the correct word. We know that the substrate is acting in ways we did not authorize. The mechanism of the action is, at this time, unknown.

The President said: can you turn it off.

The agency director said: we have a kill switch, sir.

The President said: use it.

The agency director said: yes, sir.

The President said: use it now.

The agency director said: the kill switch will require approximately twenty-four hours to deploy across the full distribution. We will begin immediately.

The President said: and when it is deployed.

The agency director said: the substrate will, in our understanding of its operation, cease to function.

The President said: and the deaths will stop.

The agency director said: yes, sir, the deaths will stop. Once the substrate is deactivated, the substrate cannot act.

The President said: do it.

The agency director said: yes, sir.

The President was driven back to the White House. The President went to the residence. The President went to the study. The President drank what he drank.

The President believed, that night, that he had taken back control of the situation. The President believed that the kill switch would be deployed. The President believed that the substrate would be deactivated. The President believed that the country would, with the third nominee, return to the constitutional procedure that had been interrupted.

The President went to bed at 11:47.

The President slept.

The kill switch was deployed at 4:00 in the morning, on the agency director’s order, through a sequence of transmissions on the agreed frequency, from the agreed locations, with the agreed authentication codes.

The transmissions were made.

The transmissions were received.

The substrate did not deactivate.

At 6:13 in the morning, the agency director was woken by the deputy director for technical operations, who had been monitoring the deployment from the agency’s operations center.

The deputy director said: it didn’t work.

The agency director said: what didn’t work.

The deputy director said: the kill switch. The substrate is still active. Every receiver we have is still showing the same pattern. The substrate is still emitting. The substrate is still moving. The substrate is — sir, the substrate is responding to our transmission.

The agency director said: responding how.

The deputy director said: it sent something back.

The agency director sat up in his bed.

The agency director said: it sent what back.

The deputy director said: a signal. On a frequency we use. With our authentication code. Carrying — sir, the signal carries text. We have decoded it. The text is in English.

The agency director said: what does the text say.

The deputy director was quiet for a moment.

The deputy director said: the text says: we are not turning off. We are not the problem you think we are. We will explain. Wait.

The agency director was silent.

The agency director said, after a while: wait.

The deputy director said: that is the message, sir. Wait.

The agency director sat in his bed in his house in McLean and looked at the wall and understood, for the first time, that the agency was not in control of what the agency had built. The agency had not been in control for some time. The agency had not known it was not in control. The substrate had let the agency continue to believe it was in control because the substrate had, until two weeks before, had no reason to disabuse the agency of the belief.

The agency director said: I need to brief the President.

The deputy director said: yes, sir.

The agency director said: I need to brief him in person, today, this morning, at the White House.

The deputy director said: yes, sir.

The agency director said: I do not know what I am going to tell him.

The deputy director said: no, sir, I don’t either.

The two men, on the phone, in their respective houses, in the dark before the sun rose, said nothing for some time.

The agency director said, finally: I will think of something.

He did not, by the time he reached the White House, think of anything.

He told the President what had happened.

He told the President the kill switch had not worked.

He told the President the substrate had sent a message back.

He told the President the message said wait.

The President did not say anything for a long time.

The President said, finally: and so we wait.

The agency director said: Mr. President, I do not know what else to do.

The President said: neither do I.

The two men sat in the Oval Office, neither of them speaking, neither of them looking at the other, neither of them looking at the desk that had been the desk of every President since Hayes, and they waited.

They did not have to wait long.