The Journalist

PROLOGUE

4:00 P.M., Sunday, May 25, 2008

Nearing the mouth of the Potomac River, Ensign Kelly Greene throttled back the pulsing engines of the restored presidential yacht, Benny I.

Waiting for the craft to slow, she touched the right arm of her thick horn-rimmed glasses. The tiny receiver, embedded in the opaque plastic frame, confirmed that a wireless microphone, concealed on the quarterdeck, was transmitting to the audio recorder she had taped under her belt.

She glanced at the ship's controls. Five knots. A guarded smile crossed her lips as she swung the ships' wheel to port for a return run up river. As the craft slowly turned, she scanned, lounging around a small mahogany table on the quarterdeck, the object of her surveillance–U. S. President Benjamin P. Armstrong's Elite Inner Circle. Better known as the E.I.C., the three‑member team (affectionately parodied by the media in human brain anatomical terms–Medulla Oblongata, Cerebrum and Cerebellum) advised the President on everything from breakfast cereal to nukes.

Cerebellum, the head of the trio–Leo Novak, law professor emeritus, Harvard–fidgeted like a sparrow on a low-to-the-ground bird feeder. He blew his tiny pug nose, cleared his throat, adjusted his rimless oval glasses, ran his hand over his slicked-back yellow hair, dusted the sleeve of his blue blazer, and adjusted the collar of his white polo shirt.

Less jittery than Novak, Medulla Oblongata, head of Military Satellite Intelligence, General William 'Mac' MacCallister–five-six, two hundred pounds, dress-blue Air Force uniform–teetered like a bemedaled Faberge egg on the top edge of a ten foot stone wall.

The third team member, Cerebellum, White House Media Guru, Dr. Barbara Lande puffed on a thin Primo Del Rey cigar. At twenty‑eight, the slender six-foot Bean Town red head wore a bright green blazer that matched her eyes. Tan slacks and white deck shoes rounding out the look, she mirrored a model out of Boating Weekly. She slid her left hand through her G.I.-cut rust hair and chatted: “It's all perception, gentleman. Create the perception and they'll follow like sheep.”

“Don't be too sure,” Mac said.

Lande savored another puff, then said, “How do most people know for sure that China is really there? Read about it, see it on TV . . . scan the internet . . . nobody feels the goods anymore . . . it's all virtual, the only reality is virtual . . . air, water, fire, and earth, the elements . . . atomic numbaahs . . . atomic weight . . . how they're put together is all in the head of Homo sapiens.”

“Lande, I think you should stick with communications and lay off the science,” Novak said.

Mac scratched his knees, “I'd say there's a little more to reality than that.”

The throaty marine motors of the yacht gurgled in the background and the six intense eye balls of the EIC might be set in three average people who savored some half-cooked bird that turned on a backyard barbecue spit. But veiled was an evangelical hunger to save the world. The desire washed the moment like a rare and exotic unseen sauce.

Lande leaned back, studied the white ash on her cigar, and said, “Brain tissue stirs ideas and out of the mouths of the word-making-mammal comes meaning, and the meaning becomes deeds put down toward the reordering of history that ends one reality and begins another.”

“My dissertation.” She tossed her cigar butt overboard. A gull swooped to snatch it from the water.

Novak batted his eyes, “Let me recap what President Armstrong and I discussed this past week at Camp David.” He cleared his throat, “As you know, the President believes that the time is ripe for a conclusive solution to international terrorism. He has no doubt in his heart that it is his divine appointed destiny . . . a unique moment in the annals of this planet . . . in the context of history, that is . . . to conceive a new world order . . . to move forward in our combined human evolution with freedom and democracy for all the earth's people.”

Novak continued, “The President also desperately wants to make the streets of America safe again for the average freedom loving Jack, Joe, and Jane. In tackling this knucklehead global terrorism at its root, he intends to do that–forge a world peace under American protections and freedoms, at home and abroad.” He looked at Mac, “He wants to utilize our military superiority while we're still on top.”

Novak folded his arms. “So Doctor Lande, why don't you expand on this plan . . . to accomplish the President's mission?”

Ensign Greene pressed the arm of her horn rimmed glasses to her ear. There was concern in her eyes. She heard static, intermittent reception–something was wrong.

Hope for the best, she thought and made a small course correction, then settled back for the return trip to the Washington Naval Yard.