'Lucy still would have taken the hit,' Link said. 'And if she pointed fingers, Kat would have been implicated. Willingly, I might add. She is devoted to the senator. Orr might have been splashed with blood by association, but maybe not enough to derail him. Which voters would have mourned an arrogant, successful, anti-American British entrepreneur? No, Mike. We needed to stop Orr permanently.'
'And how would you have done that? By killing him?'
'If necessary,' Link admitted. 'You don't understand, Mike. I've been watching this guy since I was in naval intelligence. I used to sit in on hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The man I saw in these meetings was not the benign Texan ordinary Joe he presented to the voters. He reminded me of Joseph McCarthy. Xenophobic, suspicious, aggressive. He said that whenever he went home, he took walks in the desert and had visions of what he thought America should be. 'Fortress America,' he called it. Our national borders not just secure but closed, our resources maximized, our enemies cut off from financial aid, crushed, or left to beat each other to death. What he was selling to the American public was a cleaner version of that. But I knew he intended to accomplish that by any means necessary.'
'So he was McCarthy and Stalin,' Rodgers said. 'Neat trick.'
'You don't believe me? Ask anyone who was at those meetings,' Link went on. 'Ultimately, I was the only one in a position to do something about it. I watched him with the help of Kendra and Eric. When the mood of the country turned isolationist and Orr saw a real opportunity to win the presidency, he took it. That was when we made our move as well.'
'You got close to him in order to stop him.'
'That's right,' Link said. 'I had two options. I could have taken him out before he hit Wilson, but that would have made him a martyr to like-minded isolationists. So we chose to let him hook himself, then just reel him in. At the Company we ran operations like this worldwide.'
'I understand all that,' Rodgers said. 'What I don't understand is why you tried to run this on your own.'
'How many people do you let in on a top secret operation?'
'That depends,' Rodgers said. He was growing angry.
'If my option was to trust someone like Paul Hood or blow up his goddamn organization, I'd trust Paul Hood with my secret.'
'But you were also working with Orr and Kat!' Link said. 'You went out with her. We didn't know how you felt about them. If we told Hood, he might have told you, and you might have told the senator. You and I weren't exactly getting along, Mike. I was pushing to find out where you stood.'
'Talking would have worked better.'
'Maybe.'
'Not maybe,' Rodgers snapped. 'Your decision killed one of my people!'
'I'm always sorry about collateral damage!' Link shot back. 'But politics is war, and in wartime, people die. Innocent people. I read your file, General. You have seen that firsthand. We're soldiers, and our primary job is to defend our nation. Sometimes decisions have to be made quickly. They have to be made by people under stress, by people who are trying to keep one eye on the end game and one eye on the best way to get there. That is what I did.'
'You rolled a tank over your own soldiers,' Rodgers said.
'That happens, too, doesn't it?' Link said.
'In retreat, when the battle plan is in disarray,' Rodgers said.
'Whatever disarray we experienced was Op-Center's doing!' Link said, raising his own voice. 'We needed a few more days to carry this operation out, to make sure that Orr was stopped. I made a command decision about Op- Center. We used the EM bomb instead of conventional explosives because we didn't want casualties. Your man was not supposed to be in the room when it went off.'
'Another indication that you made the wrong decision,' Rodgers said.
'We stopped Orr, didn't we?'
'Sure.' Rodgers motioned the marines over. 'Can you stand, Admiral?'
Link rose. 'Where are we going?'
'I'm taking you to the San Diego PD,' Rodgers said. 'This is for them to sort out with the D.C. Metro
