Chapter 32: Building a Case

“There’s something we’ve been leaving out of the big picture,” Steve reminded the group.

“Which is?” Michael asked.

“Who’s going to take over in Stinson’s place once he’s been impeached?”

“I’d suppose the vice president?”

“Yes, so maybe we’d better get a briefing on who that is. Bob?”

Bob Zaglinder snapped to awareness. He’d been sipping a cup of coffee, staring out the window at the river scene through the trees at the edge of Steve’s back yard.

“Vice president? That’s Aaron Bronstein, of course. They call him the invisible man. He was on Stinson’s ticket only because he attracted a certain voting bloc, as is usually the case. But little has been seen or heard of him since the election. Rumor says that Stinson won’t allow him into any White House meetings. He’s totally excluded.”

“Is that legal? Permissible, even?” Michael asked.

“Oh, yes. All he’s required to do is preside over the Senate proceedings. Even there, he’s only a figurehead. The senior senator of the majority party, the President pro tempore, rules the Senate. The Vice President sits there and keeps his mouth shut.

“Other than that? Nothing! He does only what the President allows,” Bob answered.

“So what will he do during Stinson’s impeachment, assuming it gets that far?” Steve asked.

“That’s a sticky point,” Bob explained. “The Vice President cannot preside during the Senate impeachment. The Constitution requires that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides over a Presidential impeachment. And that’s where we have a major problem: Chief Justice Duane Sorensen is totally corrupt. He’ll never let a Stinson impeachment go anywhere in the Senate if he can possibly interfere. We’ll have to get the Chief Justice removed before we can remove Stinson!”

“Okay, that’s understood. But with Vice President Bronstein, we’re dealing with an unknown. Can we put together a profile? What we can expect from him if he assumes the Presidency?” Steve asked.

“Oh, sure, no problem. I can have it for you later today. He’s pretty easy to research, actually.”

“Good. And getting back to Chief Justice Sorensen. Do we have enough solid evidence compiled to get him impeached?”

“I think so. I sure as hell hope so!” Bob groaned. “It’s damned tough to remove a sitting Supreme Court Associate Justice. It takes impeachment in the House of Representatives, and conviction by the Senate. As for a Chief Justice? He’s pretty much untouchable. We’d have to film him with a smoking gun in each hand, standing over the bodies of his victims, to have any hope that he’d go down,” Bob explained.

“We assumed that all of this would be pretty straight-forward,” Michael complained. “Find evidence of their corruption and their crimes, and expose them. You’re saying that political influence and power can trump that?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying. There’s enough political corruption in Washington to discredit and suppress any evidence. It would never come to trial. The only hope we have of pulling this off is to make such a strong and shocking case with the public, through the power of the press, that the impeachments will survive the Congressional gauntlet.”

“There may be another option, but I’ll have to keep it close to my chest for a while,” Steve mused.

“You’re thinking what I think you’re thinking?” Michael asked.

“Yes. They have bad dreams and they decide to confess their guilt,” Steve confirmed.

“Good luck with that!” Michael countered. “It requires a conscience to feel guilty. That’s something lacking in those people.”

“There is another alternative,” Bob suggested.

“That is?” Steve asked.

“We find a prosecutor with the balls to press charges for an impeachable crime committed by the Chief Justice,” Bob answered.

“Yes, but doesn’t that put us right back into the political meat-grinder? I mean, trying to find a judge who could stand up under that kind of pressure? I can imagine the fire storm of opposition, the blizzard of stalling and delaying and obfuscation tactics from the most powerful defense lawyers in the nation, all of them piling on. I really don’t think a conviction is possible. We’d be destroying the careers of a good judge and a dedicated prosecutor for a lost cause,” Michael protested.

“Still ... if public outrage and the weight of evidence were great enough...” he wondered aloud.

***

The key planners of the pumpkin snatch were gathered around Steve and Marie’s fireplace. They’d called in Bob Zaglinder to consult with them. They needed his political experience. The swamp had gotten deeper and uglier.

“Tell me, Bob,” Steve asked. “What the hell was the point of having those old Russian suitcase nukes? We’re aware that Stinson and Barnes sent teams to locate and recover them, and had them squirreled away under guard. But what was the point? What the hell did he want with his own personal nuclear arsenal?

“If I tell you, several things will happen. I guarantee it. And I also guarantee that you won’t believe it, at first. When you finally do believe it, you’ll wish I hadn’t told you. Then, all of you will go half crazy, wanting to rally the troops to capture Stinson and take him to the nearest hanging tree. After that, you’ll want to parade his head on a spear in front of a disbelieving nation,” Bob said with a dead flat voice, his eyes boring into everyone around him in turn.

“You ... you’re not joking. You’re dead serious about that, aren’t you,” Steve replied.

“Deadly serious!” Bob answered. “Marie already knows, or she should. She’s seen it in her visions. That’s why she warned Viktor, and why he laid the charge on Pietor.” Bob looked to Pietor, studying his ashen face for a long moment.

Yes, he knows, Bob thought to himself.

“Didn’t any of you ever wonder why Marie or Pietor have never mentioned how or why the mushroom cloud would appear over an American city? How that would come to be? Who or what would be the source of the attack?” Bob asked.

Only the sounds of the burning logs crackling under the great fire pit hood was heard as the group fell silent. A chill feeling quieted them while they looked into each other’s faces. Did they really want to hear the answer to that?

“Damn it all to hell, we can’t just shove this behind us,” Michael protested. He turned to Marie: “I’m sorry. I don’t want to re-open horrors that I think you’ve already faced. But we have to know, and we’re together in this. No one is alone with it, like I suspect you’ve been all this time. And Bob, apparently he knows! Bob, you’ve swallowed the knowledge of this, this unspeakable thing, for how long?”

“Too long, Michael.”

“And you really don’t want to open up this can of crap, right?”

“I’d prefer not to, Michael, but I don’t see how we can shove it behind us now. Can we? It seems to me that it’s already too late to just let it pass.”

Bob hung his head and gripped his knees tightly with his hands, appearing to brace himself against some unknown horror.

“Let me guess,” Steve interjected. “Stinson was going to use one of them, right? Or maybe more than one? He was holding them as a sort of hole card to play against some little piss-ant dictator that wouldn’t knuckle under to one of his

“Not even close,” Bob interrupted, glaring with haunted eyes at Steve. “First, I’ve got to know that none of you would believe that I had any part in this, none at all. And I was never privy to the inside knowledge until I began to put scraps and hints together from things I overheard — chance remarks from certain people that made no sense, and finally — finally, I violated a bunch of secrecy laws and looked into private files that would have been the death of me had I been caught. Can I get some assurance that I’m clear of any of this in your minds, if I tell you?”

“You’re clear in my mind, Bob,” Michael answered. “I think that’s good for all of us?”

Everyone in the room nodded silent assent.

“Let’s get to the point, then. Whatever this is, we’re going to have to confront it. So, spit it out, Bob. Get to the damned point, already!”

“Alright, but ... damn it! I’ve warned you. I hate this!” Bob snarled.

He looked up to the ceiling as if waiting for lightning to punch through. He lowered his face into his hands and rubbed his eyes and forehead, and then with a haunted look he began to explain:

“Stinson and Barnes planned to use at least one of the portable nukes. It was part of his overall plan to seize control of the United States, permanently, with himself as supreme ruler, as dictator. All of everything you’ve seen since the arrival of the Masi’shen has been shaped to fit his plans. The alien menace was unexpected, for certain, but all it did was add an even greater, more useful element of alienation and fear to his hate campaign, a campaign to climax with a nuclear strike against an American city. This supposed terrorist strike would achieve two major goals for Stinson. It would annihilate a group he despised, and it would give him an excuse to declare martial law. He could cancel elections and tighten his grip. Within a short time, a year or two at most, he and his cronies would be permanently in power. He would achieve a coup. Nobody could touch him”