The Good Lie Read online

  Dedication

  For John and Katherine,

  and R, L & K, always

  Epigraph

  I . . . solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion . . . so help me God.

  —oath of office for all federal employees, other than president of the United States

  You can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now?

  —“Control” in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

  Only the dead have seen the end of war.

  —Plato

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One: Fiasco

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Part Two: The Rotten Onion

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Part Three: How Not to Govern

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Part Four: Welcome to the Jungle

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Forty-Eight

  Forty-Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-One

  Fifty-Two

  Fifty-Three

  Fifty-Four

  Fifty-Five

  Fifty-Six

  Fifty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Tom Rosenstiel

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  Fiasco

  DECEMBER 7 TO DECEMBER 9

  One

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 5:35 P.M. EASTERN STANDARD TIME

  WASHINGTON HILTON, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Peter Rena watches the man who might be president pace back and forth in front of him.

  “I’m not saying I’m running,” David Traynor says. “But I’ve been approached.”

  The man looks different in person than on television, Rena thinks. On camera the billionaire’s epic self-confidence could seem cartoonish. In front of Rena now, he comes across as more serious, even charismatic. He also seems older.

  Most Americans had an image of David Traynor frozen in time—from the famous photo of a college student operating his first business out of a dorm room, or as pro basketball team owner, adorned in his signature midnight-blue T-shirt, in the famous meltdown video screaming at a ref, or a couple of years later hugging his star player as they lifted the NBA trophy. There was also the now-legendary clip of Traynor at Davos telling fellow masters of the universe, “Man, we need to get over ourselves.” The middle-aged man in front of Rena now is thicker and fleshier than in those images. But Traynor, a man who knows how to turn most things into success, wears this new layer of flesh proudly, like armor. And he conveys in his smile, the twinkle of his eye, the way he moves, just how sublimely he has enjoyed every meal, every popping bottle of Dom, every trip on his private Gulfstream, also midnight blue. Part of Traynor’s appeal is the hint—with all his frat-boy antics and blunt charm—that he is the everyman tech billionaire, not a geek or financial wizard or ruthless bastard; he’s just a guy with good instincts, common sense, and a little more chutzpah than most. You could be, too.

  “And the people we’re talking about, the people who’ve approached me about running, are serious people,” Traynor says.

  Peter Rena sits on a cream-white sofa in the living room of the hotel’s penthouse suite. Two more men, the political consultant Sterling Moss and the money bundler Anton Sylvester, sit in armchairs flanking Rena, the three men forming a semicircle around Traynor, who is standing. All four are dressed in black tie for the evening ahead.

  “If I did run,” Traynor says, beginning to pace again, “I need to know what I’d encounter.”

  Thirteen months ago Traynor added U.S. senator to his myriad titles. He also seemed to offer a wholly new political blend—a businessman who argued for environmental radicalism, a Democrat who denounced his party’s cowardice for not fixing entitlements, a billionaire who criticized Wall Street money managers for “building more summer houses than jobs,” and a self-made billionaire who advocated redistributing wealth as a way to save the economy. “I’m rich enough to know trickle-down is a scam. The only way you build anything is up.” Audiences relish what they see as scolding, refreshing candor, especially in his purple home state of Colorado. The press keeps debating whether Traynor is farcical or authentic.

  He stops pacing. A sharp look at Rena. Steel-gray eyes under sharp black brows. A stubby index finger pointing.

  “I’m told you can find out what they’d throw at me, Mr. Rena. That you’ll discover what others miss. Into the deleted history. The wiped hard drives. Things even I won’t remember.”

  Rena doesn’t respond.

  “Am I wrong? Was I misled about you?” Traynor says and turns to the political consultant, Moss. “Stir,” he says, using Moss’s nickname, “am I wasting my time?” Then back to Rena. “Aren’t you the best, Mr. Rena? Best in the city? The guy who can learn anything?”

  Traynor is famous for this kind of rhetorical grilling—part flattery, part bullying, part negotiating.

  “I mean your resume, man. Special Forces, military investigator, unearths a scandal in the army that costs you your career. Now you have your own firm. Last year, the whole Supreme Court nomination thing. I mean come on. Aren’t you the freaking best?”

  Traynor’s stroll through Rena’s background is another calculated message: I’ve done my homework. I have my own investigators.

  Some of what Traynor has referred to is common knowledge. Rena left the military a decade ago to become a Senate aide and later was encouraged by his boss, Senator Llewellyn Burke of Michigan, to open a consulting firm. Rena, Brooks & Toppin did investigations and problem solving for business and political clients. Eighteen months ago they helped vet and confirm the newest Supreme Court justice, Roland Madison. The confirmation process became notorious when someone threatened the nominee’s life. Rena ended up killing the man in the waters of the Potomac.

  Some of what Traynor has alluded to, however, is not public knowledge: the history of sexual harassment Rena uncovered about a three-star general, which cost Rena his military career.

  “Senator, are you asking to hire me to do opposition research on you?” Rena says at last, stating the proposition Traynor has not yet spoken out loud.

  “Is that what they call it? Opposition research?” Traynor says, pretending not to know.

  “Oppo for short,” Rena says dryly.

  “I love it,�
�� Traynor says. “‘Oppo’!” He claps his hands together. “I’d have a former top military investigator doing oppo on me! Dude!”

  Rena looks at Moss, whose raised eyebrows convey a mixture of disbelief and enchantment.

  “How does oppo work?” Traynor asks.

  He knows the answer, Rena assumes. But Traynor wants to hear the consultant describe it, to learn more about it—and about Rena. Traynor’s blustering frat-dude clownishness is a provocation and an act, Rena recognizes. He is smarter than he pretends, and a better listener.

  “My team would dig into every aspect of your background as if we were your opposition,” Rena says. “We would try to find everything we could about your life, your family, your finances, the people you had done business with, your personal behavior, any lawsuits ever filed against you, everything we could find to make you look bad. Anything you said or anyone else ever said about you in public, and every piece of paper that had your name or the name of any of your companies on it, including shell companies. We would unearth the papers you wrote in college, everything you ever posted in social media, and anything about any companies you have any ownership in, any board association with or hold stock in. We would put that information in the worst possible light. We would imagine how people who want to destroy you would see it. Then we would provide it to you, so you’d know how your enemies will come at you.”

  “Geeezus!” Traynor looks more intrigued than alarmed. “Isn’t there some risk, I mean if you start digging, that you just loosen up stuff that’s deep buried? You know, get people who have forgotten and forgiven to just start thinking about it all over again?”

  Sylvester smiles at Moss.

  “Yes,” says Rena. “But the bigger risk is assuming anything will remain buried. Think of John Kerry and the enemies he had made in Vietnam who came at him with the Swift Boat campaign. If he’d been prepared, he would have had a rapid answer.”

  “He might have been president,” Moss says.

  Rena says nothing, but his expression makes it clear to everyone he doubts it.

  “I’m not a cautious guy, Mr. Rena. I’m a disrupter. I break shit. First-generation digital: I didn’t grow up with computers; I helped invent them. So I’m not John Kerry. I’m a rapid-response team all by myself.”

  “Perhaps then you don’t need opposition research.”

  “Fuuuck that!” Traynor declares. “I need it more than anyone. People will come at me from everywhere. And I don’t even know what it’ll be. In my generation, you market yourself. You are the product. And you piss off a lot of people along the way. So, good goddamn right I need oppo!”

  Traynor stares at Rena and laughs, a salty, infectious ain’t-life-wild laugh. When it fades, his tone has become serious. “Tell me how you do it.”

  Rena describes his firm, the mix of lawyers, former military and police, digital sleuths. Traynor listens.

  A striking blond woman in a sleeveless black evening gown enters from an adjoining room.

  “Davey,” she says. “It’s six.”

  “Yeah, babe,” Traynor answers. “Peter Rena, my wife, Mariette.”

  Rena, military polite, is already standing.

  Mariette Traynor, fifteen years younger than her fifty-six-year-old husband, had been an executive in his third company, after a career as a top-level marathoner while getting degrees from Stanford and Wharton. Traynor himself had gone to a land-grant college and gotten his MBA at “whatever top-ten school had the cheapest tuition.”

  “I better powder my goddamn giant nose,” Traynor says. “Think about it, Peter.” Traynor gives him a hard look that morphs into a mischievous smile. Then he follows his wife into the next room.

  Sterling Moss walks Rena to the door of the suite.

  “What do you think?”

  The smile on Moss’s weathered face is half amusement, half excitement. Rena can see Traynor thrills him.

  “I’ll ask Randi,” he says.

  Randi Brooks is Rena’s partner and, like Traynor, a Democrat. She’s already been approached about their working for Traynor but wanted Rena, a Republican, to meet him first, before they saw him together.

  “But I’m gonna tell her I wouldn’t touch this guy for a million dollars.”

  A flash of worry tightens Moss’s smile, but only for an instant.

  “Oh,” Moss says, “I think he might pay more than that.”

  Two

  SATURDAY, DECEMBER 7, 11:29 P.M. CENTRAL AFRICA TIME

  OOSAY CITY, REPUBLIC OF MORAT, NORTH AFRICA

  When he gets to the roof, Assam Baah lifts his ancient field glasses to his eyes and looks two streets away into the American compound.

  He sees four armed men standing outside the gates next to a pair of aging pickups. Poor bastards, he thinks. You have no idea what is about to happen to you.

  Baah glances at his watch. Seven minutes.

  The poor bastards are members of the Liberty Brigade, the local militia paid to guard the American compound. Local governments are required to provide protection to all foreign properties on their soil.

  There is little local government, however, in Oosay City in the fledgling Republic of Morat. Four years since the rebellion sent dictator Ali Nori fleeing with his billions to Saudi Arabia, the people of Baah’s country practice freedom on whatever terms they can grab. One armed militia has seized the water system, another electricity, a third ambulance service, each of them little more than street gangs—including Baah’s own group.

  Another glance at his watch. Six minutes.

  He thinks of Sulla, his wife, and the boys, and the long trench where their bodies now lay with their fellow villagers, like so many broken objects thrown into a dump. In six minutes he will jump over that trench and enter a new world, alone, and live a life of secrets and lies and vengeance. And everything up to now will be erased.

  He sweeps the glasses inside the compound until he finds the large yellow house with a brown roof where they will make the attack. The Manor House had been a merchant’s residence a century and a half ago, built by a mining executive from Burgundy, back when the French ruled Morat. The Americans bought it a few months after the rebellion so they could have an outpost in Oosay, a place to meet privately with the sort of Moratians whom Westerners considered “reasonable”—so-called moderate militia leaders, lawyers, intellectuals, and politicians.

  Baah knows the layout of the Manor House, though he’s never been inside. A large front parlor, a dining room, and a library on the main floor where rumor has it Americans hold their visits. A large veranda in back overlooking what remains of the gardens. Upstairs, offices, and security rooms where Americans monitor the cameras and bugs rumor has it they’ve placed around the city. On the third floor there are bedrooms where American dignitaries spent the night—until recently.

  Through the field glasses he finds the new building called the Barracks. Two stories high, nearly windowless, hidden behind a tall dark gray wall. A compound within a compound. No Moratians allowed.

  Standing on the roof of a building two blocks away, Baah tries to stay calm. He is a thin man in his late thirties, stronger than he looks, with a down-set face and a beard that will never fill out. He wishes he were more physically imposing. He wishes he were as large as he feels inside. He lowers the field glasses and glances at his watch.

  Three minutes.

  He leans against a railing and thinks about the Americans. They keep making the same mistake, though this is something he cannot say aloud to anyone—especially his new righteous friends. He thinks of it as a parable. Imagine a teenager who has committed no crime being rounded up, put in prison, and tortured for many years, as Ali Nori did to so many. When the boy is still young enough to be angry and remember everything that has happened, he is set free. The Americans tell themselves the young man will feel no longing for vengeance. They think he will forgive his jailor and forget the judge who sentenced him because he will want to live a better life. They think he will not seethe i
nside to kill the politicians who gave the orders. And they think, if you fired all the policemen and judges and politicians who falsely imprisoned all the thousands who were just like that young man, you can find new police, new judges, and new politicians who have no memories, no history, and no family.

  But we are not Americans, Baah knows. We have history and memory and family.

  He hears the sound of trucks now pulling in front of the compound. He raises the field glasses.

  It has begun.

  The six Toyota pickups arrive, one after another, until they surround the Liberty Brigade guards.

  Each flies the black flag of the Islamic State Army. Each has a mounted machine gun in back. The Liberty Brigade guards are now outnumbered twenty-four to four.

  Baah’s heart races.

  His friend Amin gets out of the passenger seat of the lead Toyota and walks up to the leader of the men guarding the Americans.

  People from the neighborhood have begun to gather. They fill the sidewalks and spill into the street. Shouts rise. Men wave Moratian flags. Some wave the black flag of the Islamist cause.

  Amin takes his bullhorn and begins to lead the crowd in anti-American chants. “Al mout li Amreeka.” Death to America. A few bottles and rocks sail over the compound wall.

  Lights burst on inside the American outpost. They flood the street, and the small protest that has gathered there looks unreal, as if someone is shooting a movie. It is beautiful.

  The crowd swells. The chanting grows. The men in the pickups remain calm, their guns still.

  Now, Amin, Baah thinks. Now.

  His friend begins to exhort the crowd to disperse. “Adhhab lilmanzil!” Go home! Be safe. Go now.

  When the crowd thins the six Toyotas pull back to make a lane and the men of the Liberty Brigade, the poor bastards there to protect the compound, drive away. It is just after 1 A.M.

  Then, with the sound of thunder, the front gates of the American compound burst into flames.

  The mangled concrete and steel opening looks like a screaming mouth spitting fire. The six trucks of the Islamic State Army storm through the jagged opening like angels entering hell.

  Baah hears the machine guns from the pickups begin to fire inside the compound.