Collision (2 page)

Falcone allowed himself a silent “Ha.” The Senate was once a place so honored that members left its rolls defeated or dead. On a shield or in a coffin. No longer.

It had become a place where dreams died, where hope for change and conciliation were ground down into the dust of rancor and bitter recrimination. So after twelve years, Falcone wanted out. He quit the club, thinking that freedom was his at last.

It was a false hope. President Blake Oxley had asked Falcone to serve as his national security advisor. What was he to do? When the President asked an old Army Ranger to serve his country one more time, did he really have a choice?

After plowing through Oxley's first term and halfway into the second one, Falcone submitted his resignation. In those six years he had handled dozens of crises, the biggest being the most bizarre and the most secret: finding the plot behind the accidental explosion of a nuclear weapon that virtually destroyed Savannah, Georgia.

*   *   *

It was Falcone's worst
nightmare: a nuclear bomb destroying an American city. Who caused the attack? How could they have done it? And why? And how should America respond? The questions demanded answers and fast. The pressure on President Blake Oxley had been immense. Someone had to pay for the worst human-casualty toll since the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Immediate speculation pointed to Iran. Some leaders in Iran's military had used extreme rhetoric, but they weren't insane. If responsible, Iran would be incinerated in a matter of minutes. That didn't make any sense to Falcone. But very few things did when it came to the kaleidoscopic changes taking place in the world.

Oxley had to act. And if he didn't, congressional leaders threatened to declare war against Iran and impeach Oxley if he failed to act upon the declaration.

Falcone managed to work with an Israeli assassin and
Washington Post
bigfoot reporter Philip Dake to discover a plot that had been orchestrated by a fringe group to attack Iran with a nuclear weapon that had dropped from a U.S. Air Force aircraft in 1959 off the coast of Georgia without detonating. The Air Force had declared the bomb lost and unarmed, assuring Congress and the country that the weapon, buried deep in the seafloor, posed no threat. But the bomb accidentally detonated when plotters attempted to extract it and move it onto a ship masquerading as an exploratory vessel.

Americans initially blamed the disaster on Iran and nearly waged war against that nation, which had no responsibility for the nuclear explosion that destroyed Savannah. The accidental denotation was more than enough evidence to cause Falcone to question every temptation to use America's formidable nuclear arsenal.

The experience had taken its toll on Falcone. He wanted out. Oxley persuaded him to stay on longer. But six years in that job was too much. Falcone, without discussing it further with Oxley, announced his decision to resign as national security advisor and left the White House.

The President held no hard feelings, but Ray Quinlan, his chief of staff, who disliked and frequently feuded with Falcone, considered Falcone's announcement an act of betrayal.

Falcone had no doubt that he had done his duty and that enough was enough. The President had accepted Falcone's resignation reluctantly and had told him that he was expected to be on call when needed. Falcone had been eager to get back into the private world. It wasn't as if he'd have to stand in an unemployment line or go on welfare.

When he retired from the Senate years ago, Falcone had joined DLA Piper, a newly minted mesh of older law firms that had decided to go global in a hurry.

He had been a star performer there and would have been welcomed back. But a number of the former partners with whom he was close had retired or moved on. He decided it was time for him to do the same. He had been approached immediately by Sullivan & Ford, one of the world's largest law firms.

The firm had nearly one hundred offices scattered across the world, from Uganda to New Zealand, from Silicon Valley to Cairo, and employed more than four thousand lawyers, including three in the London office who had been knighted by the Queen. The average profit per equity partner this year would be
$
1.9 million. The firm's senior partners assured Falcone that his compensation would be much higher. They made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

But there were two conditions Falcone said were nonnegotiable.

First, no lobbying. He had just read in the
Atlantic
that back in 1974 only three percent of retiring senators and House members became lobbyists. Now half the retiring senators stayed in Washington to get rich lobbying, as did forty-two percent of the retiring members of the House. He wasn't ever going to join the herd that camped outside the doors of the House of Representatives or the Senate, pleading or cajoling members for votes. His door would always be open for those who sought his counsel, but his former colleagues on Capitol Hill and in the Oxley administration knew where to find him.

Second, he would not keep time records for billing the firm's clients. Whether he devoted days or less than an hour to a case, his value wasn't going to be weighed by the clock. Sullivan & Ford's partners had no problem with his not wanting to lobby. They figured he could still make a call or two without breaking any laws. Several partners complained about his refusal to record how he spent his time, but they swallowed hard and folded. His name on the firm's letterhead would add a mark of distinction. He was seen as a man with worldly gravitas—and that was money in their pockets.

Even though Falcone refused to lobby, he still kept in touch with the makers of laws and shapers of policy and was often seen at events that drew Washington's elite—State Department receptions for foreign leaders, White House dinners for heads of state, the Kennedy Center Honors, change-of-command ceremonies at the Pentagon. He also served on the President's Intelligence Advisory Board. And, with little or no publicity, he went on missions as U.S. special envoy to hot spots where the President wanted an extra set of eyes.

*   *   *

Now, on this October
day of blue sky and Indian summer, Falcone began walking briskly from his penthouse atop the high-rise at 701 Pennsylvania Avenue to Sullivan & Ford's gleaming steel and glass ten-story building at the foot of Capitol Hill.

He started his workday, sleeves rolled up and sitting behind a large handcrafted mahogany desk, embellished with replicated lions' heads and insignias from the age of King Arthur. The desk was oddly out of place in a building that screamed of geometric angularity and Spartan efficiency. More than efficiency, Falcone wanted substance, solidity, something that conveyed a respect for the past.

He had spotted the ornate desk while on a trip to London and had it shipped back to Washington. It was expensive, but it was just one additional price that his fellow partners were willing to pay to persuade him to join the firm.

From the window behind him he could see the dome of the Capitol, a quarter mile away. On the wall opposite his desk was a sixty-inch flat-screen television that contained an unusual capability. When it was turned on, ten different news channels appeared in small boxes along the set's border, with the preferred channel occupying the center of the screen. At the moment, the preferred channel was GNN, Google News Network. GNN had worked out an exclusive agreement with a relatively new enterprise, which called itself SpaceMine. The name had debuted about three years earlier in a great splash of GNN-generated publicity. Ned Winslow, once GNN's premier news correspondent and reportorial rival to CNN's Wolf Blitzer, had become a huckster. He belonged in the field or behind an anchor's desk. Maybe it was a matter of ratings, but whatever the reason, Falcone was disappointed with Winslow's new role. Content used to be king on television. Now, it was just schlock and awe.

Winslow breathlessly hailed SpaceMine for “taking the world into a new realm—the commerce of space.” SpaceMine's founders, he went on to say, planned to mine asteroids. “These gems of the heavens,” he said, “have higher concentrations of precious metals, such as platinum, than any known ore mine on Earth.”

At no time did Winslow ever describe how SpaceMine would chip away the asteroids' treasure. Instead, he ran a cartoonish NASA video that showed huge robotic machinery and vehicles gouging ore out of a landscape consisting entirely of rock.

The press conference that had launched SpaceMine had been dominated by the hologram of SpaceMine's CEO, Robert Wentworth Hamilton, the world's fifth- or sixth-richest man, depending upon what list of billionaires you accepted. There were also two former astronauts and three investment bankers, who looked particularly uncomfortable being projected as spectral holograms. In the following months, GNN had begun producing
SpaceMine Special
and sold rights to television networks throughout the world.

SpaceMine seemed to be everywhere—a Facebook site with an ever-growing army of friends; a constantly spouting Twitter with 1,627,435 followers. “SpaceMine” appeared at the top of responses to any Googled query with the word “space” in it. Every special fostered videos and endless comments on blogs, some of them genuinely spontaneous and others written by SpaceMine's digital hires.

Each special was a kind of reality show devoted to talks by Hamilton or an astronaut and images of SpaceMine workers at scattered, unidentified sites performing vaguely described experiments or building components of what was called the Asteroid Exploitation System. In the latest special, Hamilton compared the enterprise to the Manhattan Project, which took several routes toward development of the atomic bomb “before deciding which one would quickest lead our nation to its goal.”

Millions of viewers got used to GNN's use of holograms, which carried SpaceMine into the borderland of scientific fact and science fiction. There was an aura of secrecy: no interviews, no identification of SpaceMine sites. Because SpaceMine was so much a product of GNN and cable television, newspapers and network television retaliated by giving the corporation little coverage.

About a year ago, a GNN
SpaceMine Special
had been devoted to discussing the potential launching of the corporation's initial public offering. Hamilton, in his usual hologram form, urged viewers to stay tuned for a progress report on the company's IPO plans, “giving anyone on Earth the opportunity to share in the equivalent of a new ‘gold rush' in space.”

Some stock analysts, whose judgments were not particularly reliable, speculated that SpaceMine could exceed the phenomenally successful $30 billion IPO achieved that year by the Bradbury451 Group. The hype had given SpaceMine a few days of publicity well beyond GNN. But Wall Street yawned and soon moved on to other news.

Falcone was no fan of television, reality or otherwise. He occasionally watched newscasts by CNN, BBC, CCTV, and Al Jazeera to see how different channels covered essentially the same news. He had not paid much attention to the SpaceMine specials until today, when, for professional reasons, he found himself watching and recording one. Hamilton was now a Sullivan & Ford client. The move of a superclient like Hamilton from one law firm to another was as secretive and complex as a CIA rendition operation. One day the client was at Firm X. The next day the client was at Firm Z, and neither X nor Z had any documents that showed who had engineered the transfer or how it was made. Falcone had learned about the acquisition of Hamilton a few weeks before, when a terse, confidential memo had been sent to Falcone and the other senior partners.

Falcone had no direct connection with the new client. He was watching the SpaceMine special out of curiosity and jotting notes on a yellow pad in the assumption that someday he would be asked to offer some counsel to Hamilton, such as the probable reaction of political and financial decision makers to a corporation operating in space.

If a corporation is a person, what is a corporation that is no longer a fulltime Earthling? Interesting issue,
the lawyerly part of his brain mused.

SpaceMine had been late to the game of exploiting space assets in our galaxy. Other firms, such as Gold Spike and Moon Struck, had bolted out of the gate the moment that Congress canceled NASA's ambitious plans to send men to Mars and beyond in the quest for scientific knowledge that could benefit mankind.

Falcone did not hold Robert Wentworth Hamilton in particularly high regard. It was nothing personal between them. He just resented how our political system had been corrupted by men like Hamilton. Politicians were like crackheads begging for a fix. Not for cocaine, but for money. People like Hamilton were eager to feed their addiction and turn them into grateful lapdogs.

And now Hamilton had hired Sullivan & Ford to handle all of the legal work associated with his latest adventure into space. This time it was millions for advice, not votes.
Given my druthers,
Falcone thought,
I would have told Hamilton to pound sand with his checkbook.
But it had not been Falcone's decision to make. And, besides, he had to remind himself that it wasn't personal. Just business.

*   *   *

As Falcone sat there
watching SpaceMine's latest info-commercial on GNN, he remembered his recent lunch with the
Post
's Philip Dake at the Metropolitan Club, one of Washington's premier establishments, where new and old power players could meet to drink, dine, discuss politics, or close business deals. He had spotted Hamilton sitting at a table located at the far end of the main dining room. He was in deep conversation with Senator Kenneth Collinsworth of Texas, the powerful chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriations.

At the end of their lunch, both men rose and shook hands. Falcone suspected that a deal had just been struck. No money had passed hands, of course. The money would come later in the form of a large check from a political action committee masquerading as a nonprofit, tax-free organization dedicated to some innocuous-sounding social welfare cause.