Empire by Orson Scott Card Page A

his comrades to stand beside him and his commander to lead him wisely, so that he will not be led to meaningless death. And the commander trusts his subordinates and soldiers to act with wisdom and courage in order to compensate for his own ignorance, stupidity, incompetence, and fear, which all commanders possess in ample measure.
    Reuben was being followed—but that’s exactly what he expected. By the time he was through a long debriefing—three different interrogation teams—it was nearly dark.
    The real question was
which
group was following him—the FBI, the Army, or the CIA. Maybe all three. Or—always possible—some other agency within Homeland Security. How many parking places should he look for when he got to Reagan National? He wouldn’t want to inconvenience them.
    Reuben could hardly blame them for expending resources on following him. What else did they have to go on? The bodies of the terrorists would undoubtedly have no information on them; it might be days before anyone came forward with information about rooms they occupied. And in all likelihood they would be far more disciplined than the 9/11 terrorists had been—there would be no notes, no letters, no convenient ID that might lead to an easier trace.
    The only thing they had was Reuben himself—with poor Captain Coleman being interrogated just as thoroughly in another room, by his own teams of debriefers. He had told Cole to answer everything, thoroughly and fully. Including as much as he wanted toof Reuben’s conversation and actions afterward, and all their speculations about why things might have fallen out as they did.
    â€œTell the truth,” said Reuben. “We want these guys to get the terrorists. Of course they’ll suspect me, and if we pretend we don’t know that I’ll be suspected, the more they’ll think I have something to hide. We’ll answer this weird conspiracy with pure truth, so that they never have a moment where they can say, Here’s what you said, but here’s what we know you actually did. They’ll never catch us in a lie. Clear?”
    Reuben had followed his own advice. While he didn’t tell them anything about his activities for Steven Phillips, that was because they were highly classified and his interrogators did not have clearance for it. “If Phillips tells me to go ahead, then I’ll happily tell you everything.” They understood and accepted this—the fact that he told them Phillips’s name was in itself a sign of extraordinary cooperation on his part, since he really shouldn’t have told them even that much. “But we’re all on the same side, here, and I’m not going to let foolish red tape keep you from finding out what you want to know.” Holding back Phillips’s name would have been foolish red tape, with the President and Vice President dead; but keeping his actual activities secret until he was cleared to divulge them was not foolish—it was essential. These guys interrogating him were just as faithful about sticking to protocols, or they wouldn’t be in their positions.
    After they decided to call it a night, Reuben went to his office, which he assumed had been searched, and then to the little coffee room, where, inside a brown lunchsack labeled “Keep your hands off my food you greedy bastards—DeeNee,” he reached under a sandwich and took out his newly acquired cellphones. If they had been thorough enough to find these, they must already be convinced of his guilt and he wasn’t going to accomplish anything anyway.
    Now Reuben was heading from the Pentagon to the airport—not much of a drive, and probably the one that would make his followers the most worried. He could imagine cellphone speed-dial buttons getting pressed and teams being mobilized. “Stop him beforehe can board a plane, but otherwise just keep him in sight,” they told each other.
    But the