“Fine. A little exhausted. I’ll try to get some sleep after this, if I can,” he told her. Then he walked over to where Holman sat. He remained standing as he interviewed her.
“We want to ask you some questions,” Chapel said. “About the Cyclops Initiative. First off, I’d like to know why.”
Holman’s brow furrowed. “Why?”
Chapel pinned her with his gaze. “Why you crashed a Predator drone into the Port of New Orleans. Why you took down the power grid in California. Do you admit that you did those things?”
“Yes, of course. We also manipulated the stock market. Oh, and we released a virus into the Internet that slowed down electronic transactions. That was one of Paul’s favorite parts of this. He was really quite proud — you see, the people who run e-commerce sites are always looking for ways to speed up transactions, to make it easier to buy and sell online than it is in the real world. Just adding code to sabotage those transactions wouldn’t have worked, because the software engineers would have noticed it right away and cut it out on their own. What Paul did was add an upstream checksum function at the level of the banks funding the…” She stopped herself. She blinked as if remembering where she was. “I… I’m guessing you didn’t know about that. You look surprised.”
“We’ll get to that later. But you’re not answering my question. Why did you do all this?”
“To soften the economy,” Holman said, with a smile. “Do you have any cigarettes? I gave up smoking years ago, but this feels like a good time to start again.”
“No. I don’t have any cigarettes. Answer the question, please.”
“The question?”
Chapel fought to control himself. “Why?”
“We attacked the economy because we wanted people to care.”
“What people?”
“The American people, of course. That’s where the name comes from. The Cyclops part. The American people are like a Cyclops, a giant of immense power but capable of seeing only one thing at a time. For years now, the leaders of the country have known this. They’ve used it to shape the discourse, to move national politics in the direction they want. Look at the Iraq war. After September eleventh, the people couldn’t see anything, couldn’t deal with any issue except terrorism. The Bush White House claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction — well, who knows. Maybe they really thought that was true. Or maybe it was a convenient excuse. They got the war they wanted. Later on, after the economic collapse in 2008, the only thing the people could talk about was the economy. About money. Which provided the impetus to bail out the banks, the auto industry, later on the insurance companies and the hospitals. All of it on the dime of the people who were already hurting financially. Because we told them it would improve the economy.”
Chapel gritted his teeth. “Maybe we can save the conspiracy theories for later.”
Holman laughed. “Theories? This is all a matter of historical fact. For a generation now, the two political parties have exploited the public’s single-mindedness to line the pockets of their friends and cronies. They’ve dismantled the American state piece by piece, sold it off to the highest bidder—”
“Enough,” Chapel said. “This isn’t a propaganda video. Get to the point. You don’t like the way the country’s being run, fine. So you started your own conspiracy to fight that?”
“The Initiative is made up of people who understand that the real problems of this country are being ignored,” Holman told him. “Climate change running amok. Income inequality so profound the only logical outcome is class warfare. Globalism and automation leading to double-digit unemployment. These are the things that need to be addressed, and yet no politician will touch them. It was clear to us we needed to remove the politicians from the equation.”
Chapel raised an eyebrow. “And how exactly do you plan on doing that?”
“By putting power in the hands of the one branch of government that doesn’t take its orders from a fickle public: the military. The point of the Cyclops Initiative is to engineer a military coup in the United States.”
“The idea was quite simple. The people of this country care about only one thing right now: the economy. As long as the politicians keep making promises, though, the people remain complacent — unwilling to actually take any action on their own. They would rather let a few hundred people inside the Beltway make the decisions for them. We needed to wake the people up — wake the sleeping giant, as it were.”
“By way of terror attacks on American assets,” Chapel said.
Holman shrugged. “We would create a situation where the economy was in such a shambles that civil order would break down. We would incite riots and social disorder — which is exactly what we’ve accomplished in California. Soon that chaos will spread across the country. The governors of the states will call in the National Guard, but of course, they aren’t prepared for something of this magnitude. They’ll need to bring in the regular military for assistance in restoring order. The legislature and the executive will be forced to give the military more and more power to aid them in containing the panic, and in the end the Joint Chiefs of Staff will simply assume command. They will declare a state of emergency and dissolve Congress. At that point, the real work can begin.”
Holman sat up very straight in her chair. She’d had a very long night, Chapel knew. She’d been kidnapped by a deranged marine. Dragged halfway across the city. Thought she was going to be blown up by a Hellfire missile, but instead she’d been brought to a windowless little room underground and forced to confess to all her sins.
But now she reached up and patted her hair. Brushed some lint from the front of her blazer. Suddenly she cared very much how she looked.
Chapel realized with a start that what he’d thought was an interrogation under duress was in fact a chance for her to say something she’d been holding in for a very long time. To express how proud she was of herself.
“We aren’t terrorists, you see,” she told him, and the camera. “We’re patriots. We love this country. We love what it used to be. What it has the potential to become again. But if we continue down this same suicidal course, if we can’t rise above ourselves to face the challenges of the twenty-first century, then—”
“Stop,” Chapel said.
“You wanted to know why,” she told him.
“Sure. I think we’ve got that. You think that to save America you need to cancel democracy. Depose all the elected leaders and put generals and admirals in their place.”
“You’re a soldier. You must know they would do a better job.”
Chapel shook his head. He didn’t want to get into an argument about this, but he could barely help himself. “I don’t know that at all. The officers I’ve known have been mostly good people, sure.”
“People with a firm grasp on reality,” Holman said.
“Fine. Yeah, because they have to be. If every decision you make means life or death for somebody, yeah, you tend to drop the rhetoric and stop worrying about how popular you are. But there’s another side to that. You get too focused. You have an objective to meet — say, you need to take a hill or secure a town. And everything you have goes into meeting that objective. But to do that, you sacrifice the bigger picture. You can’t worry about why your superiors wanted that hill or that town. You can’t waste mental energy thinking about why the war started. You can only think about how to finish it.”
“And that’s exactly the kind of focus we need,” Holman insisted. “Get some people in place who can fix things. And then maybe in ten years, or maybe twenty, then the military can restore democracy and let us try again.”