8
NATIONAL HARBOR, MARYLAND
The MGM National Harbor Resort & Casino had brought big-time gambling to the edge of Washington, not even ten miles from the White House. To match the capital’s low skyline, the casino stretched wide and long, a beached cruise ship. An eight-level, five-thousand-space garage was hidden underneath, a last indignity for losing gamblers. You’ve given us your money. Now find your car and get gone. Drive carefully! À bientôt!
Anton Petrov hadn’t lost. Then again, he hadn’t played. He circled the garage’s lowest level, looking for the black Dodge Challenger with its Tennessee plate. There. He found a spot two rows away, parked his gray Kia Sorento. The most forgettable of vehicles. Perfect. Petrov glanced around, found he had the garage to himself. No surprise. People didn’t linger down here.
He burrowed his head into the hood of his red Nationals sweatshirt and turned for the Challenger. Like all casinos, National Harbor had surveillance cameras everywhere. Petrov preferred to keep his face in shadow. He could have been a poker pro. But he had no interest in poker. He specialized in a riskier game.
He slipped into the Challenger.
Classical music, dark and heavy with violins, rang from the speakers. Petrov didn’t know the composer. The man in the driver’s seat jabbed at the dashboard touch screen until the violins were a whisper.
“Adam,” the man said.
Petrov had lived in the United States for thirteen years, arriving legally from Moscow for a graduate program in computer science. He dropped out after his first year. But he never went home. He now lived as Adam Petersen, a Swede with a driver’s license and a half-dozen credit cards. He had a face just this side of handsome, short brown hair, a narrow nose. He’d smoothed his accent for two years before leaving Russia. He still didn’t sound native, but he didn’t necessarily sound Russian either. He could pass as Swedish to an American ear. Not that people here cared about his origins. In all his time in the United States, he’d been asked where he was from only once. Americans regarded the question as bad form. Of course, a real Swede would see through his cover, but he’d never met one.
He supported himself writing software. Good coders never ran short of work. He picked up most jobs through Craigslist or other websites. The people who paid him never saw him. He lived in a two-bedroom rental apartment in Clarksburg, a Maryland exurb thirty miles northwest of Washington. Far enough from the city that he didn’t have to worry about bumping into professionally curious FBI agents.
He lived alone. He couldn’t risk even a casual girlfriend. He relied on Tinder on those rare occasions he wanted sex with someone other than himself. When he wasn’t coding or playing Xbox, he puttered with his aquarium, his only hobby. He owned a commercial-grade twelve-by-four-by-two-foot model. His favorite fish wasn’t a fish at all but a black-and-white eel, a muscled, toothy creature that hid in the gray reef and ate anything foolish enough to come within striking distance.
A bare existence. But he didn’t mind.
Petrov was the SVR’s top undercover operative in the United States. The CIA called its undercovers non-official. The SVR—the sluzhba vneshney razvedki, the Russian foreign intelligence service, equal to the more famous FSB on the Kremlin’s org chart, though not in reality—referred to them as illegals. The SVR’s description was closer to the truth. Most Russian and American agents worked out of embassies, with official diplomatic protection. If they were caught stealing secrets, they were given a persona non grata letter and sent home.
Undercovers lived as ordinary citizens, subject to the justice of the countries where they operated. Petrov had taken the act a step further. He’d hidden not just his identity but his nationality—a tricky game in a world full of databases. He couldn’t have passed as American-born, so he’d taken a smaller leap. A Swedish programmer was less likely to attract the attention of the FBI or CIA than a Russian of any stripe.
Petrov had been careful at every step. Most important, he hadn’t rushed. He’d taken the years he needed to live his new identity. The effort had paid off. In SVR jargon, he was a 200, a foreign operative with a completely clean cover. The SVR went to great lengths to keep him sterile. Petrov ran with almost no face-to-face oversight. Emails and other coded comms were his primary connection to the service. Though a couple senior operatives in Washington knew about him, his handler was based in Spain rather than the United States. Petrov saw her only once a year. On the rare occasions he had to pick up money or hand over packages, he used old-school dead drops.
The SVR was bureaucratic as well as paranoid. Its willingness to let Petrov operate with such independence proved his importance. The SVR had only two 200-rated operatives in the United States. It saved them for its most valuable missions.
Like running the man in the Challenger.
The agent’s code name was Grad, the Russian word for city. The Russians used the simplest code names for their most important spies. Petrov hadn’t recruited Grad. In fact, the man’s existence had come as a shock to him. Three years before, he’d received an email from his handler telling him to book a cruise out of Miami on the Royal Caribbean Harmony of the Seas. He was to sit by the ship’s main pool on the cruise’s third afternoon. Nothing more. He wondered if he was being told to run. Maybe the CIA or FBI had discovered him. But he’d seen no unusual activity around his apartment, and the Harmony didn’t leave port for a week.
The Harmony was the world’s biggest cruise ship, longer than an aircraft carrier and twice as heavy. It included an ice rink and a fourteen-hundred-seat theater. And it was full for Petrov’s voyage, eight thousand passengers and crew members roaming its decks. Petrov had no hope of figuring out who belonged or who didn’t. He didn’t try. He relaxed. After so many years undercover, Petrov understood his truest camouflage came from eliminating the gap between actor and role. He didn’t play at being a vacationing programmer. He was a vacationing programmer.
He covered his skin in sunblock and lined up for the hundred-foot waterslide. He leafed through a boring manual on C++ coding. He drank margaritas and ate nachos. Americans weren’t good for much, but they led the world in tasty ways to fatten themselves. Mostly, he sat behind his sunglasses and watched women. College girls in bikinis, moms chasing their kids, divorcées wearing oversized hats to hide their wrinkles. The college girls were out. He wasn’t interested in the moms. Maybe he’d have a chance with the divorcées. But trying would be too much trouble. Both Adam and Anton were content to look.
Petrov knew he wasn’t a deep thinker. Way back during SVR training, he’d seen the recruits who were. They tied themselves up over spying’s moral quandaries. They didn’t last. Maybe Americans could afford such nonsense. Not Russians. Russians had learned sometime between Genghis Khan and Napoleon that survival was its own moral imperative. And Petrov didn’t like the United States. It had humiliated his people after the Soviet Union collapsed. To this day, it took every opportunity to tell the world how weak and untrustworthy Russia was.
On the third afternoon, he felt himself stirring. The gap between his twin selves opened a fraction. He wondered how his masters would signal him. What they’d want. The hours passed. The humidity rose, and the sun disappeared behind a scrim of clouds. The pool emptied out. Petrov nursed his margarita, the day’s third. He must have dozed because he woke to a cold shower. His controller, Julianna, dumping water on his head.
“Hey!” The shock of being woken meant that the word formed in his mind in Russian, but he pushed it out in English.
Julianna took the deck chair beside his. She had long blond hair and ropy muscled arms. Her girlfriend, Shira, stood at the other end of the pool. Shira’s pregnant belly popped from her black one-piece. The SVR had correctly gauged that even if the CIA’s Madrid Station realized Julianna was a Russian agent, it would pay her little attention. Langley would assume the SVR wouldn’t give important jobs to a lesbian with a Jewish girlfriend.
Petrov had known Julianna eight years. He liked her, but her foolishness today nettled him. He toweled off his face. “What if I’d yelled in our old language, Julianna?”
“Swedish, you mean.” She grinned. She was half drunk, he saw. Fortunately, no one was within fifteen meters.
“You’re taking your cover a bit far, don’t you think?”
“I think this ship is filled with people who care more about their next meal than anything else in the world. I could wear a hat that says Russian Spy on my head and no one would notice.”
Petrov waved at Shira. “Is it yours, Julianna?”
“Is what mine?”
“The baby, of course.”
“I always knew women’s insides confused you.”
“I don’t care enough for them to confuse me. How are you these days?”
“Come to our room at nine, I’ll show you. Ninety-two thirty-six, the ninth deck.”
“Nine-two-three-six.”
“That’s right. And don’t eat too much at dinner. You’re getting fat, Adam.”
At precisely 9 p.m., he sat on the edge of Julianna’s bed, reading a thin file. She sat beside him. Shira was off doing whatever an eight-month-pregnant woman did when she wasn’t allowed in her room.
“This is real?” he said when he was done.
“No, I made it up.”
“Men like him, they don’t betray their countries.” He was whispering. He knew Julianna was right: No one on this ship was listening. No one had the faintest idea who they were or what they were doing. But given what he’d just read, he couldn’t help himself.
The American had offered to betray the United States on his own, without even being recruited. The CIA called traitors like him walk-ins. The SVR term was kamikazes, because they all blew themselves up sooner or later.
Naturally, the SVR had considered the possibility that the man was a dangle, a fake mole offered by the CIA as a way to feed false information. But he was too senior to be used that way. And his first dump of information had been too valuable to be anything but real. Petrov flipped through the file again, checked the pictures. A successful, handsome man. A celebrity, of sorts. American royalty.
At a dinner at the French embassy in Washington, this man slipped a key and a piece of paper to the SVR’s deputy chief of station, Dmitri Zlobin. An address and number, nothing more. The address led to a self-service storage facility in Northeast Washington. The number to a ten-by-ten locker.
Zlobin opened the locker himself. At first glance, it seemed empty. An odd prank. Then he saw the flash drive taped to the base of the back wall.
Now the American had a new name.
The drive included a two-page letter from the American with instructions on making contact and his demands for payment, as well as a brief explanation of his motives. I know you may question my sincerity . . . The letter and a Russian translation were included in the file Petrov held. The man wanted two hundred fifty thousand dollars a month, paid into a Panamanian bank account controlled by a Cyprus-based trust.
On the surface, the money explained Grad’s betrayal. But he had millions of dollars already. As Petrov read the file, he decided the money was a smoke screen. The American’s real motive was jealousy.
Petrov didn’t understand jealousy. What difference did anyone else’s success or failure make? But then, Petrov had realized long before that he didn’t have feelings the way other people did. He wasn’t exactly a psychopath. He wasn’t inclined toward cruelty. But he’d suffered no remorse about shedding his identity and taking on another. He didn’t miss his parents or friends or his old life. If he had to give up this new life, he wouldn’t miss it either. And though he’d never killed, he was sure he could if the SVR ordered him to do so.
Julianna rested a hand on his leg. The move would have been flirty from another woman. “You don’t believe?”
Petrov read the man’s letter again, decided he did. Not because of what the American said. But because he had set out his motives in bullet points. Such inartfulness could only be real. “I do. Anyway, what I think doesn’t matter. You want me to run him, I’ll run him.”
On that score, the orders were clear. Petrov would give up his other agents. From this point forward, Grad would be his only responsibility. Proof the SVR believed in this man.
“It’s the oldest story, what he’s doing,” she said. “Read the Bible.”
“You know what the Bible says about women like you?” He pushed her hand off his leg.
“You’re a cold fish, Anton.”
“Who’s Anton? My name’s Adam.” Petrov was already looking forward to this job.
Grad’s letter had set the time and place for their first meeting. Prince William Forest, a Virginia park close by the FBI training center at Quantico. Petrov disliked the location. What if an overzealous trainee went for an early morning hike? But he couldn’t change it. So on a Tuesday, just after sunrise, he parked and made his way into the forest. The ground was level, and the trail easy to follow, but after a few minutes he found himself huffing. Julianna was right. Too many long nights stuffing himself with Oreos as he sat typing code on his laptop. He promised himself he would start to work out, lose his gut. Tomorrow.
The American was where he’d promised, the third tree marked with a yellow blaze along Quantico Creek. Petrov stopped beside him. He was trim, in his mid-fifties, salt-and-pepper hair. The photos in the file hadn’t conveyed his power. Even standing still, he radiated a coiled energy.
“Do you know where I can find the green trail?” Petrov said.
The man hesitated, like he might pretend not to understand. Though he must know he had no choice.
“Down this way. I can show you.”
After a few minutes, the trail opened into a small picnic area, empty now. They sat at a splintery table, staring at each other, as the jays and finches twittered around them. Petrov couldn’t deny this moment thrilled him. He would have to establish control over a man who was used to giving orders rather than taking them. Build trust with a man who was betraying his country.
He started simply. “We’ve accepted your offer.” He unfolded a paper from his pocket, slipped it across the table. An alphanumeric string, nothing else. “Your account is set, as you’ve asked. Five hundred thousand in it to start. Another two hundred fifty thousand on the tenth of every month. It’s yours without restriction, but we recommend you tell us if you want to bring it back here. We can help.” In fact, the SVR had no plans to let the American touch the money. He would trap himself if he tried. If he made a fuss, the SVR would find a way to move it for him.
“I don’t.”
The answer confirmed Petrov’s belief that the money wasn’t the real motive. “Next. As a rule, we’ll contact each other electronically. Nothing fancy. Your people look hard at encrypted communications anywhere near Washington. The better the encryption, the harder they look. We’ll use standard Gmail and Hotmail accounts with simple codes, keywords you won’t forget. When we have information to pass, we can use short-range encrypted wireless links. Or flash drives. Simple handoffs—you leave it in a newspaper at a Starbucks, I pick it up. No cutouts.”
“That seems risky. Physical handoffs.”
“You know how many people have clearances at your level in Washington? Tens of thousands. Active surveillance is reserved for suspects. You’re not a suspect. You’re not going to be. From now on, you don’t contact our people in Washington. Never. Not for any reason. I handle you. If you feel pressure, if someone’s watching, something’s wrong, you tell me. We’ll figure out what to do. If you come across something important, time-sensitive, we have to know right now? Me again.”
“Don’t want to share the credit?”
“You’re too valuable to be run through our usual channels.”
“Is this the part where you tell me how important I am? I’m helping both our countries?”
“Would that make you happy?”
The man smiled. “What if I call, you don’t answer? What if I wake up one day, see on CNN that the FBI has arrested you?”
“The FBI doesn’t know I exist. They won’t unless you tell them. But—” Petrov slid across another piece of paper. “Two emergency phone numbers, two email contacts.” One email and one number went to Julianna in Madrid, though the American didn’t need to know her name. The other two were monitored continuously in Moscow. “A simple code for emergencies. Even if I’m gone, we can have you out of the United States in four hours.”
“And spend the rest of my life in Russia? I don’t think so.”
Petrov didn’t bother to argue. If the man was confronted with what the FSB and SVR called trudnyy put’—the hard way—he might reconsider. Until then, better to steer him from such unpleasant thoughts. “Memorize this paper and destroy it.”
The man stared at the paper for a minute and then pushed it back.
“You’re sure you’ll remember.”
“It’s only my life.”
“Tell me, then.”
The man did. Perfectly. “Now, do I have the honor of knowing your name?”
“Adam Petersen.”
“You can do better than that.”
Petrov slid over his Maryland driver’s license.
“This is real?”
“Come to Clarksburg, you’ll see where I live.”
The American handed back the license. “Why show me that? No diplo protection for you, my friend. If I’m fake, you’ve just given yourself up.”
“If you’re fake, there’s a hundred FBI agents watching us. And I wouldn’t get back to my car anyway. Do I look like I have the skills to hide in the forest?”
The man grinned. “I thought Russians were tough.”
“Besides, you’re not fake.”
“No I’m not. But suppose they catch me? Aren’t you worried I’ll give you up?”
“I trust you to protect me.”
Petrov saw his words land. They both knew he was voluntarily sharing the risk the American faced. With those last two sentences, he had jump-started a relationship that normally took years to build.
“Fine. You handle me. Any other rules?”
“Don’t be greedy. For information, I mean. Let it come. If we need something specific, we’ll ask. But don’t start poking at things that never mattered to you before.”
“Adam. I didn’t know you cared.”
After that first meeting, Petrov and Grad developed a routine. The SVR was wise enough not to burn the American by pressing too hard. The man was in an unusual position. He wasn’t a case officer, so he didn’t have access to individual agents. He would have raised suspicions if he pushed for details of ongoing operations.
But he had latitude to demand after-action reports, as well as top-level analyses and the secret appendixes that detailed the raw intelligence behind them. Not just about Russia. All over the world. The topline assessments were valuable, but the appendixes were the real prize. They provided the specific intelligence sources supporting the verdicts.
Even with his security clearance, Grad had to read them in secure rooms. An agency minder checked whatever notes he’d made before he could leave. But as he’d said, Grad had an excellent memory. In his first big coup, he’d helped the FSB find spyware the NSA had planted in its computers. A few months later, he told the Kremlin that the CIA’s Moscow Station was stepping up its recruitment efforts, including several specific targets.
Petrov met Grad once every three months or so. They got along. The American was brisk and businesslike. Petrov mirrored his attitude. He didn’t ask for personal information or interrogate Grad about how he was feeling. Petrov felt those questions might only cause the American to reconsider his decisions. The man seemed content with the arrangement. The money piled up in his bank account month by month. He never mentioned it, and Petrov knew he hadn’t tried to take any out.
Julianna hadn’t told Petrov of Russia’s long-term plans for the American, or even if it had any. But a few months before, she had ordered Petrov to find out what the CIA, FBI, and NSA knew about the SVR’s operations in the United States. Aside from hacking or other cybercrime, do the agencies fear that Russia is planning attacks on the United States homeland? Are the FBI or DHS tracking Russian teams on American soil? Does the CIA have a retaliatory plan if the United States finds out that Russia has attacked its citizens?
Petrov passed along the questions. Twelve hours later, Grad signaled, the first time he had ever asked for an off-schedule meeting. They met the next day at a long-term parking lot near Dulles, a scorching summer afternoon.
“Nice car.” Petrov hadn’t seen the Challenger before.
“It’s all right. What’s this new list, Adam?”
“What they want, they want. They don’t tell me why.”
Grad stared at Petrov with hollow-point blue eyes. “Then put me in touch with someone who can.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Don’t play dumb. It doesn’t suit you. These questions—the only reason to ask them is if your people are planning something here.”
Grad was right, of course. “Maybe.”
“Not what I signed up for.”
Petrov’s turn to stare. Did the American really think he could pick his assignments? He belonged to the SVR now. Petrov needed to make him understand without saying so.
“You don’t want to answer these, don’t. I’ll tell them.”
“Then what?”
“Probably nothing.” As vague as possible. Not even a threat.
The American nodded as if the reality of their relationship had hit him for the first time.
“We’re not friends, our countries,” Petrov said. “You knew this when you signed up.” He leaned across the front seat, put a finger in the older man’s shoulder. “It’s why you came to us in the first place.”
Under the hood, the big engine hummed and ate gasoline. Through the vents, the air conditioner blasted an arctic jet stream. Global warming wasn’t even a dream in this car. Petrov sat back and waited.
“Yes,” the man finally said.
“So don’t pretend you care now. Whatever we do, it’s what you want.”
Petrov knew he was taking a chance pushing the American this way. Grad was breathing hard, like he’d run one of those marathons he liked. He reached across Petrov, opened the door. “Out.”
“Think carefully—”
“Out.”
The hot soft pavement sucked at Petrov’s sneakers as he watched the Challenger wheel away. He cursed himself for overreaching. He’d overestimated the American. The man wasn’t ready to face the extent of his betrayal.
Driving home, Petrov realized how much trouble he might face. Grad might demand a new controller. Anger and pride might even spur him to walk, figuring the SVR had too much invested in him to burn him. In that case, Julianna and everyone else would make sure the blame stuck to Petrov. The SVR would order him back to Moscow. It might even try him for dereliction of duty.
He wondered when he would have to admit to Julianna what had happened, decided to give himself a week. He waited six miserable days before his burner phone buzzed him awake. A blocked number.
“Did you tell your bosses I told you to get lost? Bet you didn’t.” Pause. “It’s okay. What you said, you were right. I’ll get what you asked for.” Then he was gone.
Yet the answers that Grad eventually passed hardly seemed worth the trouble. The agencies didn’t think that Russia would risk a full-scale operation in the United States, given the risk of blowback. They thought more hacking was the most likely strategy. Petrov sent along the information, waited, heard nothing more. The months ticked by, a new year began.
Then: Dallas.
Petrov hadn’t known the quiet American suburbanites around him could be so furious. The morning after the attacks, he saw three white guys screaming at the Arab clerk who ran the 7-Eleven on Perry Road: Go home, we’ve had enough.
Lived in Maryland all my life, the man said.
Not anymore. One reached out and slapped him.
These Americans wanted blood.
Petrov wondered if his people had been involved with the attack. Before the Russian presidential election in 2000, bombs killed three hundred people in Moscow and other cities. The Kremlin blamed Chechen terrorists. But most observers, then and now, believed the FSB had carried out the bombings. The service wanted to make sure that its preferred candidate—who was running on a law-and-order platform—would win the election. Intelligence agencies called such operations, carried out by one country but blamed on another, false flag attacks. And if Russian security forces would kill Russians that way, they would certainly kill Americans.
But a false flag attack on United States soil risked huge blowback. The move was too risky if Russia’s only goal was to rile Americans against Muslim terrorism. Anyway, the attackers in Dallas were obviously genuine jihadis. Petrov didn’t see how Russia could have found them, much less given them orders.
Then he saw Senator Birman’s speech in Nashville. A guess at what his masters might be planning came to him. The next morning, he found a message from Julianna ordering a meeting with Grad. With a new list of questions. Petrov nodded as he read them over. More evidence supporting his theory.
Unfortunately, Grad was on a hunting trip in Texas. They couldn’t meet until the following Monday, more than a week after the attack.
But it had passed, and here they were, under the National Harbor Casino.
Classical music, dark and heavy with violins, rang from the speakers. Petrov didn’t know the composer. The man in the driver’s seat jabbed at the dashboard touch screen until the violins were a whisper.
“Adam,” the man said . . .
“Colonel,” Petrov said.
Colonel Eric Birman (Retired). Decorated veteran of the Special Forces. Chief of staff for his cousin Senator Paul Birman. American hero.
Spy for Russia.
“What couldn’t wait?”
“Your cousin’s speech.”
Petrov handed Eric the list of questions from Julianna. Eric studied it in silence for two long minutes, handed it back. Petrov didn’t need to ask if he’d memorized them.
“I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
“All right. One other question. Your cousin—is he going to run for president, do you think?” Petrov would need to handle this conversation carefully. If Eric Birman had become a spy out of jealousy over his cousin’s success, hearing that the Russians were hoping to make Paul president wouldn’t improve his mood.
Birman turned up the music and they sat in silence.
Finally, Petrov turned off the radio. “So, yes?”
“He’d run for emperor, if he could.”
“You should have been Russian. You hate with a majesty.”
“Maybe he even thinks he can win.”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
Birman drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.
“Imagine. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away—California. My cousin was sowing his oats. Fervently. He was twenty-six, twenty-seven. He got a girl pregnant. Sixteen. Henry tried to take care of it—”
“His father?”
“Yes, Adam, his dear old dad. The original Senator Birman. Uncle Henry. Sent lawyers to get her to, you know, terminate. Offered a million bucks. She had the baby. Papa don’t preach. Signed a confidentiality agreement. I think we pay her five thousand a month, sixty grand a year.”
“But if it’s stayed secret for so long—”
“Running for your daddy’s Senate seat is one thing. Hometown boy, hometown papers. You go for the White House, reporters tear open your whole life. They’ll find her.”
“The confidentiality—”
“Even if she sticks to it, it doesn’t cover the kid. It can’t. He wasn’t born when it was signed, and he couldn’t sign away those rights. She wasn’t supposed to tell him. But if she hasn’t, she will now. Wouldn’t you tell Junior that your father is gonna be president of the United States?”
“Can she prove it?”
“You mean, was there a DNA test? I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. The kid looks just like him. And there may have been another girl, too. If there was, she took the money and had an abortion, which is why I can’t be so sure, but Bobby—”
“Who?”
“Robert. My other cousin. Paul’s brother. He hinted about it a couple times. Back in the day.”
“But why would Paul run, then?”
“You don’t understand how the world looks to my cousin. He’ll convince himself it won’t come out, that no one will believe her, that maybe the kid isn’t his after all, that people will look past it. But they won’t. People in this country, they’ll put up with a lot from their politicians, but not this. It’s not just that he knocked up a teenage girl, it’s that he never took responsibility. So you can tell your bosses that if they’re hoping I’m going to ride Paul to the White House, they’d better come up with a Plan B.”
“I see.” Petrov saw something else, something he would keep to himself. If reporters didn’t find out about Birman’s love child on their own, Eric would tip them. He couldn’t abide the idea of his cousin becoming president.
“Good. I’m glad. My turn, Adam. The thing in Dallas, was that yours?”
“I don’t know. Truly.”
“I know, you’re just the water boy. But you know your people. What do you think?”
“It’s possible.”
“Because I’ll tell you, the agency, the FBI, they’re freaking. They can’t figure the C-4 or how Shakir got radicalized. And they think more’s coming. But like I said, if the point is to get Paul elected, then you’re killing people for no reason.”
“I understand.”
“Anything else?” Eric jabbed at the touch screen and the violins came up. “Otherwise, I have to go. Since the speech, things are crazy. He picked up two million Twitter followers in a week. Say this for my cousin: He’s the man of the moment.”