The Days to Come

by Tom Rosenstiel

Genres: Crime Fiction; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

A masterful political thriller thrusts veteran Washington fixers Peter Rena and Randi Brooks into a dark world of cyberattacks, a new era of foreign espionage, and a risky, classified plan to save the world from environmental disaster.

Billionaire entrepreneur David Traynor has big dreams for fixing a broken government in his first term as president of the United States. In the months before his inauguration, he’s developed daring and, in some cases, secret strategies to solve the climate crisis, force Congress to work again, and rebuild America’s economy—and that’s just the beginning. Everyone in the capital is scrambling to adapt to the new disruptor in chief’s bold agenda, though many, both at home and abroad, also want to see Traynor and his steely vice president, Wendy Upton, fail. Unsure of whom he can trust, Traynor intends to turn to an unusual group of people to advise him, including the savvy and sometimes ruthless DC fixers Peter Rena and Randi Brooks.

Though he is at the height of his career, Rena finds his world in chaos. His personal life is a mess; he wonders if his work—saving powerful people from their mistakes—has become too cynical. When malicious, untraceable cyberattacks related to his past start seeping from the dark corners of the internet, Rena’s doubts overwhelm him. Then an unpredictable tragedy throws the country into crisis, and he must come out of his stupor.

If Rena wants to help the new president salvage American politics, he will first have to reckon with his own demons and come to grips with a world far different from the one he once believed in. With the government and the country polarized and on the cusp of enormous change, Tom Rosenstiel’s The Days to Come is a clever, gripping thriller and a cogent meditation on how to heal a divided country.

Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Release date: November 23, 2021

Publisher: Ecco

Print pages: 352

Sample

1

ASPEN, COLORADO

Wednesday 16 December

PETER RENA

The quarrel started in the hotel. Now it was continuing in the car.

“That is exactly what you said, Peter. You should listen to yourself.”

Peter Rena felt like a swimmer knocked backward by the surf, head suddenly underwater, feet thrashing above him. Vic was right. That is what he’d said. He’d forgotten—not quite believing he had said something so thoughtless—and then denied it.

Vic was staring straight ahead, driving. Now she turned to look at him.

Her eyes, the color of smoke flecked with gold, were the first thing Peter had noticed about Victoria Madison when they met three years ago, the first thing about her he had fallen in love with. Now they were filled with accusation.

“You need to say something, Peter. This is not a time for one of your deep silences.”

But Rena didn’t know what to say. His mind was flooded, the swimmer scrambling to regain purchase. The woman he loved had just asked for his true feelings. Why did he not know them?

A few minutes earlier they’d been laughing. They were at the hotel getting ready and Vic was talking about how strange the evening was going to be. She was looking in the mirror, putting on earrings, using her free hand to pull her hair away from her face. Her hair, which was straight and dirty blond and which she always wore short, reminded him of summer.

Her reflection in the mirror looked back at him. He needed to make his mind up about something, she said. About whether he had to work tomorrow or would spend the day with her. She had upended plans to be here, and she wanted to talk about something.

Tomorrow? He’d forgotten to tell Vic: the vice president-elect wanted to meet with him.

Rather than answering, he’d tried to lighten the mood. “It isn’t fair to give me ultimatums when you look so good.”

It was a joke, but Vic’s expression had frozen.

“Make up your mind for once in your life,” she’d said sharply.

Her vehemence had surprised him.

“Babe, I don’t understand what the problem is.”

That was the truth, but he wasn’t thinking—and in an instant this had become serious. She had never given him an ultimatum, not once in all the time they’d known each other.

IN THE CAR ON THE WAY TO DINNER VIC WANTED TO TALK MORE about why she was angry.

“This isn’t just about tomorrow.”

A year earlier Vic had asked him to move to California to be with her, or she could move to Washington with him. This afternoon she’d brought up having children again. He had missed that cue, too. And tonight he had made a joke about ultimatums.

He watched himself being stupid, hurting her.

She was crying as she drove. “Go to hell, Peter.”

This was Vic, who never lost her temper, who helped everyone else manage their moods, who Randi Brooks, his friend and business partner, said made everyone around her better at life.

Rena was supposed to be good in tight spots; that’s how he made his living, helping people in trouble. A cool head and a slow heartbeat, even in combat. But he was this person, too. A fuddled man in a car having a fight with the woman he loved, understanding nothing and making it worse.

He and Vic had flown in that morning from different ends of the country, Rena from Washington and Vic from California. They had come to Aspen for dinner at the home of the next president of the United States. The evening would be “a small personal and professional gathering,” they’d been told. “About a dozen people. A semi-working dinner.” The invitation had come only a few days before, a surprise.

Rena only glancingly knew president-elect David Traynor, the tech entrepreneur and Democrat who a month ago had won the presidency on an improbable bipartisan ticket. He and Randi had done work for Traynor’s running mate, a Republican senator from Arizona named Wendy Upton. Someone had threatened to destroy Upton if she accepted Traynor’s supposedly secret offer to join his ticket. Rena, Brooks, and their small consulting firm of background investigators found the person behind the threat and ended it. The episode had probably pushed Upton toward accepting the offer to run—not away from it.

In the months that followed, Upton by most estimates helped tip the razor-thin election to her running mate. While Americans wanted change, a good many had doubts about Traynor—a new-economy billionaire turned populist outsider—just as they did about his Republican opponent, a charismatic, ultraconservative war hero from Michigan named Jeff Scott. Having to choose between two macho disruptors, a growing number of voters found something reassuring about the shy, tough, western woman senator who crossed party lines. In the odd alchemy that happens between TV screen and voter, Wendy Upton made the daring David Traynor feel more trustworthy.

The mysterious dinner invitation was not the only odd element of the day. There was also the magazine story. A Washington policy publication called The National had published a lengthy profile that morning about Rena and Brooks as Washington fixers. The headline had been embarrassing: WASHINGTON’S SECRET PRIVATE EYES: THE ODD COUPLE BOTH PARTIES TURN TO WHEN THINGS GO WRONG. Peter and Randi had only cooperated because The National would have done the story without them—and it was safer with them. But the article struck a sensitive chord with Vic. A year ago, in the middle of the whole Upton probe, she’d asked Peter flat out: How can you keep doing what you do when politics has become so grotesque? He had answered in a way he thought at the time persuasive. All the things wrong in Washington were a reason to stay, he said, not leave.

In the year since, he saw more clearly their relationship had drifted into a state of suspended animation. They talked every day, saw each other often—one or the other making the trip across the country each month or so. But they had fallen into a pattern avoiding all difficult questions, until tonight. Vic was thirty-eight and Rena forty-three. It was time they decided where they were headed.

The magazine article talked about Rena’s “detective’s intuition,” about how—when he developed a theory about a case—he could fall into deep silences, pondering what the article called “thought experiments”: What if? His mind would drift into the if, and he would mull by himself, until all the pieces in a case were examined against the possibility of the if.

Detective’s intuition? Vic was the most important person in his life. And he had no idea what she was thinking. He was the master of oblivion.

What was frightening him? Failing at marriage a second time? Failing Vic?

She had stopped crying. “I told myself I wasn’t going to bring this up tonight,” she said. “I was going to wait until tomorrow.” She wasn’t looking at him. “I’ve started to see someone else.”

Rena thought he hadn’t heard her right.

Not Vic. She wouldn’t do that. He tried to process the words. He looked through the windshield at the dark night. There was little moonlight and clouds masked the peaks of the jagged snow-covered mountains, as if the tops had been cleaved off by the sky. What remained looked like white elephants.

His phone rang.

Don’t answer it.

Then a text message. Then the phone rang again.

He stole a glimpse at Vic. She was reading his mind, sensing his panic, understanding everything better than he did. She was still angry.

Then came another text. “Look at it,” Vic said.

It was from Arvid Lupsa, one of the computer experts in Rena and Brooks’s office. Urgent. Read this! Something from the social platform Y’all Post had been copied into the message:

Peter Rena is a liar and a fraud. He is a wife beater and a baby killer. He is no one to judge others. Or investigate anyone.

I have the proof.

It was signed by someone using the screen name Out of the Past.

“I’m sorry,” Rena said to Vic, “for being an idiot.”