The Ten Consequences of Lord Atlas

It begins when Suzanne gives Garrick a birthday gift. Troubled by his growing obsession with Ayn Rand, she writes a satirical libertarian manifesto that pushes his ideas to their limits.

Nearly thirty years later, a former Navy SEAL climbs aboard a superyacht in the Caribbean and kills him.

The First Consequence

Garrick has a hundred copies of Suzanne’s birthday gift printed, and the little book begins selling around Cambridge and on college campuses. One copy reaches William Wharton, Garrick’s old college roommate, the “Little Billy” he has known for years. Billy takes the Liberation Manifesto seriously and brings it to his father, a Wall Street man connected to a group of wealthy older Rand devotees.

They have been carrying versions of these ideas around since the 1950s, and now somebody has handed them a document they think can become the basis of an actual movement. They want to remain anonymous. They are also willing to put up serious money—fifty million dollars in seed capital. Garrick will run the organization. They call it the Freedom Society. Suzanne’s joke now has an institution behind it.

The Second Consequence

By the time Suzanne and Garrick are together again at his house in Morro Bay nearly thirty years later, the Freedom Society has grown far beyond the little book that first circulated around Cambridge. Garrick is rich. He's started a robotics company with Little Billy. The Liberation Manifesto is treated as his work, and Suzanne has never claimed authorship. She has spent those years working as a research scientist on classified Pentagon projects while quietly feeding Garrick promising young scientists whose work might help him build the cyberweapon he wants. Most of them have no idea what he intends to do with it.

Suzanne has gone along because she still loves him, even as the joke she wrote for his birthday has become something she barely recognizes. At Morro Bay, after they make love, Garrick leaves. She later finds a note in her suitcase telling her that he is going underground and that from now on she will deal only with Little Billy, now calling himself Eurynomos. Garrick tells her: Don't love me. Love the revolution.

Suzanne is furious. She puts on a red dress, makes a Campari spritz, sets the note on fire in an ashtray, pleasures herself, and pisses on it. The woman who wrote the Liberation Manifesto now decides she is going to destroy the man who built his revolution around it.

The Third Consequence

Years earlier, after Suzanne had taken the job at the Pentagon, she decided to meet with a young graduate student named Laura Cavendish, one of Garrick’s most brilliant students. Garrick wanted Laura involved in the work that would eventually feed his cyberweapon. Laura wanted nothing to do with him. One day over coffee with Suzanne, she talked about the boy she had left behind in San Diego, Carson McCready, who had joined the Navy after high school. Suzanne remembered the name.

After Suzanne turns against Garrick, Little Billy calls with an assignment. The Freedom Society is setting up a telemarketing operation inside the San Diego County Jail, staffed by hardened convicts. They need a manager who will do the job, take the paycheck and look the other way when things start getting strange. The inmates will eventually be made to look like a secret Islamic terrorist cell operating inside the jail. When Garrick’s planned cyberattack begins moving through computer networks connected to federal systems, those prisoners will take the blame. The government will look helpless while basic functions fail, giving the Freedom Society exactly the argument it wants for privatizing government.

Suzanne is supposed to find a stooge. Instead she remembers Laura’s old boyfriend and starts looking into him. Carson McCready became a decorated Navy SEAL and platoon leader. He also got into hot water after one of his men killed a Somali civilian and powerful people tried to exonerate one Davis Glover, the SEAL who committed the war crime. Turns out Glover was the son of a Kentucky bourbon baron, the fraternity brother of the Kentucky senator who wanted to cover up Glover's crime. Carson refused to play along. That was all Suzanne needed to know. Carson McCready was her guy, the man she thought might blow the whole thing apart.

The Fourth Consequence

Carson McCready arrives at the San Diego County Jail thinking he got lucky. He needs a job. His bills are piling up, and a woman he met by chance at Dog Beach steered him toward a telemarketing operation run by Johnny Petit. Carson has no idea that Suzanne paid to put him there, or that Petit has delayed the normal background check because a mysterious woman told him to. He walks into a room full of convicted felons and within minutes tells Petit to leave him alone with them.

Carson looks around the room and sees something familiar from his years training SEAL recruits. These men have no team. He moves the chairs into a circle, strips away their prison names and gang identities, and makes them introduce themselves to one another. A Black inmate named Terrell Smith ends up shaking hands with a white skinhead whose real name also happens to be Terrell Smith. Carson has to keep himself from crying. For a moment he sees his old platoon sitting there. He calls it the Circle of Trust and gets back to selling. Money time.

Suzanne had counted on Carson becoming a problem for Garrick. She could not have known what Carson would do with a telemarketing job. He is Carson being Carson. Carson turns their telemarketing operation into the San Diego Promise, which raises scholarship money for kids growing up in the same neighborhoods that sent some of these men to jail, and organizes a charity football game against a semipro team. The San Diego Prisoners against the All-Americans. Garrick’s conspiracy needed a manager who would look the other way. Suzanne put Carson McCready in the room.

Then Richard Heller, the big boss overseeing the prison system, tells Carson the prison’s tech people have found something strange in the computer network. Someone has been probing it for weaknesses, the kind of activity that can precede a cyberattack, and the probes began after Carson was hired. Heller does not accuse him. Carson files the warning away.

Later, at his old bar in Torrey Pines, the bartender tells Carson that Laura Cavendish has been asking about him. She is back in Solana Beach. Carson has thought about Laura for nearly thirty years, and now he has a reason to find her that he can pretend is practical. Laura went to MIT. Her field is AI and cyberwarfare. She would know what those probes might mean.

The Fifth Consequence

By now Carson has started receiving anonymous texts from someone who seems to know far too much about him, the prison job, and what may be coming. The messages tell him he has been set up and warn of a cyberattack. Richard Heller has already told him that someone is probing the jail’s computer system. Carson takes all of this to Laura.

Laura has her own reason to be disturbed. At MIT, Garrick tried to pull her into his circle and took an unsettling interest in the cyberwarfare technology she was developing. One night she and Carson go back to Mount Soledad, where they used to hang out as teenagers, and begin fitting the pieces together. Garrick wants to cripple the government. The jail computers connect to networks far beyond the prison. Laura knows the kind of weapon that could move through those networks because Garrick once wanted hers.

Then Johnny Petit tells Carson to come in late the next morning. There will be another security update. Carson knows they just had one. Laura receives her own anonymous warning that Nessie, the cyberbot she created years earlier, has been compromised. The possibility they worked out on Mount Soledad suddenly looks imminent. Laura builds Baby, a countermeasure designed to stop the attack they now believe Garrick is about to launch.

The Sixth Consequence

Baby works. The cyberattack Garrick spent years preparing collapses before it can spread into the government networks. Laura knows what that means: Nessie was behind the attack, and Garrick was behind Nessie because he stole it from Laura.  For Carson and Laura, the night at the jail is a victory. A temporary one.

Thirty thousand feet above the country, William Wharton gets a call from Garrick and diverts the Freedom Society’s Gulfstream to Nassau. He takes a sea shuttle out to Garrick’s yacht. Garrick is waiting under a canopy with iced vodka and soda, furious that years of planning have gone down the drain. The original plan depended on blaming the cyberattack on the supposed Islamic cell inside the San Diego County Jail, making the FBI look hopelessly incompetent while the Freedom Society pushed more government functions into private hands. There is no cyberattack to blame on anyone now. Garrick wants what he calls a “shot over the bow.” William hears something new in him. They had agreed to avoid violence. Garrick is tired of waiting. “I feel Lord Atlas in my soul,” he tells William.

William leaves Nassau disturbed yet knows who he has to meet. In Bethesda he meets Agent X, a former FBI director and an old Freedom Society ally. Garrick wants a CPD event—Creep, Penetrate, Destroy—at Carson’s charity football game, where ten to fifteen thousand people may be gathered. Agent X can provide the men, transportation and explosives. The attack will still be laid at the feet of the fabricated Islamic cell. Agent X names the operation Liberation Day, after a passage Suzanne wrote decades earlier in the Liberation Manifesto.

The game Carson created to raise scholarship money for prisoners and their children now has a bomb aimed at it.

The Seventh Consequence

While Garrick’s people are moving toward the football game from one direction, Carson has gone back into his own life.

Late one night he calls Michael in Flagstaff because he wants to hear his son’s voice. Michael tells him about Dirk, his mother’s new boyfriend, who has been taking him shooting and filling his head with talk about weapons, patriotism and military service. Carson hears the warning signs immediately. Michael doesn’t. Then he asks the question that sends Carson onto a plane the next morning:

“Dad, did you ever think a guy like Dirk is the real deal and you’re the one talking bullshit?”

Carson goes to Flagstaff expecting an overbearing boyfriend with lousy judgment. He finds a man wearing the costume of the life Carson actually lived. Dirk never served, but he talks like a warrior, surrounds himself with guns and patriotism, and has begun pulling Michael toward a version of the country Carson hardly recognizes. Carson sees his fifteen-year-old son confusing performance with experience, and he wants him out of Dirk’s orbit.

The charity game gives Carson a reason to bring Michael to San Diego. He wants his son beside him while the San Diego Prisoners play the All-Americans to raise scholarship money for children growing up in the same conditions that helped send some of those men to jail. Michael agrees to come.

Carson has no idea that, on the other strand of the story, Garrick’s people have already chosen that same game for Liberation Day.

The Eighth Consequence

The bomb explodes just as Carson turns to celebrate with Black Terrell. He hears a blast louder than a thousand fighter jets taking off at Miramar and watches bodies fly through the air. An adult tumbles across his vision like a stick. A little girl has been cut in half. Black Terrell bends over White Terrell, begging him to wake up because they won the football game.

Carson wakes in a military hospital with his arm and hand badly injured and pain running through his back and legs. His first question is about Michael. He expects his son to walk through the curtain so they can get out of there, drive the Coast Highway and have lunch. The doctor tells him Michael died in the bombing. Carson rips the line from his arm and tries to leave. He makes it as far as the floor.

The story Garrick needed is already taking hold outside the hospital. An unidentified black-ops squad has taken the surviving San Diego Prisoners into military custody. Black Terrell, Antonio and the others are blamed for the bombing and shipped toward Guantánamo Bay as Islamic terrorists. Their constitutional rights are suspended. The FBI is blamed for allowing the attack to happen. Legislation is already being prepared to dismantle the Bureau and replace it with a private security corporation. Garrick lost his cyberattack and got much of what he wanted anyway.

After Michael’s funeral on Mount Soledad, Carson meets Amy Watson at a donut shop in Lemon Grove. She has gone undercover because parts of the Justice Department and FBI are compromised. She traces the conspiracy from Garrick to William Wharton and into the government itself, but she cannot prove enough of it in court. Amy wants Carson to join an unofficial team. Carson refuses. He spent his military life acting under authority. Now his son is dead and the authorities themselves are part of what he is fighting.

“From now on, I work for myself.”

Suzanne, meanwhile, goes back to Morro Bay and walks into Garrick’s house unannounced. Garrick wants her back. He talks about what they have accomplished and the civilization he believes they are building. The bombing has pushed him further into the world Suzanne once invented as satire. He is talking seriously now about Saint Ayn, Saint Garrick, Lord Atlas, the Church of Living Capitalism. He refers to Michael’s death as an opportunity. Suzanne tells him Carson McCready is going to hunt him down and kill him.

Before leaving, she asks to use the bathroom. Garrick still keeps his phone on the bookshelf in the library. Suzanne takes it with her and tries his old passwords. AYN fails. ATLAS fails. GALT fails. Then she types SUZY. The phone opens. She connects it to another phone with a military-grade high-speed wire and copies Garrick’s data. Ten minutes later she has a clone. From then on, when she texts Agent X or one of Garrick’s operators, the message can appear to have come from Garrick himself.

Carson leaves California. He tells his mother he is going to Montana and takes Diego north, needing distance and time to figure out what comes next. Laura has disappeared too. Two days after the bombing she flew to the Galápagos Islands, frightened that the government might come for her because of her work on Baby. Carson manages to send her an encoded email telling her he is heading toward Montana. He hopes she understands it. He has no way of knowing whether she will come.

He gets as far as Ely, Nevada. Still hurt from the explosion, drinking cheap Irish whiskey in a Motel 6, Carson borrows a laptop and tries to locate Laura. Diego is with him. He has no weapon.

Agent X has sent a former Army Ranger to kill him.

The assassin has followed Carson through Nevada in a black SUV. He expects an easy job. Carson is an injured former SEAL traveling alone. When Carson fails to stop along the highway, the assassin follows him to the motel and pays Emilio, the young brother of the desk clerk, a hundred dollars to knock on Carson’s door. Emilio thinks he is helping an old friend surprise him.

Diego starts growling.

Carson looks through a crack in the curtain and sees the man behind Emilio holding something out of sight. He knows what will happen when the door opens. Emilio will die first. Then Carson. Then Diego.

Carson has Diego’s baseball bat. He cuts eyeholes in a pillowcase, pulls it over his head, adds a beanie, shuts Diego in the bathroom and turns off the lights. Then the barefoot, wounded ghost creature kicks open the Motel 6 door and comes at a professional assassin with a wooden bat. The assassin loses the gun before he can fire. The fight lasts less than twenty seconds.

When it is over, Emilio is shaking under a tree and the man Agent X sent to kill Carson is dying on the ground. Carson tells Emilio to protect himself and his sister and never tell anyone what he saw.

“This, what you saw here tonight—it’s the beginning.”

The Ninth Consequence

Carson makes it to Montana with Laura, but the peace he wanted in Ely doesn’t last long. A month after the bombing, he tells her he needs to find Suzanne Dreyfus. Laura agrees. Too much of what has happened leads back to Suzanne, and she may be the only person who knows where Garrick has gone.

Laura writes to her. Suzanne answers and gives Carson a number.

It is the first time Carson and Suzanne speak directly. Carson already suspects she was behind the anonymous warnings and perhaps much more. Suzanne knows about the assassin in Ely. She knows about his connection to Laura. When Carson asks whether she sent the texts warning him about the cyberattack, she dodges the question.

Then she tells him where Garrick will be.

Late August. His yacht, Liberty, near Nassau. Garrick will be there with members of the Freedom Society and some of the people who helped him carry out what happened in San Diego. Suzanne names politicians, the FBI director, Agent X. She also names Senator Graybill of Kentucky, the man who protected Davis Glover after Somalia and helped end Carson’s Navy career. The gathering is being billed as a celebration.

Carson leaves Montana.

He has spent three years trying to live as a former SEAL. Now he becomes one again, except there is no Navy behind him and no team going with him. An old SEAL friend in Virginia helps him get the equipment and a boat. Even that arrangement has been penetrated. The woman hired to take Carson out to Liberty has also been hired to kill him. Carson discovers the setup, kills her and takes the Zodiac himself.

While Carson is getting ready to go aboard, Laura hacks Liberty’s surveillance system from Montana and learns what the celebration is really about. Garrick considers San Diego a victory. The cyberattack failed, but the CPD operation worked. The prisoners took the blame. The FBI is being dismantled. Garrick is already talking about the next attacks.

Then he goes further. Sitting aboard a hundred-million-dollar yacht with wealthy members of the Freedom Society and a former clergyman, Garrick tells them that every lasting religion needs a human story. San Diego has given Lord Atlas one.

Michael McCready.

He calls Michael the son of Lord Atlas, “the son made flesh,” a boy who gave his life on Liberation Day. The men raise their glasses and begin chanting.

“Garrick Cripps is Lord!”

“Michael, the son of God.”

Laura closes the laptop. She never tells Carson what she heard.

A few hours later Carson climbs aboard Liberty alone in the dark. Among the men he finds there is Davis Glover, now presented by Garrick as a decorated SEAL and the Freedom Society’s new head of international security. Senator Graybill is there too.

Carson kills them and keeps looking for Garrick.

He finds him hiding in the engine room. Garrick knows exactly why Carson has come. Michael, he tells him, was “unfortunate collateral damage.” Then Garrick tells Carson that Agent X has men watching Laura at the ranch in Montana. If Garrick dies, Laura dies.

Carson shoots him anyway.

He walks over to the wounded Garrick with his Navy knife and drives it into his chest.

“That’s for Michael McCready. A fifteen-year-old kid. My son.”

Then Carson removes the Trident—the ‘Budweiser,’ in SEAL slang—that he earned twenty-five years earlier, kisses it goodbye and pushes it into the wound.

“This Bud’s for you, motherfucker.”

Back on shore, Carson knows what he has done. As a SEAL, he killed under orders and under an oath. On Liberty, the authority was his alone. The government that once gave force to that oath had failed his son, imprisoned innocent men and let Garrick’s people operate from inside the law.

Carson had left his Trident in Garrick’s chest. Now he calls himself something else: “Carson McCready, citizen to nothing. Red-blooded American killer. The King of Liberty.”

The Tenth Consequence

Suzanne's story is done, or would seem to be. Garrick is dead. Carson did what he was supposed to do. Suzanne got what she wanted, or did she?

She tells herself: now I can go back to Colorado. Get the puppy she'd always wanted, the normal life she'd always hoped for. Play fucking pickleball with other upper-middle class peers in her leafy Boulder neighborhood where nothing ever really happens.

She wants a cave that opens up to another cave. Another kind of story, one oblivious to anything beyond her own private world. An enclosed life that ends with her story and nobody else's. Not Carson's. Not Laura. No fucking Manifestos. She wants mortality.

She wants to be that regular American person that Garrick had taken from her. The woman she had left behind because she had allowed a power-hungry ideologue to seduce her when she was young.

William calls her and plants a seed. A seed that could germinate into power. She's the real author of the movement after all. She could take the movement to new places that Garrick never had the imagination for.

She is genuinely torn. She goes to the kitchen, makes a drink, the same Campari spritz that began the story with anger and revenge on her mind. And now? Desire gripped her with possibility. She could become her own story, not Garrick's.

Pickleball could give her mortality. But Saint Suzanne could be immortal.

The tenth consequence of Lord Atlas?

Suzanne Dreyfus had everything she desired, but nothing she had ever hoped for.