A House Divided

by Adam Yoshida

  Blair had met "David" on a website devoted to facilitating such mutually beneficial arrangements. "David" – whose real name turned out to be Daniel Hampton – was intelligent, sophisticated, very kind, and while he was not someone who Blair would have gone home with under any other circumstances, he was handsome in his own way. Blair, tall and willowy with long blonde hair, was a beauty by any measure. Still, whatever their relative positions in the world and whatever the nature of their relationship (in her private moments Blair wondered if she was Dan's mistress or his prostitute, or if she fell into a third category altogether), Blair cared for Dan and vice-versa.

  When Dan had stepped through the door of Blair's apartment, he had appeared to be under greater stress than usual. Blair had hugged him and taken his coat and he had immediately walked into the kitchen and poured himself a drink, loosening his tie as he moved.

  Standing at her kitchen island, he downed his Scotch and set the tumbler down. Blair stepped softly towards him to kiss him. He softly met her kiss and then broke away, stepping backwards.

  "Do you have much cash?" he asked her, deathly serious.

  "I... I'm fine for money," she answered softly. They tried to avoid talking about money directly, both feeling that the subject was at least slightly tawdry under the circumstances.

  "No," he replied, "I mean actual cash. How much can you get out from the ATM?"

  "I don't know. My daily limit is $1,000 or something."

  She moved in to kiss him again. He stopped her and walked back across the room to pull something from his jacket pocket. It was a cashier's check for $9708. He handed it to her.

  "You need to cash this as soon as you can. Don't deposit it into your account. If you have more that you can withdraw immediately, do it. At least assuming that it's less than $10,000 at once. Do you understand?"

  She nodded. He stepped forward and embraced her, holding her for far longer than was the norm. In his jacket pocket, his phone continued to buzz.

  Wayne Gerber, the Secretary of the Treasury, pushed the end button on his phone and returned to the home screen to check the time. 7PM. He set the device down on his desk and looked forward for a moment before straightening his tie. After a moment's contemplation he stood up and buttoned up his suit jacket. He pushed the call button on his intercom.

  "Call the car around. I'm going home."

  The Secretary sat silently, looking out the window, through his entire drive home. The driver would later observe that this was very unusual behavior: the Secretary of the Treasury typically would spend every waking moment on his phone, either sending messages or speaking on the phone while surrounded by a group of aides. On this occasion, however, he did not speak a single word until the car pulled up to the front of his Bethesda home.

  "Miguel," he said, "thank you for everything."

  Alicia, the Secretary's wife, was surprised to see him come through the door at just after 8. As the nation's financial troubles had deepened it had become rare to see him arrive home before midnight. Often, with an eye on the Asian markets, he didn't even return home at all, spending days at a time in the Treasury building trying to cajole investors into buying up the mammoth debt that had to be issued each day in order to keep the American system functional. She had long ago given up the pretense that this was a temporary or unusual situation and so she hadn't even bothered making him dinner.

  The children – to whom their father had become more of an idea than a physical reality during his three years as a member of the Cabinet – were delighted to see their Dad.

  "Do you have your phone?" he asked Alicia.

  "Sure," she replied. "Don't you have yours?"

  "I forgot mine at the office," he replied, taking the proffered device from her hands. "I'm going to order a pizza for myself. Is it ok if the kids stay up and have a slice?"

  The pizza came in a surprisingly quick twenty minutes and together Wayne, Alicia, their six-year-old son Andre and their four-year-old daughter Julia watched "Star Wars", which was Wayne's favorite movie, but which the children had never before seen. Afterwards, Wayne and Alicia made love for the first time in months and blissfully fell asleep just before midnight.

  At a little after 2AM, Wayne got out of bed. Moving into his den, he turned on his spare computer and fired up Microsoft Word, printing out a copy of a document that he had e-mailed to himself from his government account earlier in the day. Softly, being careful not to wake Alicia or the children, he took it to the master bedroom and sat it down upon the bed.

  After leaving the bedroom, he quietly made his way to the guest bedroom where he swiftly dressed himself in the old tuxedo that he'd worn on his wedding day. It didn't quite fit and it wasn't really suitable to wear to an occasion of state, but he had never been able to bring himself to dispose of it. When that part of his task was complete, he walked out into the tool shed in the back yard. As soon as he closed the door, he retrieved the gun that he had equipped with a homemade silencer some days earlier. The internet really was a wonderful thing, he thought for a moment. Then, without further reflection, he put the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  At a little after 5, Alicia woke up and found the document.

  "I'm sorry, I tried my best," it began.

  "I'm in the tool shed in the back. Call the police and have them find me. Don't come in there yourself. Don't let the children see. I'm so sorry. I love you," it concluded.

  The children had slept through the muffled gunshot, but they awoke when Alicia screamed.

  Daniel Hampton was asleep at his Manhattan apartment when his phone rang again. As a general rule, central bankers have good reason to fear and answer early morning phone calls.

  Raul Emerson, the White House Chief of Staff, didn't bother introducing himself before he began speaking.

  "Wayne Gerber took his own life," he said in a soft but urgent voice, before morbidly adding, "with a gun in his shed."

  "What? When?" Hampton groggily asked.

  "Sometime during the night. The news hasn't gone public yet. I think that it's safe to say that it won't inspire great confidence in the marketplace today."

  "Do you need anything from me?"

  "I called," replied Emerson, "to ask the same of you. Anything that you boys in New York need – the President stands ready to provide."

  "I'll make an assessment," said Hampton, "but, frankly, the Dow goes down every time the President is up there on television these days."

  "I'll keep that in mind, Danny," replied Emerson before ending the call.

  Dan's wife, Susan, was already up and had turned the lights on.

  "I don't think I'll be home for at least a few days," Dan announced. She nodded grimly.

  "Why the fuck did he have to go and do that?" President Henry Warren said, his voice carrying with it both the early hour and a certain wariness of life.

  "He was under an awful lot of pressure, Mr. President, but in these cases we never really fully know why, do we?" Raul Emerson repeated for a third time that morning.

  "We have people over at Treasury trying to sort through the records," Alexis Jensen interjected, "and they have some preliminary thoughts."

  "Go on," said the President.

  "Well, everyone knows that the fiscal situation is horrible, especially with the worldwide economic decline. But it looks like, going through the preliminary reports that have been filtering through the Treasury and passed through the OMB and the Council of Economic Advisors over the last few days the picture has grown worse in the last few weeks in a way that has not yet been fully captured in public."

  "We're coming up close upon the debt limit..." said Jensen.

  "We all know that," snapped the President. "And we all know that the fucking Republicans making trouble about it – again – are diminishing confidence in this economy."

  "Yes, Mr. President. But what we're seeing suggested from these numbers is that, while the Treasury has been scrambling to try and keep us under the limit – moving
money from one account to another, deferring some payments – all the usual stuff – that an error has taken place."

  "What sort of 'error'?"

  "Well, it would appear – and I emphasize that it appears this way at the moment but, because of all of the factors in play, we cannot be certain, that the present debt limit was exceeded yesterday."

  "Yesterday? How the fuck could that happen?"

  "Apparently there was a math error somewhere along the way," said Jensen sheepishly.

  "Shit," the President cursed.

  "Jesus Fucking Christ," the President slammed his fists on the desk and stood up, beginning to pace the room.

  "We have a second fucking Holocaust, our soldiers fighting fucking Jihadist crazies across the whole Middle East, I have the Goddamned Prime Minister of Goddamned Canada calling me every day to tell me that the fucking Canadians are shooting each other over politics now and asking me to send our troops into that mess and now you're telling me that the whole fucking country is out of money? Is there any good news?"

  "The lobster catch in Maine is better than it has been in many years and, consequently, the price of lobster has dropped significantly," the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury flatly replied. The President slumped down at his desk.

  "If we're over the limit, we need the Congressional extension today," Jensen asserted.

  "If we need the extension today then the Republicans are going to make us pay and pay," said Emerson.

  "No. Fuck that," replied the President, who again stood and began to pace. He reached into his pockets for a cigarette and, with shaking hands, laboriously lit the thing.

  "I want options and I want them now. Every time that we've had this debate we've seen these options floating around for these... These so-called 'nuclear options.' I want recommendations on my desk in two hours. I've had enough of this debate and I'm sick of paying the Republicans their danegeld every single time that this comes up, never mind what they'll demand once this comes around."

  Their first date had been simple, but Christopher Sorensen had been smitten from the first time he spied her across the Starbucks crammed into the back of a Barnes & Noble (it was hardly the world's most romantic location, but it was geographically convenient for them both). Sarah Watkins wasn't what might be objectively classified as a world-class beauty – her complexion was slightly marred by acne scars and she carried a clearly visible extra few pounds around the waist – but she carried herself with such enthusiasm that these quickly, in Sorensen's mind, become markers of her unique virtues. She had bounded across the coffee shop and practically dropped into the chair.

  "Hi!" she'd simply begun.

  Now he was sitting in her kitchen, waiting for her to finish breakfast. It was not only good to have a homemade meal – for Sorensen's culinary skills had never advanced beyond grasping the rudiments of microwave programming and McDonald's ordering – but the plain truth was that Sarah was actually a good cook. In fact, she'd recently taught him what "broiling" was. Christopher had assumed it to be some kind of advanced cooking technique when, in fact, it turned out that it was actually what the top of the oven was meant to be used for.

  Because they both needed to get to work – he at the document review mill and she at the elementary school where she taught – breakfast today was simple enough: Eggs Benedict (though with homemade Hollandaise sauce). As he continued reviewing the morning's news, Sarah glided into the room and sat two plates down on the table, kissing him on the cheek before grabbing her chair.

  "It's terrible over there, isn't it?" she said as she unfolded her napkin and sat it in her lap.

  "Hmmm?" Sorensen asked, looking up.

  She gestured in the direction of his tablet.

  "I thought that the whole reason for sending all of those soldiers over there was to stop the fighting. It only seems to be making things worse."

  "Well," he replied, venturing towards offering his opinion, "the problem is that we should never have gone in if we weren't prepared to use overwhelming force. Of course, if we'd just backed the Israelis to the hilt in the first place..."

  "The Israelis," she pointed out, invoking a now well-worn Democratic talking point, "have used more nuclear weapons than anyone else in the world."

  "What choice did they have? The Arab armies were already invading."

  "They could have chosen to make peace years ago..." she shot back, before stopping.

  "Anyway... Weren't you looking for a new hard drive? I think I saw a good price for a 16TB drive in my e-mail this morning," she said, flipping through her phone.

  There had been some initial controversy when General Dylan Mackenzie had decided to locate his headquarters in Jerusalem but, given the pace of world events, most of it had quickly subsided. Officially the decision had been made because of Central Command's need to be located in a major city and justified on the grounds that lingering radiation from the nuclear blasts in Haifa and Tel Aviv posed a possible long-term health danger to American soldiers. Mackenzie's staff lawyer had even managed to produce an EPA regulation that arguably prevented the deployment of civilian personnel of the Federal Government in either city, even though the Israeli government, such as it was, continued to operate out of Tel Aviv. In reality, the command was in Jerusalem largely because it appealed to a certain streak of grandiosity that ran through Mackenzie's veins to have it there.

  The forces at the disposal of US Central Command, totaling some 400,000 members of the Armed Forces plus 100,000 supplemental civilian personnel, were scattered across the entire Middle East from the Sinai to eastern Persia. Those men and women were fighting and dying somewhere each and every single day.

  "An IRGC platoon shot up a supply convoy on the road to Tehran," one aide whispered.

  "Artillery fire hit a Marine squad on patrol in the Sinai. No dead, three wounded. One had to be evacuated by air," came another report.

  "Special Forces captured a group of insurgents with chemical weapons precursors near Hama."

  "IED hit a convoy on the road between Haifa and here. One dead, two wounded."

  General Mackenzie looked up at his desk and checked the time. It had been nine hours since he sat down at his desk. Numbly he had issued one set of orders after another as the unending toll of terror had ticked by his eyes.

  "General?" came a voice through the door.

  "Come in," said Mackenzie. Standing up to grab an additional cup of coffee as Lieutenant General Avigdor Aronov stepped in through the door. Officially Aronov's only position was as a liaison between the Israeli Defense Force and the American forces deployed to assist in the widespread peacekeeping operation in the Middle East. However, when the terms of the deployment of the American force had become clear, the Israeli Government had been forced to resign and been replaced by a caretaker "technocratic" regime that dared not dissolve the Knesett and face the people of Israeli directly. The lack of a credible government had left the General, as the man closest to the man who held real military power in the land of Israel today, as the most powerful living Israeli. Aronov walked in and closed the door and took a seat in front of Mackenzie's desk.

  "Our friends," Aronov spoke deliberately, "report that they have had some success."

  Mackenzie swept his arms across the room.

  "There are no fucking listening devices in this room, Avi. You can speak freely."

  "Our forces located another two Iranian scientists just outside of Qom. They've been taken in for... questioning."

  The central Iranian government had, of course, fallen apart even before the first stage of the war ended. The combination of the departure of most of its senior officials in advance with war damage had been too much for it to bear. American intelligence, along with what was left of the Mossad, believed that the Israeli counter-strike had been successful in bringing about the final elimination of the Iranian nuclear arsenal. But, then again, they had also sequentially believed that Iran was years from having a nuclear capability and that a nuclear Iran
was a threat that could be managed.

  Technically speaking, General Mackenzie had no authority under which Iranian nuclear scientists and other former regime officials could be detained. In fact, his orders had been to deploy his forces into Iran only in accord with the directives of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA was, in turn, generally being stymied by the unwillingness of its inspectors to enter into so-called "hot zones" and the uncooperative nature of the provisional government of Iran. The Israelis, on the other hand, were understandably eager to gain one hundred percent certainty that there were no other nuclear weapons out there and, further, to mete out suitable punishments for those complicit in the great crime against Israel.

  Therefore, a deal had been struck under the table: the American forces would use their technical capabilities to facilitate the capture of as many former Iranian officials as possible, but the actual grabs and the subsequent interrogations would be conducted by off-the-books Israeli operatives, none of whom had the slightest compunction about the use of the harshest methods of information extraction available to them. All of this was extremely sensitive. For that reason, the teams on both the American and Israeli sides were very small and there were no survivors on the Iranian one.

  "The latest batch of prisoners suggested the same thing as the last," said Aronov, flipping through the letter that had been passed to him, "that there were rumors of additional devices not being stored at the sites, but that they had no specific knowledge, etc, etc. And I am assured that my men were very thorough before they disposed of the prisoners."

  Daniel Hampton had landed at Reagan National Airport at a little after 8:30AM and was immediately shuttled to the White House, arriving at just after 9. He was pre-cleared through security at the gate and ushered immediately into the Oval Office.

  "Mr. Hampton," President Warren extended his hand, "I'm going to have to admit, I am sure that we have met before, but I don't recall when or anything else. I'm sorry for that, but there's no time for pleasantries. This is a very serious situation."