Balance of Power

by Richard North Patterson

  "Why?"

  "What's the usual line—'I can't bring a life into a world as cruel as this'?"

  Kerry stifled his dismay. "Is that really how you feel?"

  Lara exhaled. "I don't know. In the last day or so, I've wondered if a child would help heal us—a new life, a new person to love after so much death . . ."

  "I've thought that, too . . ."

  "But it's not a reason. People should have children more for the

  child's sake than their own. Things are so unsettled now, even with us." Pausing, Lara spoke more quietly. "We need time to heal, Kerry. And I have something else to do."

  Kerry fell silent.

  "I worry about safety, too," Lara confessed. "All the people who'll hate me, and what could happen." In the darkness, she rested the crown of her head against his face. "I know what you want. But it's not the time to have a child."

  * * *

  After this Kerry could not sleep.

  He lay thinking for what seemed like hours, waiting until Lara's stirring told him that she, too, was awake.

  "If you do this," he told her, "use domestic violence as a wedge. Not even the SSA can advocate shooting women and children. If you keep the focus on the victims, instead of the gun lobby, there's less the SSA can say."

  * * *

  The next morning she asked to walk alone.

  Kerry watched her become a small figure in an oversized sweater, perhaps a mile distant, gazing out to sea. It was an hour before she returned.

  When she did, she took his hand. "At least you're here," she said. "If anything happened to you, I don't think I could bear it."

  * * *

  In candlelight Lara still looked wan. But at least, Kerry thought, she had begun to eat again.

  "It's not just my family," she told him. "This is a once-in-ageneration chance to save thousands of innocent lives. What choice do I have?"

  He could not quarrel with this. In his silence, Lara said quietly, "We've talked about everything but you."

  "What has there been to say?"

  "Quite a bit. We're caught in this cycle of guilt, me blaming myself, then blaming you. You've had nowhere to go."

  Kerry could not speak. For the first time he fought back tears.

  Lara watched his face. "John Bowden gave us a lot to live with. I'll try to do better, Kerry. For both our sakes."

  When he reached out his hand, she took it, gazing at their fingers as they intertwined. "I'll never put this behind me," she said. "Whether I want to or not, my life will always be defined by this. The only question is what I do with it." Looking up at him, she finished softly, "I think I'm ready now."

  * * *

  The next morning, before they left, Kerry watched with Peter Lake as Lara took her last walk on the beach.

  "Wherever she goes," Kerry said, "I want you to go with her."

  EIGHT

  One day after the President and First Lady returned to Washington, Senator Frank Fasano and his wife Bernadette paid them a condolence call.

  The meeting was brief and awkward. To Fasano, Kerry Kilcannon looked subtly older, Lara's face hollowed by a loss of sleep and appetite. Though both were gracious, Fasano felt something beneath their cool façade which, while he could not define it, made him apprehensive.

  Leaving, Fasano could not shed his disquiet. "What are you thinking?" Bernadette asked.

  Perhaps, Fasano reflected, what he felt was the chill of death, a bonedeep grasp of the torment both Kilcannons must be suffering. But a single word leapt to mind, unbidden. Lethal.

  "That this is trouble," he answered.

  * * *

  That night, the President invited Senate Minority Leader Chuck Hampton to dine with him alone.

  They were seated in the Family Dining Room where, Hampton remembered reading, the Kilcannons had last dined with Lara's family. He could envision the Costellos admiring the Louis XVI mantel, the gold filigree, the silver centerpiece on the mahogany dining table. During Kilcannon's intermittent silences, Hampton could imagine him recalling the voices which had filled the room.

  The President himself made Hampton edgy. They had never been close; for Hampton, beneath Kilcannon's quickness and charm lay a molten core which eluded Hampton's reckoning. The year before, he had supported then–Vice President Dick Mason for his party's nomination, and one thing he was sure of was that Kerry Kilcannon would never forget this. Himself lawyerly and cerebral, Hampton sensed that, in the wake of the Costello murders, Kilcannon would not rest. Even his quiet felt purposeful.

  "Guns," the President said at last. "That's what we're here to talk about."

  Watchful, Hampton dabbed his lips with a linen napkin. "We should make it an issue," he allowed.

  "An issue?" the President echoed coolly. "I've heard that before, Chuck, including from you. But I'm less inclined to play the hollow man."

  "You're hardly that, Mr. President." Hampton summoned a faint, ironic smile. "You gave us Caroline Masters, the gift that keeps on giving."

  Kilcannon smiled as well, though his eyes did not. "And changed the Supreme Court for a generation. While preserving the right to choose."

  "At a price," Hampton countered. "Abortion's divisive enough. If we push gun control too hard, we'll tear apart our party.

  "You know your ex-colleagues, Mr. President. Close to an election year they're like feudal lords. They care most about their fiefdoms." Smoothly, Hampton adopted a mollifying tone. "Please don't misunderstand me. There's immense sympathy in the Senate for all that the First Lady and you have gone through. But our side is afraid of where that may take us."

  "And where is that?"

  Hampton sighed. "A political death spiral, Mr. President. Right now, the great majority of Americans say they favor 'stricter gun laws.' But no one's defined that for them. Once we propose a law, the SSA will attack it as confiscatory, and tell their people to vote against any legislator who stands with you." Pausing, Hampton ticked off states on the fingers of one hand. "Montana. New Mexico. Georgia. Nebraska. Missouri. In each state there's a Democratic senator up for reelection. In each state, ten months ago, you lost—lost rural votes, lost white males, lost by at least five percent. Our senators hold those seats by opposing gun control—that's the trade-off they have to make for favoring abortion rights. If you push this to the limit, you may well take them down."

  Listening, the President's expression did not change. Quietly, he answered, "It's different now."

  Slowly, Hampton shook his head. "Not to the SSA's core constituents. They're single-issue voters: 'protecting gun rights' is all they care about. There are no single-issue voters for gun control.

  "Fasano knows that. He's praying for you to go all out and inflame the Republican base. First he beats our people in the Senate, and then he goes after you."

  Once more, Kilcannon gave Hampton a thin smile. "Go on."

  The President's calm, Hampton realized, unnerved him. "To survive," he continued flatly, "our people will have to abandon you. Being true to yourself may be the Kilcannon persona. But in Montana, being true to you is suicide. Remember the bumper stickers on all those pickup trucks, 'If Kilcannon wins, you lose'?

  "You lost, Mr. President." Leaning forward, Hampton mustered all the conviction he possessed. "In the senate, we've got forty-six votes out of a hundred. I can't get forty for any gun law you could sign without gagging. That's the fact."

  Gazing at Hampton across the table, the President rested his chin against the curled fingers of one hand. "What else should I consider?"

  "You know all this, Mr. President." Hampton stopped abruptly, stifling his aggravation, the strong sense that Kilcannon was toying with him. "There's also the union vote. At least forty percent of the rank and file has some sympathy for the SSA. In Michigan, they shut down auto plants on the first day of deer season.

  "The AFL-CIO is not willing to sacrifice jobs or health care or better public schools to gun control. Their president told me just yesterday, 'more people get k
illed in car wrecks than with guns.' "

  "Sweeney," Kerry said coldly, "can say a lot of things. But the AFLCIO needs me to succeed. Without me, they're screwed."

  Hampton sat back. In the rawest sense of power politics, this was true—the union leadership had nowhere else to go, and so must fight to save the president they had. "So let's talk about the SSA," Kilcannon continued calmly. "They're like the Wizard of Oz—as scary as you imagine them to be. After every election, they go around claiming victory— listen to them, and you'd think their candidates never lost a race. But last year they lost five of seven Senate seats they targeted. Then they proceeded to brag about their power, and lie about their losses.

  "You keep mentioning the states I lost. How is it, I sometimes wonder, that I'm sitting here." Kilcannon's voice became sardonic. "Perhaps because of California and New Jersey, which I won partly because of gun control.

  "Look at the map. This rural culture you keep worrying about is fading away, replaced by suburbanites who worry less about hunting season than keeping their local incarnation of Bowden away from school yards." Kilcannon's voice softened. "The SSA feeds on our own cowardice. Every day they hope we won't notice that they're more scared than we are. And have more to be scared about."

  Hampton shook his head. "Fear works for them just fine, Mr. President. That's what they use you for—to scare their members into giving them votes and money so that they can keep their guns . . ."

  "I've heard them," Kilcannon interjected with an ironic smile. "They're like tent show evangelists—'send us money, or Kerry Kilcannon will get you before the Devil does.' 'Confiscation was the first step to the Holocaust.' 'Without our guns, Kilcannon will set loose gays and blacks and lesbians, unleashing a new epidemic of AIDS and destroying the white male–dominated family which has made this country strong.' 'Once Kilcannon takes your gun, Al Qaeda terrorists will make house calls door-to-door.' " Pausing, Kilcannon added dryly, "After that, I'm planning to unleash the Internal Revenue Service."

  Reluctantly, Hampton smiled. "My personal favorite," Kilcannon told him, "was the family of five slaughtered by a madman with a pitchfork because they'd locked away their guns. Too bad it's a total fabrication.

  "There will always be a lunatic fringe, Chuck. But these people don't speak for most gun owners. Right now, no one does." Kilcannon leaned forward. "I'm not getting into a catfight with the SSA—that would make them too important. I intend to talk right past them, and let them get hysterical on their own."

  "That won't be easy." Pausing, Hampton folded his hands. "I'm a duck hunter, Mr. President. But I can't bring that up at a dinner party in this town without some desiccated society woman thinking I'm a murderer.

  "I was raised on a farm. When I was seven, my dad gave me a twenty-two and taught me to use it safely. I went to college on a sharpshooting scholarship, and I still collect guns. I've even got a shooting range behind my farmhouse.

  "Vermont's full of people like me. We enjoy guns, period. I'm trying to make the Democratic Party a safe place for these folks. But every time you say 'gun control' what they hear is a city boy who views them with disdain." Hampton spoke more quietly. "Bowden should never have had a gun. As far as I'm concerned, the SSA has blood on their hands, including the First Lady's family's. But most gun owners out there believe that the SSA at least respects them, and that you don't.

  "You could get us beaten. You could even lose the Presidency. Instead we'll have some blow-dried reactionary like Fasano who shafts minorities, women and the poor, doesn't give a damn about health care, and thinks the Second Amendment protects lunatics with rocket launchers."

  Kilcannon's smile was faint. "Believe it or not," he answered, "I've

  thought a lot about white males, and all the states I lost. And about why I'm sitting here instead of the guy who won them.

  "I know guns are symbolic. I still remember campaigning with a Southern congressman, counting the bullet holes in stop signs. A lot of them were his own, from when he was a kid." Abruptly, Kilcannon stood, hands braced against the back of his chair. "I can also read a map. The Republicans own gun territory, we own gun control territory. Because politics has turned into a culture war.

  "Forty years later we're still fighting over the 1960s. If you believe that civil rights, the women's movement and protecting the environment were basically good things, then you're likely to be a Democrat. But if you think the sixties were the time when minorities got out of hand, women abandoned their duties, promiscuity ran rampant, movies became violent and rock lyrics obscene, and the only acceptable form of discrimination became shafting white males—in short, if you still feel threatened by the changes in our society, there's precious little chance you'll hear what I have to say. Even though I tend to agree about popular entertainment.

  "That divide is strengthened by religion. I attend Mass every Sunday. But in the last election regular churchgoers voted against me three to two. The same proportion who voted for me if they didn't go to church.

  "So where do guns fit in?" Kilcannon asked rhetorically. "For people who feel threatened they're emblematic—'you've taken everything else away from me, but you can't take my gun.' Not my natural constituency."

  "Nor," Hampton added, "representative of all white males."

  "Precisely. But Fasano and his pals have conditioned a lot of them to vote for buzzwords—'prayer in school'; 'family values'—instead of programs. It's like all these white guys trapped in some right-wing lab experiment.

  "What am I going to tell them in order to compete—that the Second Amendment embodies their most sacred right? I can't." Pausing, Kilcannon softened his voice. "The trick isn't to compete. The trick is to remind them that we protect their unions, their medical care and their retirement. And that the Frank Fasanos of the world will screw them in favor of their country club friends who bleat if they can't get a tax cut and a bigger second home.

  "I can speak that language. But we can't obsess on white guys. Do their votes count more than the votes of women, or blacks, or Hispan ics, or people who live in cities? Not unless we deny those voters a reason to come out for us. And that's what happens when Democrats are as gutless and whiny as we've become.

  "We need to start chipping away women and Republican moderates who think their party has been hijacked by gun nuts, antiabortion extremists, and televangelists who believe that women's suffrage was our second bite of Eve's all-too-wormy apple. So for every Democratic senator worried about losing, there's a Republican like Chad Palmer who worries about where their party's going. If we create enough pressure, Fasano won't be able to hold them." Kilcannon's eyes bore into Hampton's. "Lara and I are going to make Fasano pay the price for kowtowing to the SSA. And it will be huge—if not next year, then soon enough.

  "If I have to preside over a divided country, I'm going to divide it my way. And by the time I leave this office, you'll be in the majority."

  For minutes, Hampton had watched and listened to Kerry Kilcannon with something like amazement. "Lara," he echoed now.

  "Yes."

  Hampton exhaled. "Mr. President," he said quietly, "I'm not sure you're the right messenger."

  Kilcannon sat again, fixing Hampton with the same unblinking gaze. "Oh, I know. I made the mistake of having a brother who got shot, then getting shot myself, and then had the sheer bad taste to let my wife-of-one-day's mother, sister, and six-year-old niece get obliterated by someone who should never have had a gun. And never would have but for the avarice and cowardice of a gun company, and the callousness of a gun lobby that's bullied and bribed most Republicans in Congress— and not a few of our party colleagues.

  "So once again I've lost my 'objectivity.' I'm disqualified from saving lives because too many people too close to me have already lost theirs." Pausing, the President spoke more softly. "Guns made me a senator, and then a President. I suppose I should be more grateful. But too much of my life has been determined by guns and now it's happened to Lara. I'll be damned if I'll sit by and w
atch it happen to others, day after day. And I'll be damned if I'll let you sit by, either."

  Watching Kilcannon, Hampton no longer concealed his astonishment.

  "There's one more thing," the President finished quietly. "You think I hold a grudge because you supported Dick Mason. I don't. Our only problem is how badly you've misjudged me.

  "You never thought I'd be President. You're still amazed I am President. And now you may be wondering if my emotions have overwhelmed what little judgment I possess." A smile played at the corners of Kilcannon's mouth. "After this meeting, I can understand that. But perhaps, Chuck, you should start considering whether I know exactly what I'm doing. Pretty much all the time."