by Jack Mars
2:05 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Oval Office
The White House, Washington, DC
“I can’t believe we’re about to take this meeting,” Susan said.
She didn’t say what she thought inside: I want to wring Stone’s neck.
Instead, she looked at Kat Lopez, who was perched in a high-backed chair across the Oval Office sitting area from her. Kat looked fresh and relaxed. Like Kurt Kimball, Kat was an Energizer bunny—she just kept going and going and going.
“Give me the details,” Susan said.
“ARTS,” Kat said. “A Return To Sanity. More than thirty thousand members across the United States, and growing. Their headquarters are here in Washington, and they have a committed pool of donors across the United States, especially among wealthy people in the Bible Belt. They were founded and originally funded by Midwest corn magnate Nathan Davis. As a lobbying organization they are growing in influence, especially among conservatives in Congress. They raised and spent over fifteen million dollars in the last fiscal year, not counting another five to ten million raised by their nonprofit arm, the American Family Education Foundation.”
“And Lucy?” Susan said.
“Lucy Pilgrim,” Kat said without hesitating. “Current president of ARTS. Sixty-seven years old. Lucy was a hippie and a political activist from her earliest days—birth control, environmentalism, anti-nukes. In the mid-1970s, she and a group of her followers used to go topless in Central Park every Sunday for three straight summers. If men could do it, so could women.”
Kat paused.
“What’s good for the gander…” she said.
“Right,” Susan said, almost laughing. “Is good for the goose. That was clever. Do you even know about that, or is it just on your cheat sheet there?”
Kat shrugged. “I learned all about Lucy while I was in college. Women’s studies. She came and spoke one time.”
Susan shook her head. “She’s something else.”
Kat raised a hand. “At some point, Lucy must have gotten religion. Or maybe it was always there, and she wasn’t eager to talk about it. In any case, she’s been president of ARTS for eight years. There is some talk that she is going to step down in the near future. She was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Parkinson’s disease two years ago. It hasn’t seemed to slow her down any, but you should realize that we may be dealing with a lame duck.”
Susan leveled her sternest gaze at Kat. “We’re not going to deal at all, Kat. What deal are we going to make? This is an organization that wants American women to stay home and have more children, am I right? Because of some misguided idea about keeping immigrants out?”
Kat nodded. “I doubt they’d put it that way, but yes, more or less.”
Susan shrugged. “We’re taking this meeting as a favor to the Vice President and nothing more. Let’s get it over with so we can get on with the rest of our day.”
Kat went over to the large closed-circuit TV monitor hanging on the wall and turned it on. It was an eyesore, but it made a convenient way to communicate with her Vice President, Stephen Lief. It had been there since his inauguration more than a month ago. But since then, Susan had begun to think she and Stephen weren’t going to be doing all that much communicating after all. Only a short time in office, and he had immediately begun to overstep his bounds.
Lief’s bespectacled face appeared on the giant screen, sitting in the upstairs study at the Naval Observatory. Susan’s study. Arrgh. That irritated her. The study was her favorite room in the best home she had ever had. He sat there like he owned the place.
Stone!
She could blame Luke Stone for Stephen Lief. Or she could blame herself for going along with it. Or she could blame human biology, and the love endorphins released by physical intimacy—they made your brain lose its reasoning ability.
Susan had known Stephen a long time. In her Senate days, he was the loyal opposition across the aisle from her, a moderate conservative, unremarkable—pig-headed but not deranged. And he was a nice man.
But he was also the wrong party, and she had taken a lot of heated criticism from liberal quarters for that. He was landed aristocracy, old money—a Mayflower person, the closest thing that America had to nobility. At one time, he had seemed to think that becoming President was his birthright. Not Susan’s type; entitled aristocrats tended to lack the common touch that helped you connect with the people you were supposedly there to serve.
It was a measure of how deeply Luke Stone had gotten inside her skin that she considered Stephen Lief at all. He was Stone’s idea. She could remember the exact moment Stone brought it up to her. They were lying together in her big Presidential bed. She had been pondering out loud about possible Veep candidates, and then Stone said:
“Why not Stephen Lief?”
She had almost laughed. “Stone! Stephen Lief? Come on.”
“No, I mean it,” he said.
He was lying on his side. His nude body was thin but rock hard, chiseled, and covered with scars.
“You’re beautiful, Stone. But maybe you better let me do the thinking. You can just recline there, looking pretty.”
“I interviewed him at his farm down in Florida,” Stone said. “I was asking him what he knew about Jefferson Monroe and election fraud. He came clean to me very quickly. And he’s good with horses. Gentle. That has to count for something.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Susan said. “The next time I’m looking for a ranch hand.”
But she had chosen him after all. There was something about conservatives and liberals coming together and rebuilding trust in government. There was something about Stephen being able to work magic in Congress, and finally getting an infrastructure bill passed—something the country needed. But so far the reality of Stephen Lief had been altogether less impressive than the fantasy.
An idea for Stephen Douglas Lief began to take shape in Susan’s mind. He was going to do a month or so traveling the western United States on a chili-tasting tour. He could start as far east as Ohio, sample some world-famous Cincinnati chili, best when smothering hot dogs to death, then move south and west to Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, and southern California.
It was hardly a punishment assignment—these were pleasant places to be in winter. What’s more, he would get to develop an iron stomach, and Susan was sure that a man like Lief, a graduate of stuffy East Coast schools like Choate, Princeton, and Yale, would love to get out on the road and meet some regular folks for a change. Susan made a mental note of it—Kat would assign someone to start scheduling this important outreach tour as soon as this conversation was over.
Sitting next to Lief on the TV screen was Lucy Pilgrim. She looked frail and older than her years—a far cry from the young beauty of her street activist days. In her mind’s eye, Susan caught a black-and-white newspaper image of a young Lucy shouting into a bullhorn at some rally or another—young, energetic, very pretty with long straight hair hanging down to her waist, in faded skintight blue jeans and a flower shirt. Time caught up with everybody sooner or later.
“Hi, Susan,” Stephen Lief said. “I want to thank you for taking this meeting.”
Susan shrugged. “Of course. I’m sure you both understand that it’s a difficult day and I’ll need to—”
Lief cut her off. “Of course we understand. Jack Butterfield was a friend of mine. I’m going to Texas in the morning, to be there when the body arrives.”
“You should stay for the chili,” Susan almost said, but didn’t.
Instead, she looked directly at Lucy Pilgrim. “Hi, Lucy, how are you?”
“Susan, nice to see you. Thanks for chatting with me.”
“Well, you’ve had a quite a champion there in the former Senator from Florida. He wouldn’t take no for an answer, as I understand it.”
“Stephen and I go way back.”
Susan just stared at the screen. She glanced at Kat, thought about introducing her, then thought better of it. Wh
y prolong this with niceties?
“Lucy, what can I help you with? I’m the President of the United States, as I think you probably know. I don’t make legislation. There’s really no sense in lobbying me.”
Lucy shook her head. As she did so, Susan could see the effect that slight movement had on the woman’s body. It seemed like her entire frame followed along with the head shake, then continued for another second or more. The effect was subtle, but noticeable. And that was almost certainly while on medications that worked to control the tremors.
Susan sighed. Life. It went like that. Money was very, very nice to have, but health was true wealth.
“Susan, I just want to share with you what we’re doing, and see if there’s any point of intersection where we may be able to benefit each other.”
“Lucy, you may or may not realize that I’m in the midst of an international crisis right now.”
Lucy nodded. “And I think you’re handling it beautifully. I watched your remarks on the TV news a little while ago. I was struck as always by your ability to inject powerful emotions into your connection with the people. But like all crises, this one will pass. And our domestic problems will still be there. International crises don’t make domestic problems go away.”
“Or vice versa,” Stephen Lief offered, somewhat awkwardly.
“Exactly,” Lucy said.
Susan almost smiled. This could very nearly be a skit on a late night comedy show.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s hear it.”
Lucy launched into it.
“Susan, times have changed since when you, and especially I, were young women. You may not think about this on a daily basis because it doesn’t seem pressing to you, but we are sitting on a demographic and cultural time bomb. In each successive generation, white women of what we’ll call child-bearing age continue to delay the decision to have children. Women of the so-called Generation X represented a radical break with the past—one out of every six chose not to have children at all. This would be a remarkable development in itself, if it had been temporary. But so-called Millennial women are on pace to double that figure, and are even delaying marriage itself. It gets worse the further down we go. Young girls in high school, when polled about their desire to have children, place it very low on their list of priorities. Marriage is at the bottom of that list.”
Susan stared into the TV screen.
“We are not replacing ourselves, Susan. A society dwindles and dies when it doesn’t replace itself. Much more preferable is if a society continues to grow. A growing economy needs people to feed it. And continued leadership in all areas needs—”
Susan held up a hand. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Lucy. But as far as I can tell, our population grows in leaps and bounds each year. We’ve got well more than three hundred twenty million people, projected to reach three hundred fifty million by…” Susan trailed off for a moment. “Kat, do you happen to have the numbers on that?”
Kat shook her head. “No, not off the top of my head, but I’m sure we can get them.”
Lucy was shaking her head sadly. “Immigrants,” she said. “And the children of immigrants. The only reason this country is still growing is because we are importing people from elsewhere. It is not a good way to grow a population. The Roman Empire found that out, much to their dismay.”
Susan stared blankly at the screen. She searched for a response, and didn’t find one. She didn’t enjoy being left speechless.
“I’m pretty sure we’ve always done it this way,” Susan said, finding her voice. She wasn’t sure where this was heading, but she already suspected that she didn’t like it. “Even the Mayflower came from elsewhere, as I recall it. You remember the Statue of Liberty, don’t you? Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free… Does any of that ring a bell with you?”
Lucy was shaking her head again, emphatically this time, setting off a chain reaction throughout her thin body that Susan could not look away from.
“We’re not against immigrants, Susan, if that’s what you’re worried about. What we’re against is cultural dislocation. We’re against losing sight of what it means to be an American. We want to preserve that. And so we feel that our job is to encourage young American women to have more children, and to help create an environment conducive for them to do so.”
“I think young women might be more interested in exploring the other options available to them right now,” Susan said. “I think that, at the moment, options for women may be the best they’ve ever been.”
Now Lucy raised a hand. “There’s a grain of truth to that,” she said. “But only a grain. Modern women are getting caught up in the rat race, and it’s a trap. Not everyone gets to win that race, Susan. Not every woman gets to be a high-priced fashion model, a Senator, and then President of the United States. Not everyone marries one of the richest men on Earth.”
Lucy stared into the screen. Next to her, Stephen Lief’s owl eyes went deer-in-the-headlights wide. Suddenly, he looked like this meeting was not such a hot idea, like he might even prefer to be somewhere else.
He needn’t have worried. The day after meeting his friend’s corpse in Texas, he was going to be in Cincinnati, surrounded by TV cameras and well-wishers, with a bib around his neck, eating hot beef and tomato gruel off the top of a frankfurter.
“Women can easily waste their youth chasing a mirage, when they could have spent that time getting married, creating a home, and building a family. You and I can help them by developing new incentives like tax credits for in-home child care, expansion of food programs to help with grocery bills, even one-time federal payments per childbirth.”
Lucy was putting forward a strange mix of right wing and left wing ideas. She wanted white women to get married and have more babies, and she wanted the federal government to pay for it. Susan wondered if in Lucy’s mind, that sort of largesse would be extended to women of color.
Susan was on the verge of asking that question, but shook her head instead. “I’m not the Appropriations Committee, Lucy. I don’t make the budget, I just sign it. You know how these things are done.”
“If you championed this cause, you don’t think people would sit up and take notice?”
Susan half-nodded. If she suddenly began to champion the cause of women staying home, pumping out babies, and making dinner for their husbands, people would definitely notice. Mostly, this was because it would go against everything she had ever stood for. It was time to cut this off.
Susan had never become accustomed to lobbyists and their over-the-top pitches during her time in the Senate. When she was Vice President, she was widely seen as powerless, so the lobbyists left her alone. And as President, she mostly kept them at arm’s length. If she ever needed a reminder why, this conversation would serve.
“Lucy, I can promise you we’re going to do everything we can.”
Lucy was an old hand at this. She must have caught the tone in Susan’s voice. “I hope so, Susan. I hope so. Thank you for listening. I’d love to buy you lunch one day.”
Susan smiled. “I’d love it, too. I’m a big admirer of yours. I always have been. We’ll do it just as soon as I’m out of office.”
Lucy nodded. “Okay.”
Kat went to the monitor and turned the device off. She let out a long exhale and looked at Susan. She raised her eyebrows. The rest of her dark, pretty face was carefully neutral. She pursed her lips, but didn’t crack a smile.
“I got a text from Kurt during that. People are assembling in the Situation Room in half an hour. He needs you there. There’s been new intelligence about the plane crash.”
The air went out of Susan like a tire with a knife plunged into its side. “Okay. But before I do that, we need to talk about Stephen Lief’s schedule for the next few weeks. I’ve got something important I need him to do.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
2:55 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Situation Room
Th
e White House, Washington, DC
The gathering was much smaller this time.
Haley Lawrence, the Secretary of Defense, was there, with two aides seated behind him. General Frank Loomis of JSOC was there again. Luke Stone was there, this time sitting in a leather chair at the conference table. Half a dozen others were there, along with a few aides and assistants sitting along the walls behind them.
Kurt Kimball was in his usual place at the head of the long conference table. It was a serious group. Kurt didn’t need to perform his typical thunderclap for quiet. Everyone was ready when Susan walked in.
“Well, Kurt. Was this the best crowd you could get?”
He smiled and shook his large bald head. “We’re restricting access to this meeting. There is some concern that classified information could be revealed.”
“More than a concern,” Frank Loomis said.
Susan slid into her tall leather chair. She placed her coffee on the table in front of her. She had been very tired earlier in the day, but she felt a second wind coming on.
“Hit me,” she said.
Kurt nodded. “Amy?” he said.
His aide made a few taps on her tablet, and an aerial photograph of a large freight ship appeared on the main screen, and on the smaller screens around the room. The image was old and the color faded, with a solid white border around the edges—a scan of a photo that originally existed as a physical print.
Kurt pointed a red laser beam at the image. “An incident took place off the coast of Nigeria earlier today, involving the ship you see here. The ship is a Russian-made Soviet-era multipurpose vessel, an oceangoing freight ship that can carry a range of cargoes, from dry goods to liquids, including petroleum products. The ship was somewhat large for its time, more than two hundred meters long and approximately ten stories high. It was known as Znamya Oktyabra, or in English, The White Banner.
“In 2003, it was sold to a private corporation known as Night Wolf Lines, and was registered under the Liberian flag. At or around that time, the name of the ship was changed to Lady Jane. As far as we can tell, Lady Jane spent the next decade or more of her life engaged in criminal activity, smuggling in particular. She appears to have spent a great deal of time moving between Africa and South America, departing Africa with pillaged natural resources—diamonds, gold, conductive metals, illegally bunkered oil, as well as poached ivory—and returning with high-quality drugs, particularly cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, military-grade weapons to fuel Africa’s various wars, and of course money.”
