by AJ Tata
Meredith waited another fifteen minutes and thought about departing but decided against it. Walking into the kitchen, she noticed the door to the basement was slightly ajar with a hint of light seeping from below. She tucked the loose strands of her hair behind her ears as she did when she became focused and peered down the dimly lit stairway.
Having just watched the movie Scream for the first time a few weeks before, she laughed at herself for feeling nervous. Here she was in the home of the second most powerful man in the world. Security systems were everywhere, and the Secret Service stood watch out front. What could happen to her?
She stepped slowly down the steps, pulling at the beaded chain hanging to the right and causing the single light bulb to flash on next to her head. She found the concrete basement floor and turned toward a small room in the far corner. Having never been down there before, she felt as though she was violating the vice president’s privacy a bit, but she pressed on anyway.
She pushed on the wooden door to a small room, and the weak light became somewhat brighter, giving her a full view of what looked like a military operations control center. Radios were banked atop one another, and two television screens showed news channels.
On the wall was a white dry-erase board on which someone had marked the days of the current week and the next week. Red slashes were through the days that had already passed and a list of events was itemized in each box representing a day. Last Friday’s box, she noticed, had Mall of America, Lennox Square/Phipps Plaza, Charlotte Coliseum, Capitol Building Tallahassee, Florida, Puget Sound Apartment Tower/Seattle. The next day had similar events. Hellerman was clearly using the board to track what had happened and keep tabs on the events.
But she had never seen this set-up before. She figured he probably came down here to study the patterns, being a former military intelligence officer. She knew it helped her sometimes to get away from the maelstrom and insulate herself so that she could follow her own instincts instead of the leanings of so many others. She remembered listening intently to his stories of interrogating high-ranking prisoners during the first Persian Gulf War. She assumed he felt comfortable in this kind of closed-in environment with the radios and maps.
She smiled when she realized she really did admire the man. As she scanned the room, her eyes drifted to the desk and chair. There was a laptop computer with its monitor shut atop the keyboard next to the bank of phones. Next to the computer was a pad of paper and it appeared the vice president had been doodling some circles and the letters RW. The letters were bored into the paper exactly twice. RW RW, overlapping almost.
Huh, Meredith thought, with a twinge of jealousy. Who could that be?
Their relationship truly started when Hellerman had asked her to work on his Rebuild America plan. He had pulled together the likes of Rockfish, Smithers, Evans, Jeremiah, and O’Hara. The group was focused on the best way to bring the country together again and shed the many divisions. It was all about defeating the secular spiritual stagnation that his favorite author, Walt Rostow, had predicted.
“Pretty interesting, don’t you think?”
Meredith jumped at the voice floating through the darkness behind her. She found herself ten feet further into the room.
“You scared the hell out of me!” she said sharply to Hellerman.
“Well, now, Meredith, God might thank me for that.” He smiled, emerging from the darkness, his face a theater mask that was half smiling, half frowning.
“My heart’s racing a mile a minute,” she said, leaning against a table and placing her hand on her chest.
“I usually have that effect on you, don’t I?” he whispered in a low voice, sliding toward her and firmly grasping her hand.
“Of course, but I have to pull my stomach out of my throat first,” she said, surprised at the firmness of his grip. She followed him out of the room into the darkness of the basement. He stopped and locked the hasp on the door.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
“About thirty minutes,” she replied.
“Down here, thirty minutes?” he asked tersely.
“No. No. I was only down here a couple of minutes,” she said. “I waited for you upstairs for about a half an hour. Remember, I’m supposed to brief you in the mansion tonight?” She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips gently, trying to take the edge off him.
He responded to the kiss as he always did. She felt him relax considerably in her arms.
“Yes, right. So what do you think of my tracking center?” he asked, pulling her away and heading up the stairs.
“I think it’s great. What do you do, just sit down there, think about what’s going on, and anticipate the terrorist’s next move?” She glanced over her shoulder at the small enclave. Something was not quite right. Something had registered in her mind as not fitting, not being precisely in place, but he had startled her to the point that the thought escaped her, perhaps forever.
“Exactly,” he said, smiling. “That’s exactly what I do.”
They climbed the steps, and she held his hand the entire way, trying to calm him back down the way she had learned to do. They sat comfortably on the sofa in the great room, facing the fireplace. He poured them each a glass of Chianti.
“Meredith, as you know, these bombings have taken a terrible toll on the nation and, in particular, on the administration. But the Rebuild America Program has oddly benefited from these tragedies.”
Meredith studied Hellerman. He was holding his glass of wine with his arm cocked on the back of the pillow of the leather sofa.
“I’ve been thinking about that. When you were in my office the other day, you said, ‘It’s all coming together like we planned.’ You seemed so excited by what was happening. It kind of scared me.”
“I know. It was more the adrenaline. We’ve been so close to Ballantine, and I thought we had him. I really thought we had him,” he said, his voice trailing off as he looked away.
“Our plan, Trip, is still achievable,” she said. “Reuniting this country is a worthy and noble cause. It will be even more important on the heels of this crisis.”
Meredith had a brief flashback to the day that the vice president entered her office and shut the door nearly eight months ago. Last summer, he had sat on one of her blue sofas in her White House office and told her to sit down. He didn’t ask her, she recalled, he directed her. She had been struck by his command presence, especially because she almost instinctively obeyed.
“I’ve been tossing around a concept,” he had said. His summer tan back then contrasted with his flashy white teeth. “I think the country is clearly split into two halves, and we need to find a way to bring them together. Rostow’s spiritual stagnation has set in. Hell, no one even knows we’re fighting two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Everyone just drives on with their business, riding around in their Lexuses and Beamers.”
Most of her friends certainly felt that way, she knew. But how would he do it? How do you reunite a country of 280 million people?
“People don’t see the real threat to our nation,” he had said, jokingly, she thought. “We have to make them understand, so I’m pulling together a team to work on some ideas for how to bridge the gap. You look at these national elections we’re having, and everything is split right down the middle. You’ve got those trying to hold on to some core American values, and you’ve got those that are convinced that changing into a new image is the right way to go. Only no one knows what that image should look like, only that it should be different. The Republicans are on one side of the issues and the Democrats on the other. It doesn’t matter who is right; it’s all party politics. If we cut through the chaff, we can get at what everyone wants: a better, more unified country.”
“What is the unifying mechanism?” she asked.
“That’s why I’m pulling all you braniacs together,” he said.
Hellerman’s light stroking on her arm pulled Meredith back to reality. Over those eight months, she
had left Matt and begun an affair of the heart and mind with this man. Generally a very conservative woman, she had surprised herself when she decided to follow Hellerman’s path. It had started rather slowly with the weekly brainstorming session in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, but then gradually it had progressed to private office visits with him and finally secret rendezvous at his Middleburg estate.
The sex had begun one night after a bottle of champagne. No doubt, she was attracted to him. Then, about four months ago, sliding off her dress, she noticed her slip catch on her engagement ring. The pangs of guilt had rippled through her, and the very next weekend she told Matt they needed to take a break.
They really had not accomplished much in the eight months. More ideas than substance. Everyone seemed to have a good handle on the problem but no real solutions. She was initially most impressed by Hellerman’s driven conviction to solving the problem. His unbridled passion was, in her mind, his most attractive feature. He was seductive, and she was drawn to him like an eager student to a wise professor.
“Trip, I hate to admit it, but it almost seems like these things that are happening are tailor-made for what we have been talking about. I mean, the country is horrified, searching for leadership. Now is your time.”
“You’re right, Meredith. Now is the time to capitalize on what is happening. In my view, we have an opportunity here to bring the nation together, to achieve a common purpose and establish a new national identity that can serve as a foundation for the next two hundred years,” Hellerman said.
She could see the intensity in his eyes.
“I agree, Trip. In a sense, if we could seize this opportunity, these deaths might somehow mean something. I’d hate to see so many people die in vain,” she said.
“Me too, Meredith. So while the president goes about his plan, I’ve been asking the group to begin pulling together a few ideas. We will develop an internal protection team to take volunteers around the country to do basic security work. Naturally, we’ll have to train them for a few weeks to give them the basic skills, so we intend to use the National Guard to put literally hundreds of thousands of civilians through a ‘boot camp’ of some sort. Right there we start the foundations of a shared experience.
“Next, we’ll activate every stateside Army division and mobilize them to secure key and essential targets around the country. They guard churches in Kosovo. Why can’t they protect important facilities here? As we do this, we make sure that we’ve cut across all the socioeconomic lines so that we build the bonds between people necessary to propel us into the future on common ground.”
“These are all things we’ve talked about in the past, Trip, and it seems to make sense that we go forward now. The real question is how much the president should know and how much we should just keep to ourselves.”
“Well, the key, Meredith, is that the president has to sign the laws and enact the legislation—call up the Reserves and all that—but we are the drivers of those actions. We have to work Congress to get the votes, but I know the votes are out there. And, the president can decree a lot of this stuff the same way FDR did with all of his alphabet soups.”
“We can do that, but can we talk about something else first?” Meredith asked.
Hellerman wasn’t even listening to her. “We’ve already started. I’ve got Jock Evans working tonight on finalizing the details of the legislation for the Internal Protection Corps. I figure each state will need about ten thousand folks, give or take, depending on the size. We’ll mobilize the National Guard within twenty-four hours, and they’ll develop cadres in each state with a standard three-week program of instruction. We’ll target mostly eighteen-to-thirty-year-old men and women. They’re the future of the country. We can adapt a military pay scale and give the organization a military rank structure.”
“Trip, I need to talk to you about us.” She realized their conversation had become surreal. So far, she had simply agreed with everything he was saying to make this part of the conversation go a bit easier.
“Congress will have to appropriate the money, of course. They’ll want to do a special tax increase. I think we can convince them to divert away from some unnecessary funding and refocus the money on this national priority. Everyone knows there’s a ton of fat in the budget, and everyone knows where it is. I’m thinking that in a time of national emergency, there will be some players who want to trim some of their own fat to avoid scrutiny later on. Plus, they’ll see this as a temporary deal, which, of course, is the intention. At least initially.”
Meredith watched the vice president’s eyes jump with excitement as he spoke about the plan. To this point, most of the discussions had been pie-in-the-sky, with no real substance. But this was substance of the best kind. Hellerman was pushing his agenda forward in the face of a national calamity. She felt like a child trying to get her parent’s attention.
Hellerman stepped from his soapbox and reached for the wine bottle, as if he were shifting gears. The Eagles’ “Hotel California” played softly in the background, adding a touch of irony to the discussion: “Good night,” said the night man, “we are programmed to receive. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.”
How true, she thought. She might be able to check out from this affair with Hellerman, but she knew she would never be able to escape his spell.
“Have you heard from Matt lately?”
“Yes, this morning we spoke about Zachary and the fact that he’s alive. It’s pretty exciting,” she said, trying to hide some of her emotions. “That’s what I wanted to talk about.”
“Yes, that’s great news about Zachary,” he said. “I was quite surprised to find out he was alive, much less in special operations. Do we have any ideas where he might be?”
“Only that he was last seen being dragged from the cottage at Moncrief. Ballantine’s certainly got him somewhere,” she said.
Hellerman stood, brushing off his pants and raised his arms in the air, stretching.
“Let’s take a walk,” he said.
“I need to talk to you,” she said as the vice president grabbed her hand.
Meredith wasn’t sure how they had found their way upstairs into the bedroom, but they had. She had every intention of telling him that she could not see him anymore and that she was going back to Matt, but when the moment came, she was unable to resist his magnetism. The evening had been captivating. He had taken her with a reckless abandon, and she had responded likewise.
His ideas, his thoughts, his clarity of mind during these most violent times were absolutely breathtaking. She was in the arms of a historical man—someone who was making history as they lay in bed together. Someone she could not ignore.
As she drifted off to sleep and felt him ease out of bed for his trip back to the Naval Observatory, and his wife, she got mad at herself for capitulating. She was a stronger woman than this. But then again, she might be out of her league.
As her mind tired and she began to swoon, she found herself replaying scenes from that mysterious room in the basement. Something was not right.
If only she could remember.
Chapter 43
Garrett Farm
Matt left Peyton sleeping and walked along the riverbank that framed his family property to the north and east. To his left the river pushed smoothly over the rocky bottom and ran full with fresh snow thaw from the spring melt. Young poplar trees spotted the high, rocky bank, along with a few oaks and ash. A level area stretched out to his right, creating a flood plain during unusually heavy rainy seasons. They had actually grown corn and sorghum on the fertile plain in recent years. The sun was cresting the hill to the southeast. He heard the distant crow of a rooster from a neighboring farm.
A cool spring breeze swept off the mountains, causing Matt to huddle against himself. He could feel his cheek redden from the wind, and he absently longed for those times that he and Zachary could just kick around the farm.
“Where are you, Za
chary?” he wondered aloud. His words floated meaninglessly into the morning ether, to be chased away by the wind.
He stepped onto a large rock and looked twenty feet below into the rumbling stream. The water bubbled and churned to the east toward the Rappahannock River and eventually Chesapeake Bay, over 200 miles away. He had caught many trout in the stream as a child, though he had never developed the patience or the technique for fly fishing. Stuffing his hands into his pockets, he recalled the time he and Zachary had been sitting on the very same rock nearly twenty years ago. Located at the outer limits of the property, they talked about a world they knew existed out there and what they might want to do one day.
“Go to West Point,” Zachary said.
“You’d be good at that, Zach. I think I just want to play baseball.”
“You’re good at baseball, and you’ll do well, Matt, but you’re too smart for that.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s most important to make a difference, do something important.”
“Baseball’s important to me, Zachary.”
And it had been. Even today, Zachary’s maturity at that point in his young life seemed impressive. At the time, though, Matt was one of the best shortstops in the state and was already receiving hints from the head coach at the University of Virginia, where he had always known he wanted to go.
“Then you should play baseball. And when you’re done with that, you will be chosen to do something else. We all have our talents and our destinies, Matt.”
Matt remembered those words: You will be chosen to do something else. As if it wasn’t his decision. There was a larger force at work, directing him, determining his calling. Was it his admiration for Zach that had led him into the CIA after college, or was it Providence. Was this his lot in life? If so, he found satisfaction in the difference he had made, so far.
He started back up the hill, picking his way through the high grass and finding the minor trail they had worn into the rise over the years.
