No, an angry Steph was not a Steph he wanted to deal with. But if angry Steph was directed at Broussard, well, Manny could live with that.
“You’ve already ordered the pullback of federal assets from all stations west of the Mississippi, and that’s a good start,” Broussard was saying. He’d been saying it was a good start for nearly five minutes, but what he wasn’t saying—what he was merely implying in a surprisingly passive-aggressive way for a military man—was that President Pilgrim had otherwise screwed the pooch. Pulling out federal assets was the right move, Broussard said, but there were so many other things she could have done, if only she’d listened to Broussard earlier. The military men around Broussard—and they were all men—nodded solemnly. Broussard was right, they all were saying, Steph could have done more. The military was right, as always, and the president had made a mistake by not swallowing their advice whole. Steph could have done more, and they wanted her to learn from her mistake: this was Steph’s chance to make up for her earlier inaction. There was only one possible thing she should do, in their minds.
Steph put down her drink and stood up. “Gentlemen, I’m not sure how much clearer I can be. Even if we didn’t still have military teams conducting operations in the greater Los Angeles area, I wouldn’t authorize nuclear strikes. Not now. You’ve been telling me to make nuclear strikes along the western seaboard for the past five days. Los Angeles and San Francisco and Seattle and everything in between. And then east, you say, all the way from the Canadian border where Montana and South Dakota meet, south to Denver and Albuquerque and down to the Mexican border, and oh, by the way, maybe we shouldn’t worry so much about those borders, and maybe we should keep using our nukes until we run out of things to nuke. The answer to everything is not a nuclear strike.” Broussard opened his mouth, but Stephanie held up her hand. “Ben, I’m still speaking, and if you interrupt me, if you say a single word, I’ll have Special Agent Riggs and his fellow Secret Service members handcuff you, gag you, and shove you in a closet somewhere in the East Wing.”
Manny stole a glance at Tommy Riggs. Most of the agents were athletic looking, but scaled at a normal human size. They didn’t stand out in a crowd. Special Agent Riggs looked average enough when he was standing by himself, in a conference room or on a lawn or somewhere else where it was hard to get a sense of proportion, but here, in a room with other people, he looked like a man who’d been run through a photocopier at one hundred fifty percent. He had to be almost seven feet tall, and Manny couldn’t even guess at how much Special Agent Riggs weighed, but he’d bet good money almost every pound was pure muscle. When Special Agent Riggs got into one of the president’s armored limousines, a vehicle that had more in common with a tank than a car, it sank a little bit on its springs. Or at least it felt that way. Everybody looking at Special Agent Riggs right now was probably thinking the same thing, which was that he could rip Ben Broussard in half without even trying. And Riggs, despite working for the Secret Service, which was supposed to be politically neutral, wasn’t very good at hiding the fact that he thought President Pilgrim was the greatest thing to happen to the United States of America since the election of Lincoln. Given that Riggs was black and originally from Georgia, being in second place to President Lincoln was nothing shabby. Manny had no doubt that Special Agent Riggs would take a bullet for Steph, but he wasn’t sure if a bullet could even hurt him.
Special Agent Riggs didn’t move, but he did smile. Just a little bit.
“I’ve been listening to you, Ben. To all of you,” Steph said, looking around at the assembled military men, “but you haven’t been listening to me, and you haven’t been listening to the scientists. The Chinese panicked and they are going to pay for it. When they dropped their first nuclear weapon they thought the outbreak was limited to Xinjiang Province and that they could contain it. But you have to think they were wrong and they didn’t contain the outbreak. We haven’t gotten any good intelligence out of China since they lit up half their country, but it seems self-evident that they wouldn’t have wreaked such devastation on their own country if the outbreak had been contained.
“If we had a similar situation, if we were simply talking Los Angeles, God help me, I’d do it. If I’d thought there was even a slim chance that sacrificing Los Angeles, or even all of California, would save the country, I would have ordered a nuclear strike days ago. But the truth is, gentlemen, if there ever was a hope of containing the outbreak to Los Angeles, that hope was gone almost from the beginning. You tell me, were you really prepared to launch a nuclear attack against our own citizens, on our own soil, when the Mathias Maersk crashed into the port? Because that was the minute it would maybe have worked. That afternoon, that evening. If we’d gone nuclear at that point, I do believe there’s a chance we could have contained the spiders. But after that? It was already too late. What’s that phrase? Closing the barn door after the horses are already gone? Now you idiots want to blow the barn to oblivion while I’m trying to corral the horses. You’re masking all of this in military terms and jargon, talking about yield and overflow and collateral damage and incurred civilian costs, but let’s be honest. Your ‘plan’ would turn the western seaboard into a nuclear wasteland.”
Stephanie looked around the room. She was still angry, but she also looked sad and tired. Manny thought she looked like she was burdened with the weight of the world. “No. If we start using our nuclear arsenal, there’s no going back. What will the cost of that be? Isn’t there a point where we have to ask, can we really save America if we’ve destroyed it? Give me a break, Ben, I’m not stupid. I understand what’s at stake. I’m not saying this as some sort of empty rhetoric, and I don’t care if it sounds cheesy. There’s a truth here. We’re talking about saving America. Saving the world. And I know there’s a truth in what you’re saying, too. There might be a point when nuclear weapons are the only real option. If we’re looking at another outbreak—if these spiders start some inexorable march across the continent—then I’ll authorize nuclear weapons. If we reach the point where the only way to save the country is to sacrifice it, then I’ll let you be as gung ho as you want. But we aren’t there yet. Not yet. And I don’t believe that’s where we need to go. You’ve all read the brief on Professor Guyer’s theory. If she’s right, it’s too late to worry about trying to contain Los Angeles. But that does not mean it is too late to try to halt the spread. This is simply not the time to use nuclear weapons. Not yet.”
Steph shook her head and echoed herself. “Not yet.” She picked up her drink and took a sip.
Ben straightened up in his chair, glanced at Agent Riggs, and then spoke. “Madam President—”
“Goddammit, Ben.”
He lifted his hands off the table in a gesture of supplication. Steph sighed and let him speak.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?”
“Okay. I hear you. No nuclear weapons. But there’s something else we can do. It’s drastic, but it does not include nuclear weapons. You’re not going to like it either, but if you want to avoid going nuclear, this will make sense. Just give me a minute here. Look, I know that you don’t like me.”
Manny shifted in his chair, glancing around the room. He could see the surprise on the faces of the soldiers, the cabinet members, even on the normally stony faces of the agents and aides in the room.
“And frankly, to be honest, I probably deserve that.” Ben stood up. He was speaking to the president, but he let his gaze fall on everyone in the room. “I’m not necessarily a likable guy. I’m saying this because I want to make sure you understand what I’m suggesting we do here. I want you to really listen to what I have to say. I want to make sure that if you reject this plan, you aren’t making the decision because of me, personally. I get that you don’t like me. I push too hard, and I know you don’t think I give you the respect that you deserve as the president of the United States and my commander in chief. And I know you think that a part of that, heck, maybe most of that, comes from
you being a woman. I know you think that if you were a man I’d treat you differently. I don’t think that’s true, but then again, it might be. When all this is over, we can talk about that, and I’ll try not to be such an asshole. Because if you are right, that I’d treat you differently if you were a man, well, then I owe you an apology. I’ll say it now. I’m sorry. And I am sorry. I’m not saying that because of some sort of political sensibility or even out of any sort of personal shame that I might be sexist or that I might not be a particularly likable person. I’m saying it, saying I’m sorry, right here, right now, because I think my job is to give you military advice, and I think you’re not listening to it because of personal reasons.”
From Manny’s viewpoint, Steph looked like she was literally taken aback. She rocked back an inch on her heels. “I’m not listening for personal reasons?”
“Hear me out. And when I’m done, if you want my resignation, I’ll give it to you.”
The room was pin-drop quiet. At any other time—say, when spiders weren’t eating American citizens and threatening the total destruction of humanity, when he wasn’t a part of a debate over dropping nuclear bombs on US soil—Manny would have enjoyed the show. Every single person in the room was looking back and forth between Ben and Steph. Steph’s hesitation couldn’t have been more than a second, one tiny, individual tick on a watch, but it felt like it could have contained a universe unfolding, big bang to black hole in the space between Ben asking and Steph nodding at him to carry on. When she nodded, Manny heard what sounded suspiciously like a roomful of people letting out their breath.
“You’re right,” Ben said. “You’re right that it’s too late for Los Angeles. And you’re right that even if you had ordered a nuclear strike on Los Angeles, it probably would have come too late to contain these things. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something we can do, and I’m not talking about nuclear strikes anymore. I still think there was a time when nuclear weapons would have been a way to address some of these problems, but we’re past that. I hear you. We,” he said, gesturing to the military men around him, “hear you. No nuclear weapons. So let’s look at the reality of where we are now. We’re trying to burn the egg sacs littered around Los Angeles at hundreds of sites, but according to Dr. Guyer, we’ve got tens of thousands of civilians who have escaped from the quarantine zone who might be carrying spiders inside them. So what’s the reality? The reality is that we are thinking about an unconventional thing in a conventional way. Or, maybe, we’ve always understood that we needed to think unconventionally, but we’ve been thinking the wrong kind of unconventional. We tried treating this spider invasion like a flu pandemic, like a biological agent spreading through infection, and I think that’s the right direction, but we didn’t go far enough. We can’t treat it like a biological weapon. We have to treat it like the biological weapon.”
Alexandra Harris, the grandmotherly national security advisor, didn’t hesitate. “You’re talking about the Spanish Protocol?”
“What the fuck is the Spanish Protocol?” Manny asked.
“You know how it is, Manny,” Alex said. “We’ve got contingency plans for everything. Land wars in Europe. Terrorist attacks in New York or Chicago or Houston. Gas in the subways. Natural disasters. Mudslides. Meteor strikes. Hurricanes. Alien invasions. We plan and plan and plan. We’ve even got a Red Dawn contingency.”
“Red Dawn? Like the movie?”
“Like the movie. If the Russians or the Chinese or whomever invade the Midwest, we’ve already got a response plan in place. Everything.”
“Everything,” Steph said dryly, “but not, evidently, a contingency plan for spiders.”
“Not for spiders,” Alex agreed, “but I think Ben’s right. We can use the Spanish Protocol as a way to try to salvage things.”
Steph looked like she was getting angry again, but before she could speak, Manny jumped in. “Let’s just save ourselves some trouble here. Can somebody please answer my earlier question? What the fuck is the Spanish Protocol?”
Alex took a deep breath. “The Spanish Protocol. It’s named after the Spanish flu outbreak near the end of the First World War. Roughly twenty million people died worldwide.”
“I don’t think we can compare this to a flu outbreak anymore,” Manny said.
“Neither do I,” Alex said. “That’s Ben’s point. It might be named after Spanish influenza as some sort of an homage to the idea of a pandemic, but the Spanish Protocol came from the CIA in the 1970s. At least, that’s where it had its roots. Height of the Cold War. The worry was the Soviet Union trying to wipe the entire country off the map. The idea was to come up with a plan that would guarantee the survival of at least some Americans, even if that meant other Americans would die. They wanted to guarantee that, whatever happened, enough Americans survived to keep the communists from inheriting the earth. The CIA wasn’t thinking of a flu pandemic.”
Manny felt that familiar sinking feeling, like his heart was dropping down into his gut. He’d been feeling it all too often since this all started. Was there ever going to come a point where he got some good news? He didn’t even want to ask, but he couldn’t help himself. “What were the CIA analysts worried about, then?”
“The flu pandemic. Or the bioweapon,” Ben said. “A concept, not a specific thing. We didn’t know what the Soviets had, but we knew what we had, and it scared the shit out of us. Infection rates that made the Spanish flu look like the common cold. A wildfire running across the country, passed from sneeze to sneeze, cough to cough. The original response plans were set up for the kind of research being done in the 1970s, but the agency has updated it every few years for the last forty plus years. They’ve made adjustments to account for advances in research, updating for what the Iraqis and the Iranians were up to, for the Russians and the breakaway former Soviet states, for the Chinese and the North Koreans, for terrorists and for do-it-yourselfer home garage scientists. Today’s model accounts for a doomsday scenario, the release of something with one hundred percent infection rates and mortality rates above eighty percent. I’m talking biomechanically engineered viruses that pass from person to person and leave you bleeding from the eyeballs. Things that don’t even exist yet and are just science fiction, like nano-weapons. The Spanish Protocol is there in the event that one of these nightmares comes to life on American soil. It’s supposed to be a last-ditch way of stopping the spread of something that is inherently unstoppable.”
“Why haven’t I heard of this before?” Steph asked. Her voice was so hard it could cut glass, and Manny, not for the first time, was glad that she’d been the horse he backed. In normal times, it would have been enough for his candidate to simply have been elected, but the honest truth, swear to God and on his mother’s grave, was that Manny could not imagine a living person more suited to the pressure than Steph. There wasn’t anybody better able to step up and take control in a moment like this. She had the weight of the world on her shoulders, but she could bear it.
“Because it was the kind of crackpot idea that there was no point briefing you on,” Alex said. “We’ve got terrorists driving school buses full of explosives into government buildings and bringing automatic weapons onto subways. And one of the problems with planning for everything is that there’s too much to worry about. The CIA and the NSA regularly hire novelists and screenwriters to brainstorm ideas for how America might be attacked. Most of it is crazy Hollywood stuff. Your job, as the president, is to lead the country, and our job, as cabinet members and agency directors, is to make sure you know about the things that are likely to be problems, not every single thing that could possibly happen in our wild speculations. There were already enough concerns that we knew were real. What would you have said if we’d come to you two years ago and told you we wanted to brief you on a crackpot contingency plan on the off chance some Russian scientist still living out the Cold War crop-dusted New York City with an engineered strain of the bubonic plague? When all this started, we were in the middl
e of running a simulation of war with the Chinese, and you thought that was a waste of time. I think a month ago, most people would have bet on war with the Chinese over an invasion of spiders as the greater threat to the country.”
“If the Spanish Protocol is such a crackpot idea,” Manny said, “why is it you knew exactly what Ben is talking about?”
“Madam President,” Ben said, stepping in. “The Pentagon has all sorts of plans in place in the event that aliens come from outer space. And in the event of an alien invasion, we would have taken those plans out and briefed you and awaited your orders, but given that ET has yet to phone home, we’re waiting on that. We pay people to imagine the worst, and some of our analysts have very active imaginations. We run numbers on everything, and there are a lot of plans that just get filed in the proverbial drawer because they seem so outlandish. And the Spanish Protocol seemed like one of those plans, the thing you’d keep buried away. But we’ve run out of normal ideas and plans, and I suggested this to Alex a few days ago. We’re coming to the Spanish Protocol because there aren’t any other options left.”
He motioned to his aide, a thirtysomething black soldier who had kept so still that Manny hadn’t even noticed him. The aide touched some keys on his laptop, and the monitors sprang to life. It was, Manny could not help but note, a PowerPoint presentation. That was the military for you, he thought. They could put a missile through a window from a thousand miles away, but they still gave presentations like it was 1997.
It turned out that the premise of the Spanish Protocol was surprisingly simple: fracture the country into as many separate pieces as possible in an attempt to create at least a few islands of safety. It meant turning the United States of America into the Balkanized States of America.
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