The Last President: A Novel of an Alternative America

by Michael Kurland

  Kit turned the car’s headlights on and pulled away from the curb. “We’re conspicuous sitting in a parked car,” he said. “Might as well head toward the coffee shop.”

  “Who’s Laszlo?”

  “Colonel Laszlo Kovacs,” Kit said. “The Special Forces man.”

  Miriam remembered Laszlo now. “The Special Executive Police,” she said. “St. Yves’ men.”

  “That’s what he thinks,” Kit said.

  “Damn, Kit,” Miriam said, “this whole thing’s insane!” She wanted to grab Kit, and hold him, and shake him; but instead she hugged herself tightly and stared through the windshield. They were approaching the traffic light on Wisconsin Avenue. “I love you,” she said, irrelevantly.

  “I love you, Miriam,” Kit said. “I’ve been thinking about that. After this—”

  ”After this?” she started laughing. “What do you mean, ‘after this?’ You’re going to be killed, you idiot. Don’t you know that? The Secret Service isn’t going to let you get anywhere near the President. They don’t care what kind of a bastard the man is, their job is to guard him. And that’s exactly what they’re going to do.”

  “I think we can get closer than they expect,” Kit said, mildly. “Believe me, Miriam, I have no intention of getting killed tomorrow. It will take luck, but if things go right, not an awful lot of luck. And it’s time we had a little luck.”

  Miriam took a deep breath and her hand sought Kit’s arm. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  They drove around for a while, neither of them saying anything, and then stopped at the all-night coffee shop. Miriam went to the pay phone and called the two women she had recruited to help, an associate professor of linguistics and a graduate student in the political science department who was completing a thesis on Roosevelt and the city bosses. Tomorrow the three of them would become telephone operators for the day at the risk of life and liberty. If Jubilee succeeded, their minor but essential jobs would receive at most a footnote in the histories of the coup; if it failed, they would stand in the dock with the rest.

  Miriam and Kit drank coffee. Kit ordered a piece of apple pie and pushed it around the plate before giving up.

  “Let’s go home,” Miriam said after a while.

  “I don’t think I can sleep,” Kit said.

  “I’ll hold you,” Miriam said. “Maybe you’ll sleep. I don’t think I can do anything else tonight, but I want to hold you.”

  Kit paid the check, and they left.

  General Tank MacGregor turned off the eleven-o’clock news and stared bleakly at the television set. It had been a long time since he had heard anything on the news to bring him pleasure, but he found himself watching compulsively. Some deep-seated masochistic impulse, he surmised, or a trace of the childhood belief that the good guys always win in the end.

  He got up and walked slowly around his den, touching and examining the memorabilia of his long career. The walls were flocked with framed photographs that formed a bridge to the past—his past: a youthful Captain MacGregor standing at attention in front of his battle-worn Sherman tank while Generals Eisenhower and Bradley strolled by: a cigar-chomping, two-star general shaking hands with Major MacGregor outside a demolished Wehrmacht command post, inscribed “To the only sonofabitch I ever had to tell to slow down—from his CO, George S. Patton”; a picture of his wife, Maggie, standing in front of the gray fieldstone cottage in Scotland that had been their honeymoon cottage—if a three-day pass the week before D-day could be called a honeymoon. And then she hadn’t seen him for eight months, and had twice been told that he was taken prisoner and once that he was dead.

  There was a photograph of Lieutenant General Tank MacGregor pointing what looked like an accusing finger at Colonel Clement Moor, USMC. It had been taken by an alert war photographer outside of Inchon, and had been published in Stars and Stripes over the caption, “Tank tells it to the Marines.”

  He stopped before the flag standing in the corner by the door: a tattered American flag with a field of thirty-three stars. His grandfather, legend had it, had three horses shot from under him carrying that flag from Atlanta to the sea. Attached to the tip of the staff were a pair of battle streamers that had once been stiff gold brocade, but were now limp with age. He held them out and could still make out the faded motto embroidered thereon:

  Harrah! Harrah! We bring the Jubilee!

  Harrah! Harrah! The flag that makes you free!

  MacGregor smiled to himself and turned to go upstairs to join his always patient, very dear wife. But as his foot touched the first step, the phone rang. He turned back to answer it.

  Harrah! Harrah! We bring the Jubilee!

  It was a quarter to midnight and the President of the United States still sat behind his great desk in the Oval Office. He was signing papers. He took great pride in his often-quoted claim that he served the people of this great country “sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.” And he meant to keep to that schedule. It was an inspiration to the Youth of America, an example to his staff—which he fully expected them to emulate—and a prod to the lazy career bureaucrats that still cluttered the lower levels of government.

  A soft chiming noise startled the President, and he looked up to see that the red phone on one side of his desk was blinking a subdued red bulb at him. He snatched the handpiece from the cradle and glared at it for a long moment before putting it to his ear. “Yes?”

  “Mr. President?”

  “Yes?” Who the hell did that idiot think it would be?

  “This is Beadle, sir, in the Special Situations Room.”

  “Yes?”

  “Jubilee has been activated, sir. The Comint staff intercepted the go parole on two separate nets in the past half hour, sir. We’ve put the Special Situations Room onto full alert status, as per standing orders, sir. Do you wish us to notify the Pentagon, or the Special Executive Police, or the FBI, sir?”

  “Jubilee?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve notified Mr. Vandermeer, sir. He said to call you immediately. Standby procedure Bull Run has been called up, sir, but we need your okay to continue.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “What’s that, sir? You mean about Jubilee? Yes, sir. We’re sure, sir.”

  “Okay,” the President said. “Vandermeer’s in charge. You do whatever he tells you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The President hung up the phone and stared down at the mass of papers on his desk. Suddenly he found them all very offensive, and with the back of his hand he pushed them off the side of his desk and onto the floor. It was beginning. The biggest crisis of them all. And he was ready, by God, he was ready for it! Only why hadn’t Vandermeer called himself instead of letting some flunky do it? It was very bad for staff discipline to have the chain of command broken like that. Besides, Vandermeer knew how he depended on him, how he needed him to make the crucial decisions that had to be made. Not that he wasn’t fully capable of handling the job by himself; not that he didn’t have the breadth of intellect, the decisiveness, the almost instinctive grasp of world and national affairs that made a truly great president. Gildruss might get the credit; Gildruss might get the peace prizes; but if Gildruss was the quarterback, he was damn well the coach. And in the long run it was the coach who was remembered. And as for national affairs, well, another chapter in that book would be written tomorrow. And they’d see whether he could handle himself in a crisis or not.

  Only where the hell was Vandermeer? Tomorrow they were going to try to take it all away from him. It was those shitty Eastern Jew intellectuals. They always had hated him. But it would all come out right in the end. He would triumph, as he always had—in the end. Vandermeer had it completely under control. But—

  The corridor door opened and Vandermeer came in. “I’m here, Mr. President,” he said.

  “Damn good thing,” the President said. He looked at his watch. It was two minutes past twelve. His sixteen-hour work day was over. “I’m going to bed now, unless you need me fo
r anything.”

  “No, sir,” Vandermeer said, taking his accustomed seat to the right of the desk. “The activation of Bull Run is right on schedule. I’m holding off calling in the camera crews. We don’t want to let this peak prematurely. With any luck we’ll hit prime time tomorrow night.”

  The President shook his head. “Be careful,” he said. “We don’t want to preempt a football game. You know how the people hate it when we preempt a football game.”

  “This is big enough,” Vandermeer assured the President. “We won’t have any backlash on this.”

  “Good, good,” the President said. “Do you think there’s any chance of these Jubilee people starting anything tonight?”

  “Highly unlikely, sir,” Vandermeer said. “The troops we believe them to be depending on are not on ready status. Our experts estimate it will take them at least six to eight hours after the go code is sent to be ready to move. That means the coup attempt can’t begin before six tomorrow morning at the earliest.”

  “Okay,” the President said. “Stay on top of it.”

  “I have a cot in the bomb shelter right next to the Special Situations Room,” Vandermeer told him.

  “Very good,” the President said. “Call me if anything breaks.” He put his jacket on, buttoned it, and left the office. He walked past the Secret Service guards without acknowledging their “Good evening, Mr. President.” That was one thing about being president; you didn’t have to say a damn thing to a damn person if you didn’t feel like it.

  Upstairs in the family quarters, the President paused at the door to his bedroom and looked over to the door to his wife’s bedroom. He felt a no longer familiar urge. Perhaps it was the excitement. He went into his bedroom and took off his clothes, hanging the suit carefully over the clothes horse and folding the rest of his garments neatly on a chair. Then he went to the connecting door between his bedroom and his wife’s and opened it. His wife was asleep. He went over and climbed on top of her. She stirred but, as usual, she did not fully awaken.

  Vandermeer stood up as the President left the office. When the door had closed behind the President, Vandermeer sat back down and looked around the room at the great oval of the walls as though he expected to find someone hiding in one of the shadows. He stared down at the great presidential seal woven into the rug at the foot of the President’s desk as though he had never seen the device before. “You’ll see,” he told the empty air. “It will all work out, just as I promised you it would.”

  Vandermeer got up and went outside through one of the French windows. Off to one side of the Rose Garden a small, two-seat helicopter was parked on the White House lawn. He went over to it and methodically began checking it out, detail after detail, working from a complex preflight check list.

  When he returned to the Oval Office, St. Yves had just entered. “They told me you were in here,” St. Yves said. “I have something for you.”

  “What?” Vandermeer asked.

  “I understand Jubilee is go,” St. Yves said.

  “That’s right. For the morning, presumably.”

  “Then I’ll sack out in the guard room,” St. Yves said. “If you want me, I’ll be there.”

  “Right,” Vandermeer said. “See you bright and early. I think I can promise you that it’s going to be quite a dayl”

  Senator Malcolm Chaymber rolled over irritably and switched on his night light to peer at the clock. It was ten past one. Who the hell would be calling him now? He picked the handset off the receiver to stop the ringing and then paused a minute to wake up before putting it to his ear. “What?” he demanded.

  “Malcolm? Adams here.”

  “Yes?” He was fully awake now; his heart was pounding.

  “I hope you’re ready for the Jubilee, Senator. We’re bringing it tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes,” Chaymber said. “I’ll be ready.”

  “If you could contact some of your colleagues on this, Senator, we’d be grateful. And, by the way, I’m calling from a pay phone. You might want to do the same.”

  “Yes,” Chaymber said. “I see. Of course. I’ll do what I can.”

  “Very good, Senator,” Adams said. “Thank you.”

  “No, Aaron, thank you,” Chaymber said. He hung up the phone. Tomorrow he and a handful of his fellow senators would vote to accept a bill of impeachment against the President of the United States—and his own career would be over. The President would not be one to give up without a prolonged and vicious fight, and even as he went down kicking and screaming he would drag Chaymber down with him. The country was not ready for a senator who was a faggot.

  At least he’d be able to pay the President back for the long months of wearing the mantle of a senator while doing the work of a toady. He put his robe on and hunted for his slippers. He was going to have to get dressed and go out hunting for a pay phone, but first it occurred to him that it would be good to go into the other bedroom. It had been a long time since he’d talked with his wife.

  It was after two in the morning when George Warren reached the Mini-Stor Private Storage Company outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, and roused the night watchman to let him into his locker. The bulky package he took out wouldn’t fit in the trunk of his Chevy, but with a little maneuvering and an extra fiver for the watchman, the two of them managed to cram it into the back seat.

  He stopped for coffee at an all-night diner before heading back to Washington. It had been a long day and promised to be a long night, and he wanted to be fully alert while handling his cargo. He would take the return drive slowly and carefully. It’s no time to have an accident when you’re traveling with a missile with an atomic warhead in the back seat of your car.

  Ian Faulkes staggered into his New York hotel room at three in the morning to find his phone ringing. He stared at it suspiciously for a minute and then picked it up. “Evening,” he said, holding the handpiece like a microphone and shouting into it. “Evening, America. This is your British consh—cons—this is Ian Faulkes speaking to all of you out there, and I’m just the tiniest bit smashed at the moment.”

  He heard a tinny sound coming from somewhere. After a while he realized that it was coming from the earpiece, which was upside down in his hand. He turned it around and put it to his ear. “Sorry about that,” he said. “You still there, whoever you are?”

  “Ian, you bastard, this is Aaron Adams. You’re drunk!”

  “I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be,” Ian said. “I’ve had a most wonderful evening, Aaron. I’d still be with the lady if there wasn’t some question of her husband arriving before dawn casts its rosy lips o’er the billowing watchamacallit. What do you need, Aaron?”

  “I need you, Ian. I need you now, and I need you sober.”

  At that moment an operator came on the line and told Adams to “signal when through.”

  “You’re calling from a pay phone, Aaron,” Ian said.

  “Yes.”

  “You in New York?”

  “No, Washington.”

  “And you need me now? In Washington?”

  “Right again, Ian. And if you don’t want to miss the biggest news story of this or any other century, you’ll hustle your ass down here.”

  “Why? What’s happening?”

  “Your ass and a camera crew and a helicopter. We won’t let you play unless you bring a helicopter.”

  Faulkes shook his head. “Aaron, what the fuck are you talking about? Hold on a minute!” He put the phone down and went into the bathroom. Sliding open the glass door to the shower, he turned on the cold water and stuck his head under the showerhead. In seconds the cold had permeated from the top of his head to the base of his spine, and he turned the water off.

  “I think I’m sober enough to talk with you now,” he told Adams. “But you’re sure as hell going to pay my hospital bill if I catch pneumonia. Now what the devil is going on?”

  Adams talked to him for about twenty minutes, at the end of which he was completely sober a
nd extremely awake. “You can count on me, Aaron,” he said. “Isn’t this a hell of a thing? See you later, old man.”

  The duty officer of the U.S.S. Guam knocked on the door to General Moor’s cabin and entered. “Excuse me, sir,” he said. Moor was instantly awake. A lifetime in the Marines had given him the ability, but he had never learned to like it. “What is it?” he asked, turning on the lamp over his head.

  “A priority message, sir. It came in from Atlantic Command about half an hour ago, addressed to you. The communications officer thinks its some sort of action code, sir, but he can’t find it in the book. I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but we thought it might be important.”

  “Let me see it,” General Moor said, swinging his legs over the side of the bunk. He took the flimsy and stared at it.

  FROM NAVATCOM WASHINGTON

  TO GENERAL CLEMENT MOOR USMC USS GUAM

  TEXT:

  JUBILEE REPEAT JUBILEE 16 JANUARY

  Moor reached for his shirt. “This ship is now on full alert,” he said. “Tell the captain.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  It was six o’clock in the morning, barely an hour before sunrise, and the first hint of color was creeping into the cloudless eastern sky. To the west the sky was still black and star-studded, with Leo just preparing to drop below the horizon. Tommy Green, his eleven-year-old body well padded against the predawn chill, hurried down the street of identical two-story houses that made up this part of Fort Bragg’s officers’ row. Already the lights were on behind a good many of the bedroom and kitchen windows.

  Tommy paused for a second to make sure he had the right house and then went up and rang the doorbell.