by Tom Grace
“The deal Egan must have cut to seize the nomination—is he bought and paid for?”
“Agreements were made, no doubt, but don’t think for a second that he sold his soul to be president. That’s the secret behind Egan—he really doesn’t want the job, not like typical politicians who either want it to be loved or are driven to create utopia.”
“Then why is he running?”
“Because the country is broke and he can fix it. The guy is an engineer and that’s the way he thinks. It’s the complete antithesis of what we find in most politicians—certainly in the way he views power. As for the rest of the candidates, look for some to show up in key posts in the administration should Egan win the White House. Those that remain in the House or Senate would rise into leadership positions, depending on the length of Egan’s coattails.”
“So no one ends up a loser in this deal?”
Denby smiled. “No one but the President.”
Egan sat in the green room backstage nursing a can of Diet Coke as he watched the vote. In addition to his security detail just outside the room, Maya and Burton Randell and Niki Adashi accompanied him. The rest of his senior campaign staff was holed up elsewhere to facilitate his clandestine arrival at the convention center.
Egan’s cell phone purred softly.
“Yeah, Dad.”
“Is this for real?”
“Is what for real?” Egan replied innocently.
“Don’t be a smart aleck.”
“Yeah, Dad, I am about to become the Republican nominee for president.”
“No way something like this just happens. How did you and the Randells pull this off?”
“I can’t talk about it now, Dad, but I’ll fill you and Mom in when I get home this weekend. And this stays in the family.”
“Damn,” Egan’s father said proudly. “You got a real good shot now.”
“I like my odds. Give my love to Mom.”
Egan rang off just as the chairman called for Nevada to cast its votes.
“Mr. Chairman, the great state of Nevada defers its place in the roll call vote in favor of the great state of Michigan.”
“This is it,” Maya gushed.
“Mr. Chairman, the great state of Michigan wishes to thank the great state of Nevada for its deference in allowing us to cast the deciding ballots in selecting our party’s nominee and the next President of the United States of America. It is the honor and privilege of the Great Lake State to cast all of our votes for our favorite son, Ross Egan!”
The convention hall exploded in cheers as the onscreen tally for Egan showed him officially clinching the nomination. The GOP chairman allowed the enthusiastic outpouring to continue for several minutes before calling for order and a resumption of the voting. In the end, a smattering of delegates from the home states of the six GOP primary candidates had cast their votes for their local favorites, but the rest went for Egan.
The delegates chanted Egan’s name in a rhythmic two-syllable cadence. As Wyoming cast the final votes of the convention, the auditorium again exploded with applause. Then the hall darkened and a brief film on the life of Ross Egan began to play on the video wall. Images of Egan interspersed with anecdotes from family and friends appeared in a documentary style, all seamlessly woven together by the dulcet voice of a renowned actress. Ironically, both the filmmaker and the narrator might have rethought their participation in the project had they known it would be used to promote the Republican nominee instead of an independent candidate.
The beautifully shot film ended with a montage of images of Africa and America accompanied by a recording of Egan’s speech on the eve of the war that wasn’t. As the final image faded and the slowly flowing flag returned, the stage lights came back up.
“My fellow Republicans!” Frakes shouted into the microphone. “It is my great pleasure to introduce the next President of the United States of America, Ross Egan!”
Egan strode onto the stage to the opening chords of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and waved to the crowd. He warmly greeted each of the primary candidates and the party chairman before approaching the lectern.
“Mr. Chairman, fellow candidates, this convention, and my fellow citizens of this great nation: I apologize for being a bit late to the party …” Egan said, adding a pregnant pause for emphasis. “But how could I decline the gracious invitation of Chairman Frakes to join an organization that my own state claims as its birthplace. I thank you all for such a fine welcome and I humbly accept your nomination for the presidency of the United States.”
Egan’s acceptance was met with a standing ovation from the delegates.
“Again, I thank you for your affectionate embrace of my candidacy. And to that end, we have one additional piece of business before the conclusion of this convention—the selection of the next Vice President of the United States. On this stage, we are blessed with an outstanding group of individuals. All, as you learned in the primaries, are more than qualified to serve as president, which is the single most important characteristic required in a Vice President.
“But it is my sincere honor to recommend to you Florida Governor Lila Oates as the next Vice President of the United States.”
Another round of applause erupted from the Florida delegation and spread quickly across the convention floor. Frakes approached the lectern and leaned up to the microphone.
“I second the nomination of Governor Oates for Vice President of the United States.”
“Chairman Frakes,” Egan continued, shouting over the applause, “as we are now in the waning hours of this convention, I suggest we suspend the normal voting rules and offer Governor Oates’s nomination to the floor for a simple voice vote.”
“I approve the suggestion,” Frakes replied. “Governor Lila Oates’s name has been placed in nomination as our party’s candidate for the vice presidency of the United States. All those in favor?”
“Aye!” thundered the convention delegates.
“Opposed?” Frakes called out.
The white noise of conversation could be heard from the floor, but not a single voice rang out in opposition. Oates’s primary opponents swarmed her with hugs and offered their congratulations.
“The ayes have it. The nomination of Governor Lila Oates as the GOP candidate for Vice President of the United States is approved. Governor, do you accept?”
Oates smoothed her jacket and approached the lectern beaming.
“Mr. Chairman, I gratefully accept my party’s nomination for the office of Vice President of the United States.”
Frakes shook Oates’s hand and then departed the stage with the five remaining former candidates. The spotlight then narrowed on the nominees. Egan offered his hand to his running mate. Oates clasped it with both hands and locked eyes with Egan as the ovation continued. She then leaned close and kissed his cheek.
“I won’t disappoint you, Ross,” she vowed.
“Ditto, Lila.”
Niki Adashi emerged from the wings and walked across the darkened stage carrying a molded aluminum briefcase. She stopped just beyond the circle light and offered the case to Egan with both hands. The video wall switched to display the stage just as Egan opened the case and retrieved a steel machete from the padded interior. The steel glinted in the bright lights and, on the large screen, the dark stains of dried blood were apparent.
Niki retreated from the stage as Egan returned to the lectern. The audience grew quiet, realizing the significance of the weapon in Egan’s hand.
“I am an engineer,” Egan declared. “As a boy, I repaired cars, trucks, and just about anything else that needed fixing. Early on, my pa taught me to always use the right tool for the job.”
Egan bent his elbow and slowly brought the machete up from his side.
“The machete is the ultimate outdoor survival tool. It’s perfect for dealing with thick brush or any job requiring cutting, hacking, slashing, chopping—can you think of any place else I might put a tool like this to good use?
”
“Washington!” the delegates thundered back.
“A year and a half ago, this machete was the right tool for dealing with tyranny. It sent a despot to his grave, liberated millions, and healed the wounds of a terrible civil war. This was the right tool at the right time.
“In this great country, we are fortunate that our Founders built a system of government based on the rule of law and not men. To change our government, we need not resort to violence. To defeat the soft tyranny eroding our liberties, the right tools are the tools of the right. Conservatism and the Constitution—these are the machetes that we will use to butcher the bloated beast of bureaucracy—”
The delegates roared with approval.
“—to pare back the poisonous profusion of progressivism—”
Another round of cheers and applause as the audience fell into rhythm with Egan’s cadences.
“—and to decapitate the dreaded demon of democratic socialism.”
CAMP DAVID
“They’ve nominated a lunatic,” Sturla said incredulously. “How could anyone take this knife-wielding buffoon seriously?”
Daniel Page and the President said nothing in response to Sturla, but both men shared a look of horror at the formidable opponent they had created.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND
JULY 29
Ken Buttrey parked the utility maintenance truck against the curb in a neighborhood of expensive homes. It was near dawn and the sputtering remnants of Hurricane Ivy littered the windshield with light sprinkles. The heaviest rains had passed, leaving patches of clear sky visible through breaks in the cloud cover. The stretch of coast between Jacksonville and Hilton Head Island had borne the brunt of Ivy’s wrath. All that remained of the Category 3 hurricane were scattered showers along the Atlantic coast.
Buttrey and his partner, Greg Taylor, put on windbreakers and quickly erected a tent over a sewer manhole. As they set up work lights, a police cruiser pulled up next to their truck and shined a light on them.
“Morning, officer,” Buttrey said as the policeman stepped out of the car and headed toward them.
“Can I see some ID?”
Buttrey and Taylor handed the officer the photo IDs that were hung around their necks. The officer nodded and returned to his car.
“If Double-H doesn’t vouch for us,” Taylor said softly, “we are up shit creek without a paddle.”
“We’re covered.”
The officer returned a moment later and handed back their IDs.
“Your dispatch said there’s a blockage?”
“Yeah,” Buttrey replied. “Ivy’s dumped a ton of water and it’s surging through the system. We get problems in the older neighborhoods, where the storm sewers cross-connect with the sanitary. Roots break free and tangle with other junk to block the lines. Folks get mighty steamed when raw sewage backs up into their basements.”
The officer nodded knowingly. “Happened to my in-laws. Hell of a mess.”
“That’s why we’re rodding the line.”
“At least the rain has stopped. Today’s supposed to be decent.”
“Is the Vice President back home?” Buttrey asked.
“Yes,” the officer replied. “Why do you ask?”
“We almost never get asked for our ID unless there’s a VIP around.”
“He’s hosting a fund-raiser at his place today, so everyone’s on duty. Have a good one.”
They waited until the cruiser turned down a side street before they reopened the rear door of the truck. Taylor stepped up into the truck while Buttrey used a long metal hook to remove the manhole cover. He exposed the subterranean concrete chamber below, its lower half filled with dark, quickly moving water.
“We are all green lights on the eel and ready to launch,” Taylor reported.
“Great,” the disembodied voice of Homer Hopps replied from half the country away.
The eel was an eighteen-inch-long submersible robot. Like its namesake, the sleek machine swam in water by articulating its flexible body, which was an advantage in the narrow confines of a sewer.
With both hands, Taylor carried the eel from the truck to the open manhole. He crouched down and gently dropped the robot into the water. It landed flat on the surface and immediately began swimming in circles, orienting itself to the space. Then it dove under and disappeared.
Buttrey unspooled a thick hose from the back of the truck and snaked it into the sewer line. They weren’t going to do anything with the hose, but it maintained their cover. He then joined Taylor in the back of the truck.
Taylor was seated at a console with two small LCD screens. The right screen displayed a map of the sanitary and storm sewers in the area with the relative position of the eel. The left showed the sewer from the eel’s point of view.
Swimming upstream against the current, the eel took almost ninety minutes to reach the tap in the sewer main that led to the Vice President’s house. While they could have parked closer to the house, doing so would have brought them within the security perimeter established by the Secret Service and drawn unwelcome attention.
“We’ve reached the backflow preventer, Double-H,” Buttrey reported. “The eel has latched on to the side walls of the chamber and is going to work.”
The eel had slipped into a chamber about the size of a large shoe box with an inlet pipe at one end, an outlet at the other, and a cleanout pipe in the top. Storm water filled the chamber and pressed a hinged, PVC flapper over the pipe that led to the house. Closed, the flapper protected the house from a sewer overflow.
A simple hack of the county’s sewer connection database revealed the make and model of the backflow preventer installed on the line from the Vice President’s home. The sixteen-year-old device had passed its annual test inspection this past April.
The eel coiled itself into a flat spiral, wedging its flexible body against the closed flapper. Tiny nozzles along its belly released a pressurized spray of liquid nitrogen directly onto the surface of the flapper. Direct exposure to the extreme cold of the liquid nitrogen turned the PVC brittle.
Water that came into contact with the super-cooled liquid immediately turned to ice, but the exchange of heat went both ways. As the liquid nitrogen absorbed warmth from the surrounding water, its temperature quickly rose explosively past its boiling point. The compromised lid shattered like glass into tiny shards of plastic. The eel shook itself free of the ice and surveyed the damage.
“Would you look at that,” Buttrey said. “Blew the flapper door clean off.”
“Nice job,” Hopps offered as he watched the video feed remotely.
“Told you it’d work, Double-H,” Taylor said proudly. “And my eel came through the blast in one piece. I’m sending it downstream to the junction.”
CHAPTER FIFTY
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Yes, Devon, I watched parts of the Republican convention,” the Vice President admitted to the host of the Sunday morning political talk show. “Like many Americans, I watched it with the same morbid curiosity that causes me to stop channel-surfing on some of those reality shows.”
“Polling coming out of the convention has Egan up eighteen points on the President,” Devon Lundford offered in his precise Ivy League diction.
“Eighteen points up in July can easily be eighteen points down at the end of October,” the Vice President countered. “Three months is an eternity in politics.”
“So you and the President are not concerned about what appears to be a conservative juggernaut heading your way?”
“Conservatism is a political dead end. When the Republicans were in charge of everything, they drove the economy into the ditch. You can’t hand the keys back to this bunch. We’re still digging out of the hole they left us in, and that hole was a lot deeper than we anticipated. We’re making progress, to be sure, but our efforts to remake the country won’t bear fruit overnight. The path we’ve chosen is long and slow, but it’s the way to go.
You don’t change horses in midstream.”
“But after four years and several stimulus programs, unemployment is stuck above nine percent.”
“And that’s proof positive that supply-side, trickle-down economics doesn’t work,” the Vice President replied. “We extended the tax cuts for the rich for two more years after the Republicans retook the House and it didn’t stimulate the economy one bit. They had it right back in the eighties when they called it voodoo economics. The economy we inherited was the worst since the Great Depression, and it took more than a decade for our parents and grandparents to work their way out of that one. We’re seeing some promising signs, but there is no quick fix for this mess.”
“Do you have any thoughts on Ross Egan or his selection of Governor Oates as his running mate? If elected, she would be the first African-American woman—or the first woman for that matter—elected to such a high executive office.”
“I’ve known Governor Oates for years, and I personally find her charming and intelligent, but her selection is nothing more than a political stunt. The Republican Party is a white-males-only club and Oates may actually cost Egan some votes among the right wing.”
“There’s a certain public fascination with Egan,” Lundford continued, “which seems only natural considering he is the fresh face in this election cycle.”
“What I find fascinating about him is how he’s paying for his campaign,” the Vice President said. “We don’t have a lot of fat-cat Wall Street millionaires and billionaires backing our campaign. We operate off of small donations from millions of hardworking Americans. Our people have reviewed the public filings of Egan and his campaign. The numbers just don’t add up.”
“How so?” Lundford asked.
“Egan’s running this so-called Just-A-Buck fund-raising drive. If he got just one dollar from each and every citizen, he’d collect around three hundred million dollars. Not everyone is going to give Egan a buck, so I can’t see him breaking a hundred million in donations.”
“Egan has stated that he intends to personally finance most of his campaign and he has declined matching funds, as have you and the President.”
