Jenner scowled. “Meaning that among other things, we will end up with an embittered nation of people who hate us, with good reason, all along our northern border from Montana to Maine, and quite frankly, in the country’s present weakened state we can’t afford to make an enemy even out of Canada. We’ve got to stop him!”
“Can you invoke the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, sir?” asked Brava.
“The language of the amendment is unclear as to exactly how a president’s incapacitation is to be determined, and by whom,” said Jenner. “Section Four says that whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of Congress officially tells the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives in writing that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”
“Got all that off by heart, have you, sir?” asked Brava, arching his eyebrows.
“I had occasion to look it up recently,” replied Jenner coolly. “The problem is time. I suppose if we had more of it, I could fill a conference room with some big dogs from Capitol Hill and persuade them that Hunter Wallace has lost his marbles, which in point of fact seems to be the truth, but Patterson and those two officers are on their way from the Pentagon with the football now.”
“You’d need a psychiatrist’s opinion that he was nuts,” said Brava.
“That’s an idea,” said Jenner, flipping his phone open. “No time to get a team of shrinks in from Walter Reed and do all the formal ink blot stuff, but I know one shrink who might be willing to sign some kind of statement that the president is irrational, something we can wave under the noses of any Congressional ad hoc committee or whatever. Plus he’s Jewish, which is always a plus. Jews invented both psychiatry and insanity to begin with, so he’ll have credibility. Agent Lyons? This is Vice President Jenner. I want you to send a couple of your guys to locate the celebrity shrink, Doctor Jake Shapira, drag his ass out of bed and get him here to the White House. Yeah, him. His office is in the Watergate, I think he lives in Georgetown somewhere. Tell him it’s a national security emergency or something and it’s top secret, but he has to come now.”
“Got it, sir,” said Lyons. “Yes, I know Doc Jake. I read his reports to the Secret Service on his governmentally sensitive patients. I need to have a word with him on the mental state of our Ms. Halberstam, see if she’s let anything unusual slip about her past or present political and racial attitudes, anything like that. I have his private number on file, so we’ll find him and get him here as soon as we can.”
Jenner closed his phone and said, “Admiral Brava, General Scheisskopf, is there any way that we can stall or sidetrack Lieutenant Colonel Patterson and whoever is with him on his way from the Pentagon?” His phone buzzed and Jenner flipped it open. He spoke briefly and closed it. “Cancel that. They’re here now and headed for the Oval Office. Let’s go.”
Jenner, Scheisskopf, and Brava managed to intercept the three men in uniform who had just arrived from the Pentagon in the lobby outside the Roosevelt Room. They were Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Pat Patterson, a thin middle-aged officer who was the White House military attaché. Patterson was carrying a white metal briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, and he looked distinctly unhappy. He was accompanied by Major General Russell Fein and Colonel Nathan Rabinowitz. Brava stepped forward. “Thank you for coming, gentlemen,” he said, nodding towards Fein and Rabinowitz. “I understand the president has summoned Colonel Patterson for consultation on possible options in view of the current crisis. He’s in the Oval Office. General Scheisskopf and I will take you on through, Pat. You gentlemen can wait in the National Security Advisor’s office. Can I have the White House mess send you up some coffee or some breakfast?”
General Fein gave his superiors a snappy salute. “The commander-in-chief has specifically requested that Colonel Rabinowitz and myself confer with him on the matter, Admiral,” he said.
“That won’t be necessary, General,” said Scheisskopf. “Admiral Brava and I can take it from here.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I spoke with the president not half an hour ago and he was very specific. He wanted to see Lieutenant Colonel Patterson, Colonel Rabinowitz and myself. Certain decisions have to be made. I believe he plans to give a briefing to the remaining members of the War Cabinet in the Situation Room later.” Fein’s voice was neutral and polite, but he clearly had no intention of backing down or allowing Brava or Scheisskopf to go in to see the president with them. Scheisskopf and Brava scowled. It was clear that a major military pissing contest was about to be unleashed, when the President Hunter Wallace appeared in the doorway of the Roosevelt room. He no longer resembled a rabid gopher quite so much, but there was something haunted and intense about him, like a man standing on the ledge of a fortieth-floor window who was about to jump. “General Fein is correct, General Scheisskopf,” he said. “I need to speak with these three officers from the Pentagon for a bit. You and Admiral Brava will be brought into the loop soon enough. Hugh, could you see if you can round up the entire Cabinet and get them here for a meeting in the Situation Room in one hour’s time? Thank you.”
“Mr. President, before you proceed, may we speak with you privately?” requested Jenner desperately.
“You may not,” said Hunter Wallace, staring at them, his lips and cheeks trembling, his fingers writhing at his side in a bizarre rhumba. “I know what you want to say. You are afraid. You don’t want me to use the power God has given me to make the whole world right again. You don’t want me to grasp the destiny for which God has shaped me as His servant and the servant of His people. I do not wish to hear anything you have to say. From now on, you will obey orders only, or else I will have you arrested, and don’t think I can’t find someone willing to use the Dershowitz needles on you three. I wonder what I could get you to confess to?” Wallace giggled. “Oh, yes, that opens fascinating possibilities! But now you bad men go away. I will call you when I need you. If I need you. You gentlemen come with me, please.” Wallace turned around and led the three blank-faced Pentagon visitors through the Roosevelt Room and into the Oval Office. They could hear the snap as Wallace locked the door behind him. They stared at one another.
“Dear God, he’s going to destroy the world!” said Jenner as they trudged in despair back into the lobby of the West Wing. “Why the hell didn’t you men do something? There are what, at least three hundred thousand living American troops who will be in harm’s way from those nuclear missiles as well? You’re supposed to be men of action. Why didn’t you do something?” he repeated.
“Like what, sir?” said Brava with a sigh. “He is the fucking President of the United States. For forty years I have been trained and conditioned always to obey the commander-in-chief, even when he’s insane.”
“What did you want us to do?” asked Scheisskopf bitterly. “Pull our sidearms and shoot them all?”
“One would have been sufficient,” said Jenner, his blood freezing with horror in his veins at the thought of what was about to happen.
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” said Brava.
“We’re good at that in America,” said Jenner bitterly. “Pretending we don’t hear and see things. Pretending inconvenient facts don’t exist. The problem is, they do, and now reality is about to jump up and bite us and the whole world in the ass. Bummer, man, as my hippie parents used to say.”
Lee Lyons appeared at Jenner’s side. “Doctor Shapira is on the way,” he told the Vice President. “I spoke with him on the phone myself.”
“You didn’t tell him anything, did you?” asked Jenner.
“No, sir, I just said the president was having a bad time personally due to the loss of his two favorite staffers and we thought he needed somebody to talk to. Doctor Shapira will be here in about half an hour. Actually, he seemed quite eager to come.”
“I can imagine he d
id,” said Jenner with a wry smile. “Now he’s got the ultimate celebrity patient. A madman in the Oval Office waving a nuclear warhead around instead of a junkie in a bodega with a hundred-dollar junk gun.”
“But there’s something else, sir, if I could have a word in private?” Lyons glanced at the admiral and the general.
“Go ahead, Lee,” said Jenner. “This is a crisis and these gentlemen need to know everything.”
“I just spoke with Agent McMann down in the control room. On my instructions, he ran a number of archived outgoing phone calls made by Ms. Georgia Halberstam through a decryption program. Mostly calls to her stepsister, Talia Halberstam. He was looking for anything that might indicate that she’s been communicating with suspect groups or individuals, anything political, anything that looked out of place.”
“And?” demanded Jenner. “Did he find anything?”
“Is the bitch a goddamned Nazi spy?” grated Scheisskopf.
“Wait, Halberstam’s a Jewish name, isn’t it?” asked Brava.
“Halberstam is her stepfather’s name,” explained Lyons. “She’s actually gentile. She’s officially a Cataclysm Survivor, and she gets the pension, but the fact remains she was born in the Northwest and she still has family there. There’s nothing specific, but McMann found some kind of weird program on the phone’s chip that he can’t identify,” Lyons went on. “No idea what it is, but it’s not standard on that or any other wireless chip. At the very least, that’s a security violation, possession of unlicensed and unapproved communications software of any kind inside a federal building or government department, five years in a penal factory right there. Something’s going on with that girl, Mr. Vice President, and even if it’s not what we fear, she’s breaking the law and we need to detain her.”
“How is Wallace going to react to that, Hugh?” asked Brava. “Us busting his bit of fluff on the side as maybe the spy who’s caused us to lose the war, and for all we know somehow managed to put the finger on Angie Herrin and Ron Schiff for last night’s Nazi hit men?”
“I have no use for Nazi bitches, but we need to think, what will that do to the president’s paranoia factor?” asked Scheisskopf. “Will it make him more or less likely to push the button?”
“Unfortunately, he’s pushing the button right now as we speak,” Jenner reminded them.
“Is he?” asked Brava. “Maybe. But the procedure does take time. It’s not a literal button; there are all kinds of procedures, checks, counterchecks, authentications, and so on to go through. He actually has to call in the codes and orders to the Strategic Defense Command, and he also has to get a return acknowledgement and a ready from the officers in charge of each missile silo cluster, who will have to confirm their targets and that kind of thing, to make sure they fire at Seattle and not at Beijing because somebody forgot to update the computer program. We may have a little bit of time if we can impede that process.”
“How much time?” asked Jenner.
“An hour, maybe,” said Brava. “Perhaps more if we could distract him with this woman’s possible treachery long enough for this headshrinker you called to get here. Then we let the headshrinker take over, and maybe he in turn can stall the president while you get the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate over here, and while Al and I round up twenty field grade officers for every Jew Fein and Rabinowitz can muster, to explain to Hunter Wallace why it’s a bad idea to disembowel ourselves in an act of thermonuclear hara-kiri.”
“In the meantime, what can we do with Fein and Rabinowitz and Patterson in there?” asked Jenner.
“I can get on the horn to Fort Lee and get some Delta Force guys I know choppered in here who will do what I tell ’em, including arresting those two kikes and poor old Pat Patterson,” offered Scheisskopf. “In the president’s presence, if we have to.”
“That won’t be necessary, General,” said Lee Lyons. “My men will detain the three officers, although I would prefer to wait until they leave the Oval Office so we don’t upset the president. Jimbo Hadding would detain Jesus and gun down Mary and Joseph if I told him to do it.”
“You’re down with this, Lee?” asked Jenner.
“So long is the president is not harmed, yes, sir,” said the Secret Service man. “It’s obvious to me that President Wallace is under a great strain, he is not thinking rationally, and he is doing things that endanger himself and others. My job is to protect the president from danger, including protecting him from himself if need be. It won’t be the first time the Secret Service has had to clean some dirty presidential laundry and when need be we do it efficiently and discreetly.”
“Don’t you think Agent Lyons here has the duty to interrupt the president even at this crucial point with serious information of this magnitude, information which directly affects the chief executive’s personal security?” suggested Brava. “If I remember my White House security protocols, the Secret Service pretty much has the power to grab the wheel at any time if a threat to the president is identified? As the Halberstam woman may well be.”
“He’s right, sir,” said Lyons.
“It will buy us some time and give us a chance to scope what the hell’s going on in there,” said Scheisskopf.
“Every minute he’s talking to somebody, about any thing at all, is a minute he’s not pushing the button,” said Jenner in agreement. “All right, Lee, see what you can do…” Jenner looked up and saw Georgia enter the lobby, on her way out the door. “No, wait. I have a better idea.”
Georgia walked calmly toward the lobby door to the West Wing, which was hidden from public view from Pennsylvania Avenue by thick hedges and shrubs. Once outside the door she would descend into the artfully concealed tunnel that ran below Executive Avenue into the underground parking garage beneath the Executive Office Building. There was a cab rank in the garage where she normally took a taxi home to her apartment, but today she would walk out of the garage and text Donald Duck to Bobby once she was clear. He would pick her up, and then would come one more rough part, the part where they would extract her daughter Allura from the Halberstams’ house on K Street. Then it was out of this filthy city, back on the road, but this time going in the right direction, going Home, with Montana gleaming in the distant skies ahead of them, and the house on Daly Avenue waited for her and Allura. Georgia was wrapped up in the nearness of home as she left this place for the last time. Through the doors, she could see the warm, clipped grass of the North Lawn and hear the cars going by on Pennsylvania Avenue outside. Just a few more steps, out the door…
Then she felt the hand on her shoulder. She turned and saw Agent Lee Lyons. His eyes were dead now, the dead of the American secret policeman in the suit who had terrorized white people in this land for a century. Somewhere, she could not for the life of her remember where, Georgia had read something about that on the internet. White male agents’ eyes were always like that when the American suits came for you. Not full of hatred, or anger, or triumph like the black or brown or female agents, glorying in the destruction of the disobedient white people they so hated. White male feds moving in for their kills had lifeless eyes, like a shark or a doll, as if they’d switched off their brains and were running on some kind of autopilot. They were robots obeying the orders of the vast soulless machine that made them and nurtured them and owned them. In a way that was more terrifying and soul-destroying than the blows, slaps, shoves, rifle butts to the head and screamed obscenities of some bestial black or swaggering Latino trying to show his macho. Georgia saw the dead eyes of Amurrica looking at her now, and she knew. The Eater of Souls had found her, and now it was her turn.
“Come with me, please, Ms. Halberstam,” said Lyons. “The Vice President of the United States wants to speak with you.”
She walked calmly, determined to show no fear as she was dragged into the machine. She accompanied the Secret Serviceman into the Vice Presidential office a few short steps away from the lobby door that had meant freedom moments ago. Jenner was sit
ting behind his desk, looking haggard. He stood up when she entered. “Ms. Halberstam, good morning,” he said in a low voice, gesturing toward a chair. “Please take a seat. I need to speak with you about a matter of some urgency.”
Georgia sat down. She was thinking rapidly. She decided that it was best not to play the dumb blonde, and she was tired of that role in any case. She wouldn’t confess, she would give Bobby his 24 hours, but she wouldn’t play chickenshit games either. “Let me guess,” she said to him. “Something is wrong with the president, and either you need to pick my brains about him, or else you want me to try and talk to him about something. Am I right?”
“You are,” said Jenner with a nod. “To begin with, Ms. Halberstam, in all honesty and fairness, I need to tell you that Agent Lyons here has some questions about some of your outgoing phone calls and texts. But that is not why I wanted to speak to you. We need your immediate help on another matter. If we can resolve that satisfactorily, then the Secret Service will deal with the issue of your phone usage later.”
“Sir?” said Lyons, astounded.
“Later,” repeated Jenner flatly. “Possibly next week some time. Do you understand what I am saying to you, Ms. Halberstam?”
“I understand,” said Georgia with a nod.
Jenner continued. “The second thing I want to do is to apologize if during the past few months I have inadvertently said or done anything that might have seemed to you to indicate any, ah, disdain or disregard on my part. You see, we need your help very badly indeed.”
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