Chapter Two
IN THE LAST TWELVE HOURS I’d been to a bomb site and a political rally, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say the political rally terrified me more. A lot more.
It had been several hours before the bombing, at the big pre-convention Armstrong George rally held in Tulane University’s football stadium. As college stadiums go, it wasn’t so big, with seating for about thirty thousand. Hell, Alabama’s Bryant-Denny Stadium held over a hundred thousand. But for a political event—a Republican political event—thirty thousand was a massive crowd. And it wasn’t just thirty thousand bodies. It was thirty thousand screaming, maniacal Armstrong George fanatics.
Eddie Basha and I took the streetcar up St. Charles to Tulane and walked over, surrounded by the George faithful. It was dusk and we were both wearing baseball caps and George sweatshirts with cutoff sleeves and nobody gave us a second look. We passed through the high-tech bomb detectors set up outside the entrance and found a place on the ramp to the stadium. The big halogen lights lit the green field brighter than the hazy day that was fading, and in the middle of the field there was a small stage. That was it. No elaborate props or staging. Up on the Jumbotrons, videos played of Armstrong George bus tours, his slogan, “Take America Back,” emblazoned on the bus.
Were this a Hilda Smith rally, we would have a band onstage and introductory speakers, probably the most popular local pol we could get and a somebody from the area who repeated a theme we were pushing that day or week: a teacher, an unemployed worker, a female entrepreneur, a veteran. I was a big believer in the Kuleshov Effect, that early-twentieth-century Russian film experiment that took the same shot of an actor and surrounded it with different images. When you see it, you think the expression of the actor is changing, while it’s actually static, the point being that viewers had different reactions based on who and what went before and after. You could take the most unempathetic candidate and surround him with happy schoolkids, and unless the candidate started actually hitting the kids or screaming at them, odds were he would look warmer and voters would talk about how he really cared about kids. Same with seniors or minorities or women or…you name it. I once tried to explain to a candidate what the Kuleshov Effect was and they looked at me like I was insane. Later Eddie Basha told me, “Don’t ever do that again. Don’t tell ’em what you are doing, just do it.” It was good advice.
We did it all the time with Hilda Smith, who had a natural Yankee aloofness that read cold. Which, in truth, was pretty accurate; she was cold by the standards of most “hug you until you can’t breathe, let me cry with you for a while” politicians of the new school. But since turning to Armstrong George and calling him out in that debate in New Hampshire, she had come to represent something that was still important to a lot of people in a beat-up country—call it dignity, or decency. At an ugly time, Armstrong George had marshaled the ugliness within us all. It was a deep, burning anger at the large forces that controlled our lives. It was probably close to the religious fervors that swept across the country in the late 1800s. Hilda Smith stood for a different kind of country, one that wasn’t seething with anger. Our bet was that something about Armstrong George made you feel worse about yourself and your country. That his calling for a New Bill of Rights and a new Constitutional Convention was radical, not conservative.
But it was a close thing, and that’s why we were down to fighting over a handful of delegates. As the sky darkened and the field grew brighter under the lights, the music swelled, and then suddenly there was Armstrong George, bursting from the locker room tunnel trailed by his son, Somerfield. The two looked eerily alike, both tall and sturdy, with big, square, Protestant faces that looked like they came from a WPA mural of the wheat farmers who had tamed the prairie. Which was what the Georges had done. They were not from the mountainside of Colorado but the flat plains that resembled the heartland in geography and belief. There were no fireworks or razzle-dazzle tricks as Armstrong and his son walked toward the simple stage. But the crowd went absolutely crazy, their yells and applause growing louder the closer the Georges got to the stage.
Armstrong George bounded up the steps, took the mike in one hand, and detached it from the stand—no fancy headset for him, he wanted to work the mike the old-fashioned way—and let rip. “Americans!” he cried. “This is our moment!” It was chilling. The crowd went from fever pitch to berserk. “Are you with me? Are we together? Are we…Americans?”
Eddie leaned in to me and whispered, “He’s big on this American thing.” It was more a shout than a whisper, the stadium was so loud.
“These have been dark days in America. Our beacon has been dimmed, but not extinguished. Within each of you glows the fire to reignite the torch of American genius and greatness. You are our future!”
“God help us,” Eddie groaned, looking around at the crowd. “It’s 1930s Nuremberg.”
I waved him off. I was there to see Armstrong George. Every time I saw him, I got some different perspective. I’d snuck into a dozen of his rallies over the past six months.
“You are the Founding Fathers of Tomorrow,” he said in a suddenly low, intense voice, so the crowd leaned forward. “I say to you that, like the Founding Fathers before us, now is the time we must seize the day and control our own destiny. It is time for a New Bill of Rights. It is Time for a New Beginning.”
Then the shout went up from a woman in the crowd. I would have bet anything she was a plant, but it was picked up, and soon the whole stadium was chanting in unison: “America for Americans! America for Americans! America for Americans!”
Armstrong George took a step back, put his arm around his son, and waved.
“Jesus Christ.” Eddie sighed. “Jesus H. Christ. We’re doomed.”
—
The rally seemed like much more than twelve hours earlier when I walked into the Windsor Court’s Presidential Suite, a name that was threatening to seem very ironic. The vice president of the United States was in a robe, looking under a couch for her slipper.
“Here,” Lisa Henderson said, fishing out the green slipper from under the couch.
Hilda Smith thanked her, and they exchanged a look I knew I’d never know. These two had invented each other, and it was not a stretch to say that they were in love. Not that I thought they had been slipping under the covers together on those cold Vermont nights or playing with marital aids back at the Naval Observatory in D.C., which is where they stashed the vice president. But each had been probably the most important person in the other’s life for a very long time, and that was probably something close to love. As for the sex, I always preferred to believe people had more interesting sex lives than they actually did. But the truth was probably closer to the fact that neither of them had any kind of sex, and likely hadn’t for a very long time.
It was possible, I suppose, that Hilda and her husband still slept together, had sex together, that is, but I had my reasons to doubt it. Not that Quentin was off sex—not hardly, as I was pretty sure he was sleeping with one of our fundraisers. She was forty-five and married to a busy doctor and I wouldn’t have been surprised if Hilda encouraged the two. I watched Quentin as he came out of the bedroom wrapping a Windsor Court bathrobe around his sizable frame. He was six foot three and had played football at Dartmouth back when six foot three made you a big player. He settled down in a chair and stuck out his feet, nodding toward Lisa and me.
“There’s no upside that I can figure to this thing,” I started in. “Eddie is already hearing from some of our delegates who want to leave town. The crazy Armstrong George people will love it. All their paranoid fantasies coming true.” I sighed. It was really bad. “I think we just go with a vanilla statement: Violence is bad, terrorism sucks, tragedy of human life, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.”
“ ‘Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit’?” Lisa repeated sardonically.
I ignored her. “But I can tell you that Armstrong George will try to turn this on us. No doubt about it.”
“H
ow?” Quentin Smith asked. He had a low, gravelly voice, still laced with his southern roots.
“I know the woman who was hurt,” Hilda Smith said quietly, ignoring her husband. Her blond hair was pulled back, and she reminded me not for the first time of an aging film queen. She paused, and somewhere down below on Canal Street drunken convention crowds were shouting. Did they know about the bombing yet? They would soon enough. Everyone would. It was four thirty a.m. “She’s from Wisconsin but came to Iowa to campaign for me.”
“Too bad she couldn’t vote in Iowa,” I quipped automatically, then caught myself when Quentin Smith scowled. He had been against hiring me from the beginning, even after his wife came in third in Iowa. They had known Lisa for years, he’d argued. Lisa was family. They had to stick together.
So what the hell was I doing making some smartass remark about his wife’s embarrassing loss in front of the guy? “This is going to hurt us,” I said, trying to get back on track. The biggest problem was what the bombing would do to the whole mood of the convention. That’s what was scaring me now.
“I want to visit her tomorrow at the hospital,” the vice president said.
“That’s been arranged for tomorrow morning,” Lisa said crisply. She liked to say that it was her job to know Hilda Smith so well she could anticipate her needs. Occasionally, she actually did.
“I’ll go with you,” Quentin said. He was a doctor, though it had been years since he had actively practiced. In the last two decades he had focused on turning the little bankrupt ski resort they had purchased into a moneymaker. Now Vermont Skiing Resorts owned three midsize ski areas, and if they weren’t huge moneymakers, at least they were staying afloat, even after the Crash. He said it kept him young, the skiing. And it wasn’t a bad way to meet young, athletic women, as my op research guy had uncovered. It was good to know everything you could about your candidate’s spouse, especially if that spouse was waiting in the wings to drop the axe on your neck if you gave him any reason to do it.
“No press,” Hilda Smith said sharply. “No press advisory. Nothing. I want to sneak in and out. Understood?”
“Absolutely,” Lisa said.
I didn’t say a word. It could be a nice news hit, the vice president and her husband visiting the victim, but I knew now wasn’t the time to argue. Every reporter in America was within a ten-block area. It would be easy to leak.
“Who did it?” the vice president asked suddenly. “And why use red dye? Just to scare people?”
Lisa jumped in. This was a question for official White House staff, not campaign hacks like myself. Never mind that Lisa was back as chief of staff just because she’d done a lousy job at campaign hackdom. She saw herself as far above my lowly station in life, what with her security clearance and her knowing where the bathrooms were around the Situation Room. That was actually better for my purposes. I didn’t give a damn about government and just needed her to stay out of my way. The more she felt superior, the less likely she would need to prove I couldn’t run the campaign. Or at least that’s how I figured it.
“We will have a briefing by the FBI tomorrow morning at oh-eight-hundred hours,” she said firmly. “But when I spoke to several of our national security people, they thought the purpose was to spread fear.”
“Well, that seems pretty obvious,” I said. “That briefing is at eight a.m.?” I drawled. It drove me crazy how White House staff adopted military lingo, particularly since ninety-nine percent of them wouldn’t have been caught dead in uniform.
“Does the president know?” Hilda Smith asked.
For a moment, I thought she was asking if the president knew who had set off the bomb. She had a healthy appreciation of the president’s decline but still held out hope that he could swoop in and help her save the nomination. I suppose it was natural—the president had believed in her and changed her life once and surely he could do it again—but to a professional like me, it was painfully naive. The president of the United States had reached that point many politicians reach when they are convinced the Fates have conspired against them: he cared about himself, and to hell with the consequences. The Oval Office had battered him into such a self-involved, shell-shocked mess that all he could think about was trying—somehow—to make sure that whoever followed him as president would make him look better.
You could argue it round or flat. If Hilda Smith won, it would prove that he still had influence, that his own vice president, a representative of what passed for the mainstream, not-crazy wing of the party, had beaten back the forces of darkness. His legacy would be redeemed as people put the unfortunate troubles—that’s what he had taken to calling the Crash, “these unfortunate troubles”—behind them. Unfortunate troubles. Talk about denial. As if the greatest economic screw-up since the Great Depression was just a minor headache. Funny how when the economy is humming along, every politician rushes to take credit, and when it’s in the toilet, it’s no one’s fault but those damn international forces beyond anyone’s control. And when it was beyond the toilet and into the sewer, it was hard to find a politician of the party in power who would even admit that elected officials could do anything about the economy.
But on the other hand, if Armstrong George was the nominee and lost, it might just redeem the president by making him look more reasonable: a good man who did his best in bad times. There was always the danger that Hilda Smith would win and prove to be a much better president and make him look hapless. Then there was the chance that Armstrong George might actually win the whole thing, and nobody knew what the hell that would mean. Put it all together, and it made for a president who was paralyzed by indecision and open to being moved by the emotions of any given moment. It scared the hell out of me. He might be a broken president, but he was still the president, and inside our party there remained a certain segment who felt he had been given a raw deal and had done the honorable thing by not running for reelection. That wasn’t a huge contingent, but when you were fighting over a handful of delegates, everything and anything mattered.
“The president,” Lisa said, “intends to release a statement in the first news cycle.”
“He won’t help us,” I said.
“No?” Lisa countered. “You know what the president plans to say?”
“I can make a good guess that he won’t be using it as an opportunity to remind Americans of the wisdom of his vice president’s position on that bundle of goodies called the Protect the Homeland package.” That was a collection of bills that supporters of Armstrong George were trying to ram through Congress. None were as completely crazy as his New Bill of Rights but it was pretty nutty stuff.
“Hilda’s opposition to these draconian measures is one of the reasons she stands the best chance to win the general,” Quentin Smith said. He was right, too, and we had the testing to prove it. There was a sizable piece of the Republican Party that supported just about any “get tough on crime and terrorism” proposals—at least in theory—but when it came to winning big battleground states like Ohio, it was a negative for the key independent voters Republicans needed to win.
We had research that showed independents and soft Democrats thought Hilda Smith was a “different kind of Republican.” This was a good thing; the problem was that we had to win the damn nomination, and the last thing we needed was a new wave of fear rumbling through the convention.
“You know what the president should do?” Quentin Smith said. “He should resign and let Hilda become president and deal with this mess. That would guarantee she keeps the White House.”
“Brilliant,” Lisa said instantly. “Brilliant.”
I looked out the window, where the first hint of dawn was showing. The Secret Service had covered the windows with a thick bulletproof translucent cover but it still allowed light to leak in. This was a room I’d fought hard to be in—the suite of a vice president on the verge of capturing a nomination—but there were times when I felt an overwhelming desire for another life. There were surely millions of per
fectly happy people out there who didn’t have to deal with trying to explain to seemingly reasonable people that their plan for a presidential resignation that was basically a coup d’état was stark raving mad. I tried not to sigh.
“Moments like this are like bombs themselves,” I said. “Tremendous energy is released. Our job is to figure out how to use that energy to get the vice president over the top. There’s going to be hysteria. Armstrong George will be screaming for bodies to be hung from lampposts. We can’t out-scream him. Hilda has to be steady and calm.”
“I’m still here.” Hilda Smith sighed. “You don’t have to refer to me in the third person. I’m not dead yet.”
I had to smile. I’d come to like this woman, somebody I didn’t know at all when I walked into her hotel room in Manchester and explained to her that her only hope of saving her campaign was hiring me to take it over. I’d learned over the years that to really sell a client, you had to believe that whatever you said at that exact moment was absolutely true. There could be no doubts. Candidates were constantly subjected to the kind of abuse and humiliation that left even the tough ones feeling raw and vulnerable. They needed to believe that you could make the pain worthwhile. And I’d been able to sell Hilda Smith because I knew, absolutely knew without a doubt, that if she didn’t make a drastic change she was destined to go down in flames. It was the easiest sale I’d ever made. She was desperate. I was hopeful. We were a perfect match.
Since then we’d been married to each other. An arranged marriage, very old-fashioned, between two people who didn’t know each other. “You meet, have sex, get married, have children, fall in love”: that’s how a stunning Czech woman had described the typical Czech marriage. She was one of Václav Havel’s “aides,” whom I’d met when we were working to elect the best of a bad bunch in Serbia. It wasn’t a bad description of what a relationship was like with a candidate. You entered each other’s lives for a certain period and you became, invariably, the most important person in each other’s universe. Often they came quickly to hate their dependence on you, resenting you when you were right, never letting you forget when you were wrong. You demanded to know everything about them, from the financial to the sexual. You needed to know if they’d ever had an abortion or knocked a girl up, been arrested or caught speeding, bounced a check, if their children had drug problems or their spouses slept around. All the awful, little, petty secrets we try to hide, the small humiliations and tragedies, every tiny bit of dirty laundry, all had to be revealed to this stranger.
The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear Page 4
