by John Barnes
“Just doesn’t seem as special as it should. Well, let’s get it over with, an old man like me should be home in bed.”
Moments later, the lights winked green on the cameras, the tech director gestured rolling, and Chief Justice Lopez held out the Bible. Shaunsen seemed to gain three inches of height and lose three decades in that instant, looking solemn and serious, and his delivery of the TelePrompTer speech was flawless as pure performance, though it annoyed the hell out of Cameron: When it came to the messages that Homeland Security had written, asking people to be understanding about the needs of defense and law enforcement, but not to wait for authority if there was something they could do right now, Shaunsen delivered it in a pro forma rush. But when it came to the words he had added, all those promises that the crisis will generate plenty of pork, he slowed down to put a grin and almost-wink into it. Shit, shit, shit I wish Kowalski had been eligible—or Shaunsen had fallen down the stairs and broken his neck getting here.
Afterward, Shaunsen extracted a handshake and congratulation from all the Cabinet officials, including the slightly-too-late Secretaries of Education and the Interior, and told Dwight Ferein, “I know your guy here”—he pointed at Cam—“wanted to give me some kind of briefing or something about the whole situation, but I’m not that kind of micromanager, everybody should just keep doing the good job they’re doing, and I’ll get caught up sometime this week on it. Meanwhile, I’m tired, and can you believe it, I’ve been in Washington all these years, and it’s my first time sleeping in the White House? I’ve got to go before I fall over. You just tell your people to take care of it, and I’ve got total faith in them.” Three minutes later, he had climbed into a White House limo and rolled away.
Ferein said, “Mr. Nguyen-Peters, I presume you heard the president.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then I just want to apologize for him. Because someone should. I suppose I should see about turning the rest of the Cabinet around and sending them home with as many feathers smoothed down as I can, eh?”
“That would be very helpful,” Cam said.
“I can see myself out,” Weisbrod said, “and I’m relatively featherless.”
Ferein had been a CEO of two different companies, an Army Reserve major, a state attorney general, and a one-term senator. He said, “If the job had fallen on me, I would not have felt up to it. I know perfectly well that I achieved adequate performance in several well-paid soft jobs, and a couple of very well-paid hard ones. But unfortunately, I think our Acting President believes himself fully up to it. I am not sure how to disabuse him of this notion, but if you have any ideas, I’ll help in any way I can. Thanks for being my Chief of Staff, Cam, and my colleague, Graham. Now and then I need someone I can make an indiscreet remark in front of; it prevents my exploding.”
“Part of my job, sir,” Cam said. “I should go upstairs and send the team home. Graham, let’s walk together.”
In the elevator, Cam said, “I suppose the White House Chief of Staff will figure out a way to shuffle Pendano out, and Shaunsen in, gently and with proper care for everyone’s dignity.”
“Most chiefs of staff can do that sort of thing,” Weisbrod said, smiling slightly.
“Yeah,” Cameron said. “Speaking as a chief of staff myself, what I actually meant to say was, I don’t envy the poor woman her job—especially since for all we know Pendano will wake up tomorrow morning and say, ‘What the hell have I done?’”
“From your mouth to God’s ears.”
“No kidding.” He stuck his hand out and shook Weisbrod’s. “Just between you and me, Mr. Secretary, my whole job is really all human contact, all I really am is a big smart Rolodex that knows where to go for help. And thank you for adding yourself to my list of people I can count on, tonight.”
“Fair enough. Honestly, I was just hanging around because there’s not much for me at home other than too much reading and not enough company, and it felt nice to be at least a little useful.”
“You were more than a little useful,” Cameron said. “Especially thanks for talking him out of turning the emergency speech into the opener for Shaunsen for President.”
“I’m just sorry that I couldn’t figure out a way to keep him from putting in that silly pork-for-everyone stuff.”
“At least you tried, and you did something. Four other Cabinet secretaries, including my boss, stood there like lumps. And Dwight Ferein called it on the nose, even if he was right about being no more than adequate; we have too many people who are adequate administrators for ordinary times, and who have attended too many seminars telling them that they’re leaders with vision, and too many of them have believed it.” Cameron nodded at Graham. “All that’s my long way of saying, I will call on you again, I’m sure, because I think you can make it up as you go, and most of these guys can’t.”
“I’ll try to live up to your faith,” Weisbrod said. “And hope it’s never tested.”
“Was that phrase of yours, ‘From your mouth to God’s ears’?”
“Perfect on the first try. You sound just like my mother.”
PART 2
TEN DAYS
MIDNIGHT INVADES
Most of the time, Americans live together like a colony of clams, growing and feeding by tapping into each other’s resources, with nothing much going on beyond the individual level. The whole grows and flourishes because its members grow and flourish. It’s efficient but purposeless unless you regard growth itself as a purpose—which nearly all Americans do.
Cooperation for a common purpose is about as American as sacrificing virgins to the Corn God; Americans have heard of it, but as something long ago and far away, not something they do themselves. When the force of circumstances does drive Americans to common action, usually it looks like a herd of cattle, either milling about until they calm down, or briefly stampeding. An especially urgent need or clear vision can make Americans form up more like a flock of geese, with a few out front pretending to know where they are going, and everyone else honking to keep the temporary, efficient formation together.
At midnight on October 29th, Americans were more like a wolf pack in which the alphas had just been shot: yapping, howling, growling, threatening, whimpering for comfort, barking defiance, and now and then, wheeling to maul each other.
WASHINGTON, DC. 12:14 A.M. EST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.
At the curb, Heather asked Lenny, “Would you like to split a cab? We can talk while we ride. I had kind of a feeling that we were both having a lot more ideas than we wanted to put out in front of the high-level types in there.”
“Heather, you are high-level—higher than Mark Garren, you’re an assistant secretary and he’s only a deputy under.”
“Yeah, but he’s got a few hundred employees and a budget of mumble-umpty-classified gazillions, and I have nineteen employees and a copy machine. We’re equal according to the rules, but—”
“Ha. This town runs on rules. What do you call all that fretting about the Constitution?”
“A normal day for Cameron Nguyen-Peters.”
“And a good thing, too. But if we’re going to talk about that kind of stuff, let’s do it securely.” He pulled his AllVoice from the outside breast pocket of his jacket and requested a security-cleared limo. “It won’t take any longer to get home, the driver’ll handle my wheelchair better than a cabbie, and in the limo we can talk about anything in the world.”
“Anything?”
Lenny waggled an eyebrow. “You were thinking of talking dirty?”
“You start!”
He snorted. “I may take you up on that. But entirely aside from your being an interesting human being and nearly identical to my idea of beautiful, you said some things I’d like to pick your brain about.”
“Well,” Heather said, “like Woody Allen said, my brain is my second favorite organ.” She risked resting a hand on his shoulder.
He stretched and rolled his neck; he definitely seemed to like it. Well, it has been
a while, he’s the only date that’s been any fun in the last couple years, intelligence is sexy, and any guy that thinks I’m beautiful, that’s a major plus right there.
As she helped to move his wheelchair into the limo, he said, “You’ve done this before.”
“My dad, for the last twenty years,” Heather explained. “His spinal cord was severed when an idiot drunk kid broadsided his Harley. It was a blind curve, and between his bike and an all-death-metal musical diet, Dad couldn’t have heard the drunk coming if he’d come with a brass band.”
Lenny laughed. “My mom has a Pod Twenty-One with all the country music ever recorded on it. I guess we can never fix our parents, can we?”
“I’m not sure I’d want to, but you’re right, we sure can’t.” The limo pulled away from the curb. “Actually, I really want to give the old guy a call now that I’ve talked about him. It won’t take long—do you mind?”
“I wish I could call my mother, but if I woke her up at midnight she’d put me in an orange crate and leave me at a foundlings’ home.”
“Aren’t you a little old for that, Lenny?”
“No one’s ever too old where their mother is involved.”
“Pbbbt. You set me up for that one. Okay, I’ll just be a minute.”
Her father picked up on the first ring. “Hey, there, little cop-chick.”
“Been following the news, Dad?”
“Naw, just worked my way up to Level Seventeen in DoomAge, been off in virtual ever since they canceled the Series. Can you believe they did that?”
“Actually, yeah, I can believe they did it. So you haven’t heard about Daybreak?”
“I think you have to be Level Twenty for that.”
“Seriously, Dad. Just for a sec.” She explained it briefly, embarrassed, in front of Lenny, to have to explain it the way she would to a distractible nine-year-old, but that was sort of what her big fuzzy dad was in every way except the physical. “So clean out the motors and electrics on your wheelchair with ammonia, and plan to do that more than once a day, and disinfect your tires. Like they say, this is not a drill.”
“Fuckin’ towelheads. And hippies.”
She refrained from pointing out that her father wore his hair down to his floating ribs with a beard that went beyond it and looked like he had dressed by rolling in a bin of denim and leather scraps. His comeback was inevitably that he’d voted for every Republican since Reagan, so whatever he was, it wasn’t a hippie.
“Just take care, okay, Dad? And if the chair starts to act up, take it down to the VA before it goes dead on you. I don’t want you stranded.”
“Okay, your old man will look after himself, Ms. Cop-chickie. Job going okay otherwise?”
“Yep.”
“Gonna bust the assholes that did it?”
“Working on it.”
“That’s my girl.”
She rung off and shook her head. “I hope that’s enough to keep him out of trouble. He’s not really all that old, but you know what guys like him tend to say, it’s not the years, it’s the mileage, and he’s really piled it on.”
“Where’s he live?”
“San Diego. He’s about five blocks from a VA facility, and they supply and support his power chair, so as long as they have parts and power, he can keep rolling. As long as he doesn’t get all stubborn and think he can fix it himself.”
“Well, at least he doesn’t have to worry about the heat going out,” Lenny pointed out.
“Yeah. Hey, you know, we’ve been out more times than I can count—”
“Seven. Good thing you’re the street cop and I’m the analyst.”
“Pbbt. I was about to say, ‘And I don’t know much about your family.’ That was going to be an invitation to talk about yourself. Serve you right if I only talked business.”
“Oh, no, you’re not getting out of it that easily.” Lenny told her about how, once he was on his own, Mom Plekhanov had gone back to school to become a special-needs teacher; then Lenny heard about life as a six-foot red-haired girl on the suburban edge of East LA. Then she discovered Lenny could be very funny on the subject of having been a Two-Million-Dollar Baby, despite the obvious fact that he had spent his first eight years of life in constant pain. Then he pointed out, “Whoops. We’re about two blocks from your place and we haven’t talked one bit of business yet. What would the taxpayers say?”
She barely thought for an instant. “I don’t know if it’s practical for you, but you could come up to my place, I’ve got a fridge full of leftovers we can eat while we talk, if you want, and then I can give you a ride home—there’s a lift on my car for when Dad visits, it’d be easy—or if it’s too late, you can crash out in my guest bedroom like a gentleman.”
“Assuming I am one.”
“Or trying to fool me into thinking you are.” I’m smiling too much. But then so is he.
“Works for me,” he said. “Definitely works for me.”
The limo driver had no apparent reaction to the change of destinations. Not reacting is probably a job requirement, Heather decided.
At her apartment, she introduced the cats: “The Siamese is Fuss. He’ll periodically yowl like death on steroids about nothing, and now and then he’ll get the rips and run all over the apartment, for reasons that probably make sense to him. He’s hardly ever affectionate with strangers, but once—”
Fuss sniffed at Lenny’s foot with cross-eyed concentration for a moment, leaped into his lap, curled up, and purred like an unmufflered lawn mower.
“Except, of course, I can always be wrong about him. The big lazy wad of fur that waddled in over there is a crossbred Persian and dust bunny, and I call him Feathers. He moves whenever he imagines there’s a possibility of something to eat. The only reason he appears to be alive is that he has a vivid imagination.”
“That’s funny,” Lenny said, “based on the things you always say about your social life, I was expecting about thirty cats.”
“That’s for after I retire. I’m working my way up gradually. Now, how do you prefer to transfer from wheelchair to couch, assuming Fuss ever lets go of you?”
“I’m comfortable in the wheelchair.”
“Yeah, but if I’m going to sit next to you and put the moves on you, I need you on the couch.”
“Oh, well, in that case, if we can just move the coffee table to give me a clear space, and perhaps persuade His Nibs here to relocate—”
“We’ll start with the easy one,” Heather said, scooping the ReadPod, Converse hi-tops, pizza box, and Nestle’s Wine-4-1 box off the coffee table and in one swoop to the kitchen. Classy way to make a good impression, she thought. Oh, well, at least I didn’t have a bra lying on it like I did all last week. She lifted the coffee table over the back of the couch and set it behind.
Lenny rolled forward. Fuss yowled as if his tail were on fire, shot at least five vertical feet, and vanished into Heather’s bedroom in a single gray-brown streak. “Well, that was easy,” Lenny said. “I didn’t know they could levitate.”
“I have to keep the windows closed so he doesn’t fly to the moon every time the neighbors turn on their blender. Can I interest you in a beer?”
“I bet you can.”
As she returned from the kitchen, a cold Corona in each hand, she saw that Lenny had transferred himself to the left end of the couch. Giving me the choice of next to him or at the other end. Maybe this guy’s a little too much of a gentleman.
To avoid towering over him, which she knew annoyed the hell out of her father, she slid onto the couch next to him. As she handed him the beer she brushed her head against his shoulder.
He slipped an arm around her. She kissed him, warmly, slowly, without tongue, or gripping and pulling, or any of the big-production ways of saying, Dude, you are so in.
Though you so are. I just don’t want to send you that message. Yet. She was just hoping that a plain old I like you kiss was what he was in the mood for.
Christ, I bet he’s thi
nking something just as complicated. This is what happens when you spend your whole life monitoring communications.
After the kiss, he said, “Well, that took care of most of my worries about misreading each other’s intentions. Um, is this the place where I tell you that although we have to be careful about my left arm and my right foot is hypersensitive, most of me moves, and the parts that—”
“We can skip all that till the issue comes up, Lenny.”
“We can?”
She grinned. “Well, if I put you through the full explanation of the mechanics before we got going, I’d have to admit that I did that to you to my dad, and then he’d beat me. And I’d deserve it. He gets so tired of having to do all that talking just to explain to whoever his latest is that he’s capable of having sex and it feels good. Look, I know that no sane man who was incapable would humiliate himself by starting a fire he couldn’t put out.”
“What if I’m not sane?”
“I’ve run into that a few times. Married it once, too. I recognize it when I see it, and you’re not crazy that way. So…” she kissed him again slowly, “as I said, we can discuss any special issues when they come up. Or when anything else comes up. Now relax, forget whatever happened with other women, and give me a chance to misunderstand you for myself.”
This time he kissed back, and she thought the question was settled until he said, “I’m hoping to break whole new territory in miscommunication before you decide you never want to see me again.”
“Are you this smooth with all the girls?”
“Only with the ones who are way too hot and interesting to be in my league.”
“Flattery may not get you everywhere, but it’ll probably get you more than far enough.”
He finally gave her the kiss she’d been trying for, definitely as the guy in charge this time. “And how would you know what my idea of ‘enough’ is?”
“Research,” she said, “starting now.”
NINETY MINUTES LATER. OFF THE CALIFORNIA COAST. 12:15 A.M. PST. TUESDAY. OCTOBER 29.
