by John Barnes
Loud cheers broke the silence; Castro noted that his four selected claques had all hit their cue perfectly, and almost everyone else had followed. He was not particularly displeased that Special Agents Bolton and Carlucci were among the few not cheering wildly; that was their privilege, and owing to their occupation, they were thoughtful men, not easily swayed and very inclined to consider things for a long time. Besides, many things would be easier if the Feds departed sometime before spring; they were handy men with weapons, and good counselors, but next summer would be easier without Federal eyes watching.
“So,” he said, “as the freeholder of Castle Castro, I would prefer that you vote in the following way…” He read off his list of intended votes, beginning of course with Norcross for president. “But again, it is your ballot. Let me offer you two options: Vote your way, if it disagrees with mine. Keep your ballot secret, if you wish. Place completed ballots in the red box to my left, and I swear upon my loyalty to my country and my family that I will report your votes faithfully and accurately to the California Secretary of State in Sacramento.
“Or, I would take it as a personal favor if you do this: Sign your name to your ballot but do not mark on it otherwise, and place it in the blue box to my right. In other words, acknowledge that because you have freely taken my protection and given your loyalty, you owe me your political allegiance, and you give over your political power to me for my use, just as you give me your bodies to use in fighting to defend Castle Castro and doing the work that must be done to house and feed us all.
“If you choose to give me your unmarked ballot, with your name on it, I will fill out your ballot for you and report it, with the others. And I will enter you into a list of people I will give preference to in any appointments or openings that may come up, because loyalty should be rewarded. All right—” He saw Carlucci trying to get his attention; the man might decide to be difficult, so Castro hurried somewhat at the last, spoiling some of the effect. Damn Carlucci anyway. “All right, all right then, now everybody vote!”
Later, as he sifted through the blue box, he discovered that Carlucci and Bolton had each signed their names, and rather than put an unmarked ballot in for him to mark, they had voted exactly opposite his desires on everything. Carlucci had added, “I do not think you understand what it is to be an American, sir, and I will leave your protection tomorrow, grateful for your help but unwilling to further give you mine.”
A man of honor. Good. And not sticking around. Even better. I’ll miss his gun. Oh well.
ABOUT THE SAME TIME. CASTLE LARSEN. (JENNER. CALIFORNIA.) ABOUT 2:00 P.M. PST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.
Bambi was charmed when, for the uncountable time, Quattro asked, “Do you think setting out the food and all is too much?”
She looked into his eyes and rested a hand on each of his triceps, dragging downward with her fingertips, willing his tense shoulders to descend. “Jenner is a tiny town, and it’s all laid out to be accessible to the road, the beaches, and the hills; nobody would ever have given any thought to defending it, it’s a place meant to welcome people. So they know that they depend on you in case of real trouble. You’ve shown them where they’ll bunk, trained their militia and armed it. It’s your canned fruit and tomatoes that’ll bring them through the winter without scurvy. They’ve gratefully accepted all of that; why would they think you were trying to buy their votes with a few sandwiches?”
“Okay. I’ll try to stop worrying. I just hope they’ll like what I could set out. I wish I could throw a real all-you-can-eat, too, you know, ’cause I’m pretty sure a lot of them are going hungry.”
Larry Mensche smiled. “Hey, truth here, Quattro? Relax and let people enjoy what you’ve done.”
“Yeah. People are just so difficult for me.”
“Just think of us as really fallible machines,” Mensche said. “Can I ask one strange question? Should we let Ysabel vote?”
“Well,” Bambi said, “she’s never been convicted of anything, she’s an American citizen, and her one vote isn’t going to change anything.”
Mensche nodded. “That’s what I think. Quattro?”
“Dude, she’s your prisoner.”
“But it’s your Castle.”
Quattro shrugged. “After all my years of wanting to be the freeholder of my own Castle, I found out I’d rather be an American citizen. Let’s let everyone vote today.”
FIVE HOURS LATER. LINCOLN. NEBRASKA. ABOUT 9:00 P.M. CST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.
In Lincoln, the governor sat down with her secretary of state and poured a glass of whiskey for each of them. “We won’t have the ballot results from the back corners of the state for at least a week, will we?”
“If we’re lucky. If there’s another big storm, could be two weeks before people on foot carry all the reports in.”
“But the only ones that need immediate reporting are the ones for the presidential race, right?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The Nebraska Secretary of State was a quiet man who generally let people arrive at their own conclusions, but he feared his governor’s nerve might fail her. He said, gently, “Nebraskans are not crazy—it’s going to come in massively for Norcross.”
“But if it takes weeks to report—”
“Well, exactly.” He drew out a sheet of typewritten paper, and said, “We got a radio link working, thanks to the physics kids at the university, but they’re having a hard time keeping it from crusting up, and they think they only have a couple hours in the battery they built before that goes, too. So it’s now or never. As it happens, what I have here is a copy, from a paper almanac, of the numbers from when Reagan carried this state, adjusted upward by either five percent or ten percent per county, re-proportioned to the last census. And if we report it, the only difference is everything that needs to happen can happen a couple of weeks early.”
She played with the pencil in front of her, pushed her glasses up her nose, and finally said, “You know, I don’t believe any of the eight states that have already reported had it any easier retrieving ballots than we did.”
“Rhode Island’s pretty small,” he pointed out.
“They had results half an hour after the polls closed. Do you think anyone can even cross Providence in less than half a day, right now?” The governor stared at him; her old-fashioned black horn-rimmed glasses glinted. “What do you want me to say? ”
“Nothing,” he said. “I want you to say nothing. I suppose I’ve been around long enough to want to be able to say truthfully that I’d told you, and you’d said nothing. I’ll radio these in right now.”
ABOUT ONE HOUR LATER. WASHINGTON. DC. 11:30 P.M. EST. TUESDAY. NOVEMBER 5.
“The poor old West Coast isn’t going to matter any more after Daybreak than it did before.” Manckiewicz looked at the whiteboard on which one of the reporters had sketched an awkward map of the United States that afternoon. They had the generator running so there was light, and in an abandoned drugstore someone had found a few calculators whose packaging had not yet rotted.
The signal chimed; he pulled on his headset. “Okay, KP-1, this is Chris, and count me in.”
The engineer in Pittsburgh said, “Five, four”—Chris drew a deep breath—“one, go.”
Chris began. “Hello, this is Chris Manckiewicz, of the Washington Advertiser-Gazette, with a special report for KP-1 News. Latest figures indicate an unprecedented landslide for Norcross. We’re ready to call Ohio and Missouri, again for Norcross, which means he needs only a dozen more electoral votes to become—”
The note in front of him had been sitting there for a while, and he knew what was on it, but he thought a population too long trained to drama would like it better this way. “Wait just a moment, I’ve just been handed a note—all right, then. It’s… all… over! ” (Corny, sure, but corn lifts spirits, and now’s the time for it, if ever.) “Illinois, Nebraska, and Colorado have all tipped over for Norcross. Will Norcross is the next president of the United States.”
He r
ecapped the whole story from the beginning, then signed off and turned to the staff. “Vern, are we preset with the ‘Norcross Wins’ headline?”
“Have been since yesterday. And I’ve been setting in the numbers as they came. Do we do an extra for tonight, or just go with a full story tomorrow? You never did settle on that.”
Chris leaned back. God, I wish Rusty could have seen this. “You know,” he said, “there probably hasn’t been an extra at any American paper in, I don’t know, twenty years? There haven’t been very many paper papers since the big bust in 2012. And an extra just sounds kind of… I don’t know, romantic. Besides, if we wait till morning, Shaunsen’s goons may be back here to smash our press. And there’re a few thousand people milling around on the Mall; I don’t know whether all of them will have canned goods, but there are quite a few living out of their backpacks. If we do half a print run on the extra, how soon can we get it out?”
“Forty minutes, if you’ve got any newsies to carry it.”
“We have five of them pretending to sleep downstairs right this minute, remember? So what the hell. It’s romantic, Rusty would have loved it, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to give those bastards a chance to stop our reporting. Be sure to re-run all the stuff about Rusty’s murder in there, too, and all the Shaunsen corruption stories. Let’s make it hot for the son of a bitch.”
THE NEXT DAY. WASHINGTON. DC. 6:50 A.M. EST. WEDNESDAY. NOVEMBER 6.
The breakfast meeting for that day was set an hour earlier, to give everyone a chance to eat before whatever might come. There had been no word from the White House after the election had been called for Norcross the night before; not even when Manckiewicz had walked up to the White House gates at three A.M. and asked if a concession speech was forthcoming.
The phone from the White House rang. Cameron looked at the clock. “Five minutes early. This won’t be good.” He signaled the transcriptionist standing by to get on the other headset, and picked it up. “Yes, Mr. President.”
“What kind of a stunt do you call that?”
Cameron kept his voice even. “I beg your pardon?”
“More than half those radio links to state Secretary of State offices were military,” Shaunsen said. “And a bunch of the ones that weren’t military were Republican. And nobody reported on any congressional or Senate races, just on the presidential race. And more than that, they’ve been telling me for days that they can’t get a message anywhere faster than a man can go on foot, yet somehow they all had counts within hours of when the polls closed. This is the biggest voter fraud and stolen election there’s ever been. This makes W Chimpface Shrub look like an amateur. And I don’t know any way they could do this without your being in on it. And who the fucking cunting hell’s idea was it to route everything direct to the news media?”
“If you mean the Advertiser-Gazette, sir, and KP-1, the election results were broadcast in clear—per your instructions—and they just listened in like anyone else could do and put the numbers together.”
“Eat shit.”
“Sir, have you been drinking?”
“That’s none of your business!” The phone slammed down.
Cameron looked over at Weisbrod. “Did you get that?”
“I could hear him through your head,” Weisbrod said. “The question is, does he realize we’ve got him beaten, or does he drag it out even further? ”
“He wouldn’t be able to drag it out if we could just take some Twenty-fifth Amendment action. What’s the situation with the Secretary of State?”
Weisbrod shook his head. “I have all but three Cabinet votes lined up your way, but Randolph is not one of them, and without him, there’s no Twenty-fifth Amendment case. He won’t budge. He doesn’t want to make history, he doesn’t want to be part of a coup. He doesn’t want to do anything, actually, other than try to get home to Mississippi. He’s worried about his family.”
It had stymied them for more than a day. The problem was that the Twenty-fifth Amendment requires both the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to certify that the President is unfit. Their little cabal of responsible people at St. Elizabeth’s was already on shaky ground, for there was no actual Vice President and Congress had never provided for the position of Acting Vice President; the Secretary of State was the next eligible person in the line of succession, which might or might not count as the same thing as “the Vice President,” depending on what Chief Justice Lopez thought.
“Maybe if the Secretary of State resigns,” Weisbrod said. “And if—”
The presidential line rang again, and Nguyen-Peters gestured to the transcriptionist, who slipped on his phones and bent to his work.
The gist of the tirade was that Cameron Nguyen-Peters had been fired, both as Chief of Staff for the Department of Homeland Security and as NCCC. As Shaunsen ran down, Cameron said, very quietly, “Sir, that is not a lawful order.”
“I’m the damn president!”
“Acting President, sir. You can order my boss to fire me, though he won’t. You can fire him and try to make his successors fire me; they won’t. You can’t call me up and dismiss me directly.
“Furthermore, as NCCC, it is my job to ensure that the acting presidency is in competent and legally qualified hands, and I don’t feel I can say that with you in office; to leave now would be to desert my post during a crisis, and the President can’t lawfully order a Federal official to neglect or act contrary to his duty. So I’m not fired, sir. Thank you.” And he hung up. He turned to Weisbrod. “Graham, if you have one good idea right now, you are my hero.”
“Don’t let your toast get cold, and let’s talk through this thing one more time.”
“That’s two good ideas. Got any more?”
“Well, President Pendano… when I talked to him on the phone on Sunday, because I was worried they’d move him with the rioting going on—he sounded much better than he did when I visited on Friday and on Saturday. I think he’s off the barbiturates and through the withdrawal, but I couldn’t chance asking when there might be some National Unity Goon listening in. So suppose he’s better. What if he were to transmit a letter to Congress certifying that he’s ready to resume his duties?”
“Could he do that? I mean—I know, Amendment Twenty-five, Section Three, he can always send the letter, but could he be president?”
“That’s not what I have in mind, Cameron. No, I don’t think Roger Pendano could be president again. I don’t think he’s even going to live very long, or if he does, it will be as a wreck in a nursing home. If he were going to rise to the need, he’d’ve done it the first night. But he might be able, for a very short time, to be a figurehead. And I think he’ll do that if we ask him. If we got Kowalski on it for the House and whoever it’s going to be for the Senate, and Roger Pendano were to appoint a Vice President and then resign—”
“I see what you’re saying, it scares me, and I don’t like it.”
Weisbrod pressed on. “Twenty-fifth Amendment, Section 3, he resumes his duties if he sends a letter that says he’s fit and a majority of the Cabinet agrees. No agreement from the VP required. If we all vote that he’s fit, and the Senate and House confirm as soon as Shaunsen protests, then Roger is the President again. Between DRET and the Cabinet, we could take care of everything, just have him read announcements and maybe wave from stands. It’ll be easier to hide than Roosevelt’s wheelchair or Wilson’s stroke were. And if he appoints a successor right away, and the House and Senate confirm immediately, we won’t have to keep the act going for much time at all.”
Cameron nodded. “Who did you have in mind for the successor?”
Weisbrod smiled. “Frankly, I was thinking you.”
“God no. I have zero charisma and I’m unknown outside policy circles and it would look like a coup. Same reason we can’t use any generals. But I do have a thought, which I’m swiping from all the stuff I’ve been reviewing about irregular successions and possible irregular successions in the past.”
“There’s a precedent for this?”
“There’s definitely a precedent, even if it’s 108 years old. Back in 1916, just before he was re-elected, Woodrow Wilson thought the country might reject him, and elect Charles Evans Hughes. The main issue of the campaign was Wilson’s policies about the war going on in Europe. If Wilson lost, especially back in those days when a new president was sworn in on March 4th, it would have been five months till the new policies came in, at a time when there were decisions to make every day. Wilson thought that was way too long for the country to stay with a foreign policy it had rejected, so he planned that if Hughes won, Wilson would appoint him Secretary of State, the Senate would confirm, and then Wilson and Vice President Marshall would resign, making Hughes the President under the 1886 Succession Act, the rules at the time.
“So I suggest that Roger Pendano pick Senator Will Norcross as his Vice President. The country voted for Norcross, so he has immediate legitimacy. And we don’t have to go through a whole additional succession on January 20; we can put Norcross in, in a perfectly Constitutional, regular way.”
“And Norcross at least grasps that the situation is desperate, and he’ll act rather than weasel around it,” Weisbrod said. “I see the logic. But Will Norcross still scares me. Do you think he understands that if we do this for him, he owes us a more middle-of-the-road, national-unity sort of administration than he campaigned for?”
“I think that you and the Cabinet should put that question to him directly, in your first meeting with him after President Pendano reassumes office.” Cameron was nodding now, liking the thought more as he considered it. “Yes, extract promises from Norcross that he’s not going to treat this as a mandate for the Christian Right—by all means. Insist that he say it in public, not just to you. Please. Because we need the country to pull together. Now—you’re the guy to talk to Pendano, and you know it—do you think he’ll be okay with it?”
