Protect and Defend (79 page)

Clayton shook his head. “No. Dash did it on her own.”

“
‘Until further notice,’
”Hampton read, “
‘Mary Ann has nothing more to say. Her deepest wish is to regain, as much as possible, what she never should have lost: her privacy.’
”

How, Gage wondered, would Hampton choose to follow this?

Looking up, Hampton said, “The statement speaks for itself. I have nothing more to add.”

He paused, seeming to draw a breath. “At this point,” he said in a quiet tone, “I yield the floor to my good friend, the Senior Senator from Ohio.”

Stunned, Macdonald Gage was powerless to intervene. To the rising cacophony of the galleries, stilled at last by Ellen Penn, Chad Palmer rose to speak.

C
HAD
P
ALMER
surveyed his colleagues: Chuck Hampton, openly wondering what Chad intended; Paul Harshman, staring implacably at Chad with his arms folded; his friend Kate Jarman, her face tight with worry. But it was the sight of Macdonald Gage, arranging his features into an expression of beneficence, which turned Chad’s anguish into the cold resolve he needed to begin.

“I hope the Senate will indulge me,” he began, “while I speak of my daughter’s death.”

The hush around him deepened. His colleagues looked on with sorrow, tension, alarm, and as though worried that, in his grief, Chad might spin out of control, or perhaps break down entirely. But Gage managed to affect a melancholy calm.

“You know by now,” Chad continued, “much of what Kyle lived through. Many of you have faced sorrows too private to share. So it was with Kyle. But only her mother and I can know the depth of her depression, her despair, a self-contempt so searing that often she could not face the world without dulling her own pain.

“Only we can know how hard her mother fought just to keep our daughter alive.

“Only we can know the days and nights, the months and years, her mother clung to hope where there was no hope.” Briefly, Chad stopped, his voice choked, and then he stood straighter. “Only we could know the joy we felt when Kyle emerged from darkness.

“Only we could know the rewards of seeing her grow stronger. Above all, only we could know the joy of being able to imagine her with a family of her own.”

“You were never
meant
to know this. Nor, any longer, can we.”

Looking around him, Chad saw his colleagues’ heads bowing, faces furrowed with sympathy. “Her life,” Chad continued, “and our dreams for her, vanished in a day—the day that callous and immoral men decided that the private trauma of a sixteen-year-old girl should be used to destroy her father.” Pausing, Chad spoke more softly yet. “They accomplished too much, and too little. For Kyle is dead, and I am here. And I know who they are.”

Skin clammy, Gage waited. He could sense the fury just below Palmer’s tenuous calm; his fellow senators were transfixed, as though they could not look away.

“They are not within the media,” Palmer told his colleagues. “The media did not steal the consent form from her doctor’s files. Nor did the media send it to a pro-choice leader, hoping
she
would expose as a pro-life ‘hypocrite’ the father who remained silent to protect his daughter …”

So
that
, Gage thought, was where Taylor had begun. Once again he felt the visceral fear which had made him avoid Mace Taylor for the last four days, afraid of what he might learn. “Instead,” Chad said with muted irony, “
she
brought it to the President. None of them imagined, I suppose, that he’d give the document to me.

“
‘Take care of your family,’
the President told me. But it was too late.” Chad’s voice became muffled, thick with emotion. “Those determined to ruin me gave a copy of the form to the
Internet Frontier
, and then to Charlie Trask. Within hours, our daughter was dead.”

Glancing about him, Gage saw Kate Jarman gaze at Chad, eyes filled with sorrow. “Those two copies,” Chad said bluntly, “killed her. And, like the envelope delivered to the President, they have been examined by the FBI.

“The President has provided me with the FBI’s report, prepared at his direction.”

Shocked, Gage felt his throat and stomach constrict. The tension in the galleries, long suppressed, released itself in a murmur that the Vice President did not rebuke. Palmer looked down, palms flat on his desk, struggling for self-control; when he raised his head, his voice trembled with anger.

“By tradition,” he continued, “a senator must refrain from attacking other senators. But no rule protects the past member of this body whose fingerprints appear on all three documents.” Turning, Palmer surveyed the astonished faces of his colleagues, then said with a chilling mockery of decorum, “Our distinguished former colleague, the Junior Senator from Oklahoma. Senator Mason Taylor.”

The involuntary spasms of noise around him—murmurs, muttered exclamations, a low, almost reverent, “Jesus” from Leo Weller—seemed to come to Gage from a distance. And then, at last, Palmer turned to face him.

“All of us,” he told the Senate, “know Mason Taylor all too well. And so we know the
other
man who is responsible for Kyle’s death …”

Facing Macdonald Gage, Chad felt the release of emotions as a physical ache. Gage looked back with a stoic resolve; he surely knew that any protest he might make would get no sympathy from Ellen Penn. Despite his fury, Chad forced himself to remain still, until he was certain that the full Senate saw whom he addressed. When he spoke, it was with a terrible softness.

“All of us know,” he said to Gage, “who does Taylor’s bidding, whose power derives from Taylor’s influence, whose ambitions to be President depend on pleasing Taylor’s clients.” Pausing, Palmer let Gage suffer in the stricken hush. “And all of us know whose aspirations I seemed to threaten, a few short days ago …”

Watching, the President felt a silent awe at what he had unleashed.

“
I do not yet know
,” Chad said with grief and anger, “
what punishment he will suffer, in this life or the next. But it is fitting that, from this day forward, every senator who greets him will think of Kyle Palmer …
”

“Will they believe him?” Kit Pace asked the President.

Slowly, Kerry nodded. “Most will. The question is what Chad does with that.”

On the screen, Chad Palmer’s silent stare at Gage was an indictment. Then, with a renewed calm which Kerry knew must cost him dearly, Chad turned, speaking to the others.

“
But I am not here
,” he told them, “
to ask you to mourn my daughter. I will do that, in my own way, for the rest of my life, hour upon hour, as I wonder at the pride and folly which impelled me to ignore the terrible risk to her of continuing in public life …
”

Stricken, Gage felt a tide of emotion overtake the Senate, and knew that Palmer—for all his grief—had aroused his colleagues’ passions so that he could redirect them. Chad Palmer not only meant them to mourn his daughter; he meant to use her to whatever end he chose.

“Rather,” Palmer continued, “I am here to address the Masters nomination, and to ask what we have come to.

“No more can we claim that our politics is simply about ideas, or values, or the clash of competing interests. All too often it is about money—the elegant system of quasi-bribery in which those who finance our campaigns become our stockholders, and men like Mason Taylor demand results.” The naked anger returned to Chad’s voice. “And if ‘results’ means ruining whoever stands in the way—for whatever private frailty they can ferret out—then they will use the media to destroy any one of us, and then the next, until the cycle of destruction, turning each of us upon the other, at last drives all decency from public life. And if their aims require a few ‘civilian casualties,’ they will provide
those
, too.”

Chad stopped abruptly, his efforts to control himself palpable. “My daughter,” he said more evenly, “is not the only victim, merely the latest and most tragic. In the course of this nomination, this twisted tactic has followed two other women—Mary Ann Tierney and Caroline Masters—into the most private area of their lives: whether to bear a child.”

At this, Gage saw, Paul Harshman stared at Palmer, resistant. But others, when Gage turned to them, refused to meet his eyes.

“All three women,” Palmer continued, “faced decisions which were painfully individual. Within my own family, we learned how complex that decision can be, how prone to disagreement, how difficult to face.”

With this admission, delivered with a softness which drew in the Senate and the galleries, Palmer turned to his party colleagues. “Caroline Masters,” he told them, “faced it twice.
Once as a young woman and then, half a lifetime later, as a judge.

“In the Tierney case, I disagree with her conclusions. But I must admit to doubts forced on us by Kyle’s personal experience. And to one certainty: that our dialogue on abortion—of which I have been part—is rife with dishonesty, distortion, and deception.” Chad’s voice lowered. “That deception, I believe, pervades the opposition to Judge Masters—distorting the reasons for, and frequency of, late-term abortion. And I fear that this dishonesty will continue as long as abortion is a political, rather than an ethical, debate …”

He’s done for
, Gage thought. But now the battle for his own survival had begun, and perhaps would end, with the vote on Caroline Masters.

For the first time, Chad saw, Kate Jarman gave him a nod of encouragement. It lent him hope; Kate must sense where he was going.

“I believe in our party,” Chad said. “We are
not
, by tradition, the party of rule-makers. We are
not the
party of intolerance. We do not believe that government should police us in our private lives. And so, however we view the Tierney case, we should give Judge Masters her due.

“Her decision placed her own privacy at risk. It placed her crowning ambition in doubt. It placed her reputation in the hands of others.” Turning to Gage, he spoke with disdain. “It exposed them for who they are, and Judge Masters for who she is. And it places this single ruling in the context of a worthy life.”

Now, like Gage before him, he searched the faces of his wavering colleagues—Clare MacIntire, George Felton, Spencer James, and Cassie Rollins. “The Tierney case was complex,” he continued. “But our choice today is much clearer. It is between integrity and immorality. It is, for me, a choice between a woman of honor and those who sacrificed my daughter.”

In the taut silence, Chad gathered his thoughts.
Yes
, he imagined telling Kyle,
I’m almost done. I hope you approve of me now
.

“Others,” he told the Senate, “will say their piece. But once they have, I will move to close debate. And then I will vote to
confirm Judge Caroline Masters as Chief Justice of the United States.”

For perhaps the last time, the senior senator from Ohio, once so near the presidency, held his colleagues in thrall. “My vote for Caroline Masters,” he finished quietly, “will be my final vote in this body. I will be honored if you join me.”

Exhausted, Chad sat.

He stared at his desk, thinking of Kyle, then Allie. Gradually, he heard the applause rising from the galleries, then the slow movement of chairs and bodies as a number of his colleagues stood to applaud, until all of the Democrats, and most Republicans, were standing, though for some it was a reluctant act of courtesy. When Gage faced him, still sitting, Chad’s lips formed a small and bitter smile.

As the applause began dying, slowly and at last, Gage turned from him, seeking the attention of the chair. His voice was flat, strained. “Madam Vice President, I ask for a recess by unanimous consent …”

“For what?” Speaking from his desk, Chad’s voice was quiet but audible. “There’s nowhere left to hide, Mac.”

Above them, Ellen Penn’s face was drained of all expression. “The Senate,” she said, “will stand in recess until one-thirty.” With this, galleries broke into an uproar, above the senators who sat looking in silence from Chad Palmer to Macdonald Gage.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, in the news summary Kit Pace gave the President, headlines battled for preeminence: “Tierney Fetus Doomed, Doctor Reports”; “Palmer Resigns, Accusing Gage in Daughter’s Death”; “FBI Report Identifies Lobbyist in Leak of Files”; “Gage Charges President with ‘Police-State’
Tactics”; “Masters Nomination Hangs in Balance.” Editorial response was equally varied: ruminations on Mary Ann Tierney’s abortion and its meaning; reflections on the degraded state of politics; fulminations for or against Caroline Masters; criticisms of Kerry’s use of the FBI. “While we deplore,” the
Times
declared, “the tactics suggested by the report, the President’s extraconstitutional abuse of the FBI is even more alarming.”

“They’ve found me out,” the President said to Clayton, “a tyrant in the making. You’d think they’d have noticed sooner.”

In truth, Kerry did not care much, nor did he have time to care. The debate which had resumed in the afternoon, listless and subdued, suggested nothing so much as confusion. So Kerry had manned the phones, as he did this morning, strategizing with Chuck Hampton and pulling undecided senators off the floor. “You can’t stall this now,” he had said bluntly to Spencer Jones. “A filibuster would be spitting on Kyle Palmer’s grave.”

He did not thank Chad. He did not need to.

“Don’t say a word,” Gage said to Mason Taylor. “There’s no crime been committed, whatever Palmer and Kilcannon think happened. There’s nothing they can do to you.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “The little bastard’s trying to ruin me,” Taylor said softly. “I need friends, Mac. Loyal friends.”

Gage’s jaw tightened. “You have them, believe me. Just hang tough, and give it time. In six months …”

“You’ll call me? You need me now, Mac.”

It was nine o’clock and there was sweat beneath Gage’s armpits. “Let me handle this,” he snapped. “
You
need
me
, too.”