The Heritage Paper (10 page)

Otto didn’t mince words. “Your grandmother has gone home.”

He could hear the choke in the Candidate’s breathing—he knew how much she meant to him. But like a great leader, he rallied, “She sacrificed her life for future generations.”

“And her sacrifice went beyond what we expected. She did it on her own.”

The Candidate sounded surprised, but relieved. He had argued passionately against silencing Ellen. Like those before him in his family, he was both stubbornly loyal and optimistic to a fault. But he also had the highest of leadership qualities, which Otto had spotted long before the Candidate understood his gift, so it didn’t surprise him that he eventually signed off on what was best for the group.

The Candidate spoke assertively, “Her behavior was erratic at the end. Did she talk to anyone about the Apostles? Are there any other trails that need to be covered?”

“Her only contact was with Maggie, whom she was helping with a school project. We can question the girl, but Ellen’s faculties had slipped greatly at the end. She couldn’t differentiate between the Apostles and aliens.”

A long silence ensued, before the Candidate said, “It’s time for the children to come home. I was the same age as Maggie when I was brought in. With the kingdom within our sights, I think the timing is ideal.”

With that, the Candidate hung up the phone.

Theodore Baer ended his phone call, pondering the news he just heard. He looked around his penthouse suite, which served as both the studio for his syndicated radio show and his campaign headquarters. It was the first time he’d been alone since he began his shotgun candidacy for the presidency on Labor Day, just two months ago. It was both a relief and a surprise not to see any campaign managers, pollsters, or whoever else was trying to attach themselves to his backside.

He moved to the window and looked down at the city below, reflecting on how this all started, back at the University of Maine. A much simpler time in his life where he hosted his first radio show on a college station. It was called
The Teddy Baer Show
, but was anything but cute and snugly. His passionate opinions got him suspended from school on more than one occasion, including the infamous term paper he wrote that compared George Washington to Adolf Hitler, which he’d meant as a compliment to both men.

Following graduation, he moved to a small station in Portland, Maine. His communications professor, Emil Leudke—the one who pushed him to do the college radio show—was such a believer in Theodore that he left his professorship to become his producer. It was the late 1970s, fresh off the wound of Vietnam, and America was being held hostage—overseas by the Iranians and at home by a gas shortage. The nation was sick, and like any ailing soul, it desperately sought a cure.

His message resonated in a big way—rebuilding a self-sufficient America that wasn’t reliant on foreign oil or trade, and didn’t involve itself in international skirmishes that drained its blood and treasure like Vietnam. He shouted to anyone who would listen that America should once again claim independence from the rest of the world, even if his critics, the dreaded internationalists, called him a radical.

If he was, he figured he was in good company. George Washington had warned the nation in his Farewell Address about the dangers of permanent foreign alliances, and the current conflict in the Middle East was another example that his warning should have been heeded. Washington believed in building a self-sufficient America, and becoming unnecessarily entangled in the battles of others worked contradictory to this goal.

Adolf Hitler believed in this same concept of self-sufficiency, or what the Germans called
autarky.
He sought economic self-reliance, just like Washington, especially when it came to raw materials. Baer was convinced that the reason General Washington sat in the pantheon of history, while Hitler lay in the bowels of infamy, was that the German leader didn’t stick to the principles of
autarky.
Instead, he chose to seek world domination and all the pitfalls that went with such a strategy.

Baer peered down at the ants below. The same way the “unbeatable” Jim Kingston and his political machine once looked at him. But as the historic election approached, Theodore Baer owned a slight lead in the polls, even after yesterday’s controversial comments.

His independent candidacy was initially treated as a publicity stunt. And they were right—Baer knew he couldn’t beat the machine. Republican or Democrat didn’t matter to him—same disease, different doctor—but it was a chance for him to get his licks in, especially during the debates, and it sure wouldn’t hurt the ratings of his syndicated radio show
The Baer Cave.

But then the Republican nominee was caught celebrating Labor Day weekend at his Florida estate with his pants down—literally—and that was only the half of it, as his partner in crime turned out to be his running-mate. This made them not only endless fodder for the late night television comics, but more importantly, unelectable. With the election only sixty days away, too late to contain the damage, Theodore Baer suddenly didn’t seem such a bad alternative for the anti-Kingston crowd.

Baer then received another dose of election magic, when tensions intensified in the Middle East, moving to the brink of war. Kingston’s biggest contributor and supporter was Aligor Sterling, head of the Sterling Center, the world’s biggest sponsor of Jewish causes. And he also happened to be his uncle—the brother of Kingston’s mother—so it wasn’t like he could just cut ties with him if he wanted to.

So despite the electorate being heavily against America joining another conflict in the Middle East, Kingston promised to commit a full arsenal of US troops to a potential war, and to protect Israel at all cost. With Sterling his de-facto campaign manager, he had boxed himself into a political corner. By Halloween, Baer went from a novelty act to ten points up in the polls.

The door of the suite opened and Emil Leudke walked in—a lone friendly face in a sea of ass-kissing. Emil put his phone away and headed toward him, showing urgency in each step of his old legs. After yesterday’s incident, they no longer felt able to speak freely in front of the campaign staff. So Emil had gone into the adjoining suite to call him.

Baer smiled for the first time in days. Age had slowed his mentor’s body, but not his mind or his passion for the cause. And he was still the best-dressed and most debonair man in the room.

Emil handed him a piece of paper, which he looked quizzically at. “What’s this?”

“This is your first act of being presidential, Teddy. It’s called an apology—just look into the camera and try to look like you mean it. They’ve all done it—Nixon, Reagan, Clinton.”

“Not you, Emil—have they gotten to you, too?”

“You know as well as I do what an important moment in history this is. We can’t take any chances—losing this election is not an option.”

The words were not necessary—Emil had been preparing him for this moment since he was a teenager. He always believed he would be president one day.

“What happened to that great advice you’ve been giving me since Maine? About never apologizing to anyone for what I believe.”

Emil just pointed at the piece of paper—it wasn’t negotiable.

There was no time to debate. The show was one minute away. Baer sat behind the boom microphone with an enormous mural of a grizzly bear in the background, the symbol of
The
Baer Cave Show
. The cameras were positioned for his simulcast on GNZ. Emil began counting down.

Being the first presidential candidate with a built-in media outlet was a unique circumstance. It gave Baer a daily pulpit from which to preach to the voters. But as his critics liked to point out, it could also serve as a noose to hang himself, and yesterday that’s exactly what he almost did.

The comments in question were in response to Kingston’s ad campaign that compared Baer’s isolationist strategy to that of those who appeased Hitler in the 1930s.

Baer responded on air that he believed Hitler’s one big mistake was not following a similar strategy as the
Baer Plan for America.
That he should have built on the successes he had in the economy, education, and the arts, which history had chosen to ignore. And by doing so, he would have let the Russians and the Western Allies fight to the death, as they eventually did in the Cold War, while Germany continued to thrive in its isolated existence.

Aligor Sterling, responded by going on the national news and reminding America that Hitler didn’t make just
one mistake
, he made
six million mistakes
, as in the number of murdered Jews. It was damaging.

Watching Sterling’s comments in his office, Baer angrily quipped that the
other
mistake
Hitler made was not taking care of Sterling when he had the chance—Aligor Sterling had survived a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. One of Baer’s staffers, a Kingston spy, secretly taped the comment and leaked it to the media. It might have been unethical, but it worked. His lead shrunk by epic proportions.

A loud bear growl shook the room—the famed intro to
The Baer Cave.

“I told you, I told you, I told you,” Baer began the show with his usual high-energy rant. “I told you the Kingston machine would pull out every dirty trick to win this election, so that they can keep you living in fear. So they can send your sons and daughters to bleed in a foreign desert.

“But the main difference between Jim Kingston and myself is that I don’t send a twenty-year-old kid with a tape recorder to do my dirty work, just like he wants to send your twenty-year-old son or daughter to do his dirty work in the Middle East. And here’s another thing—I meant
every word
of what I said yesterday. I
do
think this would be a better world if Aligor Sterling were gassed in a concentration camp. What he and Kingston are planning, by sending your children to die for decades as part of their war machine, and creating more dependency on foreign nations, is no less despicable than any act of the Nazis!”

Baer sneaked a peak at the cringing Emil. He could visualize the pollsters going into seizures in the next room. He shrugged at Emil, as if to say he couldn’t help himself—it was in his nature.

Zach didn’t need his journalism degree to figure out that Veronica was tense. She was gripping the steering wheel so hard he thought she would break it. The trip to Rhinebeck would be just over an hour, but he got the feeling that it would seem much longer than that.

Her children were in the back seat, along with a ninety-something Nazi hunter. And behind them, in the hatchback, was a priceless stolen painting. Just your typical road-trip upstate.

Zach focused on Youkelstein, thinking back to the story he did on him and Sterling a few years ago, titled
Shh It’s Nazi Season
.

The Nazi hunters weaved an interesting story, although they were vague on certain details, and danced around Zach’s questions about their rumored vigilante style of justice. On the record, they claimed that whenever they’d tracked down war criminals, they’d always handed them over to the proper authorities. Zach wasn’t buying it, but still marveled at their passion, and it’s not like he could evoke sympathy for the butchers who may have ended up on the wrong side of their sword.

As Zach peered out at the monotonous row of barren trees that lined the Taconic Parkway, he felt a certain twinge of excitement. He’d had too many days lately where he knew how the next twenty-four hours were going to turn out before they ever happened. Raising TJ was all about schedules and pickups, which he worked around to write his bland stories for the small paper that was currently employing him.

So perhaps him “tagging along” on this journey was another chance to chase the big story, which led to the question:
Is it a big story?
Zach wasn’t sure, but saw two possibilities—one was that it was a hoax of crop circle proportions. He doubted that one. TJ was good with altering photos, but not that good. The more likely scenario was that Ellen was telling the truth as she saw it. Of course, her cognitive abilities were very much up for debate. Like a good reporter, he would observe, seeking the truth without pride or prejudice, and remain open-minded until facts were validated.

He thought of Sara, who always told him he was afraid to take a side. She said he used journalism as an excuse to avoid life—observing, but never living it. Sometimes he wished she’d done a little less living, and then perhaps she might still be there for their son.

Veronica turned to him. “Do you really think Aligor Sterling could have given Ellen those cyanide tablets?”

“I don’t know, but the guy does have a lot to lose in this election. And if he thought Ellen’s connection to the Nazis was a threat to Kingston winning, who knows.”

Youkelstein cleared his throat and spoke up from the backseat, “I’ve known Aligor since 1944. We’ve had our differences over the past few years, but he saved my life. He saves lives, not takes them.”