The High Road (32 page)

Then Barbie and Ken asked permission to explore Angus’s plot of land. They pulled out the official municipal survey for the area, showing the property lines, and headed outside. After opening the trunk of their sedan and donning parkas, boots, and backpacks, they walked back up the driveway to start what they called a perimeter security audit.

Angus and I returned to our writing at the dining room table, but kept an eye out the window to track the progress of the intrepid Secret Service agents. We watched as they spent the next hour tramping around the property, crawling under the house, exploring every inch of the boathouse, clambering onto the roof with scopes and tripod, and slipping and sliding their way out onto the ice, presumably to check for sniper sightlines.

Eventually they came back and toured the inside of the house with Angus trailing closely. They asked a raft more questions but seemed satisfied as they took notes and spoke into what I assumed was a hand-held digital recorder. But who really knows what it was: visions of James Bond and his Q branch gadgets danced in my head. Agent Leyland asked whether Angus objected to the removal of a tall silver maple that hampered surveillance. He pointed to a beautiful tree on the east side of the property, visible through the dining room window.

“You’ll cut me down before that tree falls,” answered Angus. “That’s always been my wife’s favourite.”

“May we please speak with her then?” Agent Leyland asked while Agent Fitzhugh caught his eye and shook her head in the negative. Clearly, she’d not only read the bio briefing note on Angus McLintock, she’d retained it too.

“I wish you could, laddie, but you’re about eight months too late,” Angus replied. “The tree stays.”

The agent didn’t need his super-acute powers of observation to see that Angus was not to be moved.

“We’ll consider other security contingencies to avoid eliminating the tree and get back to you.”

They were almost out the door when Agent Fitzhugh returned to open the well-stocked liquor cabinet. Several single malts stood ready.

“Can this be locked?” she asked.

“Mercifully, it cannae be. I managed to lose the key years ago,” Angus replied, laughing. “Why anyone would want to lock that door is well beyond my ken.”

“We’ll call in a locksmith so that the securing mechanism is rendered functional again,” she declared in a monotone that just seemed to fit the sentence.

“May I ask why that exceedingly uncivilized measure is necessary?” Angus asked.

“I’m sorry, I cannot answer that on the grounds that it would compromise national security.”

They left soon after.

For my entire life, I’d laboured under the impression that the courageous agents of the U.S. Secret Service were congenitally emotionless, humourless, cold, by-the-book automatons. Now that I’d spent an hour or so with two of them, I was forced to conclude that for all those years, I’d actually been right.

We had lunch and spent the rest of the afternoon deep in the writing. We were so close.

The next morning, Angus and I sat in front of Deputy Minister Rosemary Holden in her Infrastructure Canada corner office just across the river in Hull. We’d brought with us the only printed copy of the McLintock Report, for her to review it. We wanted to leave nothing to chance, so having her set of eyes on the document was important to us. While she read the twenty-two
pages, Angus and I watched out her window as workers with acetylene torches laboured on the twisted remains of the Alexandra Bridge. The engineering experts in Rosemary’s department had determined that the damage to the bridge had been too severe to allow it to be salvaged. The bridge would be dismantled and replaced. I privately hoped they’d add at least two more lanes in each direction to ease the rush-hour congestion.

When I wasn’t looking out the window, I watched Rosemary for signs of her reaction. She was nodding throughout, sometimes quite vigorously, and once slapped her hand on the desk. I couldn’t tell whether she was agreeing with something she’d read or rejecting it.

She and her department had been paragons of professionalism throughout our four-week investigation. They’d responded quickly to each of our requests and had even provided very helpful information for which we hadn’t asked when it was clear we needed additional context to ensure a balanced perspective.

About two-thirds into the report, I watched her eyes widen. She looked up at us.

“This is much broader than the collapse of the Alexandra,” she noted.

“Aye, it is, and that was our mandate,” Angus replied.

“It illuminates the core issue at play, not just the most recent and dramatic outcome.”

“And that’s been our intention from the outset,” I added.

“You do remember that the Liberals were in power for the first four years of this era of neglect?” she asked. “That’s when it all started.”

Angus and I nodded in unison. She returned to her reading and we waited. Five minutes later she turned the final page and shook her head, with a faint, perhaps wistful smile.

“Do you think the PMO will really let this see the light of day?”

“As far as we’re concerned, the report will be publicly released, and likely not by the hand of the Prime Minister,” I responded.

“What is your reaction to the paper?” Angus asked. “Have we overstated or understated? Have we struck the right tone? Have we supported our findings adequately? Have we left anything unsaid – any stone unturned?”

“It’s extremely strong. Well researched. And the funding numbers only slightly exceed what we’ve been proposing for the last twenty-three months. Overall, the report conveys to the government what this department has longed to say for many years without having had the voice,” said Rosemary. “I don’t think the tone is too strong and I do think the claims you’ve made and the conclusions you’ve drawn are all backed up by data and facts. But I think you’re missing one critical piece.”

“That’s why Angus and I wanted you to see the draft. This has to be bulletproof if we ever hope to pull this off.”

“I don’t think you made it clear enough that the collapse was in no way caused by any kind of inherent flaw in the design of the bridge itself,” she explained. “It needs to be hammered home that there are dozens, even hundreds of bridges of this design all over North America and Europe, most of which are actually older than the Alexandra. My staff has looked at every one, and none of them, not a single one, has collapsed. I’d advise you to close down that avenue of speculation very early on.”

“Aye, that’s a grand idea,” Angus agreed.

“Can we footnote your department’s research to back up our claim?” I inquired.

“I assumed you’d want to,” the DM replied as she pulled a document from a file drawer and handed it over. “Here’s the final report cataloguing every similarly designed bridge that we could locate. You may footnote to your heart’s content.”

“So, any other thoughts?” I asked. We were on a schedule and had to leave shortly.

“Just my gratitude for the piece at the end about the department,” she noted. “It was gratifying to read that, and it will be very much appreciated by those who have worked here over the last two decades when this has been coming to a head.”

As we rose to leave, Angus said to her, “I thank you for all the support you and your team have provided as we’ve worked through this labyrinth. We’d not have made it this far without you.”

“That’s kind of you, Professor McLintock, but we will be in your debt if you can get this report out there and actually have the government buy in to your recommendations. I’ll be watching closely. It would certainly be something to see after putting in twenty-five years as a civil servant.”

Angus and I headed for the car and the drive back to Ottawa.

“I can add a section on the design of the bridge towards the front of the report,” I offered. “I thought she raised a good point.”

“Aye, she did. She’s surely not lacking in cerebral gifts.”

“I’ll draft the new section and have a final report for your signoff by this evening,” I proposed. “I still want to get the PM and Bradley an advance copy tomorrow in the remote chance that they’ll love it and let us hit the streets with it. They can’t stop us now, so we might as well give them a look at it.”

“Young Mr. Stanton won’t be very happy that we’ve not changed the recommendations since you shared the earlier draft with him. But I can see the logic in trying again,” Angus conceded. “I think it would be wise to let Muriel have a pass through it before it leaves our hands.”

“Well, the weekend is pretty well a write-off as you pal around with the most powerful couple in the world. So let’s wrap up the report tonight,” I concluded.

“Where to now?” Angus asked when we were driving back downtown.

“How could you forget? It’s not every day we get to visit the U.S. embassy.”

“Hell and damnation. I had managed to put that out of my mind.”

I drove us down Sussex Drive towards the Prime Minister’s residence. Long before we got there, I turned into the
well-defended grounds of the United States embassy. At the guard booth I pulled up behind a car driven by the Chief of Staff to our Foreign Affairs Minister. I felt a bit sorry for her, as it had been decided between the White House and the Prime Minister’s office that the Foreign Affairs Minister would not be invited to the quick stopover visit by the President and his wife. To add insult to injury, however, his Chief of Staff would still be fully briefed on what they’d be missing.

When it was our turn, the uniformed sentry, a marine I think, approached my open window and looked closely at Angus, then at me. He scanned his clipboard for a moment before looking back at each of us.

“Messrs Addison and McLintock, I presume,” he said. “Passports please.”

We’d been warned about this and I handed both passports over to him. He swiped them through a machine and we waited. Then he stacked our passports with several others he’d accumulated and handed me two lanyards with official-looking name tags, each embossed with the stamp of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

“Put these around your necks now and do not take them off for the duration of your visit. You’ll be relieved of them by my colleague on the other side when you drive off the grounds. Please drive up to the official visitors’ parking area just in front of the main embassy doors. You can go right inside, where you’ll be met.”

As instructed, neither Angus nor I said a word but just nodded in submission to signal that we understood but didn’t want any trouble. We slipped the lanyards around our necks, drove up the road, and parked.

The embassy was amazing but we had no time for sightseeing.

“Mr. McLintock, you must be wearing your official lanyard, and it must be visible at all times,” said the severe woman at the reception desk.

“Aye, and I’ve been wearing it the whole time, madam,” Angus replied, somewhat indignant.

I looked over and saw no sign of the lanyard. I looked more closely and figured it out.

“Angus, it’s buried under your grey cascade. You’ll have to let it sit on top of your beard or we might soon be in an interrogation room.”

He moved it out from behind to rest on his beard, where it looked slightly ridiculous. But neither of us was about to complain.

“Sorry madam, it seemed my lanyard, as you call it, had slipped from view. I trust this configuration is acceptable.”

“Fine. Thank you” was all she said.

Eventually we were escorted to an enormous boardroom where we joined about two dozen other people sitting around the table. I recognized staff from the PMO and several bureaucrats from the Department of Foreign Affairs who sat next to the minister’s Chief of Staff. They all looked ticked at being frozen out of the President’s visit. It was odd, if not unprecedented, for the Foreign Affairs Minister to be excluded from meetings with a visiting head of state. As the briefing unfolded, it seemed a compromise had been reached. The minister would greet the President and his wife at the Ottawa airport for approximately forty-six seconds. Then the helicopter,
Marine One
, with the President and First Lady safely inside, would lift off for the short flight up the river to Cumberland. For the minister, forty-six seconds of presidential face time was some consolation.

Senior embassy staff led the briefing. They walked us through a minute-by-minute rundown of the entire visit, including presidential bathroom breaks and makeup touch-up times for the First Lady. Angus and I learned for the first time that the entire visit to the house would last about ninety minutes, including forty-five minutes for the one-on-one between the PM and President. During the official meeting between the heads of state, Angus and I were in charge of showing the First Lady
around the property and giving her the chance to see the hovercraft. Both the Pres and his wife would walk past the hovercraft on their way to the house after
Marine One
landed on the ice. But the First Lady would get a second, longer look at it, as she’d requested.

I had a bad feeling about this. Leaving the First Lady with Angus for thirty minutes was a great deal of responsibility for someone who couldn’t even meet the U.S. embassy’s lanyard-wearing standards.

As the briefing ended and the room started to empty, a young well-dressed woman with her hair pulled back behind her head in some kind of tortoise-shell comb-clamp device approached Angus and me.

“Professors McLintock and Addison, would you come this way, please? The ambassador would like to see you.”

I tried to remember if I’d said anything vaguely anti-American in the last few years but came up empty. The ambassador’s office was enormous, and really made you feel that you actually were deep in the heart of the U.S. of A.

“Thank you, Susan, but I’ll take this meeting alone with our guests,” the ambassador said.

“Certainly, sir,” replied the woman known as Susan, and she left us, closing the door behind her.

Introductions were made, drinks were offered, and banal banter exchanged. The ambassador was a retired Republican senator from New Hampshire who had a reputation as a ball-busting neo-con with very strong ties to the White House. He and the President had fought together in the Republican trenches and served together in the Senate. He was the New England equivalent of a good ole boy.