Ultimatum (17 page)

“Senator, leave this part to us now,” said Murphy. “We’ll get it right.” He glanced at Levy. They weren’t exactly a natural pair. Levy liked to work alone, producing draft after draft and polishing up the product. Murphy loved to work with others, yelling ideas across the room and burning bright on shared energy.

The senator read the next sentence. “The fact that I stand today in this high place before you, the bearer of your sacred trust, shows that you know we have this rare opportunity, and that, through me, you want this moment to be seized.”

The senator paused, pondering the page. The others waited.

“That’s just. . . That’s awful.”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been saying,” muttered Levy, throwing a glance at Jodie Ames.

“How the hell do we still have something like this in there at this stage? Imagine me standing up and saying that. Physically. Try and say it to yourselves.” Benton drew a line through the page. “Strike the ‘know we have this rare opportunity.’”

Levy nodded. “So you want it to read: ‘shows that you, through me’ . . . no, ‘shows that through me, you want this moment to be seized.’”

“Make that the rare opportunity,” said the senator. “Actually, you know that part later with the line about it being a once-in-a-generation moment? We should move that back to here.”

“That’s good,” said Levy. “Explains why it’s such a rare opportunity.”

“It belongs here,” said Murphy.

Levy deftly made some changes on his handheld. “I can streamline a couple of other things on that. That’s really good.”

Benton was still gazing doubtfully at the line. “You think it’s triumphalist? You know, look at me, here I am, in this high place.”

“But you’ve got the humility with the ‘bearer of your sacred trust,”‘ said Levy. “That’s why it’s there. It’s a high place, but you’re their servant.”

“Then why don’t we say I’m their servant?”

“That’s a little too much humility. You’re their servant, but you’re also their president.”

“Jodie?”

Ames read the line thoughtfully on her handheld. “I think Sam’s got the balance.”

“John?”

“I like it,” said Eales. “Depends how you read it, Senator.”

Benton read it aloud. “What do you think?”

Eales shrugged. “I still like it.”

Ames nodded. Levy and Murphy watched the senator.

“‘Through me.’ I don’t like ‘through me.’ What am I, their savior? That’s too much. Change that to ‘through my administration.’”

Levy nodded. “That’s better.”

The senator continued to gaze at the paper. “No, I still don’t like it. How about: From this high place, as the bearer of your sacred trust, I pledge that my administration will seize this rare opportunity.”

“Say that again, sir,” said Levy, tapping it in.

The senator repeated it.

Levy shook his head. “It’s got no rhythm. Not when you look at the sentence before.”

“You’re already changing the sentence before.”

“You’re right. Leave it with me, Senator.”

Benton kept reading. Slowly, they worked through the rest of the speech.

It was past one o’clock when they got to the last sentences. Joe Benton read them aloud.

“My fellow Americans, it’s time. Our time. Not a time to take, but a time to give. Not a time to rest, but a time to work. A time to renew the foundations. A time to rebuild the house. To build it strong, to build it sturdy. Come build it with me. And in times to come they will look back and say, in these years, these people built a house to last.”

There was silence.

“How do I say it?” asked Benton.

“That was good,” said Jodie Ames.

“That was better than good, sir,” said Barry Murphy.

“Come on, be hard on me. It’s not good enough. Let me hear you say it.”

“Who?”

“You, all of you.”

They looked at each other.

Murphy shrugged. He cleared his throat. “My fellow Americans ...”

The senator listened.

“I could really get into this,” said Murphy when he had finished.

“Sam?”

Levy read it. With emotion. They were his words. Then Jodie Ames read it. Then Eales.

There was silence.

“All right,” said the senator. “I’ll work on the delivery. Very good. Thank you. Sam, can I have the redraft by seven?”

Levy looked at his watch. That gave him a little over five hours. “Sure. Senator, can I ask you something? Are there going to be any surprises?”

“Sam, you know I always reserve the right to have a couple of surprises.”

“I don’t suppose you could tell me where they might fit?”

Benton knew that John Eales was watching him, waiting to hear what he would say.

Joe Benton’s face cracked in a smile. “Sam, what would be the point of that? If I did have anything up my sleeve, it would just spoil the surprise.”

~ * ~

Thursday, January 20

The Capitol, Washington, D.C.

It was the strangest ride. Joe Benton wondered whether anyone who had taken it had ever thought otherwise. He and Mike Gartner sat side by side in the limousine, one the loser, the other the winner who had taken his crown. And yet perhaps there was something wonderful about it as well, he thought, humbling. It made a kind of sense, like the ancient Roman practice of having a slave standing in the emperor’s chariot whispering that all the glory before him would soon pass.

Benton glanced at Gartner. The other man’s head was turned, looking out the window at the bleachers that had been erected along Pennsylvania Avenue. They were full of people who had opposed him, who wanted to see him gone. People who had come to cheer as he was deposed. Thoughts of tumbrils and guillotines came to mind.

The day was dazzling bright. Cold.

“It rained on my Inauguration Day,” murmured Gartner. “It was a crappy day.”

Joe Benton remembered. A fine, misty rain. Unseasonably warm for Washington at that time of year. He had watched Gartner’s inauguration as a member of the Senate. Back then, a mere four years earlier, it had seemed unlikely the time would ever be right for him to run.

Gartner turned back and sniffed. He had a cold. His big nose was red.

Benton didn’t say anything. He respected Gartner’s right to his thoughts at this moment.

They had met once more since their secret meeting in November. That was the meeting everyone expected. Gartner had had his secretaries of state and defense with him, and Benton had brought Larry Olsen and his nominee for secretary of defense, Jay MacMahon. The press were there to take pictures. There had been no discussion of the Chinese negotiations, nor any mention of Dr. Richards and the ESU.

Benton had always thought of Mike Gartner as a mediocrity, a timeserver from the right family and the right state who had spent his eight requisite years as vice president and then had proceeded to squander his four years as chief executive in a stuttering series of firefighting actions. If any common thread ran through his policies, it was the naked brazenness with which they maintained the status quo for the Republican party’s donors. The presidential pardons Gartner had just handed out on the last full day of his term were egregious even by the standards of that questionable tradition. Yet it wasn’t what he had done during his time in power, but what he hadn’t done, that was the greater crime. Opportunities lost, one after the other. Joe Benton had promised himself and the American people that his presidency would be everything that Gartner’s had not been, fresh, vigorous, purposeful, effective. A complete break. And yet, after swearing the oath, if he made the speech that Sam Levy had finally drafted for him, if he revealed nothing of what he had learned that day back in November, there would be something at the heart of his presidency that wasn’t a break with Gartner, but a continuity. He felt, in a way, that he would be complicit with Mike Gartner in a deceit against the American people that the man beside him in the limousine had perpetrated in the final months of his presidency. It was the last thing Joe Benton wanted, to feel bound to this man for whom he had so little respect, to feel that the shadow cast by his action loomed over his own presidency from the very beginning.

But that was the nature of power, he knew, to be confronted by exigencies that didn’t fit with your plans. To find yourself with bedfellows you despised. And the successful exercise of power was to steer your way through those exigencies, to walk past those bedfellows, holding fast and trusting to the vision of where you were going, and to get there in the end, if not sooner, then later, if not all the way there, then a good part of it, peacefully and with integrity. That was what he had to do. If he didn’t believe he could do it, he shouldn’t be in that car.

Maybe that was the speech he should make. Just that. One minute. Wasn’t that all that needed to be said?

“You know, you never can tell what’s going to hit you next,” murmured Gartner gloomily, as if reading Benton’s thoughts. “I bet you think you know what I mean, but just wait until you’re president.”

Gartner gazed at him for a moment, then turned away again.

The car pulled up. A marine in dress uniform pulled open the door.

Benton got out. Above him, in the clear blue sky, rose the dome of the Capitol.

On that icy, dazzling January day, in those last minutes before he was sworn in as the forty-eighth president of the United States, Joe Benton still believed he could manage to do what he had promised, to break with the past, to use his presidency to turn the enormous challenge that awaited the American people into a triumph. Over the last weeks, the structure of his four years had crystallized. It no longer seemed a long time, with scope for trial and error, as it had seemed during the campaign. It was painfully short. The first year would determine his success. He had to go hard, gamble everything. The year was mapped out in his mind. A parallel strategy of two parts. First, the programs, the bills, of which there were eleven major ones. The elements of fairness that would create the new foundation for the country. They would have to be in place by the time he made his first State of the Union address in a year’s time. It was a daunting prospect, but with a majority in both houses, it was possible, provided he could keep the swing supporters with him. If he had to, he’d pork-barrel like the best of them. Then at the State of the Union, he would reveal the other side to his strategy. Over the last weeks, almost against his own instincts, he had found himself moving to a decision to deal bilaterally and secretly with the Chinese government over emissions. If all went well, in a year’s time, with the elements of fairness in place, he would have a deal with China and be ready to reveal the terms of that deal and take it to the global community.

That was the only way it could be done. Fast, furious. If he got bogged down, he would never extricate himself, and in four years he would be in Mike Gartner’s seat. Worse, the once-in-a-generation opportunity with which the American people had entrusted him would be out of reach, and it would be another twenty, thirty years before it would swing back into reach again.

That was the thing that scared him. Not his own fortunes in four years time, but missing the opportunity for the people who had voted overwhelmingly for him to act on their behalf. Being the one to let it slip.

He went up the steps. Gartner climbed them by his side.