Ultimatum (3 page)

Eales watched as Benton made the call. After the opening pleasantry, the senator said little, mostly listening. His brow furrowed. “Certainly,” said Benton. “I’ll get him to do that.” Then the call was over. It had lasted about a minute.

He gave the handheld back to Eales. “He wants to meet.”

“We’re setting up a meeting for a couple of weeks from now. Ben knows about it. You want me to get Ben?”

“Not that kind of meeting. Just him and one or two of his guys. No press, he doesn’t want anyone else to know about it. Ed Steinhouser’s going to call you to set things up. He’ll tell you how we’re going to do it. You and Ed talk directly so no one knows.”

“When does he want to do it?”

“Soon. Ed’ll call you today.” Benton saw Eales open his mouth to ask the obvious question. “He didn’t say what it’s about. Just said it’s something we need to talk about and when we do I’ll understand why he wants to do it like this.”

Eales nodded. Neither Joe Benton nor John Eales had ever been through the transition to the presidency before. Anyone who does it, does it only once, and it isn’t the custom to leave instructions behind. Neither man knew what the rules were. They didn’t know if there were any rules.

“John,” said Benton. “You think this is normal? A secret meeting like this?”

Eales shook his head. “I was just about to ask you the same thing.”

~ * ~

Monday, November 15

Canoustie House, Virginia

The Virginia countryside was wintry. Gartner was waiting inside when they arrived, along with Ed Steinhouser, the White House chief of staff, and Art Riedl, a special advisor who had been the man closest to Gartner during his presidency.

Mike Gartner was a Virginia Republican who had served two terms as vice president under Bill Shawcross before moving into the White House on his own account. Thanks to Joe Benton, he was going down in history as a one-term chief executive.

“Sit down, Joe,” he said as he sat himself down in a big armchair upholstered in some kind of a floral fabric

It was the first time the two men had come face-to-face since the last debate before the election. Benton was generally considered to have wiped the floor with Gartner during that encounter. He had forced the president into defending his record, his long list of tax cuts and reductions to federal programs. The more Gartner defended it, the more hard-hearted he seemed.

“You ran a good campaign, Joe,” said Gartner.

“Thanks,” replied Benton. “I think I was saying what the American people wanted to hear.”

“What they want to hear ain’t necessarily what they need to hear,” said the president.

Joe Benton didn’t respond to that. The American people had given their own answer two weeks earlier.

Gartner shook his head. “One-term president.” He looked up at Benton. “That’s not something I recommend.”

Joe Benton didn’t say anything to that either. There was nothing to say he wouldn’t be in the same situation, he knew, four years hence.

“Your son might run next time round, Mr. President,” said Art Riedl.

“And give these boys another Gartner to wallop?” muttered the president sourly. “I don’t think so.” Gartner’s oldest son had been elected junior senator for Florida four years earlier. “Remember what happened the last time we did that? What a fuckup! Twelve years in Iraq. What a goddamned fuckup.”

There was silence.

“And now we’re stuck in Colombia. Another godforsaken shit hole. You know, the funny thing is, people think I was one of the people who wanted to take us in there. But you ask anyone who knows.” Gartner slapped his hand forcefully on the armrest of his chair. “I told Bill Shawcross. I said we’ll never get out of that place. It’s a fucking swamp. But he took us on in. Said there’s only one way to stop the drugs coming out. Just a limited intervention. Pressured the Colombian government to invite us in to help beat the insurgency and the limited intervention expands and before you know it you’re dropping bombs on housefuls of villagers and the whole goddamned cycle begins again. I’ll tell you this. There’s no such thing as a limited intervention. You start it, you never know when it’s going to end.” Gartner laughed disgustedly and ran his hand through his thinning dark hair. “There’s some advice I hope I didn’t need to give you. Well. . . You boys want coffee?” he asked suddenly. He motioned to a sideboard where there was coffee and juice and water.

Ed Steinhouser got up and started pouring. He gave a coffee to each of the men in the room.

The president slurped a couple of times, then put his cup down.

“Okay, we should get down to business,” he said. “I apologize about the secrecy and all.”

Benton smiled. “I thought you normally left a sealed letter on the desk.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s one way of doing it. It’d have to be a damn big letter.”

There wasn’t even a flicker of a smile on Gartner’s face as he said it. Suddenly Joe Benton thought the other man looked weary. He had known Gartner for years, known him as a fellow senator even before he became Bill Shawcross’s vice president, always ebullient, usually overbearing. He didn’t think he had ever seen him look so down.

“What is it, Mike?”

“There’s some stuff you’ve got to know about. I wanted this meeting secret because I don’t want the press asking what we talked about. Pretty soon it’s going to be your problem. Believe me, Joe, you don’t want the press asking.”

“What is it?” said Benton.

“I’m sorry to have to spring it on you like this. But you wanted the job, right?” The president picked up his cup and slurped again. “Okay. Tell me; you spoken to President Wen since the election?”

Benton nodded. About half the world’s leaders had called him in the days following the election, including President Wen of China.

“What’d he say? You don’t mind me asking, right?”

“He congratulated me. Said he hoped we’d work together. The world has big issues and we have to solve them as partners.”

“What big issues? Anything specific?”

“It was a general conversation.” Benton couldn’t say much more without checking his notes. To his recollection it was pretty much the same conversation he’d had with most of the other leaders who had called, part congratulation, part platitudes about working together.

Gartner nodded. “Nothing else?”

“Like what?”

“Like we’ve been holding negotiations with the Chinese.”

“What about?”

“Emissions. Bilateral negotiations, Joe. Strictly bilateral and strictly secret.”

Benton stared at Gartner. Then he glanced at Eales, who had stopped, coffee in hand, and was staring at the president as well.

As president, Gartner’s stance toward the Chinese had been one of perfect intransigence. That was one of the reasons the country had dumped him. The crucial swing vote—the Latino community and women between the ages of thirty and fifty-five—found him excessively belligerent and unilateralist in international affairs. Fully seventy percent of them, for instance, believed he was more likely than not to expand the U.S. military presence in Colombia. The percentage that believed Joe Benton would do that was so low it was essentially unmeasurable.

Gartner’s line on China had always been that the Chinese government would have to show they were genuinely doing something on carbon emissions before the United States could sit down with them again. They had broken too many promises on emissions reduction in the past. Action first, was Gartner’s line, often repeated. Action first, words later.

“How long have these negotiations been going on?” asked Benton.

The president glanced at Art Riedl.

“Seven months,” said Riedl.

Benton nodded. It was starting to make sense. Gartner had been hoping to keep it secret, then announce some kind of a deal with China just before the election. Pull a rabbit out of a hat, steal the show, and ride triumphantly back into the White House.

He glanced at Eales.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking, Joe,” said Gartner. “But you’re wrong. I’m not denying it would have been nice. Would have. But there were other reasons for keeping it secret. I’d like you to meet somebody.” The president looked at Ed Steinhouser, who got up and left the room. “One of the fun things about this job,” said Gartner as they waited for Steinhouser to come back, “is you get to find out about all kinds of stuff you never even knew existed. Stuff I had no idea about even as vice president. I’ll tell you, if I had known there was all this stuff I didn’t know when I was vice president, I’d have been frustrated as hell. And it was frustrating enough, that’s for sure. You’re lucky, Joe, you never had to do the job. That running mate of yours, Chavez, I pity what she’s going to go through.”

“Angela’s going to be involved,” said Benton.

“Sure,” said Gartner, and he smiled knowingly.

Ed Steinhouser came back. A woman in uniform came with him. She was small, slim, with tightly coiffed blond hair.

“This is Dr. Richards,” said the president. “Dr. Richards, Senator Benton.”

Benton stood up and shook her hand.

“Dr. Richards heads a navy unit that’s responsible for environmental surveillance,” said Riedl. “I should add that the information Dr. Richards’s unit gathers is not released publicly nor is it shared with any other government.”

“Combining this with the data available in the wider scientific community, Senator,” explained Richards, “we have the most complete data set available. That means we have a far more precise and accurate picture of environmental trends than any other government in the world. This puts us at a significant advantage in the quality of our scenario generation.”

“In’t that great?” quipped the president.

“What kind of data is this?” asked Benton.

“Deep ocean salinity, deep ice sheet temperature and thickness variations, ocean current velocities, ionosphere particulates and a number of other critical variables. Few institutions have the ability to track these variables even sporadically, and none have the ability to track them constantly, which is what we’re able to do at the Environmental Surveillance Unit.

“They have a whole fleet of vessels,” said Riedl.

“Fourteen,” said Dr. Richards, “including support ships. And we have a number of ESU land stations. The unit was established nineteen years ago, Senator, after Kyoto 2 in the Copenhagen round, and with the quantity of historical data we now have we’re reaching a point where our predictive accuracy is quite high.”

“How high?” asked Eales.

“We feel in general we’re now in excess of ninety percent accuracy.”

“And what have you found?” asked Benton.

“We believe our previous predictions were incorrect. We’re finding that the rate of change across a range of variables is fifteen to twenty percent higher than we had projected.”

“Because no one’s in compliance with Kyoto 3,” said Benton.

“No, sir. That’s factored into our assumptions. The increase appears to be largely due to carbon feedback effects. Principally we’re talking about release of trapped carbon dioxide as ocean temperature rises and areas of permafrost thaw, and reduced reflection of sunlight as the Greenland ice pack melts and sea ice generally disappears. The Amazon fire is also having an effect, and a number of more minor feedback effects are in play as well.”

Benton frowned. “None of this is new, right?” The senator was aware that feedback effects in climate change had been under discussion for decades, and if he knew about them, he assumed there must be deep understanding of the phenomena in the scientific community.