Empire

Wonk

Cecily Malich put the leftover cookies on the table for the kids to discover as they wandered in and out during the day. They did home school in the afternoons during summer vacation, but not on Fridays. Fridays were lazy days, and that meant Mark was over at one of his friends’ houses, Nick was curled up with a book, slowly driving himself blind with Xanth or Discworld novels, Lettie and Annie were playing some madcap game in the back yard that would leave them smelling like a compost heap, and John Paul was dogging her heels. Except that he was down for a nap right now so the house was silent.

And then he woke up and it wasn’t silent anymore. He was three and mercifully had toilet-trained himself fairly early, so there was no diaper to change. J. P. got a cooky in his booster seat.

The rest of the cookies disappeared in bunches as the girls came in from the back yard and she sent them up to the tub, where of course they would play almost as hard as they had outside, but at least they had cookies in them to renew their energy and guarantee full saturation of the bathroom floor and walls.

It was only fair to bring a plate of cookies to Nick. It was a good thing that he was reading, even if she thought the books were deeply uninteresting herself. He shouldn’t be deprived of his share of homemade cookies during his growing-up years. And she saved the last three cookies in a sandwich bag for Mark.

None for her, but that was fine. She didn’t like chocolate. Never had. Now, if she had made snickerdoodles… but those took refrigerator time before you could bake them, so there was no way she could have gotten them made before Captain Cole showed up.

She wondered if she had done him any favors by telling Reuben that the boy looked like someone he could rely on. She knew that whatever Reuben was doing, it was dangerous and might be the kind of thing that would someday put him in front of a congressional committee like Oliver North back when she was a kid and watched CNN obsessively.

What kind of ten-year-old watched CNN? She was glad none of her kids was as strange as she had been. Such a loner. Didn’t have any real friends till she was in high school and found a group of proud-to-be-geeks, though now they’d be called wonks. Who but a wonk like her would even be attracted to the studious young ROTC officer who wore his uniform every day as if he was just daring politically correct students to say something snotty. Which they did. And which he always answered with a surprised look and the same chilling little phrase. “I’m willing to die for you,” he’d say, and then go back to whatever he was doing. How could they answer that?

He’d die for his country; and I spend my life taking care of his kids and making his life worth trying not to die.

She remembered those two glorious, hideous years as an intern and then a paid staffer in a Congressman’s office, where she saw what went on behind the scenes, the stuff they never showed on CNN because reporters and cameras were never present when the real work was being done. It’s not that her Congressman was corrupt—far from it. He was a squeaky-clean Mormon from Idaho who never drank or smoked and treated male and female staffers exactly alike. But he knew how Congress worked—it drank campaign money and breathed publicity. He was an expert in finding and using both.

LaMonte Nielson. He had a conscience and strongly held ideas, but not for one second did he let that get in the way of making whatever deal would get things done and make him indispensable to other Congressmen. Now he was Speaker of the House. Not bad for a smalltown veterinarian who got bored with putting old dogs to sleep.

He had liked her. Gave her a job after her internship. Offered her a huge raise when she said she was quitting. But when she explained she was leaving to marry a soldier, he smiled and said, “That matters more in the long run than anything we do in this office. Go for it.”

Today she might have been a senior aide to the Speaker of the House. Instead she was listening to J. P. in his booster seat at the kitchen table, babbling on about garbage trucks, his obsession of the moment. He was explaining the rules of recycling. She wasn’t sure whether he could read yet or not. Could he really have memorized all this after getting one of the older kids to read the brochure to him?

Getting to know these kids was a lot more fun than getting to know a bunch of Congressmen and their aides. Negotiating with them about bedtime and videogame use was a lot more satisfying than wrestling with other wonks about what would and would not go into the legislation. Not just because at home she had all the power (she and Reuben, when he was home) but also because she could actually change things. Help them overcome their weaknesses. Help them discover and develop their strengths. Make them feel better when they felt bad. Rejoice with them when they were happy. Like Congressman Nielson said—this was what mattered in the long run.

Except…

Except she had to hide from the television. Whether it was CNN or, when Reuben was home, Fox News, she’d find herself filled with yearning—no, be honest, she told herself—frustration. Because things were happening and she wasn’t part of it. All these years later, and she still had the disease.

The front door banged open and Mark ran into the kitchen yelling something. She was only half listening as she got his bag of cookies out of the fridge—he liked his cookies cold.

“Turn on the television!” he shouted at her.

“What?” she said.

“They blew up the White House,” he said.

All the channels were showing the same pictures: the White House with a gaping hole in the south wall of the West Wing, people in suits and people in uniforms, emergency vehicles and military vehicles all around. Reporters explaining that all air traffic was grounded so they couldn’t give us aerial shots—thank God, she thought, that’s all we need, the sky around the White House cluttered with choppers—and promising that as soon as they could get confirmation they’d tell us who died.

Because people had died. That much they knew.

The information bled out, each bit savored and discussed till the next one surfaced. An apparent terrorist attack. One or more rockets launched from a distance. From the Mall, then from the Washington Monument, then from the Tidal Basin. That’s the rumor that stuck.

And then there was the video clip—sold to the highest bidder?—on CBS and then picked up by everybody else (but with the CBS logo in the corner—capitalism continues!) taken from a car on the eastbound lane of Independence Avenue, where it bridged the Tidal Basin. The footage showed the terrorists on the asphalt of the westbound lanes just past the retaining wall of the Tidal Basin, and two rocket launchers.

The camera was shaking—obviously a digital snapshot camera with only a short video capacity. But there were pops of gunfire and some of the terrorists turned to fire… almost right at the camera. Was this tourist insane? He should be down inside his car, not vid-ding the whole thing.

Then a dark shape moved right in front of the camera in a blur of motion. A man in a suit. But with a weapon. And then another, only in uniform. And a voice saying, “Get down inside your car!”

Of course the camera stayed where it was.

Pop. Pop. Pop-pop-pop. One of the terrorists went down. Another. One of the launchers was knocked out of alignment and tipped over. But the other one fired and then the video ended.

Mark pushed a button on the remote and things started rewinding.

“What are you doing?”

“Rewinding,” said Mark.

“This is all a tape?”

“It’s DVR, Mom,” he said, like she was kind of dim. “We’ve had this for two years now. You can rewind anything if you haven’t changed the channel in between.”

“But I want to hear what they’re saying.”

“Mom,” said Mark. “Why do we have to listen to them when we can see?”

And then he added, softly: “I think it was Dad.”

The moment he said it, she knew he was right. Dad in a suit. And that was Captain Coleman in the uniform. Somehow they were at the Tidal Basin with rifles and they were shooting at the terrorists only they hadn’t been able to get them all in time.

The video didn’t prove anything. Everything moved too fast and blurred too much. But she knew it was Reuben.

“Again,” said Mark.

“No,” said Cecily. “Let me hear them talk. I have to know what they’re saying.”

A lot of babble about unidentified early responders and then some idiot talking head saying that the range had been quite short and these must not be trained soldiers because those weren’t hard shots. Right, thought Cecily, not hard at the firing range, but damned hard when somebody was firing back at you and you were running from cover to cover.

Then the talking heads were interrupted by a bulletin from the reporter standing just outside the White House grounds.

The President was definitely in the room where the rocket exploded, along with the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

Mark pushed another button and suddenly everything jumped on the screen. “What are you doing now?”

“Going live,” said Mark. “We were a minute behind because of the replay.”

“The President is confirmed dead,” said a man inside a briefing room that she recognized immediately—it was in the Sam Rayburn Building. Why would he be in the Rayburn?

Because the White House briefing room wasn’t available, of course. But…

There was Congressman LaMonte Nielson with his hand on the Bible. Raising his right hand. Why was he taking an oath of office?

“Apparently the Vice President was killed in a traffic incident only a few minutes before the rocket attack on the White House. I say ‘incident’ because it is hard to believe that this was an accident, a mere coincidence. By the time the President died, this country had no living Vice President. So the law of presidential succession is clear. After the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and then the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and—but here’s the new President of the United States, just sworn in. President LaMonte Nielson. Most Americans don’t even know his name, but he’s all we’ve got right now.”

His last words overlapped with Nielson’s. Looking straight at the camera—Cecily remembered how hard it had been for him to learn how to do that steady gaze at the lens—he said, “Fellow citizens, our enemies have done a terrible thing today, and good people have been murdered. They clearly intended to strike a blow to our hearts, and they succeeded. But we still have—we must keep our heads. Our Constitution still works.

“I’m not the man anybody picked to be President. But I’ll do my job, as will everyone else in government. Some emergency measures will be taken, but except as instructed by legal authorities, we urge you to go about your normal business. We do not know who did this. Do not jump to any conclusions. Do not show anger or hostility to anybody just because you think they might share the religion or the national origin or just look like whoever you guess might have done this. Let’s add no tragedies to the ones we already face today.

“I join the rest of our nation in mourning for our President and Vice President and the other great public servants whose lives were taken today in service to their country. God bless the United States of America.”

As the camera pulled back and the newspeople started judging the new President’s short speech, Cecily could see that he was already surrounded, not just by the Secret Service, but by troops in full battle gear.

“Mark,” she said softly, “don’t tell the other children that we think Dad might have been under fire. Not till we know something for sure.”

“Okay, Mom,” said Mark.

From his voice she knew he was no longer just shocked. He was crying.

“Stay here, please,” she said to him. “I’m going to get the other kids.”

A few minutes later they were gathered in the living room on their knees. None of the prayers she knew seemed adequate. She struggled to come up with the right words to add to the prayers the kids all knew. Ultimately, it all came down to the same thing that LaMonte Nielson—President Nielson—had said. God bless the United States of America.

And then Nick added, “And God bless Daddy and all the soldiers.”

“Amen,” said Cecily. But then she hastened to add, “But as far as we know, Daddy’s all right.”

“But it’s a big war now,” said Nick. “It has to be.”

Go about your normal business, LaMonte had said. But what was her normal business now?

She sat the kids down and explained about presidential succession. She told them about her time working for LaMonte Nielson. She talked about the slain President.

“You didn’t even vote for him, Mommy,” said Lettie. “Mark said so.”

“Your father voted for him,” said Cecily. “And even though I didn’t, he was still our President, and he did the best he knew how to do for our country. It’s a terrible thing, not just for him but for all of us, all Americans. By killing him, they were trying to hurt us all.”

But after a while, she ran out of words. The girls were too young to really understand it all well enough to stay interested. She let them go back to their room and play quietly. “Indoor rules,” she said.

Mark and Nick, though, stayed with the television, watching CNN. Cecily knew the footage at the Tidal Basin would come back on. She knew that at some point, someone would tell the names of the men who were firing at the terrorists. But she couldn’t very well forbid them to watch history unfold. And she couldn’t stay and watch with them, because J. P. needed her attention.

And because she might break down and cry from sheer frustration and fear if she didn’t keep herself busy. So with J. P. playing on the kitchen floor, she fumbled around the cupboards looking for something to prepare for dinner that might keep her busy for a few hours.

The first call came from DeeNee Breen. “As far as we know,” she said, “Major Malich was not injured in any way. Nor was Captain Coleman. But it’s confirmed that they were the ones who fired at the terrorists and disabled one of the launchers. At the moment their location is unknown but I can’t imagine they won’t make their way here as quickly as possible to be debriefed. Or somewhere.”

Cecily thanked her and then went in to tell Mark and Nick that yes, it was their father and his new assistant who were in the video, firing at the terrorists.

“So… Dad’s, like… a hero,” said Nick softly.

“Honey,” said Cecily, “your dad’s a hero about forty times over. But yes, he did all he could. But I also know he’s very sad right now that he wasn’t able to stop both rockets from firing.”

“They thought the bodies were booby-trapped,” said Mark. “Of the terrorists. But it was just the rocket in the launcher they didn’t fire at the White House. Somebody touched it and it launched into the ground and blew up and killed a bunch of guys.”

“But not your father,” said Cecily. “Or DeeNee would have known. They would know if he was hurt and she would have told me. So he’s okay.”

Mark looked relieved. But Nick—she could never guess what he was feeling. Privately, Reuben called him Stoneface, because he just took things in. She had worried when he was four that he might be autistic or suffer from Asperger’s. But no, not at all, he was just a quiet kid who kept things to himself. Like now. Did he believe his dad was safe? Or did he not care? Or was he a seething mass of fear and none of it showed? The mystery child.

But she wasn’t going to try to get through to him right now. What would “success” consist of? Nick erupting in tears? Oh, he’d thank her for an achievement like that! “Yes, Oprah, my mother was never happy unless she could get me to cry.” Child-rearing today was so complicated. You always had to think of what they’d say on television later.

DeeNee called again to find out if she knew anything about Reuben’s whereabouts. And then she started getting calls from friends who wondered if it could possibly have been Rube in those videos from the Tidal Basin. “I don’t know,” she said. “It looked like a blur to me. No, I don’t know where he is, but he could be anywhere, you know how his job is.” Of course they didn’t know how his job was, but what could they say, anyway?

And then came the call from Reuben.

She said hello, not recognizing the number on caller ID, expecting it to be another curious friend.

She knew Reuben’s voice at once. “You go ahead and visit Aunt Margaret without me,” he said. “I’ll get up there as soon as I can.”

“Reuben, what—”

But he talked right over her. “I love you, Cessy.” And then the connection was gone.

He had warned her back when this most recent assignment began that there was a strong chance their phones would be tapped all the time. By both sides. So they had longstanding telephone discipline—play along with whatever the other one is pretending.

The game was this: Apparently they were planning a trip to Aunt Margaret’s in West Windsor, New Jersey. Though Reuben’s tone was cheerful, the cryptic nature of his instructions told her a great deal: He wanted her and the kids out of town. And it wasn’t just because the press would hound them as soon as his identity was known—he would have explained that openly over the telephone. Something was seriously wrong.

And her job, now, was to trust Reuben.

She went into the living room and knelt down in front of the two boys. She beckoned them to get their faces close to hers, so she didn’t have to talk loudly to be heard above the noise of the television.

“That was Dad,” she said. “He’s fine. But he asked us to do something. We’re getting in the van and we’re driving to Aunt Margaret’s. I need you two older boys to pretend that we’ve been planning this trip for a long time, and the only thing different is that Dad will be coming along later. If the girls don’t play along, don’t argue with them. I’ll help them pack and you guys pack your own stuff. Three days’ worth of clothes, plus Sunday clothes, plus swimming trunks, plus a couple of books and maybe DVDs and the PSP and the Gameboy Nintendo thing—the DS.”

They looked at her gravely and Mark nodded. Nick didn’t nod, but when Mark got up, so did Nick, and they padded out of the room together.

It was packing for J. P. that took the longest, but it was as if they had rehearsed for such a move for years, it went that smoothly. They were backing out of the driveway only half an hour later.

They went out Route 7 and crossed the Potomac above Lees-burg. The bridge was packed and it took almost two hours to get past the bottleneck—hardly a surprise, since all the Washington bridges were closed and this was the first bridge open to the public. After that it was still slow going, so it wasn’t until after dark before they pulled into Margaret’s driveway. Aunt Margaret had the front door open before they were out of the minivan.

“Your soldier boy called,” she said. “He’s being debriefed and everything’s fine.”

But she and Aunt Margaret both knew that nothing was fine. The President was dead, Reuben had shot some of the assassins, and he had sent his family out of town in a rush and without explanation.

In some ways it was worse than when he had been in Special Ops. At least in the field, Americans were all on his side. He had support. But for all she knew, he was in serious trouble and couldn’t count on anybody.

Except her. He had assigned her to take care of their children. As long as he knew his kids were safe, then he could face anything else with courage. Her own dreads and worries had to be set aside. She had a job to do, and she was going to do it well.