“Yes sir,” Andrea replied.
“Congressman Mason is off his meds and won’t appropriate any more funds under any circumstances, even if Americans remain trapped in Taiwan,” the president said. “Is there any way we are going to get a better deal than this?”
Andrea sensed an opening. “This deal is absolutely the best we can get. Otherwise we’re going to have to nickel-and-dime our way through funding this war, and that is no way to run a railroad. If this war is still on when we run out of money, China wins completely. This way, we get a little something and we buy time to straighten out our finances and be prepared if there is a next round.”
“This is surrender!” General Ogden roared. “Why are we talking surrender just when we have China on the ropes?” His round face was now beet red. Andrea could swear he was physically swelling. “Do you think they would have proposed this if they thought they were winning?”
President Murray cocked his head slightly, as if thinking the general had a point. “If we really do have the upper hand in this, how long would it take for us to defeat the Chinese?”
“At the current rate, unless we really take the gloves off, several months, probably.” Even General Ogden knew the Chinese were no pushovers.
Andrea figured as much. “I hate to keep bringing this up, but we don’t have several months. We have only one week of money left.”
“Enough of your damn excuses,” General Ogden shouted. “Find some more money, dammit!”
“I did my part!” said Andrea, more comfortable raising her voice to the general. “I found as much money as I possibly could. This is it without Congress.”
“Screw Mason,” General Ogden sneered. “What I wouldn’t do to get that guy out of Congress. Screw the Hatch Act. I’d campaign against his sorry ass tomorrow.”
President Murray turned to Andrea. “There’s nothing else you can do?”
“I’ve found what I could.” She pulled her pockets inside out for effect. “There is no way I’ll be able to find the several months’ worth of money General Ogden just said he’ll need. We have to take this deal. Our finances won’t get better, and neither will our position in the South China Sea. If you don’t take the deal, you are going to have to end the war in a week and you won’t get even a fig leaf of a concession.”
“General?” the president asked.
“This is absurd. Do you know what we could let fly into China from American shores?” General Ogden slammed his fist on the coffee table. “You want to end this war in a week? I’ll end this war in a week.”
Andrea nearly blurted out her horror, but President Murray beat her to it. “And what’s going to land in California before it’s over? You don’t think the Chinese will be able to respond in kind? They have nukes too, you know.”
“We’ve got more.”
President Murray was aghast. “If we lose Los Angeles and San Francisco, it’s okay if they lose Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong? Bombs Away Ogden?”
“That nickname’s taken,” said Andrea.
“The bean counter speaks again,” said General Ogden, still red-faced and swollen with fury.
“You can call me any names you want,” Andrea retorted. “We don’t have the cash to keep paying the expenses to be shooting at the Chinese. Mr. President, take the deal.”
“You think that’s going to solve our problem?” General Ogden was boiling. “Every two-bit tinpot dictator is going to look at this surrender and think it’s open season.”
Andrea raised her arms in frustration. “What do you want me to do about it? The government can’t borrow money. I can’t conjure money. What part of there is no money don’t you understand?”
“I don’t understand any of it! America has three hundred and fifty million people. We have three trillion dollars a year in tax revenue. Take the damn money and fight the damn war!”
“You are going to get us all impeached by the end of this, General.” Andrea knew it would be her and President Murray and not General Ogden getting hauled up to the Hill for impeachment hearings.
“Maybe you deserve it,” General Ogden hissed.
“Maybe we’ll fund the impeachment hearings with your war money,” Andrea blurted.
She nervously looked around the room, wondering if she’d crossed a line.
“All right, that’s enough,” President Murray interjected. “I’m taking the ceasefire. Our boys in Taiwan have to come home.”
Andrea swore steam was coming out of General Ogden’s ears.
“What’s really got me worried is paying back that four trillion dollars in debt with collateral,” the president continued. “Fighting the war with unconstitutionally obtained funds might get me impeached. Allowing Chinese solders to come to America and take government property might get me shot.”
“Do we really have a choice?” asked Andrea. “The alternative is defaulting on that debt. And if we default, the world economy will collapse.”
“The world is going to collapse if we surrender Taiwan and the South China Sea to the Chinese,” General Ogden barked.
Andrea wasn’t going to be the first OMB director to preside over an American default. “My collapse will have Americans selling apples on street corners for a nickel again. The consequences of a United States default would have the Chinese coming to take property look like a Sunday picnic. You think things are bad now? Wait until no one will loan the US money ever again. Talk about belt-tightening. That would be gastric bypass surgery.”
“Print money!” General Ogden bellowed.
Andrea rolled her eyes. Didn’t anybody ever listen to her? “The dollar’s no longer the reserve currency. China and the Europeans saw to that. We can’t inflate our way out of debt. How many times have I been over this? We’ve already killed Social Security. You want to kill peoples’ retirement accounts too? You want people to pay for food with truckloads of dollars? Why don’t you go online and search ‘Weimar’ and ‘wheelbarrows’ sometime?”
Silence.
The president turned to Brooks Powell. “Any ideas, Brooks?”
“No sir. I hate to say it, but take the deal. We won’t get better terms.”
The president looked at the group with a blank stare, then nodded mournfully.
Murray looked at Andrea, then turned to General Ogden. “Accept the cease-fire,” he said.
The thought of the humiliating surrender—President Murray called it a “cease-fire” but it was a surrender—sickened Andrea and kept her awake all night. She sat at her kitchen table—the family asleep upstairs—and wondered what the next day would bring. Surrender on top of Medicare and Social Security cuts might move the protesters in Lafayette Park from holding signs to burning effigies. Thousands of American soldiers and sailors dead. Billions of dollars of the most sophisticated military machinery up in smoke or at the bottom of the sea. All to watch the Chinese flag fly over Taiwan and the South China Sea.
A car slowly drove by outside. Then the thud of the Washington Post landing in her driveway. She looked up at the clock. It was 4:50 a.m. Even though she got the papers at work, Ryan wanted the Post for the crossword puzzles.
She opened the front door, collected the paper, brought it inside, and pulled it from its plastic sleeve. The headline left no doubt as to the outcome of the war:
Ceasefire Reached in Dramatic End to War; Funding
Crisis Forces Peace; Taiwan to Stay in Chinese Hands
Andrea first felt relief. The death and destruction were over. American soldiers would be out of harm’s way. But she was surprised the headline said nothing about the repayment of the debt to China with American assets. How did that not make it into the headlines? Andrea wasn’t about to complain, though. That might be the most unpopular aspect of the whole thing. For now, the less said, the better.
More surprises were in store. According to an overnight poll, over seventy percent of the American public supported the ceasefire. The Post quoted a TrueCon Network anchor gushing over President Murra
y bringing the troops home and making Taiwan fight its own war.
Good grief. Did they miss the part about China coming to the United States to grab property to repay the debt? But Andrea stopped herself. For the first time in forever, she felt like she’d been a part of something people liked. Or didn’t hate, anyway. TrueCon Network hosts weren’t branding her an Establishment lackey for once. Andrea didn’t know whether to be happy or worried. She had no frame of reference for the bouquets TrueCon Network hosts seemed to be throwing her way.
Andrea went upstairs and quickly dressed and showered. She wasn’t dreading going to work. In fact, she felt like a damned hero. All hell broke loose around her, and she was the calm amid the storm. The glue holding the place together. For a moment she fancied herself the rock of the administration. She’d given Murray the extra weeks of war he needed to get the best terms possible for ending the war. And doggone if Americans didn’t think he had.
On the drive to work, she turned on the radio to the local news station, WTOP. There were no more ads for government contractors with all her budget cuts. The hosts were talking a lot more than usual to fill the air.
And who should they be interviewing this morning but her nemesis, Lewis Mason.
“If it wasn’t for my cutting off the funding, we’d still have our boys getting shot at by the Chinese,” said Mason. “It was never our fight. And we shouldn’t be going into debt to support some foreign country.”
That goddamned jackass. Mason had done everything he could to make it impossible for her to deal with the debt and then used that very problem to end the war. All of a sudden, he was in touch with his inner isolationist and rediscovering his worries about the national debt. Still, it was a nice change of pace from him beating the snot out of her and President Murray.
“If it wasn’t for the Pripyat Consortium international bond boycott, could the United States have continued to fight the war?” the interviewer asked.
“We’ll never know, will we,” said Mason. “I deal in reality, not hypotheticals.”
What a smug, arrogant son of a—
The Pripyat Consortium!
She hadn’t heard a thing since she’d asked Rachel to have the FBI look into that Pripyat Consortium spokesman.
Andrea pulled into her parking space on West Executive Avenue and rushed up to her office. She ran straight in and grabbed Rachel.
“Come into my office, quickly,” Andrea said.
“Good morning to you too, sweetie,” Rachel said sarcastically. “What’s going on?”
“With all the craziness I’d totally forgotten about how you asked the FBI to check into that Pripyat Consortium spokesman.”
“I did ask,” said Rachel. “They told me they’d been working it from the moment the guy appeared on the television screen. But they had no idea who he was. I haven’t heard a thing from them since.”
“Let’s get them on the phone and get an update.”
Rachel leaned over Andrea’s desk and dialed a number on the speakerphone.
“FBI, Agent McClain,” said the deep voice.
“Hey, Gus, it’s Rachel Samuels.”
“Rachel, I was wondering when you’d call,” Gus said with hesitation.
“My boss wanted to see if you had anything new in your investigation into that Pripyat Consortium spokesman. I have her on the line with me.”
“Hello, Ms. Gartner,” said Gus. “We looked in our databases and asked our financial crimes contacts around the world. We haven’t found a thing so far about the Pripyat Consortium or the spokesman.”
“What does that mean?” asked Andrea.
“That the Pripyat Consortium probably is a front for someone else, some bad actor that wants deep anonymity. It’s a ruse of some kind. Quite possibly a foreign cutout doing the dirty work for a government that wants plausible deniability.”
Andrea shook her head. “What about the Pripyat Consortium spokesman? The guy in the fancy suit. Do they know who that was?”
“We looked at every database we have,” said Gus. “We talked to Interpol, MI5, GCHQ. No one has a clue who this guy is. It’s like he doesn’t exist.”
“What is he, a hologram? I saw him with my own eyes on TV. And doggone if he doesn’t look familiar,” said Andrea. “Doesn’t the FBI have every surveillance tool in the world at its disposal?”
“He’s probably working for a hostile government,” said Gus. “Russia, China maybe. Pripyat was in the Soviet Union, you know. And we just got done shooting at the Chinese. If I was a betting man, I’d say one of them is the likely culprit.”
“Yeah, I know about Pripyat. Chernobyl. Doesn’t that seem weird to you?” Andrea asked.
“Naming an investment group after an abandoned nuclear-contaminated town is some kind of sick joke,” Rachel interjected.
“Or a message,” Andrea said. “Agent McClain, keep us posted on what the FBI finds. Someone must know something. We’ve got to figure out who’s behind this.”
“Absolutely,” Gus replied. “Our director has made it our top priority. When we figure this out, we will be sure to let you know.”
“Enter the temple tonight,” the message read.
The Ministry must be pleased, Mason thought. Tonight, I receive the spoils of my victory.
And what a victory it was! China owned Taiwan and had turned the South China Sea into a Chinese lake. America had been humiliated. Vietnam, the Philippines, even Australia and South Korea were adjusting to the new reality and coming to Beijing to beg for mercy. If Beijing wanted to tighten the screws on any of them, who was going to come to the rescue? The bankrupt Americans?
As he drove to his Capitol Hill office the morning after President Murray announced the cease-fire, Mason surveyed his handiwork, wishing he could publicly claim credit for the misery he’d unleashed. The domestic effects of the emergency budget were everywhere. Half-built bridges and construction equipment sitting idle. Crowds of angry people surrounding pharmacies, unable to pay for their prescriptions because of Medicare cuts. Kids aimlessly wandering the streets because the federal grants their school programs depended on had been abruptly cut.
But when he turned on his office television to watch the morning news programs after arriving at the office, he was shocked to learn snap overnight polls on CNN had President Murray’s approval rating at sixty percent. Sixty percent! For a guy who had cut people’s Medicare and Social Security? The headlines were brutal. The New York Times webpage called the surrender a “dark day for freedom,” and the New York Post ran a headline of “Choker!” with President Murray’s picture. And yet Murray was becoming more popular, not less.
How was it possible the country was reacting this way? The budget crisis and war were supposed to trigger revolution, not strengthen the president. Acorn had misread the American public. Mason now wondered if he himself had misread the public too.
What am I going to tell Madame Xu?
She had to be happy, didn’t she? The Chinese had achieved their eighty-year-old dream of reunifying Taiwan with the mainland and taking control of the South China Sea. The United States had been humiliated and exposed as a paper tiger, unable to afford fighting a war and defending itself. It was open season on the United States. And he’d made it happen.
Having reassured himself Xu Li would appreciate his handiwork, Mason spent a quiet day in his office doing phone interviews and signing more pictures to send to constituents. As evening approached, he departed his office for the abandoned Baltimore warehouse. Night had fallen by the time he arrived.
The stench of death still hung over the place. Dead animals, animal droppings, abandoned furniture, that broken piano. He loved the contrast with his immaculate, ornate Capitol Hill office building, his Capitol Hill clothes absorbing the scent of the filth like pungent cigar smoke. He was no effete trust-fund-baby radical, no Brooklyn hipster protesting the Man by day and eating farm-to-table tapas and drinking craft beers by night. He got his hands dirty and enjoyed licking them clean.
He slowly descended the darkened staircase to the basement. A small flashing red light from the console beside the video screen pierced the darkness. He tiptoed into the basement, flashlight on, and found the solitary working lightbulb. He pulled its chain and turned it on. The bulb lit the middle of the room, but the rest remained in the shadows.
He made his way to the red button and pressed it. The ceiling projector whirred to life. The same room from which Xu Li had communicated with him previously appeared on screen. It was empty.
Where was the Ministry? They called him all this way and no one was there? Mason fitfully looked around the basement. Was someone lurking in the shadows? Was the Ministry about to suicide him like it had Acorn? Mason felt the urge to run.
But before he could, Xu Li appeared on the screen. She said nothing at first, but her furrowed brow and intense scowl left no doubt about her view of Operation Pripyat’s status.
“You have failed, Crimson.” Xu Li intensified her scowl.
Surely she couldn’t be that angry, could she? He’d struck a mighty blow for Marxism, the oppressed peoples of the world, the Third World, the Left. The capitalist hegemon was crawling on its hands and knees begging for money just to stay afloat. Lenin dreamed of it. Stalin dreamed of it. Mao dreamed of it. And he, Lewis Mason, who grew up in Nowheresville, Kansas, had done it.
Mason’s thoughts went back to Acorn, how he was dumped in the trunk of the Forester and left to bleed to death. A shiver crawled down his spine. Was he next to be suicided?
“Madame Xu, I do not understand. China is ascendant. America is reeling. What more is there to be done?”
“America exists, and as long as America exists, she will be a threat to China.”
“America can’t buy a ham sandwich.”
“Not today. But you are like all the other Americans. You can’t think a hundred years into the future.”
“With all due respect, Madame Xu, no one can.”
“I can,” Xu Li replied angrily and arrogantly. “As long as America exists, it can recover. It can grow more food, extract more oil and gas, and catch more fish than any country in the world. A country like that will not stay down forever. A weakened America is not enough. America as we know it must cease to exist.”
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