“Dignity left town a long time ago,” Murray said. The morning’s events seemed to have left him in a daze.
Images of Chinese representatives making their way down New York Avenue toward the east gate of the White House complex appeared on the television.
“Stan, call State. Get someone who speaks Chinese down here,” the president said.
“Will do, Mr. President,” Stanley said, running off to make the call.
NBC’s camera on the North Lawn picked up two Chinese soldiers in their dress whites and gold braids, with red stars on their hats, holding ceremonial rifles with gleaming gold bayonets, taking up positions at the front door to the White House. Tourists snapped photos in disbelief as Chinese soldiers, not American Marines, stood guard at the West Wing entrance in full dress uniform.
Two massive flatbed trucks pulled into the White House driveway. Andrea was jarred by the sight of these dirty, utilitarian vehicles with their roaring diesel engines and industrial-sized tires driving along a driveway ordinarily the province of the highest-end limousines.
There was a knock at the Oval Office door. The door slowly opened and Stanley Marshal poked his head into the Oval.
“Mr. President?”
“Yes?”
“The Chinese are here,” Stan said.
President Murray looked at Andrea, still standing beside him. She nodded mournfully. He nodded, then turned to Stan. “Escort them in, Stan,” he said with a resigned sigh.
Six Chinese representatives entered the Oval Office. Four were armed soldiers in fatigues. Two appeared to be bureaucrats in dark blue suits and solid red ties. A Chinese television correspondent and her camera crew followed behind.
President Murray stood ramrod straight and tightened his tie. “Welcome to the Oval Office, gentlemen,” he said in the strongest voice he could muster.
One of the Chinese bureaucrats in a suit nodded toward him. The rest said nothing. They didn’t even look in the president’s direction. For all Andrea knew they didn’t understand a word the president had said.
The bureaucrat pointed to the north wall of the office to the left of the fireplace and gestured for President Murray and Andrea to move there. The Chinese soldiers circled the room like predators closing in on their prey, inspecting their booty. One of them began taking photographs with his smartphone.
President Murray gritted his teeth. “That guy is taking selfies with his iPhone. I’d like to knock his block off.”
“Dignity, Mr. President,” said Andrea, gently restraining him with her arm. “We need to maintain a stiff upper lip for the country.”
The Chinese soldiers laughed, joking around as they rummaged through the Resolute desk. One eyed the red telephone on the desk, fascinated. He picked it up and put it down repeatedly, perhaps wondering who was on the other end. It had been an emergency line to the Pentagon. President Murray had it disconnected when the Chinese arrived in the United States.
Andrea’s stiff upper lip began to waver. She wished that for once, just once, she had the physical courage of an Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt. To be able to walk right up to one of those Chinese soldiers and lay them out cold, right there in the Oval. Her jaw clenched and she felt pressure rising in her head and the muscles in her arms tensing. All the energy she wanted to unleash on the Chinese soldiers had nowhere to go.
The Chinese yanked the Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington from the wall and carelessly tossed it into a cart. Bits of plaster fell to the floor. Dolley Madison had saved that painting before the British burned the White House in 1814. Andrea imagined herself pictured in a history book next to Dolley Madison.
Here’s the hero who saved the picture, and here’s the failure who lost it.
The Chinese bureaucrat screamed at the soldier. The soldier bowed before the bureaucrat apologetically.
“What was that about?” President Murray asked the interpreter State had sent.
“He told him to be careful, the painting is worth millions,” the interpreter replied.
As the soldiers continued their work, the Chinese television correspondent took up position in front of the fireplace and began prattling away in incomprehensible Chinese.
“What’s she saying?” President Murray asked.
The interpreter quietly responded, “She is saying that this is the end result of democracy—voters’ demands bankrupting the country and politicians too cowardly to stop them. She said China’s system is far superior, with experts providing economic stability and no elections requiring politicians to promise voters outlandish and unaffordable spending.”
“Fuck these assholes,” President Murray said. He clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles turned white and his fingertips a dark red.
Four Chinese soldiers stationed themselves at each corner of the Resolute desk and lifted it onto a waiting dolly. Two of the soldiers rolled the desk out of the Oval Office.
“That desk has been in this office for over a hundred years,” Andrea said. “I’m going to be sick . . .” She covered her gaping mouth with one hand and held her stomach with the other.
The Chinese continued to loot the rest of the contents of the Oval Office. The bust of Winston Churchill. The painting of Andrew Jackson. The flags of each military service with the ribbons clipped to the top of the flagpole honoring their every battle. All unceremoniously grabbed, loaded onto hand trucks, and rolled to the cargo trucks in the White House driveway.
Finally, all that was left was the Oval Office carpet and the coffee table with the broken glass top Admiral Wilkerson had cracked with his fist.
“What happened here?” the Chinese bureaucrat asked in English.
“None of your goddamn business,” President Murray said.
The Chinese bureaucrat laughed. “You can keep this. We do not want broken furniture. Now move yourselves, please.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that,” President Murray protested, pointing at the bureaucrat.
The bureaucrat said nothing and shooed at the president.
President Murray raised his fists and began to move toward the bureaucrat, but Andrea stepped between him and the Chinese soldiers. A donnybrook in the Oval Office would do the country no good. Seeing the president in a fistfight with Chinese soldiers would only add to America’s debasement. Especially because there were more Chinese than Americans in the Oval Office and the president might well lose that fight.
“You goddamn sons of bitches!” President Murray shouted over and over.
Andrea gripped the president’s arms tighter. She imagined herself a coach restraining the irate Oriole manager Earl Weaver of her youth. She slowly backed the president off the carpet and toward the wall as the Chinese bureaucrat snickered.
The Chinese soldiers rolled up the carpet and loaded it onto the last waiting dolly. The Oval Office stripped bare, the soldiers marched out of the office. The lead bureaucrat gave President Murray a mock salute and left. The president lunged forward, but Andrea restrained him again.
Now they were alone in an empty Oval Office. The office was so white. So plain and empty. All that remained was the coffee table with its broken glass top in the center of the room.
President Murray slowly walked around the empty room, looking at the walls like someone inspecting a new house. There were circles on the floor where the military services’ flags used to stand; sunlight had faded the floor around the bases. He ran his finger over the hole in the wall where the painting of President Jackson had been mounted. A small bit of plaster fell from the hole. The grandfather clock was gone, its outline still visible from having protected the wall from being faded by sunlight for a century.
Andrea bit back tears. She checked her watch. It had taken the Chinese nearly four hours to complete their repossession work in the White House.
The president’s smartphone chimed. It was a text from Vice President Campbell on the Hill. “The Chinese are taking everything here,” Murray read aloud.
He called
out into the foyer where Stanley Marshal was still on duty. “Can you get me a computer? I want to see what else the Chinese have been doing.”
Stanley brought in a small laptop computer and set it down on one of the Oval Office’s built-in shelves.
“Go to C-SPAN’s website,” Murray said. “See what’s happening in the Capitol.”
The C-SPAN homepage featured a series of videos from Capitol Hill chronicling the Chinese repossession team’s work in the Capitol complex. There was a video link that read “Statuary Hall repossession.” Andrea clicked on it.
The video captured Chinese soldiers rolling small trucks, cranes, and other heavy lifting equipment into Statuary Hall. The soldiers were loading the statues onto rolling dollies and removing them. Samuel Adams. Dwight Eisenhower. Thomas Edison. Helen Keller. The Chinese even removed the beautiful deep-red curtains with the bright gold trim that served as the backdrop for these marble American heroes. All they left was an empty rotunda, the Corinthian columns at its perimeter and the decorative ceiling the only hint of the hall’s former grandeur.
“I used to take tour groups to Statuary Hall when I was a congressman,” the president said. “Beautiful room, the old House of Representatives chamber. With every state’s two statues of their native sons and daughters who became American heroes. I’d walk the tour groups all the way through each of the statues to be sure they appreciated the richness of American history. One of the most American rooms in America. Every one of them represented something great about this country. People are watching this at home, probably wondering if we’re about to become a Chinese colony.”
“This is what it must have looked like when the Visigoths sacked Rome,” Andrea said. “I’d do anything to go back in time to cut something from the budget, anything, just so we didn’t have to watch this.”
Andrea clicked on the next link, titled “House and Senate Chambers repossession.” The studio anchor was speaking in a quiet golf voice. “We’re now getting live shots of the House and Senate floors.
The cameras in the House and Senate chambers captured Chinese soldiers pulling up the desks and chairs on the floor of both chambers. Two Chinese soldiers pulled down the flag behind the Speaker of the House’s seat. That flag had served as a backdrop to some of the most memorable speeches in American history, from FDR’s “a date which will live in infamy” speech in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor to a century’s worth of State of the Union addresses. The methodical stripping of the two chambers reminded Andrea of the end of a funeral, with gravediggers unfeelingly dumping dirt on a freshly laid coffin.
C-SPAN had even captured Chinese soldiers taking the American and state flags outside each member’s office suite and pulling off the bronze name plaques adorning the front door of every door. The same plaques Andrea saw when she’d first come to the Hill seeking the Debt Rebel Gang’s endorsement. Her political adventure had come full circle.
President Murray sat stone-faced and numb as he witnessed the Capitol Hill repossession. He appeared emotionally unable to react further.
The country couldn’t see the president like this. As long as he stayed strong for the country, it would survive, Andrea thought. But a shell-shocked president might end any hopes of surviving the debt crisis. The president didn’t have much of his staff left under the emergency budget. Only Stan Marshal was around now, and he was a functionary. It was up to her to restore the president’s strength.
“Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were dastardly. The Kennedy assassination was horrific. But this?” President Murray’s eyes glistened with tears. “This is humiliating.”
“What about when the British burned Washington?” Andrea asked.
“At least we were fighting then,” he replied. “Not surrendering.”
He walked over to the windows facing the South Lawn, fixing his vacant stare on the Washington Monument.
Andrea thought about her discussion with Ryan the day before. She might be feeling the same humiliation as the president, but she knew why she was putting herself through it. President Murray needed her to recalibrate his equilibrium and confidence the same way Ryan had recalibrated hers.
“Mr. President, what do you think America is?”
The president turned to her. His nose was red. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, why are we working so hard to solve this debt crisis? What are we putting ourselves through hell for?”
“What are you driving at?”
“America is an idea and an experiment in self-governance,” Andrea said. “A test of whether a nation can create a government of specific, enumerated powers that maximizes human freedom and gives each citizen a voice in their governance.”
“Experiments can fail,” President Murray replied.
“Experiments don’t wait two hundred and fifty years to fail,” Andrea said. “Our people are made of strong stuff. How do you think they got past five years of killing each other in the Civil War and got on with the business of building the country? We owe it to our ancestors to get past this.”
“Times are different, Andrea.”
A small flame had lit inside her. “Mr. President, you and I took very different roads to get to where we’re standing right now. But I think we’re motivated by the same thing: to leave the place better for our children and their children. Lord knows we didn’t ask to implement the emergency budget or fight this war. But we’re seeing it through. And so are Americans. They’re looking at all this trauma and helping their neighbor in need, not rioting.”
The president, head bowed, slowly circled the spot on the floor where the Resolute desk had sat. “We’d better hurry it up and see it through, because I’m sure to be a one-term president.”
“It may not look like it now, but when the debt slate is clean, we will have done what we set out to do,” Andrea said. “I said it before and I’ll say it again: I think this will be your finest hour. But if you lose reelection, history will be kinder to you than the electorate.”
“I wish I had your confidence, Andrea.”
“You can, and you should, Mr. President.”
The chiming of an alarm clock awoke Mason in his Capitol Hill office. Normally he slept in his apartment uptown, but he was not going to miss the sun rising over the Capitol the day after the Chinese had ransacked it. Mason got up from his couch and went to his desk chair, seated himself, and turned to face the window with anticipation.
As sunlight began to peek over the horizon, the Capitol dome came into view. The fifteen-thousand-pound Statue of Freedom that had sat atop it since 1863 was gone, hauled off by Chinese soldiers the day before.
What could be more demoralizing for Americans than to watch a totalitarian Communist dictatorship pull down the Statue of Freedom?
The flagpoles atop the House chamber stood bare. The parking lot, usually buzzing with black Suburbans shuttling members of Congress to work, was empty.
Intoxicated by the sight of the stripped Capitol exterior, Mason turned back to his desk to see what the Chinese had done to the rest of the country. He browsed through news media on his laptop, smiling at the sheer number of videos chronicling America’s humiliation.
In one video, Chinese soldiers methodically emptied the Air and Space Museum, hauling off John Glenn’s Friendship 7 capsule and the Apollo 11 capsule. In another, Chinese soldiers carted away copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Emancipation Proclamation from the National Archives. A third video showed Chinese bureaucrats taking the tea sets and furniture from the Diplomatic Reception Rooms in the State Department and the massive bronze bust of John F. Kennedy from the Kennedy Center.
A video of New York showed the Statue of Liberty’s empty pedestal standing powerlessly on the island with the Statue of Liberty lying on its side on the deck of a Chinese barge steaming out of New York Harbor. Shock, sorrow, and hopelessness were written all over the faces of the New Yorkers watching it sail away.
Mason never thought he would see a vid
eo like this in his wildest dreams.
I, Lewis Mason, pride of the Kansas heartland, succeeded where the Nazis, Japanese, and Soviets all failed. I defeated, humbled, and sacked the United States.
Mason now understood what Xu Li meant when she said he would know when to make his move. Any Ministry agent worth his salt would know the iron wasn’t going to get any hotter. Chinese soldiers were on American soil. And if the faces of ordinary American citizens were to be believed, China had stunned Americans into a mortified paralysis.
After a shower in the Longworth building gymnasium, now shorn of its exercise equipment, Mason called the White House.
“Congressman,” President Murray said coldly.
“Mr. President.”
Mason sensed the curtness and anger in the president’s voice.
So much the better. His judgment will be off.
“I saw the Chinese were in the White House yesterday. Did they not take your phone?”
“We all brought in old phones and furniture. I’m sitting at a card table Andrea Gartner brought from home on a folding chair she found in her garage.”
Mason feigned concern. “My goodness, Mr. President.”
“What do you want, you duplicitous son of a bitch?” asked the president, still fuming from Mason’s double-cross. Mason decided to get right to business.
“Mr. President, we need to decide where we go from here. Budget-wise, I mean.”
“You fucked me, Lew,” the president shouted. “You think I’m going to negotiate anything with you now? You’re lucky I don’t come up there and wring your neck. And even if I was inclined to meet with you, my team has got a long way to go before it’s ready to talk to Congress.”
“Respectfully, I disagree, Mr. President. I think we ought to work together from the beginning. From the ground up. It’ll help the country heal to see us working together.”
“Now you want to work together?” President Murray shouted. “Fuck you, you cynical bastard. You get up in the well of the House, trash the war, embarrass me, and now you want to work together?”
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