The
Latina
President
A Novel
By Joe Rothstein
LCCN 2016911716
ISBN-13 978-0997699944
ISBN-10 0997699944
The Latina President is a publication of
Gold Standard Publications
1025 Connecticut Avenue
NW, Washington, D.C. 20036
(202) 857-9742
TheLatinapresident.com
[email protected]
Cover by Akira
Photography by Mia
Copy Editor, Michelle McSweeney
©Joe Rothstein, 2016, all rights reserved
Published in the United States of America
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
To Our Immigrant Past, and Future
Prologue
The Aragon Years
Political Years
White House Years
Epilogue
The Latina President’s Main Characters
Author’s Notes
About the Author
A Request
About the Author
To Our Immigrant Past, and Future
All four of my grandparents fled from the lands of their birth and the authoritarian tyranny that almost certainly would have claimed their lives had they remained. They fled to the United States of America, a nation that promised to be their refuge. Because they immigrated, my family and I have had the great fortune to live the promise that brought my grandparents to these shores. In one form or another, my family’s story is shared by almost everyone I now know or have ever met.
To our immigrant past, and, hopefully, its future, this book is dedicated.
Joe Rothstein
Prologue
At 8:09 p.m. two District of Columbia police cars piloting the presidential motorcade turned onto Virginia Avenue in Southwest Washington where it intersects Second Street, next to the Washingtonia Grand Hotel. The cars were quickly followed by six lead police escort motorcycles, two black limousines and two identical black SUVs. Behind them came three vans, one especially equipped for use by the counter insurgency and hazardous materials mitigation teams. Another van delivered communication equipment and operators. A third van carried members of the day’s media pool. Finally, as always in a presidential motorcade, an ambulance, four more trailing police motorcycles and two police cars.
Elevated railroad tracks hovered on concrete piers over the south side of the narrow street. The hotel, spanning a city block, was the only structure on the north side. The escort vehicles filled the street space in between. Police barricades blocked all other traffic. On this small stretch of pavement, the night now belonged to the flashing red and blue lights of the world’s tightest personal security force.
Eight Secret Service agents jumped out of the SUVs. Six hurried into the hotel through the Virginia Avenue employee entrance. Two others took positions at the door. Two agents emerged from the second limousine and opened a heavily armored rear door. Into a narrow slice of incandescent light cutting a triangular path through the near total darkness, the soft-outwash from hotel signs and windows, stepped U.S. President Isabel Aragon Tennyson. Alone, except for the tight embrace of her Secret Service escort, she moved quickly through the mild early November night, leaving her wool coat behind. Dozens of spectators drawn by the lights and sirens, but held back by barricades a half-block’s distant, could glimpse little but her moving shadow.
Inside the hotel, more than 1,000 partisans of the new National Security Immigration Act had been ushered from a cocktail reception to tables assigned by numbers matching their $200 meal tickets.
The National Security Immigration Act had become law thirty months earlier. It was a stunningly quick conclusion to a decades-long debate. The architect of the triumph was President Tennyson, the first U.S. president of Hispanic heritage. The tide that swept her into the White House lifted into Congress the votes needed to overcome immigration reform’s frenetic resistance. Now, two and one-half years after passage, the final serious legal challenge had been overcome. Tonight’s celebration needed no qualifiers. No remaining asterisks. After so many years of promise, disappointment, bitter conflict. Settled. Done. The leaders of that battle were assembled tonight to toast victory. Organizational heads, community workers, members of Congress. And, in a few minutes, their heroine, their leader, the president.
Tonight’s gala would be a poignant capstone to the epic U.S. immigration reform battle. Just weeks before, the U.S. House of Representatives had voted to impeach President Tennyson. Within days, the U.S. Senate would decide whether to remove her from office.
A two-story elevator ride lifted the president and her security team to the ballroom floor. Hotel manager Glen Freiberg greeted her as the elevator doors opened into the hotel’s enormous kitchen, alive with staff in the final stages of preparing the largest sit down dinner the new hotel had ever served. The president asked to take one last look at herself before becoming the center of attraction. Freiberg escorted her to a bathroom to the left of the elevator doors. Check your hair, your lipstick, assess your appearance and how you will look close up on television. Take a few deep breaths to calm yourself. It was a ritual she followed through her political career.
Four minutes later, a brisk walk through the kitchen with frequent handshakes—cooks, waiters and other staff, many of whom themselves secured by the new immigration law. Now she was behind a curtain veiling her from the banquet floor, greeted by long-time friend and ally Leon Rivas, chairman of the Immigration Reform Coordinating Committee. They embraced warmly and exchanged whispered words.
“Ready?” he asked. She nodded.
“Great night,” he added.
She breathed deeply and closed her eyes.
Rivas cued the evening’s master of ceremonies, Florida Senator Carson Coulter. Coulter had been filling time on stage, introducing notables, raising the emotional temperature of the crowd for the president’s arrival. With the signal from Rivas, Coulter lifted his arms dramatically as if to levitate everyone in the room.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” his rich baritone boomed, “the president of the United States.”
A brassy “Hail to The Chief” bounced off the ballroom’s hard surfaces, amplifying both the sound and the excitement. President Tennyson strode quickly onto the stage, an energetic, hands-waving entrance, the image of victory.
The ovation was deafening, sustained, overriding the orchestra. Many in the room had lived their adult lives with the uncertainty of place and belonging. For so many, the war now was over. Victory achieved. This was V-J Day and for tonight, this ballroom was Times Square.
Television cameras were live, as they were at most of the president’s events these days, recording what could be the last moments of her historic presidency. The images shown now were caviar to cable television directors, a rich visual feast of expressive faces, tears, embraces. The president, triumphant, love enveloping her, love she requited with each air blown kiss.
Then the cameras went dark. Black. Suddenly and ominously. All of them at once. Those watching on television could no longer could see anything.
Those in the ballroom saw hell.
The television trucks parked on the east side of the Washingtonia Grand hotel, where satellite reception was best, were hurled against the building by the explosion’s force. Most were set afire. Channel 6, a local Washington, D.C., news channel, had arrived late to the event and, prime locations already occupied, found space on the less d
esirable west corner, near the hotel’s main lobby entrance, where the building had shielded it from fire and the blunt force of the shock waves.
Gloria Graham, a Channel 6 news intern, was bounced from one wall of the truck to the other and landed on the floor at the feet of video engineer Bruce Brimberg.
“What happened,” she screamed.
Brimberg checked all of his screens. “Gone,” he yelled back. “Nothing at all coming from the hotel.”
With expert hands trained through decades piloting remote television broadcasts, Brimberg continued to work his controls. To his surprise his satellite signal was still strong enough to feed a live broadcast. “Harley!” he yelled.
Harley Littlefield, the backup tech, had been half-dozing in the front seat. Whether the blast was real or just a punctuation point in his nap was unclear to him until he heard the yells from Graham and Brimberg.
“I’m on it!” Littlefield grabbed the spare camera and fired it up.
“Gloria,” Brimberg yelled again, “get ready to go on air live.”
Gloria pulled herself up from the truck’s floor and steadied her legs by leaning against an equipment console.
“Me? I don’t know what to do.”
“Figure it out. Get the hell out there.”
Littlefield thrust a microphone into one of her hands and roughly pulled her out of the truck with the other. He positioned her so that the camera could see both Gloria and the hotel’s smoke and flames in the same frame.
“You’re crazy,” she yelled. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what to do.”
Harley’s red light went on.
“You’re live,” yelled Brimberg. “Start talking.”
The small television audience watching local Channel 6 coverage of the banquet now saw a strange and jumbled picture. A young woman wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt and a red Washington Capitals windbreaker fumbling with her microphone, uncertain how close to hold it to her face, her head disconcertingly jerking from eye contact with viewers to the scene behind her, smoke, fire, people running from the hotel.
“Talk,” yelled Brimberg.
In a high-pitched, excited voice that immediately signaled to viewers that they were watching an unfolding horror story, Gloria talked.
“Oh, my God! I’m standing in front of the Washingtonia Grand hotel where, honestly, I have no idea what just happened,” she yelled. “It sounded like an explosion of some kind. Then there was this huge fire ball. Now we see all this black smoke like a chimney gone crazy.”
Littlefield widened the frame to show as much of the hotel as the lens would allow from this distance.
“It happened in the last five minutes. We’re here to cover a speech by the president...”
And then she realized...
“Oh my God! The president’s inside that hotel! Oh, my God! And more than a thousand people at a dinner! Senators and congressmen!
Gloria did not know, could not know, that hers was the first reported word of the explosion. The only live broadcast from the only remote television unit that survived. Television viewers whose screens had gone black on other channels switched around until they came upon Gloria. Suddenly Channel 6, a channel whose bread and butter programming focused on Washington area meetings, local news and weather, had an audience rapidly building into the millions.
At the headquarters of the Secret Service, less than a mile from the hotel, across the National Mall, Sid Farnham, the night’s control officer, didn’t need television or a phone call to know that something terrible had happened. His office shook until he thought the windows would shatter. Within seconds communications chief Charley Friar yelled out, “Comm’s gone. Lost connection with POTUS.”
LOST CONNECTION WITH POTUS!
No contact with the president of the United States. Dreaded words. After twenty-two years in the service, Farnham instantly understood the enormity of the moment. Instinct ruled hesitation. He spun in his chair to face his deputy manning a bank of screens behind him.
“Daniels, get a team to the hotel. Go!”
“We’re alpha one,” Farnham called out through the building’s intercom system. “Alpha One. This is NOT a drill!
“Hillman, get Samoza at the vice president’s house. Total lockdown. Send eight to help him there.
“Milly, locations of House and Senate leaders and spouses. Tell Saperstein to round them up and take them to Location 10A.”
“Simmons, DC PD. Capitol police. Open direct lines.
“Charley, anything from the FBI?”
“They’re under way. DC fire, police, Hazmat all rolling.”
“Pentagon?”
“Looks like they’re scrambling Andrews.”
Someone punched numbers on the office television remote until it landed on Channel 6. On a sixty-five-inch screen, like a mirage appearing from desert heat waves, the hotel emerged framed by a curtain of smoke. A hanging portrait of disaster, punctuated by flashes of flame, some reaching as high as the hotel’s eighth floor.
Farnham looked up from his desk to see live, in full color, the worst nightmare the Secret Service could ever experience, the entire reason for its existence, failed. “Good God,” said Farnham. “The president’s dead.” To himself he thought, and probably every one of the agents he sent there to keep her alive.
Lincoln Howard, the Washingtonia Grand’s chief of security, quickly regained his feet and raced up two flights of stairs from the security office to the ballroom level. The dark cloud blowing through the ballroom doors flashed scenes etched in his memory from two tours in Iraq. Howard ducked into a bathroom, surprising three women standing immobile at the sinks. “Get out!” he shouted to them. “Get out of the hotel!” They ran. He grabbed fistfuls of cloth hand towels, soaked them in water and raced into the ballroom through a door closest to the stage, wet towels covering his face.
Howard was no stranger to dead and wounded. But his years in the Marine Corps never produced a scene like the one at the other end of his flashlight beam. It was as if a deranged choreographer had positioned a vast expanse of bodies on the floor, bodies partially hidden by white table cloths. Shrouds. Shrouds adorned with memorial wreaths of flowers, scattered from dinner tables by the force of the explosion.
Despite the arc of horror framed by the blackness beyond flashlight range, the stench of something, what, chemicals of some kind, he took a few tentative steps on a floor now slippery, sticky with salad oil and vinegar, water from overturned vases, wine, the color of blood, mixing with the still bleeding bodies all around him. Howard edged into the ballroom swinging his light’s beam, searching for movement, any sign that someone was alive, anyone who might claim priority for removal from this grotesque tableau.
Back and forth he swung his light, one delicate step after another, feeling the terrible softness of draining life under his shoes. Then he saw her. With disbelieving eyes, he saw her. On her back, as still as the parquet floor beneath her, a woman in a green suit, right sleeve hanging from her shoulder, skirt pock-marked with what appeared to be charred holes from tongues of flame, blood painting her forehead and cheeks. The president of the United States was in the tight beam of his flashlight, for the moment, a star, spot-lit, the center of his attention, his alone, her eyelids tightly shut. Nothing about her suggested life.
The vice president’s residence is at No. 1 Observatory Circle, on the spacious grounds of the Washington Naval Observatory, an urban estate once owned by the Rockefeller family, five miles from the Washingtonia Grand Hotel. Its neighborhood is known locally as Embassy Row, a cluster of embassies and ambassadorial residences.
Tonight the vice president, Roderick Theodore Rusher, was dining alone, his wife Anna away in Richmond, visiting with their son and his family. As dessert was being served, Oscar Samoza, the vice president’s on-duty senior Secret Service agent, strode urgently into the dining room.
“Mr. Vic
e President, please come with me,” said Samoza, a commanding voice and presence, hands motioning haste, a manner not open to discussion.
“What’s up,” said the vice president.
“The president may be dead. Assassinated. We may be under some kind of attack. Please, come with me.”
Rusher rose quickly and followed Samoza down a flight of steps to a basement recreation room, below ground, accessible only through the door they just used.
“What’s happening?” asked Rusher.
“Explosion at the Washingtonia Grand. No communication yet, not even with our people. We’ll know soon. If she died, we have to find a place to swear you in. I’ll be back as soon as I hear. Please don’t leave.” Samoza ran back up the stairs, leaving Rusher alone with this incredible news.
The president dead? My God! Assassinated! Images raced through Rusher’s mind like waves crashing ashore one after another hurled by a gale. Tonight! This isn’t how he wanted it.
The U.S. Senate was just days away from a decision on whether to remove President Isabel Aragon Tennyson from office. There had been months of hearings. Lurid hearings. Tales of gun running, money laundering, complicity with Mexican drug cartels, murder. Roderick Rusher was prepared to inherit that office, eager for it, a goal he had worked toward for decades. But not like this. Not assassination!
Disoriented, Rusher felt an overwhelming need to do something, anything. Impulsively he grabbed his private cell phone, thumbed through his contacts, found a number he had never expected to use, and pressed the round call button. A voice answered. A thick, accented voice.
The Aragon Years
1
“Isabel. “Isabel? No, I don’t think so.”
“But that’s my name!”
“Not cool. It’s not.... I don’t know.... it’s not how people should know you.”
“What difference does it make?”
“Well, I don’t know. I’m just thinking about the first few days of school. You’re new there. Everybody else knows each other. People are funny. You don’t want them making fun of you. It’s important.”
The Latina President...and the Conspiracy to Destroy Her Page 1