Chapter 15—Freedom?
THE FOLLOWING morning, David had breakfast. As he headed to the bathroom to shower, he spotted the telephone and decided to try reaching Gray again.
“White House operator, how may I help you?”
“Connect me with the President, please,” David asked.
“I’m sorry, sir, but he’s not in the building at the moment.”
“Yes, I know that,” he said, trying to remain pleasant. He knew it wasn’t this person’s fault that his call hadn’t gone through. He wanted to shout, but remained civil and professional. “I need to speak with him. If he had been in the building, I would have just turned to his side of the bed and spoken with him.” He chuckled to make his comments funnier and less harsh. “But I do need to speak with him, please.”
“I’ll need to try to contact his detail and see if he can be interrupted. I’ll need to call you back, sir.”
“Do that. I need to speak with him. I’ll be here for another half hour, and then I’ll be leaving for the university. You can reach me on my cell phone—scratch that. My phone was destroyed in Maryland, so I recommend you get him on the phone now since there will be no way to reach me once I leave here for work.”
A HALF hour later, just as he was about to leave for campus, a phone in the residence rang.
“Sir, this is the operator. I have the President for you. Can I connect him now?”
“Yes, please.” When he heard a couple of clicks, he said, “Hello?”
“David? What’s wrong? Are you sick?” Gray asked.
“No,” David said slowly. “Was I supposed to be? Are you disappointed that I’m not?” Wow, his harshness astonished even himself.
His attitude seemed to go completely past Gray, who said, “I had an urgent message to call you.”
“Urgent? Who said anything about urgent? I just told the operator I needed to speak with you.”
“They took that to be urgent. I’m very busy at the moment. Can I call you back? I’m in a meeting. I’m trying to wrap things up here so I can be finished and at the White House when you get out of quarantine. I’m starting to get worried that I may not make it in time.”
“As usual, I see that your information is worthless. I got out yesterday,” David said. “Do you remember telling me the things you were going to do upon my release? Do you, Gray?”
“Yes,” Gray said.
“Do you remember telling me that you were going to hold the door open for me?”
“Yes.”
“And hug me?”
“Yes.”
“And rub my feet?”
“I get your point, David,” he snapped.
“Thank you for all those things you said you were going to do, but didn’t.”
“You’re out already?” Gray sounded incredulous. “How is that possible? I thought….”
“Sorry to disappoint you. I fulfilled my twenty-one days and demanded to be released.”
“They didn’t want to keep you—”
David froze for a moment, wheels in his head turning and falling into place. “So it was you? You’re the one that wanted to extend my prison sentence and keep me incarcerated longer?” David was pissed. “Why would you do something like that?” he demanded angrily.
“Marty thought—”
“Well, there’s your problem. Any sentence that starts ‘Marty thought’ is undoubtedly something stupid. Whatever he recommends, you should do exactly the opposite. You should never listen to that man. He’s trouble. Always has been, always will be. You know he despises me just about as much as I despise him.”
“Can we have this conversation later?”
“I don’t know. When are you coming home?”
“I really wanted to be back in time.”
“That clearly didn’t happen. I got back yesterday only to find an empty house. So when are you coming back?”
“They’ve had me running around like crazy since we got here. I barely know which end is up at the moment between the jet lag and the meetings.”
“I see,” David said. “Last night I’d been home for half an hour before I found out you weren’t even here but were, in fact, thousands of miles away, out of the country. The daily schedules your staff supplied to me were either falsified or just plain wrong. Just like my trip to hell, I had no advance notice that you were not going to be here when I got back.”
“David, I can’t talk right now. Can I call you back later? Can we have this conversation later? Please?”
“Not until someone replaces my cell phone—mine was confiscated by your goons at the quarantine tent. As soon as I get one you’ll be able to call me but not until then. Go back to your meeting. I have to go see if I still have a job.”
“I’ll do the best I can. Love you, babe. Bye.”
And he was gone before David could repeat the word back to him.
FIVE HOURS later—of course while David was standing in the anatomy lab tutoring two students, his hands encased in surgical gloves and holding a human heart—one of his agents said, “Sorry to interrupt, sir, but you have a telephone call.”
“Who is it?” he asked.
“The White House operator, sir.”
“As you can see, I’m kind of busy at the moment. Can you find out what they want?”
“Sir, they have the President for you.”
“Tell him I’m holding a man’s heart in my hands at the moment and cannot talk, but I’ll be finished in an hour. I can talk with him then. He’ll need to call me back in an hour.”
An hour later, when he was free, David called the White House operator and told her he was able to talk now.
“I’m sorry, sir, but he has a ‘Do Not Disturb’ request for the next six hours.”
“I see,” David said, even though he didn’t really see. “Thank you.”
DAVID HAD a quiet evening and headed to bed at about ten o’clock, more from boredom than from anything else. About five hours later, though, a ringing telephone woke him from a sound sleep. At first his mind did the best it could to integrate the ringing sound into his dreams, but finally it was too annoying to ignore, and it roused him from sleep.
Fumbling around in the dark, David knocked the receiver off the hook and to the floor. “Fuck.” He found the light, which nearly blinded him when he turned it on, and managed to locate the telephone where it had fallen.
“Hello,” he said, although he wasn’t at all sure if that word actually made it from his brain to his lips. “Yeah?”
“Sir, I have the President for you.”
“Who?” David groggily asked.
“The President, sir,” the operator repeated.
“Um, wait a minute, I’ll get him. I mean, I’ll wake him up.” David looked at the other half of the bed and saw that it was empty. “He’s not here. You’ll have to take a message. I don’t know where he is.”
“No, sir, I’m not calling for the President. The President is calling you.”
“The President of what?” David sleepily asked, having a very hard time focusing since he’d been deeply asleep when the phone rang. “What time is it?”
“It’s 3:00 a.m., sir. May I connect your call?”
“Sure, why not.”
“David?” he heard the familiar voice, sounding entirely too perky.
“Huh?” David asked, having a hard time waking up.
“You there?”
“I…. Sure. I don’t know. Um, who is this?”
“Crap. Did I wake you?”
“What would make you think that?” David asked. “I never sleep at three in the morning,” he mumbled.
“David, I’m so sorry. I’ve been so busy that when I got a break, I just called without thinking about the time difference.”
“Huh? Oh, okay.”
“Go back to bed. I’ll call again later if I can.”
“No. Don’t hang up, damn it! I want to talk with you. I think I’m up now. Where are you, anyway? Oh, wait, why didn’t I
know you were going to Brussels? When the hell did that happen? The last time we talked you said you’d be here. I really cannot believe you’ve misled me again. Is this the way you’re going to operate from now on? When I was paroled and got back here, I learned that you weren’t in the building. Hell, you weren’t even in the fucking country. Was all that crap about missing me just stuff you told me while I was still a safe distance away from you?”
“I’m so sorry. I wasn’t scheduled to be here, but with the European financial crisis, the G7 wanted to back up the German chancellor and try to shore up the euro.”
“Is your chief of staff there?”
“In Belgium?”
“With you, so if you’re in Belgium, then yes, is he in Belgium? Is. He. With. You?”
“Yes. He’s on the trip with me.”
“I assume he’s the one that manipulated you into this trip?”
“What do you mean ‘manipulated’?” Gray asked.
“Just answer the goddamned question. Clearly someone was determined to keep us apart beyond the twenty-one days of my quarantine, and to the best of my knowledge, he is the only agent of evil you have working for you. I don’t know what his story is, but he’s either homophobic or a total traditionalist of some sort or another. The bottom line is that I don’t like him, and I certainly don’t trust him.”
“He just doesn’t know what to do with you because you don’t fit into any of the categories he’s used to plugging people into.”
“Tough. He needs to adapt. The world is not always going to be the same. You need a younger man in his role, not someone as rigid as that man.”
“He’s got amazing political skills.”
“The only skills I can see are his skills in getting his way in keeping us separated for as long as he wants. He seems especially skilled at manipulating you to get whatever he wants, regardless of the cost. When are you coming home?”
“In three more days.”
“Three days? Crap,” David cursed. “Son of a fucking bitch.”
“Too soon for you, babe?” Gray tried to joke.
“No, just the opposite. In three days I leave for San Francisco. You wouldn’t remember, but I go to a medical conference every year, and I leave here in three days for that trip.”
“Son of a bitch,” the President opined, finally on the same page as David.
“Awfully coincidental, isn’t it?” David asked, unable to keep the irritation from his voice. He sighed and dropped back onto the bed in frustration. “Am I ever going to see you again? If I hadn’t already paid the enormous registration fee, arranged my air travel, and prepaid my hotel reservation, I would consider canceling, because we have a lot to talk about and catch up on. By the time I see you next we will have been separated for more than a month, and that is the longest I can ever recall not seeing you in all the years I’ve know you. We may even need to have someone reintroduce us.”
“I’m glad we’re at least talking again,” Gray said. “How long are you going to be in San Francisco?”
“Five days,” David answered.
There was quiet on the line for a moment before Gray swore loudly, “Shit!”
“Let me guess. Does your chief of staff have you scheduled for another out-of-town trip right around then?” David heard Gray sigh.
“Yes. I’m going to be in California. Los Angeles this time.”
“Hang on a second,” David said, dropping the phone and grabbing his iPad. In a few seconds he had what he wanted open.
“As I suspected, this trip to California is not on your schedule. Did you know that? When did this one get added? The Secret Service must just love all these last-minute additions to your schedule. I’m sure I know who put this one on your schedule.” David took a deep breath and then said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving the country?”
“It all happened so quickly, and I honestly thought I’d be over here and back before you got out.”
They were both quiet for a moment before David said, “If I am able to pick you out of a crowd when you get back, we are going to have a very big conversation, one of the most serious conversations we’ve ever had as a couple. Even if it takes months before I see you again, we are going to have a major conversation about relationships and trust and love and support and quarantines and travel schedules and life and work and deceit and a whole bunch of other things. We are long overdue for that, and clearly we absolutely have to have such a conversation, so prepare yourself, because we are going to have this out. We may not come out of it the same as we are going into it. We are going to talk this all through. I promise you that.”
“Okay,” Gray said, sounding hesitant or at least unenthusiastic.
“So don’t tell me I didn’t forewarn you. We are going to have a conversation that you will probably hate. Do you understand?”
“I was advised that it was a necessary step,” Gray suddenly blurted out. “That not enough was known about the transmissibility of the disease… and that we couldn’t risk it being passed to me.”
“What you just said was complete bullshit, it was totally false. We knew precisely what we were dealing with. We had lab results five minutes after I handed over the samples. It was classic Marburg. No mutations. It behaved exactly as predicted. It was not transmissible by air, so someone with the disease could not pass it by just breathing the same air. It could only be transmitted by the direct exchange of bodily fluids. So whoever advised you otherwise was just plain wrong. And I’m sure I know who led you down that pathway.”
David listened to silence on the other end of the line.
“Just as I thought,” David said.
“Please don’t be mad at me, David. I hate it when you’re angry with me. We’ll talk when—” Gray started to say.
“When what, Gray? When you get back? Sorry, I won’t be here.” David was pissed. He hadn’t intended to be, but it had crept up on him as he listened to Gray talk. “When I get back? Oh, wait, you won’t be here then.”
“Sorry I woke you. You clearly need to get some sleep.”
“Good night, Mr. President.”
“See you….”
“In a couple of weeks,” David said, finishing his sentence for him.
“Don’t put it that way,” Gray asked, his voice somewhere between begging and whining. “That makes it sound so far away.”
“It is far away, Gray. But that seems to be what we’re good at.”
“I’ve got to go. Love you,” Gray said. “I hope you can get back to sleep okay. Good night.”
“Night.”
David turned off the light when their phone call ended and lay back in bed but wasn’t able to get back to sleep for nearly an hour. It left him groggy and cranky the next day, which served as a sample of his mood for the remainder of the week.
Chapter 16—San Francisco Medical Conference
THREE DAYS later, rather than go to work, David grabbed his suitcase and his motorcade drove to Joint Base Andrews, where his plane was waiting to fly him to San Francisco for his conference. The flight was uneventful, other than a patch of rough weather over the Midwest.
Issues such as check-in times were not an issue with a Secret Service escort, so David was able to check into his hotel and then walk south two blocks to the convention center, where he picked up his badge and printed program for the conference. Over coffee he quickly plotted out what sessions he wanted to attend that afternoon.
The last time David had attended this conference, Gray had been a candidate for Vice President, but now he was attending as the husband of the President. He had not realized until that first day of the conference what that would mean for him. People he barely knew or had no clue about all spoke to him as if they were old friends, all jockeying for positions near him in the audience of each session.
In the hallways between sessions, he was bombarded more times than he could count by people offering their congratulations—most of them were completely unknown to him. The few peop
le he knew really well, the people he wanted to see and talk with, consequently had a very hard time working their way through the hordes that all wanted a piece of his time and attention, assuming that he could get them access to the President.
Before the end of the first day of the conference, David had numerous ideas pitched to him, some delicately and some bluntly and crudely. He did his best at putting people off, but when he went back to his room that first night, he was exhausted from the extra stress he had not anticipated. He kicked himself repeatedly that evening, realizing he had been very shortsighted to not expect it to happen.
AS HE went to bed that night, rather than look forward to the next day of the conference, he was starting to dread it. But he realized he had control over this and was not going to give up on something he enjoyed personally and professionally and had looked forward to for so long. He vowed to take a firmer hand in the way he dealt with people initiating uninvited conversations and to make better use of his Secret Service escort as a first line of defense. He also decided he would simply reach out to his friends and set things up with them ahead of time rather than wait to run into them in the hallways. The loose approach he usually adopted at conferences would have to change a bit, but he could handle that.
He had turned off his light to go to sleep but turned it back on, got up out of bed, and pulled out his laptop to send a series of e-mails to the friends he wanted to see and spend some time with during the conference. Within minutes he had responses to many of his messages and his calendar was quickly filling with coffee dates, lunch dates, and dinner plans.
As he moved back to the bed, he realized he had not heard from Gray that day and was mildly curious if he had returned to Washington as planned. A quick call to the White House operator, though, gave him the answer to that question.
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