by Alix Labelle
“I couldn’t possible—”Bruce tried to dismiss her.
“Yes, you can.” Anita clutched at his jacket with both of her hands. “Look, my father is a Supreme Court justice. You should meet him.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m meeting your father?”
Anita giggled. “It’s not like that,” she said, even though she hoped her words weren’t true.
Chapter Three
Anita rang the doorbell of her childhood home as she stood on the porch of a house much farther outside of D.C. than she would have liked with Bruce, their relationship status listed as complicated, standing next to her. As she waited for her father to make his way to the door, she had to physically restrain herself, holding her hands together, to refrain from reaching out and grabbing his. Somehow, just having him standing there next to her wasn’t enough.
Before she had time to cave into her more base desires, the door swung open and before her stood her father, Richard Rhodes, his tall frame towering over her, the gaze of his dark eyes diluted by the readers he wore to cover his face. He glanced at Bruce, his eyes narrowing as he examined him. “You’re the new ambassador, correct?” he asked as he extended a hand.
Anita tried let the fact that he hadn’t so much as looked at her since he opened the door bother her.
“Yes. Bruce Harrington, sir.” He shook Richard’s hand.
Richard nodded, glancing at Anita, before turning and stepping back into his house.
The two of them followed him inside and, as Anita turned to shut the door behind her, she took note of the scent of turkey baking, vegetables steaming, and sauces boiling. “Is Gabi hard at work?” she asked as she continued into the house.
Richard just nodded at her. “You can go greet the woman if you want.”
Anita set her jaw; his dismissive manner only made her want to disobey. So, instead of following his directions and breaking off into the kitchen, she said, “I don’t want to bother her. I can just join you in the study, if you want.” She could feel Bruce’s eyes on her.
Richard narrowed his eyes at her. “I was going over some case files. You can’t look at any of them.”
“I know,” she said in a strong voice.
“So, what could you possibly want with my study?”
“I don’t know, to spend time with you?” She had all but forgotten about Bruce’s presence for the time being.
Richard released a sharp breath. “I invited you to dinner. I didn’t expect you to be early.”
“Well, I’m sorry if my existence is an inconvenience.”
“Don’t be dramatic.”
At that, Bruce cut in, placing a hand on Anita’s arm. “It’s perfectly okay if he wants to get some work done. We could just sit in the living room until dinner is ready.”
Anita scowled. Having her father completely mistreat her was agitating enough without having to listen to Bruce’s attempt at peacemaking. “You know what? That’s just fine,” she said as she stalked past the both of them and into her old living room. She stood on the center rug fuming with her hands curled into fists, biting her lips. She hated how her father constantly tried to reach out to her, making her feel guilty for staying away as much as she did. But as soon as she showed up at his doorstep, he treated her like he was doing her a favor for tolerating her company in the first place.
The man had no one except for her, but unfortunately that alone wasn’t enough motivation for him to treat her decently.
“I’m sensing a bit of agitation.” Bruce placed a hand on her shoulder as he came to stand next to her.
Anita scoffed. “I was so surprised that you accepted my invitation that I didn’t even think for one second of how embarrassing it would be to have you around my father.”
Bruce stepped in front of her. “There is nothing embarrassing about your successful father.” He glanced around at the well-kept sitting room, taking in everything from the expensive mahogany coffee table to the framed photos that covered the golden walls. “Or your obviously comfortable childhood.”
Anita let out a dark chuckle. “Why are you being so nice to me?”
“You invited me into your home. I can’t really be an asshole from a position of weakness.”
“Accepting my invitation was not weakness.”
Bruce opened his mouth as if to say something, but then, thinking better of it, closed it again. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder, staring at the walls. “I’m not going to argue with you about this.”
Anita laughed at the fact that no matter what they were doing or where they were, an argument was practically a given. “I suppose it would be wise to at least pretend to agree with each other as long as we’re here,” she said as she went for the remote.
“Television? Really?” Bruce raised an eyebrow.
“I just have to see what’s happening on CNN.”
“It’s Thanksgiving.”
“I know.” Anita nodded. “But I’m going to pull my hair out if I have to sit here doing absolutely nothing while my father is in the other room working.”
Bruce shrugged, taking a seat on the couch. “I suppose we could check the news.”
“Just the news,” Anita muttered as she joined him on the couch. But when she had finally managed to find the right channel, CNN wasn’t flooded with Thanksgiving-related news as she would have thought, nor were images of the protests of the days before covering the screen.
As a woman spoke furiously quickly, Anita’s eye fell to the headline at the bottom of the screen.
Breaking: Palestinian troops have invaded Israel.
Chapter Four
Anita jumped to her feet, her eyes darting from the television to Bruce. “This can’t be happening!”
Bruce stood up at well, walking towards the television, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes either. “Did I miss something?”
Anita glared at him. “What the hell is going on?”
As she said this, she heard the whoosh of a door being opened and the thumping of footsteps afterwards. “What is all this noise about?” Richard asked as he stepped into the room.
Anita glanced at him, her mouth opening to explain the catastrophe that was unfolding right before her eyes. But he looked over her shoulder, his eyes narrowing as he read what was on the screen. “An invasion?”
“This is surprising,” Bruce said in a voice that didn’t sound half as surprised as it should have been.
“It says Palestine is claimed just cause. What did you do?” Richard demanded, turning on Anita.
Anita sucked in breath after breath, but she didn’t seem to be getting any actual oxygen. The room started to spin around her as she struggled to figure out what the hell was actually going on. “I don’t know!”
“Russia’s behind this,” Bruce said, almost physically stepping in between Anita and her father.
Anita turned her gaze to him. “Of course Russia is behind it, but I thought we had time. The resolution was supposed to be a deterrent.”
“Israel is a goddamn sitting duck. This is a disaster.”
Anita could feel her lunch tumbling up from her stomach. “Oh God,” she whispered.
Bruce opened his mouth to say something, but the sharp ringing of her cell phone stopped him in his tracks.
She slipped it out of her back pocket, answered it, then pressed it against her ear. “Did you leak the fucking resolution?” Victoria’s voice filled the earpiece.
Anita’s eyes went wide. “I resent that! Of course I didn’t leak the fucking resolution!”
“Language!” Richard cut in.
“Someone leaked the resolution.” Bruce stared right at Anita, his voice almost eerily level.
“All right, well, someone did. Someone tipped off the Palestinians that we were interfering,” Victoria said.
“It’s a UN resolution, not a private IM message! The word was gonna get out anyway. This is just an escalation of what would have already happened.”
“Only, you didn’t predi
ct this would happen.”
Anita stepped out of the living room. “I’m not fucking psychic. I thought by the time it made it to the UN floor, Russia would have felt the opposition of the entire world against her.”
“This isn’t Russia.”
“This is Russia. Palestine hardly has the military to invade another country. How do you think they did this?”
There was a pause, during with Anita could hear the full force of everything that was happening behind Victoria, from excited voices to the shuffling of papers and feet. “We shouldn’t even be discussing this over the phone. Come into the office,” she ordered.
Anita hung up the phone, too frightened of what was unfolding around her to be annoyed with Victoria’s tone. She stepped back into the living room to find both Bruce and her father staring intently at the screen. CNN was showing footage of what looked like Palestinian military over the border. The sound of rapid fire gunshots filled their living room.
“I have to go in,” she said.
Bruce turned to look at her first. “I’ll go with you.”
The two of them muttered a hasty goodbye to Anita’s father before rushing out of the house and to the car they had come in. Anita drove through the eerily quiet suburban roads, not reaching D.C. soon enough. She raced down the highway thirty miles per hour above the speed limit, a tiny voice in the back of her head praying that they don’t get pulled over by a cop, although considering the fact that Thanksgiving Day was well underway, the chances of that were slim.
After almost thirty minutes of driving, she finally turned into the nearest parking garage to the White House. She swung the car into the middle of two parking spots, cut the engine, and then frantically scrambled out, Bruce following her the whole way.
As they entered through the side entrance, Anita took note of the lone reporter on the lawn, grasping the microphone with her left hand and pushing her hair out of her face with the other. After a quick security check, they scurried down the halls until they reached the entrance of the Oval Office, framed with two secret service men.
Anita passed by them with no trouble at all, but as Bruce tried to pass, one of them slammed a hand into his shoulder. She turned, flashing a questioning glare at the both of them.
“Only her,” the man said.
Anita shifted her gaze from Bruce to the men for a short moment, before her urgency kicked in and she stepped inside.
As they shut the door behind her, she saw the president standing in the center of his office, his head turned up but his eyes looking at nothing in particular. “Mr. President?”
When he turned to face her, his bloodshot eyes made her blood run cold.
She gulped. “This is my fault…It was my resolution.”
He shook his head. “No one even believed he could touch Israel.”
“We left them unprepared for too long. Of course he could.”
“Putin knows what he’s doing. He’s starting the next world war.” He shook his head, looking away from her. “Everyone talks about it, but no one thinks that there is leader crazy enough to actually do it.”
“Putin isn’t crazy. He’s gambling. He doesn’t expect a full scale response.”
“America can’t live with herself if she betrays Israel.”
“We need just cause.” Anita took a step towards him. “We can’t just declare war on Palestine like that. We need—”
“No.” When the president stared at her, she saw the same timid, confused, fearful Holland she had met before his Senate campaign all those years before. She wasn’t even sure he still existed. “Not, Palestine. Russia.”
Chapter Five
“This is what is happening,” Anita declared as she paced back and forth along the rug in the Oval office. “Putin is driving western control farther and farther back. He wants to grip the Middle East and use it as a weapon against us.”
The president nodded, taking off his glasses and placing them on the desk in front of him. A sigh slipped from between his lips as he rubbed his eyes. “Exactly. Which why he needs to be stopped.”
“But war?” Anita asked. She stopped to stare at him, wringing her hands and biting her bottom lip.
“Ever since you left the military, you’ve shied away from it every time it’s reared its head,” Holland said, stepping around his desk.
“A war of this magnitude could quite literally end the world.”
Holland shook his head. “Putin is doing that already.”
Anita shook her head. “If we’re going to do this, we need support. A joint declaration.”
“From who? Europe’s economy is holding on by a string. The last thing the UK, France, or even Germany would want to do is get into the third Great War. This could devastate them.”
“There’s no doubt about that.” Anita looked down at her heels, her mind working a mile a minute as she chased that invisible and illusive solution. “China has a stake in the Middle East.”
“Not enough to start a war, and certainly not enough to work with us.”
“Well, what do you suggest that we do?” Anita threw her hands up in frustration.
Holland shot her an intense gaze, narrowing his eyes as he seemed to be chasing that same illusive solution Anita couldn’t manage to grasp. “We find just cause. We prove that Russia is funding this invasion, and then we get Putin on the phone.”
Anita’s eyes went wide. “To do what? Threaten him? You plan to shower him with empty promises?’”
Holland shook his head. “They would be far from empty.”
Anita’s heart started pounding against her chest, but she tried to keep her stare as even as possible. “We can’t go blindly into war with Russia.”
“It wouldn’t be blind. It’s time the United States asserted itself.”
“Into Middle Eastern affairs? Again?”
“Israel is our ally. We cannot stand by and do nothing.”
“Can’t we just get help?”
“The rest of the world will follow our lead.”
Anita shook her head. “That is a gamble and you know it.”
But Holland had stopped listening to her, he stepped behind his desk and buzzed Victoria in. “Mr. President?” her voice filled the room.
“Get me Hector and John in the situation room, now,” he said as he lifted his blazer off the back of his chair and made his way to the door.
Anita stood in the center of the rug, stunned.
“Are you coming or not?” Holland said, ducking his head at her.
She nodded and followed him out of the office, across the hall and down multiple flights of stairs. By the time they had gotten there, it looked as if John, the General of the United States Army and Hector, the director of the CIA had only just arrived. The two of them stood on opposite sides of the room.
Hector, whose eyes were covered by the baseball cap he wore, spoke up first. “We have two field agents ready to go,” he said, already a step ahead of both Anita and the president.
John spoke before Holland could. “What do you plan to do with field agents?”
“What’s wrong with field agents?” Anita asked, more inclined to defend the director of the CIA than an asshole like John, the trigger-happy United States General.
John ignored her, his gaze fixed on Holland. “Mr. President, if you are planning to infiltrate a base, you need to send people that know what they’re dealing with.”
But Holland shook his head. “I’d rather risk exposing a member of the Intelligence than actual military personnel. If it comes out that we put our military on their grounds, we could be facing a lot more than the decision to go to war.”
John reluctantly agreed, and the four of them went to work mobilizing the operatives. They danced around each other with their words and their bodies, drafting strategies and coming up with plans A, B, C, and D. Anita found that she had almost forgotten the bigger picture, the looming, violent future in light of accomplishing this relatively small task. It was simple: send men into
the newly erected Palestinian base to conduct an analysis of the artillery and to trace its whereabouts. Anita found herself almost actually calming down as she sat down at the table and watched the field agents through their bodycams. Until, that is, they were able to determine that the Palestinian invasion was nearly undeniably fueled by the Kremlin.
“Get Putin on the phone,” Holland said, but he didn’t have time for his order to trickle down the ranks. He picked up the phone on the small table in the back corner of the room and started dialing. Anita watched the room spin as Hector took off his baseball cap, squeezing it in his hands. The three of them listened to the president’s words, watched him declare war on Russia.
She racked her brains for any other solution, but she found none. When she took her position at the start of her term, she promised herself she would make a third World War a fundamental impossibility, but for the last three years, a series of short fixes to small problems had led to this moment, right here. The moment that started the third Great War in under a century.
“Russia had it coming,” Hector muttered.
“We all did,” John said.
Anita could only agree with the both of them.
Chapter Six
Anita sat alone in her office, listening to the sounds of the afternoon happening right outside of her window. She leaned over her desk, her hands folded in front of her as she struggled to wrap her mind around what had just happened, what she had just let happen. “What have we done?” she whispered.
No sooner had the question slipped out did she hear a knock on the door. “Come in!” Her voice came out horse and weak.
The door opened and Jori stepped inside, shutting it behind her. “The president just gave his press conference.”
Anita nodded.
Jori sat down in the chair across from her.
Anita could feel her harsh gaze. “What is it, Jori?”
“How could you do it?”
“There are no other choices.”
“I disagree.”
Anita shook her head. It wasn’t a question of agreeing or disagreeing. This was life or death. They were faced with two decisions: a bad one and a horrible one. It seemed that everywhere she looked, the world was forging on and dragging her behind it. The United States had been playing the reactionary role in foreign policy for far too long. This was the only thing she could have done. “I don’t know what you expect from me.”