Red, White, and Blood

by Christopher Farnsworth

  —The Colbert Report, Wednesday, October 10, 2012

  OCTOBER 12, 2012, CURTIS CAMPAIGN

  HEADQUARTERS, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

  Zach breathed it in: the smoke-and-Pine-Sol odor of hotel carpeting; the new-car scent clinging from airport shuttles and rentals; the slight chemical aroma of the wash-and-wear, wrinkle-free shirts pulled straight from the plastic that morning; the barely contained stink of gas pains from fast food and stress and too little sleep; mouthwash fighting with halitosis, deodorant against flop sweat.

  The smell of the campaign.

  He didn’t regret his work with Cade—well, not much, anyway—but as vital as it was, it would never sing to him the way this did. Being this close again brought it all back.

  Politics. The highest and lowest form of human expression. God, he didn’t even realize how much he’d missed it.

  He walked into the Curtis campaign headquarters in Chicago. It made sense to be here, given Curtis’s roots in Illinois, but it was also the closest major city to the launch pad for Curtis’s Heart of America tour. (Zach had not been consulted about the name. He thought it sounded like a country music song.)

  The room was filled with the low buzz of gently trilling phones, tapping keyboards and the occasional outburst of disbelief:

  “You’re kidding me! He was wearing what? A Klan robe? How is that historical reenactment?”

  “No, no, no. Please don’t tell me he— He did. He forwarded the pictures to everyone on his campaign’s e-mail list. Oh, that’s it. He’s toast.”

  “Sir, for the last time, I don’t know anything about any conspiracy or lizard-men or the CIA. Don’t call here again.”

  Curtis was not coming here. He was flying direct to Malmen, Illinois, for the kickoff rally.

  But first they had to get the buses there. And the press.

  Zach found Butler and his agents in the fenced-off parking lot behind the building. Ordinarily a pay lot, the space had been rented out by the Secret Service as a staging area. The chain-link fence had been erected overnight and topped with razor wire. Massive, portable floodlights sat on their wheels to illuminate every square inch of concrete. At the center of the lot, lined up side by side, were the three Greyhound-size luxury campaign buses. One for the president and select staff, one for support staff and one for the media.

  The president’s limo—affectionately known as The Beast—was being airlifted to Malmen. It would follow the buses in case the president needed it. Bulletproof, bombproof and able to run even if its tires were shot out from under it, The Beast was much more secure than any of the buses. The Secret Service had only insisted it come along on the trip. Butler wanted a place he could stash the president in case everything went pear-shaped on them.

  Zach saw the detail leader and waved. Butler nodded back. He was checking the buses again with Latham and Dunn. No one had been near them except the Secret Service, but Butler wasn’t taking any chances. They were using mirrors to sweep for bombs and testing the cargo areas for gunpowder residue.

  Zach’s job, by way of contrast, was simple. He just had to get some luggage on board.

  Lanning appeared from the rear door of the building. Despite the no smoking signs everywhere, he was puffing away on his unfiltered Camel. Half of it was ash with a single deep breath. The president was chewing nicotine gum like Hubba Bubba to keep his promise to the First Lady and his kids that he’d quit, but there was no way Lanning was going to abstain. He was an unrepentant four-pack-a-day man. Zach had not seen anyone smoke like Lanning who wasn’t already being treated for emphysema.

  Lanning was just finishing a conversation on his cell phone. “You know what? Fuck the liberals. No, seriously, fuck them. They don’t like it, they can go back to tiptoeing over the homeless on their way to get a fair-trade foam latte in a recycled cup at Starbucks. What are they going to do, vote for Seabrook?” He ended the call and exhaled a huge, toxic cloud of smoke. Then he saw Zach.

  “Christ almighty, Barrows,” he said. “Did you bring a surfboard?”

  He pointed to Zach’s luggage: a seven-foot-long, sleek fiberglass trunk. It had wheels at one end so Zach could drag it along easier.

  Butler and Latham walked over and hoisted the trunk away from Zach and loaded it into the cargo bay of the president’s bus.

  “Sorry, Dan,” Zach said. “The contents are classified.”

  “My three ex-wives together didn’t pack that much crap on a trip.” Lanning lit another cig off the one in his mouth. Zach honestly didn’t know how the man’s lungs were anything but tumor at this point.

  “You going to be okay with Lanford?” Lanning asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean, Zach. If you run into your old man?”

  Zach stiffened a little despite himself. “It will be fine.”

  “Good. So are you busy consulting, or you got time to do some real work?”

  “What do you need?”

  “It’s time to throw a cheeseburger to the crocodiles.”

  “Oh,” Zach said. “The press.”

  THE PRESS. Zach felt an instinctive and not-quite-irrational loathing for all of them. It was like seeing a weird colony organism out of some bad made-for-Syfy TV movie: a hundred yammering, hungry, belching, shouting, chattering heads on one fleshy body, all demanding food, oxygen and attention, with sharp teeth and strong jaws to devour anything stupid or slow enough to fall in the middle of them.

  As James Carville once said, if you don’t give the beast a cheeseburger, it’s going to start munching on your leg. Sometimes, this seemed almost literal to Zach. He’d never had anyone scream at him like a journalist who missed his or her complimentary packed lunch.

  But even if they swallowed what you fed them, you could not trust them. Journalists were loyal only to themselves and, by extension, their stories. Reporters were excellent at weaseling their way onto your blind side, and using that proximity to find stuff you never thought anyone would notice. You were stuck in the tunnel vision of the campaign, while they knew how to craft the narrative so it told a completely different story to outsiders.

  So if a story was really big, then all the warm and happy secret handshakes didn’t mean dick anymore. You could give a reporter a seat at the candidate’s Thanksgiving dinner, and the next day they would still run a story that linked the campaign to a child molester if it meant readers or ratings. It went from “Zach my main man” to “Mr. Barrows” in under sixty seconds, with stiff-necked outrage where it was all smiles and jokes a day before. There was nothing like a good, dirty scandal to remind them all that they weren’t on the same side. And the media were always looking for a scandal.

  They filed onto the bus, the difference between the print crowd and the TV people like Morlocks and Eloi. Lanning greeted them all with the same good-natured cynicism. Every news outlet had sent its top talent, best known by their nicknames: the Mustache of Understanding; the Mean Girl; Blonde Ambition; the Silver Fox; America’s Sweetheart. They took their seats and studiously ignored one another.

  Then Lanning grimaced like he had heartburn. “Oh Christ. That’s all we need.”

  Heading down the aisle was a grown-up cheerleader—perky and taut and bouncy from head to toe—except for the look on her face. She showed her teeth and narrowed her eyes in something that was less a smile and more a joyous kind of hostility. Zach couldn’t get the idea of a teddy bear with fangs out of his mind.

  “Who is she?” Zach asked.

  Lanning barked his short, harsh version of laughter. “You’re kidding. That’s Megan Roark.”

  Zach did a double take. He’d been on the cutting edge when he was still in politics. Now he needed flash cards to identify the players. “That’s her?”

  “Lois Lane with thirty-two double-D’s, a million and a half daily pageviews and zero soul. That’s her.”

  Lanning shut up then, because Roark had walked right up to them both.

  “Daniel,” she said. “I
’m sure you didn’t expect to see me here, after all the roadblocks your little elves put in the way of my press credentials.”

  A lot of political hacks would have danced away from the accusation. Lanning beamed with pride. “The problem, Megan my dear, is that we usually only give access to journalists.”

  “More people watch my show—”

  “YouTube channel,” Lanning said.

  “—my show than those limp dicks you’ve got here from CNN. Internet? Wave of the future? Maybe you’ve heard of it.”

  “Yeah, and a million people watch online porn, too,” Lanning said, deliberately looking down at Roark’s low-cut blouse.

  “What a good feminist sentiment. Sure explains those sexual-harassment complaints from your staff.”

  Lanning scowled and pushed Zach in front of her. “Have you met Zach Barrows?”

  She ran her eyes up and down Zach, taking in everything, and then dismissed him utterly, all in the space of a second. “Barrows? You were dumped by Curtis two years ago. They must be desperate if they’re going back to the junior varsity.”

  Zach blinked. “I’m just happy to be on the team,” he said.

  “I’ll bet. Wasn’t Starbucks hiring?”

  “They’re still looking over my résumé.” He crossed his fingers in front of her.

  She frowned. “Cute. Real cute. Too bad you’re working for the Devil.” She turned back to Lanning. “Your boy is going down. You can’t stop the truth.”

  She turned and bounced back down the aisle. Lanning and Zach both watched her go.

  Lanning recovered while Zach was still staring. “Easy there, kid.”

  “You couldn’t keep her off the bus?”

  Lanning sighed. “More traffic than the New York Times. If we kept her off, she’d make it into a story. Pretty soon the rest of these jackals would take up her cause, because it’s easier than doing their goddamn jobs, and then we’d have to explain why we were censoring the press.”

  Zach looked at Roark again, laughing and flipping her hair at something Brian Williams said to her. Lanning smacked Zach on the shoulder, not gently, and leaned close.

  “You know reporters are the enemy, but in the end, we’re all in on the same joke, right? Not her. She’s a crusader. She’ll do anything to take us down,” he warned. “So don’t you dare sleep with her.”

  Zach was offended. “Goes without saying.”

  “It would,” Lanning said, “with anyone else but you.”

  Friday, October 12, 2012

  All Times ET

  10:00 AM

  The President meets with Secretary of State Rusk

  Oval Office

  Closed Press

  10:35 AM

  The President departs the South Lawn en route Joint Base

  Andrews

  South Lawn

  Open Press

  Gather Time 10:15 AM—North Doors of the Palm Room

  10:50 AM

  The President departs Joint Base Andrews en route Illinois

  Travel Pool Coverage

  12:55 PM

  The President arrives Illinois

  Local Event Time: 11:55 AM CDT

  Quad City International Airport

  Open Press

  1:45 PM

  The President departs on Campaign Bus Tour

  Local Event Time: 12:45 PM CDT

  3:00 PM

  The President arrives Malmen, Illinois

  Meeting with Malmen Chamber of Commerce

  Local Event Time: 2:00 PM CDT

  Malmen Downtown Business Association

  Open Press

  VICE PRESIDENT’S OFFICE, WHITE HOUSE,

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  It was sort of funny when he thought about it. Vice President Lester Wyman only felt welcome in the White House when the president wasn’t home.

  He had an office in the West Wing. But it was signaled in all sorts of subtle ways that Wyman shouldn’t spend much time there. For instance, the staff stopped emptying his wastebaskets for a whole week once. People glared at him as he walked through the halls. Aides stopped using his title. Little things like that.

  So Wyman spent most of his time in the Executive Office Building, where VPs traditionally waited for the funerals of foreign dignitaries.

  The president arranged his schedule so they’d never have to speak. Everything was communicated through intermediaries these days. Wyman heard FDR did the same thing to Truman.

  But it wasn’t supposed to be like this between him and Curtis. They’d come into office as a team. He’d been the political knife-fighter, while Curtis got to be the inspirational figure.

  Wyman supposed he had to take some of the blame for the rift between them. After all, he did—technically—betray Curtis and very nearly got them both killed. Curtis had never been able to prove it. But he suspected.

  Wyman didn’t feel that guilty about it. In fact, he mainly felt bad that it hadn’t worked out properly.

  Wyman, when he looked at himself unemotionally, knew he was not a very good man. He accepted it. He assumed it was genetics or destiny or whatever people thought decided the course of their lives these days. So be it. No one had ever embraced him immediately—not even, he thought with surprisingly little bitterness, his parents. He never doubted they loved him; they bought him every toy, indulged his whims, lavished him with affection. They simply never seemed to like him very much. And in the cold moments, when he was brutally honest, he couldn’t blame them. They seemed to know the same thing the kids at school did from the very first day he was plopped down in kindergarten. Perhaps he was too watchful. Perhaps he was too honest in putting his own needs first, as most normal kids do. But whatever it was, a hollowness grew in the place where other people might have had the warmth of easy affection and regard from others.

  However, he was smart—smart enough to know that he could fake being nice long enough to get what he wanted.

  It made things easier for him. He never worried about losing friends, because he believed he’d never really had any. He was capable of breathtaking selfishness without guilt. And he discovered that ambition warmed him even more than love. Maybe that’s why he set his sights on politics at such an early age.

  By high school, he was a winner by any definition. Student body president. Prom king. Perfect GPA. He was accepted at Yale and tapped for its most elite secret society. He turned it down to join another fraternity, almost as prestigious, where it would be easier to rise to the top.

  After college and law school, with the same unsentimental clarity, he immediately married and knocked up his girlfriend. Without student deferments, he needed a reason to stay out of Vietnam. He entered the protest movement as well, mainly because it was a quick way to advance in the Democratic Party without working his way through the ranks of the old guard. He was elected to statewide office, then the House, then the Senate.

  And that’s where he stalled. It chafed him. It seemed that he could get pretty far without charm or charisma, but not all the way to the top. He sat on the panels of the Sunday talk shows, he tried to become a national figure with his speeches and carefully selected bursts of moral outrage. But he never quite found the magic vehicle that would carry him in front of the cheering crowds. His one attempt at running for president himself was stillborn in the primaries with a dead-last finish in New Hampshire.

  That’s when he met Samuel Curtis. He was selected to be the freshman senator’s mentor. Curtis was handsome, smart and magnetic. People wanted to be around him. They liked him, while they merely tolerated Wyman. Even Wyman had to admit he liked Curtis.

  It made it easier to bear as the younger senator bypassed him effortlessly in his first term. Or, at least, it made it easier to choke down the resentment in public.

  More important, Wyman knew that Curtis was going to be the star he’d never be himself. He stifled any anger and stayed close, becoming Curtis’s trusted hatchet man: the guy who would do the awful things so Curtis could remain belov
ed.

  When he was chosen by his Senate protégé to be the second man on the ticket, he’d accepted with a shit-eating grin. He knew the VP spot with Curtis was a surer way to the presidency than trying to crawl into the Oval Office on his own. His previous attempts at presidential campaigns had proved that.

  Then something interesting happened. A group he’d heard rumors about during his time on the Senate Intelligence Committee reached out to him. A man in glasses met with him privately and hinted he could be president in much less time than eight years.

  Wyman had never thought of himself as a particularly bad person. But he knew what that meant and he shook the man’s hand anyway.

  Of course, nothing had worked the way it was supposed to. He’d fed the Company classified info about the president’s security and schedule. He told them all about Cade and the treasure trove of occult objects under the Smithsonian. He gave them everything short of a key to the front door of the White House.

  And yet Curtis had survived the attempt on his life—an attempt that would have killed Wyman as well. The Company began telling him what to do, like he was their servant. Even worse, the president seemed to suspect something and Wyman’s exile into political limbo began.