by Joseph Flynn
Only Blessing’s professionalism kept him from overstepping his boundaries.
“Will there be anything else, sir?” he asked.
McGill shook his head.
“The president has been notified I’m on the premises?” he asked.
“The moment the Secret Service saw you, sir, at her request.”
McGill nodded. “We’ll need some time to ourselves.”
“Of course, sir. No interruptions.”
“Unless it’s my family or Margaret Sweeney.”
“Very well, sir.”
Patti arrived just as Blessing was leaving. She exchanged a few whispered words with the head butler. He gave a small bow and closed the door behind him.
The president crossed the room to her husband and embraced him, holding him wordlessly as his tears fell on her shoulder. She led him to the room’s large leather sofa and they sat next to each other holding hands. McGill was trying to find the words to tell her what had happened when Patti spoke first.
“Which one?” she asked.
Galia hadn’t let on as to the nature of the crisis, but had said Jim would be speaking to her later. Understanding that her chief of staff was deferring to her husband out of respect for his wishes and seeing Jim more distraught than … than any time since Andy had died, she knew something life changing had happened to one of the people he held most dear. It wasn’t her; she had the gut feeling it wasn’t Sweetie and it probably wasn’t Carolyn, either.
So, one of the children. But which one?
“Kenny,” he said.
McGill gave Patti the bad news.
She squeezed his hands, but sat back and looked him in the eye. Comforting her husband would have to take second place to helping his son. Kenny was a charmer, and he’d long ago captured her heart. The president was not about to let —
McGill saw where Patti was about to go and told her Nick had already gotten the ball rolling on Kenny’s course of treatment.
Patti nodded in approval. “Nick’s very good, but Harlan Mallory knows every top medical specialist around the world.”
Mallory was the Surgeon General. The only reason McGill was aware of him was because his confirmation hearing had made news. Mallory was an outspoken advocate of doing anything and everything to maintain and advance public health. At the hearings, members of the president’s own party had given the man a hard time when he refused to budge from his insistence that public schools must provide comprehensive sex education starting in the eighth grade.
Going farther, Mallory said that parents should be given remedial sex education so that they could initiate meaningful instruction on reproduction and other facts of life with their children at home as soon as the onset of puberty.
That caused an uproar, until Mallory leaned forward and told his Congressional inquisitors, “Implement this plan and you’ll cut the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country by half. Fail to implement it and the responsibility for an unguessable number of abortions will be yours.”
McGill liked the idea of a fighter like Harlan Mallory being on Kenny’s team.
“Yeah, that’s good,” he said. “Please call him.”
“He’s on the line right now.”
“Galia told —”
“No. She didn’t. I just told Blessing to have all of my cabinet secretaries and senior advisers called. I figured I’d cover the bases. For whomever you needed.”
McGill’s heart swelled. Patti kissed him.
She said, “Let me go talk to the Surgeon General. We’ll do everything we can for Kenny.”
Putnam Shady’s townhouse, Florida Avenue
Putnam stood in his living room, looking out the window at the street. He waved to Sweetie as she drove away in her Malibu. Cool old car, he thought. Would have been better, though, if it were a convertible and she had waved to him as she left, her hair blowing in the breeze. But she hadn’t waved or even looked back.
She had kissed him before she was out the door.
Not just a peck on the cheek or a sisterly closed-lip buss.
An honest to God kiss, full of passion.
Almost took the starch right out of him.
She had told him about Kenny McGill, and that was awful. Probably, it was sympathy for the kid that got Margaret worked up, provided a little transference of deep feelings to him. That was okay. He’d take a kiss like that from Margaret any way he could get it.
He sat down on the sofa adjacent to the picture window. There was a gun on the end table next to the sofa, a Walther PPK. It was a recent gift from a friend. Putnam thought he vaguely remembered the Walther being the gun James Bond used, but the friend who’d given him the weapon said a single round from it didn’t have much stopping power. His advice had been to keep right on shooting once you acquired a target.
Sweetie had told him pretty much the same thing when he’d shown the weapon to her. It had surprised him that she hadn’t chastised him for having the gun. Then she shared with him the story that James J. McGill’s first wife, Carolyn, whom Sweetie described as a peacenik, had felt the necessity to acquire a handgun when she thought there were people threatening her children.
True, Margaret had shaken her head while telling that story, as if to silently regret what the world was coming to, but she went on to tell Putnam that she’d given Carolyn instruction in how to fire her weapon effectively. She said she would take him to the shooting range, too.
In the meantime, she’d shown him how to hold the weapon in a two-hand grip, how to sight a target, how to squeeze not jerk the trigger.
Hardly the stuff of romance, but an intimate experience nonetheless.
Then the call came from Caitie McGill and Margaret was off.
But not before he got his kiss — and a warning to make sure all his doors were locked and the security system was armed. Putnam thought he’d go up to bed, see if he could fall asleep and make it an early night. Remember the feeling of Margaret’s lips on his.
See if he could remember a prayer for Kenny McGill, too.
He turned off the lamp on the end table, darkening the room, picked up the Walther and got to his feet. That was when the first shots crashed through his living room window. Putnam, holding on to his gun, dived for the floor.
Another volley shattered more glass, flinging shards on him.
Putnam wanted to shoot back — without exposing himself. He could have just fired out into the sky, but Margaret had warned him of the possibility of hitting an innocent bystander, one who might be blocks away, with an errant round. Spilling the blood of anyone he shot would be a moral burden, she’d told him, but shooting an innocent person would be a crushing weight on his soul.
All that was well and good, but as a third volley entered his home and crashed into the wall behind him, Putnam knew he’d better do something fast before the sonofabitch with the gun poked his nose in the now empty window frame and saw him cowering on the floor.
He rolled onto his back, looked up at his ceiling and fired off round after round, figuring the projectiles would lose most if not all of their lethal power by crashing into the ceiling above him and the second floor roof.
But the shooter outside would only see the muzzle flashes, hear the percussion of shots being fired. He would learn that Putnam was armed and the jeopardy of being shot was now his, too. He wouldn’t know, Putnam hoped, that the gunfire wasn’t being directed at him.
He also hoped that at least one of his neighbors had called the cops by now.
He knew the response time was pretty good in his neighborhood.
If he could just hold out until — he felt the gun click empty.
Margaret hadn’t showed him how to reload yet.
All he could do now was hope and — he thought he heard someone running off.
He remembered a prayer he could say. One for blessings received.
Chapter 2
Tuesday, August 16th, Blair House
Kenny McGill awoke a changed fourteen year o
ld. He had always been a better than average student but never a great one. He was pretty much that way with most things: better than run of the mill but nothing special. He knew he could shine in at least a few subjects, but he just didn’t push himself. Couldn’t see any reason to go all out.
In that way, he was unlike both of his sisters. Abbie was ridiculously smart and approached everything she did like it was a work of art: Every detail had to be perfect. Caitie was maybe half-a-notch below Abbie for brains, but Caitie would run right over you to get what she wanted. When Caitie had told him she was going to be president someday, just like Patti, he didn’t doubt it for a moment.
Not that he’d let her know, of course. She was still his kid sister.
He was going to hold on to the upper hand as long as he could.
What Kenny was good at was sizing up people, and what he’d seen yesterday was that everyone in his family had been scared silly by whatever was wrong with him. Even Dad, and that gave Kenny a shiver. Normally, he’d have let himself be scared, too.
He had been getting scared until Sweetie arrived. She came into his room, sat on the edge of his bed and held his hand. He could see that she might have been worried a little, too, but she wasn’t going to let herself be scared. Heck, Sweetie had stepped in front of a bullet to save Dad, and she hadn’t let that stop her. She got well and went back to being a cop, went back to being herself.
As Kenny was talking to her, he decided that’s what he was going to do, too.
Get better and be himself.
No, he was going to be better than he used to be.
You got real sick, who knew what could happen to you? Maybe the reason to go all out was you had to do it while you still could. You never knew when it might be too late. He was going to give it everything he had to get well.
Then he’d think about what to do with the rest of his life.
He looked to his right and saw Nick dozing in a chair in the near corner of the room. The White House physician looked to Kenny like he was going to wake up with a stiff neck, if he’d been sleeping in that position long.
Before he said anything, he thought about how he felt. Not great, but not too bad. Nothing really hurt. He hoped he wouldn’t get to hurting. What he felt like, he needed to be recharged. Plug him into an electrical outlet.
Kenny called out to the White House physician.
“Hey, Nick.”
Blinking, Nick looked over at his young patient.
“I was resting my eyes.”
Why did old people always say that, Kenny wondered.
“Me, too. I think they call that sleeping.”
A wide smile brightened Nick’s stubbly face.
“You are your father’s son.”
Kenny nodded. “Yeah. How about we get this show on the road?”
Washington, D.C., Lafayette Square
More than one early rising tourist did a double-take. In reply, the president of the United States smiled and said good morning. Yes, it was really her. Out for a stroll. Celsus Crogher strode at the point of a diamond formation surrounding the president with other Secret Service agents following aft and on both sides. There were emergency vehicles on all four sides of the square and air cover, too. But the president was out walking among her fellow Americans.
A round of spontaneous applause put extra bounce in her step.
A young father plucked his child out of the stroller his wife was pushing and raised the toddler high, the better to see Patti. The little girl, if an outfit with pink stripes still meant anything, seemed to catch the spirit of the moment and smiled broadly at Patti before sticking her hand in her mouth. The president stopped briefly to speak with the family.
She waved and said hello to everyone who called out to her.
Entering the lobby of the Hay-Adams Hotel, she felt much better than she had leaving the White House.
Hay-Adams Hotel, Presidential Suite
“Madam President,” Reynard Dix said, “thank you so much for sparing me a few minutes of your time.”
Reynard Dix was the chairman of the Republican National Committee. The president was meeting with him in the grand old hotel because the Hatch Act forbade elected and appointed officials from engaging in political activity while on duty or in a federal workplace, e.g. the White House.
As president, Patricia Darden Grant was the titular head of the Republican Party. Truth be told, she and Galia had both devoted themselves to the affairs of state and had not tended much to the nuts and bolts of party politics. She’d never been one of the boys.
As a woman running for the Republican presidential nomination, Patti had entered the field as an outsider, a dark horse. There had been support for her in some quarters because of the pain she’d suffered in losing her first husband, Andy Grant, to an assassin. Some of the savvier political consultants in the party went so far as to suggest she would make the best vice presidential nominee the GOP could have on the ticket.
Not only was she a sympathetic figure, she was glamorous and well spoken.
She could be the Stepford veep.
Other wiseguys in the consulting class said it wouldn’t work. Have Patti Grant as the number two and the president, whoever he was, would spend all his time trying to nail her.
Patti had put an end to all the schoolboy leering by passing the word through Galia that she would be nobody’s vice president — and she would have none of the party stalwarts running against her as her vice president.
Hard feelings about this hard line position abounded, especially with Galia Mindel running Patti’s campaign.
The idea of two women at the top of the party was more than many of its members could abide. Who the hell did these broads think they were, Democrats?
They might as well have been, Patti thought, because after the election she and Galia kept right on, filling many White House staff positions and cabinet posts with independents and Democrats while giving only pro forma attention to the suggestions and pleadings of the party apparatchiks.
One of whom was Reynard Dix, now offering her a chair and refreshments.
Patti took the seat and declined coffee.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Dix?” the president asked.
The chairman had helped himself to coffee and put his cup and saucer on his lap.
“Looking at the calendar, Madam President, I thought it would be a good idea for us to touch base.”
Patti had never liked Dix. She thought of him as a phony’s phony.
“Touch base regarding what?”
“Well, there is an election coming up.”
“Yes?”
“Unless, I’ve overlooked something, Madam President, you’ve yet to announce your intentions about seeking another term.”
Patti smiled. “Are some of my would-be successors getting restless?”
“There’s never a shortage of ambition in this town, Madam President.”
Patti had to laugh at that.
“No doubt, Mr. Dix.” Patti thought as long as she’d had to see the chairman, she might as well sow a seed or two of mischief. “Have you heard about Roger Michaelson?”
“What about him, Madam President?”
“I have it on good authority he’s going to run for the Democratic nomination.”
“To be president?” the chairman asked.
“He’s already a United States senator, Mr. Dix. Do you think he would seek a lesser office?”
“No, no, of course not. You just caught me by surprise. Pardon my asking, but are you sure of this?”
Patti nodded. “Let me ask you, as party chairman, who among us in the Party of Lincoln do you think might be best positioned to defeat Senator Michaelson?”
Not possessing the keenest of intellects, Dix still knew the immediate reply to offer, “Why, you’ve already beaten him, Madam President.”
“So I have. Who else in our party would do as well?”
Dix was impolitic enough not to deny anyone would run against th
e president in the party primaries. He gave her question serious consideration, mentally ticking off how Patti’s would-be challengers would stack up against the junior senator from Oregon.
By the expression on his face, not well.
He needed a jolt of caffeine to bolster himself.
Patti stood up and clarified matters for the chairman.
“I intend to run for another term, Mr. Dix. I’ll make the announcement at a time and place of my choosing. Please let any potential primary challenger know that I’ll make him or her look worse than Roger Michaelson ever could.”
The president left the room before the chairman could get to his feet.
Celsus Crogher fell into step ahead of her.
He spoke into the microphone at his wrist, “Holly G. is moving.”
Miss Shirley’s Cafe, Baltimore
“You make quite a first impression,” Teddy Spaneas said.
He’d never met the thin man sitting across from him. The guy had let Teddy order breakfast for him and still hadn’t said a word five minutes after they had walked into the restaurant.
“You don’t have a voice, my friend? Perhaps you’re not the man I was expecting, just some lucky fellow who is letting me buy his breakfast.”
The thin man smiled. That said enough. He was the man Teddy wanted.
“Perhaps you think I am not a man of good character,” Teddy suggested. “You think I would betray a potential business partner?”
The waitress came with their orders.
The two men ate in silence.
When they finished, the thin man said, “Let’s talk in the conditional tense.”
Teddy was a natural businessman, but he had never gone past the eighth grade.
“What does this mean?” he asked.
“Could, would, might, may. Like that.”
Teddy understood perfectly. “If you could help me, I might be interested.”