Protect and Defend

by Richard North Patterson

  “All of us,” he told the Senate, “know Mason Taylor all too well. And so we know the other man who is responsible for Kyle’s death …”

  Facing Macdonald Gage, Chad felt the release of emotions as a physical ache. Gage looked back with a stoic resolve; he surely knew that any protest he might make would get no sympathy from Ellen Penn. Despite his fury, Chad forced himself to remain still, until he was certain that the full Senate saw whom he addressed. When he spoke, it was with a terrible softness.

  “All of us know,” he said to Gage, “who does Taylor’s bidding, whose power derives from Taylor’s influence, whose ambitions to be President depend on pleasing Taylor’s clients.” Pausing, Palmer let Gage suffer in the stricken hush. “And all of us know whose aspirations I seemed to threaten, a few short days ago …”

  Watching, the President felt a silent awe at what he had unleashed.

  “I do not yet know,” Chad said with grief and anger, “what punishment he will suffer, in this life or the next. But it is fitting that, from this day forward, every senator who greets him will think of Kyle Palmer …”

  “Will they believe him?” Kit Pace asked the President.

  Slowly, Kerry nodded. “Most will. The question is what Chad does with that.”

  On the screen, Chad Palmer’s silent stare at Gage was an indictment. Then, with a renewed calm which Kerry knew must cost him dearly, Chad turned, speaking to the others.

  “But I am not here,” he told them, “to ask you to mourn my daughter. I will do that, in my own way, for the rest of my life, hour upon hour, as I wonder at the pride and folly which impelled me to ignore the terrible risk to her of continuing in public life …”

  Stricken, Gage felt a tide of emotion overtake the Senate, and knew that Palmer—for all his grief—had aroused his colleagues’ passions so that he could redirect them. Chad Palmer not only meant them to mourn his daughter; he meant to use her to whatever end he chose.

  “Rather,” Palmer continued, “I am here to address the Masters nomination, and to ask what we have come to.

  “No more can we claim that our politics is simply about ideas, or values, or the clash of competing interests. All too often it is about money—the elegant system of quasi-bribery in which those who finance our campaigns become our stockholders, and men like Mason Taylor demand results.” The naked anger returned to Chad’s voice. “And if ‘results’ means ruining whoever stands in the way—for whatever private frailty they can ferret out—then they will use the media to destroy any one of us, and then the next, until the cycle of destruction, turning each of us upon the other, at last drives all decency from public life. And if their aims require a few ‘civilian casualties,’ they will provide those, too.”

  Chad stopped abruptly, his efforts to control himself palpable. “My daughter,” he said more evenly, “is not the only victim, merely the latest and most tragic. In the course of this nomination, this twisted tactic has followed two other women—Mary Ann Tierney and Caroline Masters—into the most private area of their lives: whether to bear a child.”

  At this, Gage saw, Paul Harshman stared at Palmer, resistant. But others, when Gage turned to them, refused to meet his eyes.

  “All three women,” Palmer continued, “faced decisions which were painfully individual. Within my own family, we learned how complex that decision can be, how prone to disagreement, how difficult to face.”

  With this admission, delivered with a softness which drew in the Senate and the galleries, Palmer turned to his party colleagues. “Caroline Masters,” he told them, “faced it twice. Once as a young woman and then, half a lifetime later, as a judge.

  “In the Tierney case, I disagree with her conclusions. But I must admit to doubts forced on us by Kyle’s personal experience. And to one certainty: that our dialogue on abortion—of which I have been part—is rife with dishonesty, distortion, and deception.” Chad’s voice lowered. “That deception, I believe, pervades the opposition to Judge Masters—distorting the reasons for, and frequency of, late-term abortion. And I fear that this dishonesty will continue as long as abortion is a political, rather than an ethical, debate …”

  He’s done for, Gage thought. But now the battle for his own survival had begun, and perhaps would end, with the vote on Caroline Masters.

  For the first time, Chad saw, Kate Jarman gave him a nod of encouragement. It lent him hope; Kate must sense where he was going.

  “I believe in our party,” Chad said. “We are not, by tradition, the party of rule-makers. We are not the party of intolerance. We do not believe that government should police us in our private lives. And so, however we view the Tierney case, we should give Judge Masters her due.

  “Her decision placed her own privacy at risk. It placed her crowning ambition in doubt. It placed her reputation in the hands of others.” Turning to Gage, he spoke with disdain. “It exposed them for who they are, and Judge Masters for who she is. And it places this single ruling in the context of a worthy life.”

  Now, like Gage before him, he searched the faces of his wavering colleagues—Clare MacIntire, George Felton, Spencer James, and Cassie Rollins. “The Tierney case was complex,” he continued. “But our choice today is much clearer. It is between integrity and immorality. It is, for me, a choice between a woman of honor and those who sacrificed my daughter.”

  In the taut silence, Chad gathered his thoughts. Yes, he imagined telling Kyle, I’m almost done. I hope you approve of me now.

  “Others,” he told the Senate, “will say their piece. But once they have, I will move to close debate. And then I will vote to confirm Judge Caroline Masters as Chief Justice of the United States.”

  For perhaps the last time, the senior senator from Ohio, once so near the presidency, held his colleagues in thrall. “My vote for Caroline Masters,” he finished quietly, “will be my final vote in this body. I will be honored if you join me.”

  Exhausted, Chad sat.

  He stared at his desk, thinking of Kyle, then Allie. Gradually, he heard the applause rising from the galleries, then the slow movement of chairs and bodies as a number of his colleagues stood to applaud, until all of the Democrats, and most Republicans, were standing, though for some it was a reluctant act of courtesy. When Gage faced him, still sitting, Chad’s lips formed a small and bitter smile.

  As the applause began dying, slowly and at last, Gage turned from him, seeking the attention of the chair. His voice was flat, strained. “Madam Vice President, I ask for a recess by unanimous consent …”

  “For what?” Speaking from his desk, Chad’s voice was quiet but audible. “There’s nowhere left to hide, Mac.”

  Above them, Ellen Penn’s face was drained of all expression. “The Senate,” she said, “will stand in recess until one-thirty.” With this, galleries broke into an uproar, above the senators who sat looking in silence from Chad Palmer to Macdonald Gage.

  THIRTY-ONE

  THE NEXT MORNING, in the news summary Kit Pace gave the President, headlines battled for preeminence: “Tierney Fetus Doomed, Doctor Reports”; “Palmer Resigns, Accusing Gage in Daughter’s Death”; “FBI Report Identifies Lobbyist in Leak of Files”; “Gage Charges President with ‘Police-State’ Tactics”; “Masters Nomination Hangs in Balance.” Editorial response was equally varied: ruminations on Mary Ann Tierney’s abortion and its meaning; reflections on the degraded state of politics; fulminations for or against Caroline Masters; criticisms of Kerry’s use of the FBI. “While we deplore,” the Times declared, “the tactics suggested by the report, the President’s extraconstitutional abuse of the FBI is even more alarming.”

  “They’ve found me out,” the President said to Clayton, “a tyrant in the making. You’d think they’d have noticed sooner.”

  In truth, Kerry did not care much, nor did he have time to care. The debate which had resumed in the afternoon, listless and subdued, suggested nothing so much as confusion. So Kerry had manned the phones, as he did this morning, strategizing w
ith Chuck Hampton and pulling undecided senators off the floor. “You can’t stall this now,” he had said bluntly to Spencer Jones. “A filibuster would be spitting on Kyle Palmer’s grave.”

  He did not thank Chad. He did not need to.

  “Don’t say a word,” Gage said to Mason Taylor. “There’s no crime been committed, whatever Palmer and Kilcannon think happened. There’s nothing they can do to you.”

  There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “The little bastard’s trying to ruin me,” Taylor said softly. “I need friends, Mac. Loyal friends.”

  Gage’s jaw tightened. “You have them, believe me. Just hang tough, and give it time. In six months …”

  “You’ll call me? You need me now, Mac.”

  It was nine o’clock and there was sweat beneath Gage’s armpits. “Let me handle this,” he snapped. “You need me, too.”

  “Then we both need to win, don’t we.”

  With this, Gage hung up.

  Swiftly, he began to calculate. With Palmer’s defection, the vote stood—as near as Gage could tell in the confusion—at forty-eight to forty-eight, with the four undecideds frozen by Palmer’s speech. But he felt the support for a filibuster eroding beneath him: a new hesitance here; a refusal to commit there; a plea for time to think, or to let emotions subside; a comment that, whatever the merits, the condition of the fetus deprived Gage of the ideological passion needed to refuse Caroline Masters a vote by the full Senate. Palmer had filed a petition to close debate.

  Still, there were countless factors which might swing a final vote toward Gage: sincere conviction; pressures from constituents and interest groups; the promise of campaign funds; fear of a primary challenge from the right; dislike for the President; the favors or punishments Gage had at his disposal. But he sensed that, for once, his colleagues feared Kilcannon almost as much as they did Gage himself: not only for the President’s ruthlessness, but also for his resourcefulness. They did not want to be standing too close to Gage if Kilcannon proved that Kyle Palmer’s death involved him.

  The problem was, they believed Palmer—not that Gage had imagined she would die, but that Gage knew what Taylor had planned. And Kyle Palmer’s death made too many of them squeamish. As Gage discovered when he called Clare MacIntire.

  “I had nothing to do with this,” he insisted. “This is guilt by association.”

  “I’m sure it is, Mac. But we have to be careful what we’re associated with.”

  “Abortion? Promiscuity? A president who thinks the FBI’s his personal Gestapo?”

  “Dead girls,” Clare answered flatly. “There are sentimentalists who think that puts the rest in a certain perspective. So have a care.” Clare paused. “I still don’t know how I’ll vote. With all this static, I’m trying to stick to the merits.”

  “Within our party,” Gage rejoined, “the merits are pretty clear.”

  “They were,” Clare said thoughtfully.

  “Then give me a little more time,” Gage urged. “Let Paul stall this, until emotions simmer down.”

  Clare hesitated. “I’ll think about it, Mac. That much, I promise. But nothing more.”

  Putting down the telephone, Gage could only hope the pressure campaign organized by the Christian Commitment and its allies—faxes, calls, and mail from Clare’s prominent supporters in Kansas—would force her into line.

  He punched another button, and dialed Spencer James.

  * * *

  At ten o’clock, as Kerry watched on C-SPAN, the Senate debate resumed. For several hours, the speeches continued, one senator after another recapitulating his past position. Yet beneath the surface, there was change.

  “The filibuster’s evaporating,” Chuck Hampton called to say. “I think we’ll get our vote.”

  Shortly before two, Gage pulled Harshman into the cloakroom. “The support for a filibuster’s slipping away,” Gage said, “I can feel it. If we lose big there, it could hurt us on the final vote.”

  To Gage’s surprise and irritation, Harshman regarded him with something close to contempt. “Chad Palmer,” he retorted, “isn’t the only senator with principles. I have mine.”

  By four o’clock, as Kerry watched, all but the four undecideds and Kate Jarman had spoken to the merits of the Masters nomination. Kerry’s vote count stood forty-eight to forty-eight when Spencer James yielded to Harshman.

  “It is time,” Harshman declared, “to take a deep breath, to sort out reason from emotions. It is time, in candor, to remember that we are grieving for Kyle Palmer, not Caroline Masters.” His voice rose in contempt. “It is time to distinguish between an inadvertent tragedy—for which, I am assured, no one here bears responsibility—and a deliberate abuse of power by a president who would intimidate the Senate and its leaders and place us on the road to a police state …”

  “Let’s have him audited,” the President said dryly. “I want to know how much he gives to charity.”

  The mild joke defused, if only for a moment, the tension in the conference room. Around him, Clayton, Kit, and Adam Shaw smiled but continued to watch.

  “I wonder what Palmer’s thinking,” Clayton murmured.

  Watching Harshman, Chad wavered between anger and fatigue. The night before, sleepless, he had held his grieving wife; now he must listen to this petty, narrow man flaunt his poverty of spirit.

  “Only debate,” Harshman said sternly, “extended debate, and the reflection which it allows us, is worthy of this great deliberative body. This independent body, no matter what the President might think.

  “We are senators, not servants. We represent our people. And our people do not want us—in a matter so vital to our future and our very moral character—to be rushed to judgment by fear, or sorrow, or pity.

  “We are senators, and the Senate, in its own good time, must work its will.”

  Shooting Chad a brief look of challenge, Harshman sat to applause from the opponents of Caroline Masters who still crowded the Senate gallery. As Ellen Penn gaveled for silence, Chad caught Kate Jarman’s eye, and nodded.

  The Vice President, awaiting this, said at once, “The Chair recognizes the Junior Senator from Vermont.”

  Kate Jarman stood. “There is much I could say,” she told her colleagues. “But I will not. I yield to Senator Palmer.”

  Slowly, Chad rose, gaze sweeping his colleagues and resting last on Harshman, then Gage, the Majority Leader expressionless save for narrowed eyes.

  “Indeed,” Chad began, “we are senators. And most of us are worthy of the name.

  “The Majority Leader assures us that the actions of Mason Taylor are a mystery to him. Senator Harshman tells us that this nomination should not be decided on sentiments like grief or shame or anger. I suggest another: self-respect.

  “That sentiment may not be important to all one hundred of us. But among the great majority, I suspect there will be considerable aversion to hiding behind a filibuster.” Pausing, Chad spoke softly. “It is time. Enough has been said, and far too much has been done. We should do what our constituents sent us to do—vote.”

  With this, Ellen Penn called—as scheduled—for a vote on Chad’s petition to close debate.

  He sat, foreseeing the outcome. He had made some calls of his own.

  “Nice,” the President said to Chuck Hampton. “What’s the count?”

  On the other end, Hampton’s voice was muffled; Kerry imagined him in the cloakroom, hunkered in the corner. “To sustain a filibuster? I don’t think they’ve got more than thirty. The only problem is that may be their way of having it both ways. As far as I know, we’ve got only forty-eight to actually confirm.”

  The President thought briefly. “Get me Kate Jarman,” he said.

  On C-SPAN, the vote to close debate proceeded.

  “Mr. Harshman.”

  “No.”

  “Mr. Izzo.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Jones.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ms. MacIntire.”
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  “Yes.”

  As the total vote reached fifty, the tally on the screen stood at twenty-nine yes’s, twenty-one no’s. The President experienced a flash of doubt—out of the next fifty votes, he needed thirty-one yes’s to reach sixty and close debate.

  And then came a string of yes’s.

  “Mr. Nehlen.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Palmer.”

  Chad, smiling slightly, said, “Yes.”

  The sixty-first “yes,” when it came, belonged to an undecided moderate, Cassie Rollins.

  “All right,” Clayton murmured.

  Waiting for Kate Jarman, the President continued to watch. The last vote, giving Chad’s motion a total of seventy-one, belonged to Leo Weller.

  “I overpaid for that one,” Kerry observed. “Imagine all those cows, roaming our national parklands.”

  The telephone rang.

  “Hello, Kate,” the President said.

  “Good afternoon,” she answered. “Are you calling to make a decent woman of me, Mr. President?”

  Kerry laughed. “I live in hope, Kate. One decent woman deserves another.”

  In San Francisco, Caroline Masters watched in her penthouse, with Blair Montgomery.

  “Thank God for Senator Palmer,” Blair said.

  But Caroline did not answer—she was too tense. And it was hard to be grateful for what had brought Chad Palmer to this moment.

  “Stuck at forty-eight votes to confirm,” she murmured. “After all of this.”

  Kerry put down the telephone. “Kate’s waiting,” he told Clayton. “Get me to Clare MacIntire.”

  On the screen, Ellen Penn announced, “The pending business is the nomination of Judge Caroline Clark Masters to be Chief Justice. The question is, Will the Senate advise and consent to this nomination? The aye’s and nay’s have been ordered, and the clerk will call the roll.”

  “Mr. Allen.”

  “No.”