Another question immediately hammered at him. It was from an old hand in Washington, who had been around long enough to know personally that a president didn’t actually have to attend Congress to deliver the State of the Union Address. Carter and Nixon had merely sent their last State of the Union messages in writing, as had Truman, though that was before his time, and he’d heard that Eisenhower had recorded one of his in a film made when he was recuperating from a heart attack.
“You said message, not address. President Foster is going to deliver his State of the Union in person isn’t he?”
The journalist also knew that a president’s address in their first year in office was not formally a State of the Union, but this wasn’t the moment to quibble about trivia.
“You can assume he will be there,” said the Secretary.
“Assume? You’re choosing your words extremely carefully, sir. My simple question to you is this: is President Foster alive and conscious? A straight yes or no, please.”
Even to the untrained eye, the Secretary was looking uncomfortable as he shifted on his feet:
“I am informed…,” he started.
“Informed?” the veteran reporter interrupted, stabbing the air with his pencil. “You haven’t spoken to President Foster yourself? You haven’t seen him? How do you have any idea what shape he’s in?”
The questioner kept badgering him, almost hysterically now:
“Mr Secretary… surely the people are entitled to hear from someone with first-hand knowledge?”
The Secretary pulled himself up to his full six-foot-one:
“President Foster is fully… ”
But the reporter wouldn’t give in:
“Mr Secretary, coming so close after the terrorist attack on New York, thankfully thwarted, can you assure the American people these catastrophes one after another are not part of some attempted coup, some conspiracy, some triple assassination attempt to overthrow…”
“America is not Tunisia or Egypt or Lib…”
Ed grabbed for the remote and switched off the TV. “Triple assassination!” he exclaimed. “What crap!”
The screen-flash from the TV burnt Ed’s strange reaction into Dr Cisco’s mind. He reminded himself that he was drained from working under high stress all night without a break, and that it had been years since he’d felt pressure anything close to this, so he dismissed his jumpiness about Isabel’s husband as being due to that and tried to calm himself by scratching useless notes onto her chart.
Davey tugged again. He signed, “Is Isabel going to die?”
“Ask Dr Cisco yourself,” George said, letting Davey read his lips and swinging his own eyes back onto Ed. He had the same reaction as the doctor to Ed’s comment.
Cisco had vaguely overheard George, but had no idea what question he would be answering for Davey so he slipped the chart back into its slot and raised his head, “Ask me what?” He licked his lower lip.
Without shifting his eyes away from Ed, George repeated Davey’s question.
Cisco nodded and sighed, “Ms Diaz has quite a few problems,” he began, and when Davey’s hands flew to his mouth in terror, Cisco continued, “but she will be okay,” saying it slowly so the boy understood. “We gave her some medicine to make her sleep. She’ll be awake in…,” he glanced at the clock on the wall, “two hours, maybe three.” An assuring smile broke out over the doctor’s tired, furrowed face and he tousled Davey’s hair. “Can you wait till then, little man?”
Davey bobbed his head and gave a little gleeful hop, and took George’s hand.
George’s eyes kept drilling into Ed.
NIKI Abbott splashed naked out of the tropical waters to find her valet standing guard where she’d tossed her clothes. Mario had unfurled a towel like a white flag of submission and, as though they’d already been lovers, she ran up to him and let him wrap it around her from behind, snuggling her back into him.
The pair stood silently, both facing the sea. Niki nudged his arms aside and let the towel slide between them to the sand. Purposefully, she grabbed behind through Mario’s loincloth and gave a strong tug, smiled and ran off from him high-stepping into the low lapping surf. Mario pulled the side-knot open and, inspired, hung the crimson cloth off himself and sped after her, laughing as the fabric flapped from side to side.
70
“CHIEF AGENT FRANKLIN, General Loane, special agent in charge of the President’s personal protective division. I gotta discuss your wife’s condition with the doctor, sir.”
Franklin’s tone and bearing were flinty and matter-of-fact, which even to Ed smacked as being frosty, as though the President’s shock asthma attack before Franklin’s own eyes had only been as bothersome as a fishbone in the throat. The arch in Franklin’s eyebrow was pushing Ed out of the room, but the former general stood his ground.
But the special agent wasn’t accustomed to resistance. “In private, sir,” he pressed.
Ed drew back his cuff and glimpsed his watch. “I’ve got to make a call,” he grunted and edged past Franklin out of the room, no mean feat since the man was almost as broad as the door itself.
Together with two members of the President’s Cabinet and a crack team of security specialists, Franklin had just flown in on one of the President’s two specially configured Boeing 747-200Bs. In this contingent, Franklin was the only one who had been with President Foster on his fateful flight the night before, though he wasn’t offering any details, certainly not to Ed. Like Ed, the agent had not slept, so Ed decided that Franklin’s personal presence here meant all was not well with the President, and that his instincts only a few hours ago when listening to the Secretary of State’s press conference were correct.
Security in and around the hospital had blown out from locals leaning on the wall when Ed first arrived, to armed guards posted at every corner. The Secret Service had also set up outside the building a 100-feet, no-cross cordon, which was being enforced by police rushed in from all over the county and a few dozen more who’d come in from neighbouring counties even though they hadn’t actually been asked to. The journalists, cold, tired and cranky were pushed well back, with all the gawkers, hardly the kind of equal opportunity that they believed America stood for.
Manifold was crawling with police and emergency personnel and security checks, and police roadblocks covered all incoming land routes. Continually circling in the air were two 767 AWACS—airborne warning and control system aircraft—with their distinctive thirty-foot rotating radar domes mounted above their fuselage. F-15s and F-16s flashed and boomed across the sky. Apart from these authorised aircraft, the town’s airspace had been reclassified as a no-fly zone with a shoot-on-sight protocol, and the TV networks who’d pointlessly sent their news choppers were furious.
President Foster was alive and well? Yeah right, Ed sniggered as he glanced out of the hospital window at the frenzy. The media were thinking the same thing: if Foster was alive, why was Isabel Diaz getting all this, frankly, presidential treatment?
But those who knew the facts weren’t talking.
71
TEMPORARILY ALONE TO make the call on the secure phone she’d requested from the special agent, Isabel pondered the answer she’d just been given and edged her head toward the hubbub of security outside her window. She winced as she turned back for a sip of water, resting the phone on her chest so she could reach the glass with her good hand. Refreshed, she picked up the phone again and said abruptly, “Noted. That’s all from Isis.”
THE hospital staff and security personnel couldn’t help but notice Ed’s exclusion from Isabel’s room; and likewise George who, with Davey, was at the far end of the same corridor on their way back from an afternoon snack at the cafeteria.
“Why isn’t she being sworn in right here and right now?” Ed demanded. Finally given the chance to confront the Secretary of State directly, Ed was going to push it, his pug nose a mere three inches away from Bert Robinson’s as the two men faced off right outside Isabel’s hosp
ital room. Invading personal space was precisely Ed’s objective. Isabel had been fully awake for two hours now and, for some unexplained reason, was conspiring with the recently arrived officials to exclude Ed from the discussions. Getting aggressive, he calculated, was the best way to insinuate himself back in, and he didn’t give a damn who might be tut-tutting about it behind his back.
Ed was convinced that President Foster was dead but also that, for whatever reason, the Administration—or what was left of it—was concealing that fact from the American public, and thwarting Isabel’s rightful elevation. What the hell were they up to? Ed pondered. Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in only an hour-and-a-half after JFK was pronounced dead in Dallas. The brief ceremony, Ed recalled from the famous photographs, had been held on board the presidential plane while it was still on the ground at Love Field.
Beneath his nose, Ed could see the Secretary’s hand clamped over a thick dossier. What Ed didn’t know was that it included those photos from 1963 as well as other, mostly classified, precedent material.
Ed noticed that the agent posted on duty at Isabel’s door had turned his head away from the skirmish with the Secretary. Perhaps he was onside and signalling to Ed that it was safe for him to come forward. Ed stepped around Robinson and managed to open the door just a crack.
“Isabel…,” Ed called through the small opening, pushing it wider but the agent blocked him from taking a step inside.
“Not now,” she snapped from her bed, declining to even look at him and lowering her eyes back to the files spread out on her lap. Her commanding abruptness threw all of them, Ed included.
She buried her head in the papers and, when the silence in the room forced her to look back up a minute later and she saw him still standing with his hand on the doorknob, she insisted that the agent close the door.
Ed put her gruffness down to her trauma, or maybe the drugs. What else it could be?
George knew. At least, he knew the part about Ed’s affair. He’d foamed when Isabel had told him. “Show me the damn video,” he said, strangely satisfied that all his contempt for Ed was now proved justified.
But Isabel had refused. “Personal drama belongs in the background right now, okay?” she said. “But promise me you’ll say nothing… especially to Ed. And Davey, too.”
AFTER the Secretary of State’s impromptu media conference in DC, he and Marcus Bentley, Foster’s Attorney General, had buckled up next to each other on the flight from Andrews Air Force Base to talk to Isabel. They’d shared many trips over the years; both started in politics as assistant secretaries in the Clinton Administration and, during the politically lean years before Obama, managed to hew illustrious and remunerative careers for themselves outside politics, one in law and the other in electronics, crossing paths frequently and making life easier for each other when they could. They were great friends, and so was Mitch Taylor before his death. The three went back a long way, and with Foster too. But Marcus Bentley and Bert Robinson were also hard-nosed professionals and weren’t going to let sudden personal grief blur their focus on the gravest matter of state either had ever been charged with.
Neither had been with the President when the attack happened, but they’d heard it all from Chief Franklin who had phoned the two of them at 3 AM, joining them into the one call and saying he was under strict instructions from the President to speak to the two of them, and only them.
Franklin had explained how the President wanted them to be ready on a moment’s notice if, heaven forbid, his condition deteriorated and Isabel in fact needed to be sworn in. That was President Foster’s Plan B, he said, though he declined to reveal Plan A even when Robinson pressed him. And despite both men screaming down the phone line, Franklin also refused to say where the President actually was.
Robinson and Bentley saw they were in the vortex of a potentially paralysing constitutional crisis.
They knew that under the Presidential Succession Law, if Foster died—or was already dead—Isabel would automatically step into his role. Permanently! After her mother’s revelation on FOX there was no longer any impediment, since any doubt that Isabel was not a natural-born citizen had been quashed.
On their flight over to Manifold, even the engine noise couldn’t drown out the concentrated hush that bore down on the pair as they read and swapped files, and exchanged whispers.
Neither man could believe the coincidences… first Mitch Taylor, then the President… thank God, Bobby was okay… well, at least Franklin kept telling them he was. But if he was fine, then why the urgency surrounding the contingency plan?
BACK in the corridor, Ed once again challenged Secretary Robinson, “The President is dead, isn’t he? Yet you’re delaying, putting up every block you can to stop…”
“You say that, General,” Robinson replied, emphasising Ed’s title to remind him that the chain of command was civilian over military. He stepped forward even closer. “But in case you hadn’t noticed, we’re still running this show,” which Robinson hoped was true, though by now his need to speak personally to the President was reaching a point of quiet desperation.
“Robinson,” said Ed, the snarl on his face betraying his contempt for the Secretary. “You call this running…”
“I’ll take my chances with history,” Robinson interrupted and, as he turned to the door to Isabel’s room, the agent posted there started opening it for him.
Ed grabbed Robinson’s shoulder and stopped him. “If the shit hits the fan, Robinson, what then? Who the hell’s in charge of this country?”
“The President. Who else?” Robinson snapped, praying he was correct, though uncomfortably unsure. He hoped that would change after he spoke to Foster in an hour’s time, a call Chief Franklin had arranged.
Ed swung himself in front of the Secretary. Threateningly, Ed let the tip of his nose actually touch Robinson’s this time, then suddenly, as though he’d achieved his objective, Ed pulled back, knocking Robinson into the door before heading to the washroom.
Bert Robinson might have been as tall as Ed but he was wiry and slight. It was why he’d got the wading bird nickname Crane in college. He stood there shaking. To calm himself, he leant back against the insipid green wall and, to make his nervousness less obvious, he removed his glasses, held the lenses up toward the fluorescent light, and hurred two sharp breaths onto them before wiping them with his tie. But his heart wouldn’t stop pounding. Winding the wire back over his ears and doing his best to mimic a cheery wink to the agent on guard, he took a deep breath and pushed himself inside Isabel’s room to get back to finalising the arrangements.
To be truthful, Bert completely understood Ed’s anger and confusion—what rational person wouldn’t?—but according to Isabel, there were things Ed didn’t know and shouldn’t know. Neither Bert nor Attorney General Marcus Bentley knew them either and she certainly wasn’t telling either of them, so Robinson was forced to accept that pragmatism was the only sensible course of action for now, no matter how awkward.
But the fact that Isabel was hiding the truth, whatever it was, from her husband as well impressed Robinson, certainly dismissing for him all those bitchy snipes during the campaign about Ed being the one pulling her strings. The woman had cojones, that was for sure, and after everything she’d just been through, Robinson couldn’t help but be awed.
Inside the room, Isabel was still hooked up to monitors, but the drips were no longer connected, and the morphine had been replaced with more standard painkillers plus her own adrenaline and single focus. If she was suffering any trauma or residual shock, she wasn’t letting anyone see it. She was plumped up in bed with pillows, her face stitched, plastered and bruised, her arm in a sling and every time she winced, Bert Robinson felt a sympathetic twinge himself. He couldn’t see the bandages beneath the sheets, but Dr Cisco had explained in detail about the hypothermia, the ripped skin and leg muscle. She’d been a lucky woman to survive, let alone to be as on top of everything as she most clearly was.
Chi
ef Franklin was whispering something to her while Attorney General Bentley was at the window surveying the security circus outside.
“Ah, Bert, you’re back,” she said acknowledging the Secretary. “Marcus, let’s run through it again, okay?”
When the Attorney finished, Chief Franklin said, “Just to make it clear, if anything gets in the way of the President delivering his State of the Union Address, we will be 100-percent ready to swear in Madam Speaker instantly.”
Plan B still rankled the two Cabinet members, and Robinson couldn’t wait for his own call with Foster, not just so he could hear it all directly, but so he could have the comfort of hearing his friend’s own voice.
“If people out there,” Isabel looked at them each pointedly, “want to believe President Foster is dead, so be it. In any case, if I am going to be sworn in as President, it’ll be when the two Houses of Congress are sitting together tomorrow night, not a moment sooner, not unless there’s an emergency.”
“Isn’t this an emergency?” Marcus whispered to Bert as they left her room.
72
AFTER SECRETARY BERT Robinson’s mobile phone battery died, the hour he spent drumming his fingers in Tom Cisco’s office waiting for his call from Bobby Foster bled into a second and then into a third. His mounting stress that as the senior-most Cabinet member, he still hadn’t made personal contact with the President almost made him puke. And this after he’d been on the head table at Foster’s wedding and later godfather to one of his kids. Despite repeated calls to Chief Franklin, even to the First Lady, he couldn’t access either.
But he persisted, both in the national interest and as a frantically worried friend, and eventually Franklin, who he viewed as a brick wall physically and who was certainly behaving like one, called him from one of the secure lines on the plane they’d flown down on after returning to the operations room he had temporarily set up there.
Born to Run Page 27