“We have JUMPER,” the agent said into his microphone. The medical team moved in at once, over the warning shouts of several construction men, but it was plain from twenty feet away that their time was wasted. His left hand held the binder containing his last speech. The falling stones had probably killed him before the fire had reached in far enough to singe his hair. Much of the body was misshapen from crushing, but the suit and the presidential tie-clasp and the gold watch on his wrist positively identified President Roger Durling. Everything stopped. The cranes stood still, their diesel engines idling while their operators sipped their coffee or lit up smokes. A team of forensic photographers came in to snap their rolls of film from every possible angle.
They took their time. Elsewhere on the floor of the chamber, National Guardsmen were bagging bodies and carrying them off–they’d taken over this task from the firelighters two hours before–but for a fifty-foot circle, there were only Secret Service, performing their, last official duty to JUMPER, as they had called the President in
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honor of his service as a lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne. It had gone on too long for tears, though for all of the assembled agents those would come again, more than once. When the medics withdrew, when the photographers were satisfied, four agents in SECRET SERVICE windbreakers made their way down over the remaining stone blocks. First they lifted the body of Andy Walker, whose last conscious act had been to protect his “principal,” and lowered it gently into the rubberized bag. The agents held it up so that another pair of their fellows could lift it clear and take it on its way. The next task was President Durling. This proved difficult. The body was askew in death, and the cold had frozen it. One arm was at a right angle to the rest of the body and would not fit into the bag. The agents looked at one another, not knowing what to do about it. The body was evidence and could not be tampered with. Perhaps more important was their horror at hurting a body already dead, and so President Durling went into the bag with the arm outstretched like Captain Ahab’s. The four agents carried it out, making their way out of the chamber, around all of the fallen blocks, and then down toward an ambulance waiting for this single purpose. That tipped off the press photographers near and far, who snapped away, or zoomed in their TV cameras to capture
the moment.
The moment cut into Ryan’s Fox interview, and he watched the scene on the monitor that sat on the table. Somehow in his mind that made it official. Durling really was dead, and now he really was the President, and that was that. The camera in the room caught Ryan’s face as it changed, as he remembered how Durling had brought him in, trusted him, leaned on him, guided him. . . .
That was it, Jack realized. He’d always had someone to lean on before. Sure, others had leaned on him, asked his opinion, given him his head in a crisis, but there was always someone to come back to, to tell him he’d done the right thing. He could do that now, but what he’d receive in return would be just opinions, not judgments. The judgments were his now. He’d hear all manner of things. His advisers would be like lawyers, some arguing one way, some arguing another, to tell him how he was both right
and wrong at the same time, but when it was all over, the decision was his alone.
President Ryan’s hand rubbed his face, heedless of the makeup, which he smeared. He didn’t know that what Fox and the other networks were sending out was split-screened now, since all had access to the pool feed from the Roosevelt Room. His head shook slightly from side to side in the way of a man who had to accept something he didn’t like, his face too blank now for sadness. Behind the Capitol steps, the cranes started dipping again.
“Where do we go from here?” the Fox reporter asked. That question wasn’t on his list. It was just a human reaction to a human scene. The cut to the Hill had bitten deep into the allotted time for the interview, and for another subject they would have carried over into the next segment, but the rules in the White House were adamantine.
“Quite a lot of work to be done,” Ryan answered.
“Thank you, Mr. President. Fourteen minutes after the hour.”
Jack watched the light on the TV camera blink off. The originating producer waited a few seconds before waving his hand, and the President detached his microphone and cable. His first press marathon was over. Before leaving the room, he looked more carefully at the cameras. Earlier in his life he’d taught classes in history, and more recently he’d delivered briefings, but all of those had gone to a live audience whose eyes he could see and read, and from their reaction he would adjust his delivery somewhat, speeding up or slowing down, maybe tossing in a little humor if circumstances allowed, or repeating something to make his point clearer. Now his intimate chats would be directed to a thing. Something else not to like. Ryan left the room, while all over the world, people evaluated what they’d seen of the new American President. Television commentators would discuss him in fifty or more countries while he found the bathroom again.
I “THIS IS THE best thing that’s happened to our country ‘ since Jefferson.” The older man rated himself a serious stu-
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dent of history. He liked Thomas Jefferson for his statement about how a country governed least was governed best, which was about all he knew of the adages from the Sage of Monticello.
“And it took a Jap to do it, looks like.” The statement was trailed by an ironic snort. Such an event could even invalidate his closely held racism. Couldn’t have that, could he?
They’d been up all night–it was 5:20 local time– watching the TV news coverage, which hadn’t stopped. The newsies, they noted, looked even more wasted than this Ryan guy. Time zones did have an advantage. Both had stopped drinking beer around midnight, and had switched to coffee two hours later when they’d both started dozing. Couldn’t have that. What they saw, switching through channels downloaded on a large satellite dish outside the cabin, was like some sort of fantastic telethon, except this one wasn’t about raising money for crippled children or AIDS victims or nigger schools. This one was fun. All those Washington bastards, must have been burned to a crisp, most of them.
“Bureaucrat barbecue,” Peter Holbrook said for the seventeenth time since 11:30, when he’d come up with his summation of the event. He’d always been the creative one in the movement.
“Aw, shit, Pete!” gasped Ernest Brown, spilling some of his coffee into his lap. It was still funny, enough so that he didn’t leap immediately to his feet from the uncomfortable feeling that resulted from his slip.
“Has been a long night,” Holbrook allowed, laughing himself. They’d watched President Durling’s speech for a couple of reasons. For one, all of the networks had preempted normal programs, as was usually the case for an important event; but the truth of the matter was that their satellite downlink gave them access to a total of 117 channels, and they didn’t even have to switch the set off to avoid input from the government they and their friends despised. The deeper reason was that they cultivated their anger at their government, and usually watched such speeches–both men caught at least an hour a day of
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C-SPAN-1 and -2–to fuel those feelings, trading barbed comments back and forth every minute of a presidential speech.
“So, who is this Ryan guy, really?” Brown asked, yawning.
“Another ‘crat, looks like. A bureaucrat talking bu-reaucrap.”
“Yeah,” judged Brown. “With nothing to back him up, Pete.”
Holbrook turned and looked at his friend. “It’s really som’thin’, isn’t it?” With that observation he got up and walked to the bookshelves that walled the south side of his den. His copy of the Constitution was a well-thumbed pamphlet edition which he read as often as he could, so as to improve his understanding of the intent of the drafters. “You know, Pete, there’s nothing in here to cover a situation like this.”
“Really?”
Holbrook nodded. “Really.”
“No shit.” That required some thought, didn’t it?
“MURDERED?” PRESIDENT RYAN asked, still wiping the makeup off his face with wet towelettes of the same sort he’d used to clean off baby bottoms. At least it made his face feel clean when he’d finished.
“That’s the preliminary indication, both from a cursory examination of the body and from a quick-and-dirty examination of the cockpit tapes.” Murray flipped through the notes faxed to him only twenty minutes before.