let down your guard.”
The way he said this made Ward drop his amused look. “You got
something you’d like to talk about?”
“Not in a million years,” Buchanan said with a sudden smile. “If I
start telling the sorry likes of you all my secrets, then I’ll have to
take my lemonade stand somewhere else and start over. And I’m way too
old for that.”
Ward leaned back against the soft cushion and looked his friend over.
“What makes you do it, Danny? Not money, surely.”
Buchanan slowly nodded in agreement. “If I did it solely for the
dollars, I would’ve been gone ten years ago.” He swallowed the rest of
his drink and looked over at the doorway, where the ambassador from
Italy and his substantial entourage stood, along with several senior
Hill staffers, a couple of senators and three women in short black
dresses who looked like they had been rented for the evening, and very
well might have been. The Monocle was filling up with so many VIPs now
you could hardly spit without nailing some leader of something. And
they all wanted the world. And they all wanted you to get it for them.
Eat you up and leave nothing and then call you a friend. Buchanan knew
all the lyrics to that song.
He looked up at an old photograph on the wall. A bald-headed man with
a beak nose, dour look and ferocious eyes peered down at him. Long
dead now, he had once been one of the most powerful men in Washington
for decades. And most feared. Power and fear seemed to go hand in
hand here. Now Buchanan couldn’t even remember the man’s name. Didn’t
that speak volumes.
Ward put down his glass. “I think I know. Your causes have become
much more benevolent over the years. You’re out to save a world few
even care about. You’re really the only lobbyist I know who does
it.”
Buchanan shook his head. “A poor Irish lad who brought himself up by
the bootstraps and made a fortune sees the light and then uses his
golden years helping the less fortunate? Hell, Rusty, I’m driven more
by fear than altruism.”
Ward looked at him curiously. “How’s that?”
Buchanan sat up very straight, put his palms together and cleared his
throat. He had never told anyone this. Not even Faith. Maybe it was
time. He would look insane, of course, but at least Rusty would keep
it to himself.
“I have this recurring dream, you see. In my dream America keeps
getting richer and richer, fatter and fatter. Where an athlete gets a
hundred million dollars to bounce a ball, a movie star earns twenty
million to act in trash and a model gets ten million to walk around in
her underwear. Where a nineteen-year-old can make a billion dollars in
stock options by using the Internet to sell us more things we don’t
need faster than ever.” Buchanan stopped and stared off for a moment.
“And where a lobbyist can earn enough to buy his own plane.” He
refocused on Ward. “We keep hoarding the wealth of the world. Anybody
gets in the way, we crush them, in a hundred different ways, while
selling them the message of America the Beautiful. The world’s
remaining superpower, right?
“Then, little by little, the rest of the world wakes up and sees us for
what we are: a fraud. And they start coming for us. In log boats and
propeller planes and God knows how else. First by the thousands, then
by the millions and then by the billions. And they wipe us out. Stuff
us all down some pipe and flush us for good. You, me, the ballplayers,
the movie stars, the supermodels, Wall Street, Hollywood and
Washington. The true land of make believe.”
Ward stared at him wide eyed. “My God, a dream or a nightmare?”
Buchanan shot him a stern glance. “You tell me.”
“Your country, love it or leave it, Danny. There’s an element of truth
in that slogan. We’re not so bad.”
“We also suck up a disproportionate share of the wealth and energy in
the world. We pollute more than any other country. We trash foreign