The President of the United States sat before his computer screen, which was still blank, and he sighed in frustration as the damn computer kept on humming at him and doing nothing else. He had switched it on and off three different times, and the screen was still blank. Not a damn thing. He had even gotten on his hands and knees below his desk in the Oval Office—an elaborate carved wood monstrosity that had once belonged to Johnson—and struggled to make sense of the jumbled strands of wire and power cords that were crowded under there, and gave up after a few minutes. Not very presidential but he didn’t care. The damn computer was still blank.
He sat back in his custom leather chair, comforted that at least the bearings weren’t squeaking any more. At least the chair was now working. It had seemed nothing much else was working this day.
Take breakfast, for example. The White House kitchen—which was much improved over the previous administrations, if any of those sell-serving memoirs he had read years earlier had been true—had about four or five breakfast choices that they rotated around each successive morning. Breakfast choices, like so many other things, had been settled during the transition period three years ago, and everything should have been fine. Except for this morning, in the private sitting room just off his bedroom, breakfast had been something that he had never liked. Lumpy oatmeal. And cold toast. And no damn Washington Post or New York Times. He had thought of throwing a hissy fit, start tossing things around and making phone calls to the Head Usher’s office, but there had been that embarrassing item in the Style gossip section in the Post last month about another incident he was too humiliated to think about, concerning missing toilet paper, so he sat down and ate mechanically, staring at the far wall.
Some breakfast, some start to the day. And as he ate, he knew there were many, many things that should be crowding his mind, things to address, things to take care of, but funny, wasn’t it, that the only thing on his mind was getting in front of his computer.
That’s it. Again, not very presidential, but there you go.
And after his disappointing breakfast, a quick sprint by himself downstairs from the private quarters on the second floor and to the West Wing and his office and then to the computer, and… nothing.
A blank screen.
He moved back and forth a bit in the chair, looking out the heavy-set windows in the Oval
Office at the best view in town, of the White House private gardens and, there in the distance, the Washington Monument. Since they were bulletproof, the windows had a greenish tinge, and he hated them from day one of his administration, since it felt like he was in the middle of a drained aquarium.
But after reading the daily threat assessments against him, he had gotten over his displeasure. Like today. So he turned away from the computer and looked at his desk. There was the leather folder thatcontained his daily schedule —micromanaged down to fifteen minute chunks—and he opened it up…
And slammed it down in frustration. This was too damn much. The damn thing was empty.
He picked up his phone and waited for Mrs. Tompkins or Mrs. Gross to answer, and there was nothing. Just incessant ringing on the other end. Out sick, maybe? Or having a coffee break? He started working his way down the buttons on his phone, trying Rogers, chief of staff; Macomber, his appointments secretary; Gillian, his press secretary, and then through a half-dozen aides and assistants.
No answer.
Nothing.
He slammed the phone back down. Could be a connection with his blank computer screen. He was sure both the phones and the computers worked off of the same type of network system. If one was down, maybe the other was down as well. That thought tickled at his mind, and he remembered a meeting some time ago, when Corcoran, his Joint Chiefs chairman, nice and sharp looking with his Army dress uniform, was waving some length of cable around. Something about a threat. Something to do with computers. Something to do with… He couldn’t remember.
The President swiveled back in his chair, switched the computer off and on again. It kept on humming along, but the screen was still blank. He could see the reflection of his face in the blank screen, like a mirror, or a… looking glass. Right? That was the phrase. Something from Alice in Wonderland, sinking into the blank screen and off he’d go, scurrying along the Internet. He slowly caressed the keys, felt an odd, brass taste in his mouth. Something like the trumpet mouthpiece he had suckled on back in high school in upstate New York, before he joined thedebate club and found that secret strength he never knew he had, the power of talking, of words, of being able to link words and sentences into something people cared about.
Another secret he never revealed, even to his wife. It had been… well, if not easy, then in some way, predetermined. Law school and private practice and lots of pro bono work, and then assemblyman and state senator and majority leader and then governor, joining the list of Rockefeller and Cuomo and Pataki, but unlike those poor sods, he had gone all the way, from Albany to D.C, like Roosevelt, so very many decades ago. Lots of work and late nights and bad food—once he had gotten here to the White House, he had forbidden chicken to be served in any way at any dinner, private or state-related—but here he was. Top of the heap. Ol’ numero uno. POTUS and king of all he surveyed.
And he couldn’t get his goddamn computer to work.
He traced the plastic keys one more time, and then shook his head and looked back at his desk.
He picked up the phone and this time, no dial tone. Nothing. So there was definitely a problem. A dead phone. Then how come no one had told him? And where was Rogers, his chief of staff? Damn it, the man was sometimes so close to him that the cartoonists—and especially that new bastard at the Post—drew cartoons that showed him and Rogers, joined to the hip, moving merrily along. Sometimes the two of them were walking in aimless circles, and other times they were walking over a cliff. He picked up a pen and started doodling aimlessly on a fresh legal pad. One of the perks of office. Fresh legal pads on your desk, every morning. But days like this, he sure could have used some of the old perks.
Like the ones R.N. was able to use, back when he and his knuckle-draggers ruled the roost. Ol’ Nixon was probably the last one with the cojones to use the FBI and CIA and IRS as his personal Praetorian Guard and enforcers, and he sure could have fun using that kind of power. Have that cartoonist bastard at the Post get an audit, go through seven years of his financial records. See if his pen inked so straight after that little adventure.
He put his pen down and leaned back again in his chair. This was too much. Where was everyone? He glanced down at the underside of his desk and the tiny red pressure-plate marked on the side, within easy reach. Just a second of pressure there by his knee and the room would be filled with Secret Service agents. That would sure get someone’s attention. The radios would be crackling with code words, saying that he had signaled that he was in danger. Code words. Let’s see, Reagan had been Rawhide and Carter had been Deacon. Nice choices. Those SS guys always had a quirky sense of humor. And Bush the Elder and Bush the Younger… who the hell knew? His own code name was Tailor. His father had been a tailor and he himself enjoyed fine clothes, and the name was okay. Of course, some of his best critics—like that smarmy economics professor who wrote a column for the Times—said his code name often meant that he tailored his opinions and objectives to whichever way the wind was blowing. Which hurt, in a weird way, though he had tried to make up for it lately at… what was the place?
Sprat. Something Sprat.
And look where that had gotten him.
He stood up from his desk and paced around the Oval Office, wanting to stretch his legs some.
No, he won’t be triggering the panic switch. Love to see that incident in the next day’s Post! He stopped by the fireplace, leaned back on the mantelpiece. The first time he had been here, during some governor’s delegation visit to the previous POTUS, he had taken it all in and had come away with two impressions. First, that the Oval Office was a hell of a lot smaller than he had thought. And second, well, he knew it was kind of crazy, but the room sort of spoke to him. In a friendly way. Something like, ol’ man, the next time you’re in this place, you will be The Man, and it will be yours for four years, eight if you’re lucky, and we’ll be seeing you. And he had whispered—real crazy times, now—he had whispered, “You bet.” And thought with a brief moment of terror that one of the escorting Secret Service guys had heard him, and he giggled with relief later when he realized the agent hadn’t.
He looked up at a clock on the fireplace’s mantelpiece, a warm gift from the people of some African country that had successfully bamboozled him out of a few million dollars of foreign aid last year in exchange for pretending to cooperate in the latest version of the war on terror. It was a bit ugly but it worked, and it told him that it was 10:30. The morning almost halfway shot, and he hadn’t spoken to a single person since getting here! What a waste of a day!
He looked over at his desk, and got a little chill that started at the base of his skull and which dripped down his back. Funny, from here, you could see what it looked like on television. He frowned as he remembered the last time the in-house TV crews had trooped in here and had set up the lights, microphones and TelePrompTer. He was sweating and his legs were trembling under the desk, and had needed a pep talk from Rogers before going on national television. It was the first time since high school—since he was a teenager for God’s sake!—that he had actually experienced stage fright. His hands were so moist that they were making wet marks on the paper sheets of his speech, the one on his desk in case the TelePrompTer shit the bed, and he knew that the others in the office could smell the fear about him. Rogers, Gillian and a bunch of aides were all staring at him, and in one corner was an angry-looking Corcoran, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, glaring at him with contempt. That look had frightened him. The head of the most mighty military in the World was staring at him with hate,and something else… yes, something else. Fear. There had been fear on the face of that old foot soldier, fear that the trillions and trillions spent over the decades, in building up the greatest force the world had ever seen, fear that… He shook his head. Refused to think about Corcoran any more.
And what was it that Rogers had said, just before that speech? “They need to be reassured,” he had said, almost plaintively, a warm hand on his shoulder, leaning in to whisper in his ear. “They need to see that, sir, in your voice and mannerisms. They need to know everything will work out, that everything will be fine.”
There were questions he wanted to ask, more questions, but then the red light over the main television camera went on and he went into autopilot, and said the words written for him as best as he could. He read them and part of him was far away, wishing he was up at Camp David or the summer White House up in the Adirondacks, phones off, television off, everything off, and just getting drunk and sitting around and reading paperback mystery books. That’s what he wanted to do, more than anything else in the world, and instead he had been sweating in an office that really didn’t belong to him, talking to millions of people who were his countrymen, and lying the best way he knew how.
The President shook his head in distaste at the memory and strolled back to his desk. Again, he switched the computer off and on, and the screen was still blank. Well, time for some action. He went across the office and then stopped, thinking he had seen something. He looked out the murky green windows. There. Just over the trees. Some smoke. Something was burning, and it didn’t look like the D.C. fire department had the sucker under control. Of course, anything that the government of D.C. ran was invariably out of control, but that was an opinion he never shared, even with some of his warhorse buddies from New York State. Votes were votes, and you tried not to screw over those friends of yours when you could.
Out of the office door and into the secretarial area. Nothing. The desks were empty, plastic dust covers over the terminals. His Secret Service detail wasn’t here. The military officer with the briefcase that held the launch codes, also known as the football, wasn’t sitting at his usual post. Spooky. Could everyone have called in sick today? Was it possible?
Or maybe they were just out of the building. In training or something, or one of those loony empathy or encounter training groups the Department of Labor was pushing, where people had to play role games and be the oppressed or the oppressor or something. God, that was something he would have to put the squeeze on, and soon. Election day was just over a year away, and problems, man, he had problems that he didn’t need to add to. He made a mental note to ask his Secretary of Labor to put a halt to some of the more loony programs. He had the loony left on his side. Had to make sure you didn’t piss off the muddling middle.
He went to one of the secretary’s desks, ran a hand over the smooth plastic. He supposed he could have taken off this dust cover and then sit down and work at this desk. Then he could log on, check his e-mail, check the overnight wire reports, and then do a little… Well, just for a while, to relax his mind. His mouth was dry at the thought. Could work now, couldn’t it? But as he started tugging off the dust cover, he stopped. That wouldn’t do, not at all. The President of the United States couldn’t be seen typing at someone else’s desk. That was unseemly. He was a bit of the man of people but he also knew what Reagan and his crew had worked with. A little pomp and circumstance was something the people craved. So no saxophone playing, no jogging and no boxers versus briefs for this Chief Executive. And no being alone with any goddamn female interns! And he’d hate to see the kind of gossip that would come around if he had been at this desk, and the entire section trooped back in and saw him here. Nope. Wouldn’t do at all. Not very presidential.
He went down the hallway and then slowed and stopped. Damn, it was quiet. No phones were ringing, no voices, nothing. Where was everyone? He was in the southwest corner of the West Wing, known as the Rectangular Office, which belonged to his chief of staff. He poked his head into his chief of staff’s office. Empty. Through the windows of the office he could make out the gothic ugliness of the old Executive Office Building. Damn it, if the man had a meeting or was out of town, he should have known about it. This was unseemly.
A few more office checks found the same thing. Empty desks, empty chairs, no lights on at all.
That tingling feeling came back to him and, as he rounded into a connecting corridor, he heard voices and started smiling. There, at least someone was here and could tell him what was going on with the phones and the computers, and why in hell the goddamn place was so empty. Another office section and he went in, and three women sat up from their desks and looked over at him. They had the White House passes around their neck and he vaguely recognized their faces, and there was something a bit… a bit off as he entered the room.
First of all, they had been staring intently at their computer screens when he had come in, and he had caught a tantalizing glimpse of green and magenta colors on their screens that had made him smile with unexpected pleasure. But like they were part of a drill team, each woman tapped a single key and the colors disappeared, to be replaced by rows of numbers. Second, he didn’t know what kind of dress code his administrative folks were enforcing, but these ladies looked… well, they looked worn. Jeans and T-shirts. No makeup. No jewelry. Puffy eyes, like they hadn’t slept well in the past few days. And their desks were piled with food and water and soft drinks, like they expected a blizzard or something to hole them up here for a week or two.
The closest of the three women said, “Sir?” in a tentative voice, and he put on his best campaign smile and said, “Is there something wrong with the telephone system?”
She slowly nodded. “I believe there is, sir. I mean, I know the phones haven’t rung here in a while.”
“Then it’s been reported?”
She looked to her companions, and then back to him. “Yes, sir, I believe it has.”
“And what about the staff?” he asked. “There seems to be a lot of absentees here today.”
“Flu,” the second woman said, and the third nodded and said, “Training,” and the first woman said, “To tell you the truth, sir, I haven’t really noticed. We’ve been busy ever since we’ve gotten here.”
“I see,” he said, not liking the expressions in their faces. “Your computers, though.”
“Sir?” she said.
“I mean, your computers are working just fine.”
“Yes, sir, they are,” and the other two women nodded in agreement.
“Ah,” he said. “Well, you see, I have a problem. In my office. My own computer isn’t working.”
The women stared at him, and he saw that their fingers were trembling over the keyboard. He cleared his throat and went on. “I mean to say, would any of you know anything about computers?”
The first women spoke quickly. “No sir, I’m afraid we don’t.”
“Well, I don’t mean the inner workings. I mean just getting the damn thing to work.” He tried his smile again. “It’s in the Oval Office. You could come by, give it a shot.”
They all shook their heads no. He tried to think of something and came up with, “If you come in, I could get one of the While House photographers to stop by and get your picture. Something to show your family.”
By now the other two women seemed to be actually sitting on their hands. The first woman shook her head even more firmly and said, “Mister President, I’m sorry, we don’t know anything about computers. Not a thing. I’m sorry we can’t help you, and we must be getting back to work.”
He nodded and moved to leave, and then looked back. Their faces disturbed him. Something was wrong there, and he knew what it was. Nothing was going to get them out of their chairs. Bribes, promises of autographed photos with the president, maybe even threats of dismissal. Nothing. The three women were desperately waiting for him to leave, so they could get back to whatever they were doing, and that something wasn’t columns of numbers. It was…
Boss key.
Now why in hell did he think of that?
He went down the hallway, past the antiques and the paintings of POTUSes past, and then it came to him. Something he had read somewhere. Boss key. Workers with computers could be playing games, stored or on line, and all you had to do was strike a single key if the boss came by, and the computer screen would instantly show something else. Like a word processing program, or a graphics program.
Or columns of numbers. Boss key. And that’s why those three women, that’s why their fingers moved in unison when he entered their office. They were up to something and didn’t want to have the Boss of Bosses find out what they were doing.
Boss key.
Damn it, he’d have to talk to Rogers today, if that Chief of Staff ever showed up. It wasn’t right for the White House staff to be playing games on the taxpayers’ dollar. If the Speaker of the House ever heard about that, there’d be hell to pay, above everything else, and he didn’t need that. No more aggravations, please. Was it too much to have a working computer so a man could relax for a few minutes?
By now he was in a corridor near the gardens and thought he could use some fresh air. There were glass doors and a man in uniform standing outside, and the man snapped to attention when he went out. A Marine, in dress blues, and the sight of the man standing there was fine indeed. He stood next to the Marine and nodded to him, but the Marine just stared ahead. The President walked out onto the grass and enjoyed the fresh air, and then wrinkled his nose in distaste. Something was burning. A lot of somethings was burning. In fact there was so much smoke that there was a faint haze about the trees.
And another thing. Off in the distance. Popping noises, like firecrackers. He sighed. Gunfire again, in the capitol. No matter whatever they tried, this was always a high-crime district. He remembered as a state senator, hooting with disbelief as Bush the Elder went on national TV to display some crack cocaine that had been seized from a dealer across the street, in Lafayette Park. At the time he thought it was a cheap-ass political trick. Now? Now that he had been living for these years at 1600 Pennsylvania, he realized what a disaster the outer neighborhoods were, some just a handful of blocks away from what was known as the Peoples House.
The gunfire seemed louder. There were finally some sirens. If the People ever found out what kind of rough neighborhood their House was ever in, they’d demand to move. Maybe to Montana or someplace safer.
Safe. The thought made his head ache. He wished Bush the Elder and his several successors hadn’t left him such a mess in D,C., not to mention everywhere else in this quarreling world.
As he went back to the open doors he nodded again to the Marine and said, “How’s it going, son?” out of reflex, from nothing else, since all the Marines at the door ever did was to stand there and stare straight ahead.
“Sir?” came the hesitant voice.
He stopped, amazed. The Marine was now looking at him, a slightly scared young man, and he found if he stared at the Marine, the uniform almost disappeared and there was no one standing there but a nervous young boy, about nineteen or twenty. The white hat seemed almost too large for his head, and he saw that the boy had a bit of a complexion problem.
“Yes?” he said, not even guessing what the young man wanted.
“Sir, I’m very sorry to bother you, but I don’t know what to do,” the Marine said, his voice quavering. “I haven’t been paid in over a month, and my wife and kid, well, we’re running out of money. They keep on saying it’s a computer problem and that it’ll straighten out, and well… I thought maybe if you knew, well… I’m sorry sir, I guess I shouldn’t have brought it up.”
“No, not at all,” he said, standing next to the young Marine, again feeling that little bit of acid guilt at the back of his throat. This man and his friends, they would go places, they could die because of a decision he did or didn’t make. Those were the kind of decisions he didn’t have back in Albany.
Politics was politics, and whether it was scratching backs or calling in favors for a highway bill for a state or a nation wasn’t that much different.
But this boy here… that was in another universe of difference, and it was those kinds of things that kept him awake nights. Nothing else. Not the fights with Congress or the media or his own people in the party. That was normal. But this… thee thought of all those young men and women, ready to risk everything, just because of something he thought was the right thing to do, or something his staff thought was the right thing to do, it really did haunt him.
Especially now.
“I’m sorry, son,” the President said. “I’ll see what I can do. I’ll get ahold of one of my assistants and straighten this right out.”
The Marine grinned and nodded. “Thank you, sir, thank you very much. And… Mister President?”
He had his hand on the French doors leading back into the White House. “Yes?”
“The Nimitz, sir,” the Marine said. “You did what you had to do. Just so you know.”
Nimitz. Sprat. Boss Key. He felt dizzy, shook his head. “Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate that. By the way, do you know anything about computers? I’ve got a problem with the terminal in my office.”
The Marine grinned, no longer so scared of speaking to the POTUS, it seemed like. “No, sir,” he said. “Could never figure those suckers out. And with the kids… never could really afford one.”
The President nodded and went back into the cool interior of the White House, again hearing the faint sound of gunfire. Nimitz. Sprat. Something was missing. He tried to think of it and he saw in his mind a series of meetings, and something General Corcoran had said, holding up a piece of cable. A glass war. Fiber optics. Sprat. And no, it wasn’t Sprat, that wasn’t the whole thing, it was…
Boss key.
He stood in the empty corridor. Where was everybody? And his stomach grumbled and he started walking again. It was almost lunch and he was damned if he was going to go back to his empty Oval Office and stare at the blank screen and wait for someone to bring him something to eat. If people were in training or out sick or taking the damn day off, he’d have to fend for himself, and he walked along, making sure that he would tell his worthless chief of staff that this was unacceptable and that if it ever happened again, that this damn White House ground to a halt again, then he would be out on his ass, scrambling for another job on Wall Street.
A Marine guard! Complaining to him about not being paid!
He went down a series of stairs to the service areas, where the real behind-the-scenes people worked. He had read that some of his predecessors could only find their way from the living quarters to the Oval Office and the Rose Garden and back to the living quarters, but he prided himself on knowing the ins and outs of everything around here. The mail room in the Executive Office Building, which handled the tens of thousands of letters he received each week, and the switchboard, where the staff there could literally connect him to everywhere in the world. Like the Majority Leader, or the President of Russia, or even the First Lady, out on one of her tours of…
Maria. He felt a warm flush of shame crawl up his back. He hadn’t thought about her all morning. She was out in San Diego doing some military hospital tour, and he knew he would have to try to reach her today, if the damn phones ever started working again. He smiled as he walked, remembering how Maria had stuck with him, through everything, and how she had helped him unwind after a brutal series of meetings or fundraisers. One of the many hazards of politics was the lovely and young talent that got tossed your way, and if you didn’t keep your pants buttoned, your career could collapse faster than you could say Gary Hart or Bill Clinton. But Maria had always managed to take the edge off, and he had a particularly fond memory of election night three years ago, when she had taken him to the hotel suite and delighted him with something particularly erotic involving silk scarves and strawberries, and she had nuzzled him later and said, “Get used to it, bud. That’s the very first of your Presidential balls.” And they had laughed for long, delicious minutes.
Even though the switchboard was having a bad day, he’d still have to try to call her somehow later, and then he went through a series of doors, still marveling at the emptiness of the place. Through an empty and dark dining area, he went through another series of double doors and heard voices, and saw two men inside one of the three White House kitchens. They were talking and packing boxes and if he didn’t know better, it looked like they were taking food supplies away from the kitchen. There was an older and a younger man, and the older man seemed in charge. Both were dressed in jeans and gray sweatshirts, and both hadn’t noticed when he came into the kitchen.
“So make sure when we get back that your mom’s got everything packed, cause we got a long drive ahead of us,” the older man said. “There won’t be time to waste, and I won’t relax until we get to the camp. Then we’ll lock all the doors and load up the shotguns and wait this out, ’til somebody—”
The President cleared his throat, and both men stared up at him. The older man looked shocked while his son merely glared at him. He looked at them both, standing behind a wooden counter, cardboard boxes about them, with canned goods and boxes of spices and other foods. The older man had a White House pass around his neck, while his son didn’t. The kitchen seemed to go on forever—stoves, walk-in refrigerators, pots and pans of every size hanging from overhead—and once he had come here just before a State dinner and was amazed at the organized chaos of the cooks and serving staff moving around in a jumble.
Now it was mostly dark, with only the three of them here. “Sir?” the older man finally said.
“You’re on the staff here, aren’t you?” he asked.
“One of the chefs,” he said, still holding a cardboard box full of canned goods, which he slowly put down.
“Well,” the President said. “I was wondering if I could have some lunch.”
“Lunch?” he said, surprised. “You want some lunch?”
“Well, it’s almost noon, isn’t it?”
The man smiled. “I guess it is, sir. Lunch coming right up.”
“Dad!” the young man protested. “We don’t have time!”
His father started moving around the kitchen with graceful moves, opening a refrigerator door and taking some covered dishes out, and then getting some utensils. “Sure we do, son. We have time to make lunch for the President. Trust me, we do. How does a turkey sandwich sound?”
“That would be fine,” he said, and he sat down on a kitchen stool. The older man went to work and the son just stared in anger over the counter at him, making him feel nervous, and the son spoke to his father. “Dad, how can you do this? Cousin Charlie, he was in that task force. How can you sit here and make him lunch?”
The older man gracefully sliced the sandwich in two, placed it on a plain white plate and slid it over. “Because it’s my job, that’s all. It may be my last day and all, but I’ll go out, doing my job. That’s what’s right. And now, if you excuse us, it’s time to leave. Mister President.”
“Thank you, thank you very much,” he said. He picked up the sandwich and looked at the two men, and even though his stomach was grumbling from hunger and that wretched breakfast he had earlier endured, he put his lunch down. He had to know. Had to.
“Can I ask you something, before you leave?” the President asked. The son was bustling around the kitchen, filling up empty cardboard boxes, stacking up cans of food and even putting some utensils to one side. His father nodded and said, “You may, sir, but we do have to get going. This boy’s mom runs a pretty strict ship.”
He was ashamed at what he had to say, but it had to be done. “Tell me, where is everybody?”
The man looked shocked. “You mean, you don’t know?”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “I’m sure I must have been briefed but I can’t remember. There must be some sort of training going on, right? Something that the entire staff has to attend. Is that right?”
For a moment the President thought something was wrong with the older man, for it seemed his eyes had welled up, but instead the man just quickly nodded and said in a gentle voice, “Yes, sir, you’re absolutely right. There’s a training session. On the new sexual harassment code.”
“And you’re here because you already took the training?”
Another quick nod. “That’s right, sir. I’m sure everyone will be back here tomorrow. Back where they belong.”
The President nodded in return, glad that he was at least getting to what in hell had been going on, and also rehearsing in his mind how he would strip off the outer skin of his chief of staff before this day was over, and he found himself asking another question.
“The food here,” he said. “Where are you taking it?”
There was a sharp rattle as the young man dropped a serving spoon, but the older man talked to him in a smooth voice, “We’re doing what you’ve told us to do, sir.”
“You are? And what’s that?”
“Donations, sir,” the man said. “You made it clear in your first month here, that we were to donate extra food items to the Washington soup kitchens. That’s just what we’re doing here. That’s all.”
“Oh,” he said, remembering that what the cook said was true. “You’re absolutely light. Thank you, I’m glad you’re doing it.” He picked up his plate and got up from his seat, and then turned and asked the older man one more question.
“Tell me, do you know anything about computers?”
The younger man glared over at him again, but his father was gently wiping down the counter.
“No. sir, I’m afraid I don’t. I never thought much of them.” The man looked up and stared at him with those moist brown eyes of his. “And what I did think was something you couldn’t print. They can do a lot of good but I always thought there was something wrong about the millions of the richest and brightest in this country, holing up in front of a screen and staring at nothing else, while their neighborhoods crumbled around them. Seems they didn’t care about the streets or jobs or anything else, so long as they could get in front of that screen. It was almost like an addiction. What was on the screen, the blogs, the stories, the games, seemed more real than anything else. But no one ever asked me, and look what happened. So there you go. Sir.”
The President nodded. “Well, thanks again for lunch,” and he started to walk back to the Oval Office, carrying his lunch in his hands.
Out in the corridors again—what was that phrase, corridors of power?—but there wasn’t much power here, just antiques and paintings and old furniture. By the doorway out to the garden the Marine guard was no longer there—probably out to lunch or taking a leak or something—but the three women were still in their office, and as he went by he looked in for a quick second. They were moving in odd fashion, eating with one hand and tapping at the keyboard with the other, and they didn’t even look up at him as he paused in the doorway. Strange.
Back in the Oval Office, he put the plate down on his desk and then got a glass of water from the adjoining bathroom. He ate the turkey sandwich in silence—it was quite good—and the water tasted better than he thought, washing it down. He looked out the window. Smoke was getting thicker.
He checked the clock. Twelve-fifty. That’s it. If the phone didn’t ring or if someone didn’t come by by one o’clock, then he was going to press the panic button by his desk, and the hell with the Post and the consequences.
He went to use the bathroom, and after washing his face and hands, he went back into the office, checked the clock, and stopped.
Voices. Outside.
He smiled. Finally!
He went through the door and into the outer offices, and a group of men were approaching, soldiers it looked like, and he stopped, hand on the doorknob. It must be more serious than he thought.
The soldiers came closer and one saw him and said something to another soldier, and they stopped, staring at him, and the President suddenly felt quite uneasy.
For the soldiers were heavily armed, were wearing unfamiliar uniforms, and they were all Chinese.
An older soldier stepped from the crowd, walking towards him, and the squad followed. The older one looked like an officer, with bright insignia and a holstered sidearm. One of the soldiers had a radio on his back and was talking into a handset. This wasn’t right, not at all, and then—
The Boss key quit, and it started to come back, like a little stream, trickling faster and faster, until it became a flood, overflowing the banks with water, overflowing the mind with information, with memories, my God, the memories. Sprat. Spratly Islands. Out in the South China Sea, a God-forsaken bunch of rocks that were claimed by Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and China, and the rocks weren’t worth shit except they were over rich deposits of oil, natural gas and other minerals. The Chinese started building a base there and started sinking fishermen that approached, claiming it was Chinese territorial waters, and Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and The New York Times and Washington Post started screaming bloody murder, and then…
“Mister President?” the Chinese officer asked, his English quite good, only slightly accented.
“Yes?” he said.
Then the pressures started, to do something, anything, and an election year was coming up and this was a good chance to show that no sir, he didn’t tailor everything for the polls or public opinion, and a naval task force—the aircraft carrier Nimitz and a half-dozen destroyers and cruisers—were sent to the Spratly Islands to show the flag. There were a bunch of scenarios about what might happen—everything from cat-and-mouse games with the task force, to an odd missile or two lobbed into Taiwanese waters, or maybe some dissidents from Hong Kong being shot in the back of the skulls in response to the approach of the task force—but no one had predicted what had actually happened.
The Chinese officer nodded. “That is good, sir. May we see you in your office?”
He couldn’t think of a thing to say.
Obliteration. That’s what happened. Two Long March missiles fired from Lop Nor and within ten minutes, the task force had been vaporized. The Nimitz and her aircraft and her sister ships and thousands of good men and women, turned into radioactive dust and water vapor. Then Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and The New York Times and Washington Post started screaming again, about losing all those lives and risking a nuclear war over a miserable pile of rocks, and his State Department and others tried to talk to the Chinese, tried to get some sort of agreement, some sort of armistice or arrangement, but the Chinese weren’t talking. They were doing. And the last news stories he had read had all said the same thing: the long wait was over. After hundreds of years of humiliation, the Middle Kingdom was re-taking its place in the world.
The President was now back in the Oval Office. He couldn’t remember walking inside. The Chinese officer spoke softly to his men and they trooped inside and then he said, “This is nothing personal, you realize.”
A lot of questions were bouncing around in his head and were fighting to come clear, but all he could do was nod to the officer. And remember.
A day after the task force disappeared, the computers across the country started failing from types of viruses and bugs that had never been seen before. There was a cabinet meeting with Corcoran and the others, and the general had been waving around that cable, a fiber optic cable. “We’re in a war, a looking glass war,” he had shouted, “and we’re losing!” Then, late at night, in his darkened office and staring at the computer screen, he had found a new game on the White House system. A computer game that involved colors and shapes and manipulating them just so, a game that seemed to suck him right in, and before he knew it, the morning sun was shining through the Oval Office windows.
And all the rest of the day, through meetings after meetings, all he could think about was returning to his screen and seeing which new level he could reach. And from the distant looks of his cabinet officers and others, he knew, in that little last part of him that was aware of what was going on, that so many others were now firmly within that hypnotic grasp.
“Excuse me,” he said to the officer.
“Yes?” the officer replied.
“Do any of you know anything about computers?”
The officer rattled off something to his troops and they laughed, and then he spoke to him and said, “A little. What is the problem?”
He gestured to his desk. “I can’t get mine to work. The screen’s blank.”
Another incomprehensible statement to his troops, and one of the soldiers sat at the keyboard, while another went down on his hands and knees underneath the desk, the desk that had once belonged to Johnson, and after a moment or two of adjustments and typing by the soldiers, the screen snapped into focus.
There! He smiled widely and scurried around to his desk, and the soldiers went away and he sat down and he knew there was so much to do, so many questions to ask, but the program was right there on his screen, ready for his fingers to caress the keys and manipulate the shapes, and he couldn’t wait.
Could not wait at all. He could not remember such desire, such hunger, such thirst…
The officer said something sharp again, and the soldiers backed away from the ornate desk. The President triggered the game program and looked over at the officer and asked, “What did you say right then? Why did they move back?”
The officer moved around, his hand at his side. “I told them to give you room. And I told them not to look at your screen.”
More questions, much more needed to be asked, but on his screen those wonderful moving and hypnotic shapes returned, the colors of green and magenta quite bright, and he had to get into the game, it had been so long, and he was just touching the keyboard when he dimly heard a sound, like a purse or pouch being snapped open.
And as the President of the United States tried to move up to the next level to the game, he ignored the feeling of something cold and metallic being pressed against the base of his skull.