President Elect. Jack Mars

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      They had flown up here from Louisville this afternoon. His boss owned this… what would you call it? An apartment? Sure, an apartment with ten bedrooms, twelve bathrooms, and half a dozen offices with a conference room and a staff dining area. It took up an entire floor in one of the most storied and most expensive hotels in the world. This hotel was where American history happened. This was where John F. Kennedy took his many afternoon trysts. This was the place.

      They would spend the night here. They had important business here in DC early tomorrow morning.

      Gerry breezed down a hallway, slapped his key card against a sensor, and passed into the living quarters. The front sitting room was furnished in opulent old-world style, like the drawing room in a Victorian mansion.

      A man with white hair stood at a tall window, the curtains pulled aside. He stared out at the night. The man wore a three-piece suit despite the fact that he was home and had no intention of going out. The open-throated dress shirts were a shuck, of course. The man liked to play dress-up as much as anyone.

      He held a martini in his hand. The martini glass looked tiny. The hands were the thing – despite the man’s elegant dress, and his obvious wealth, he had the big gnarled hands of someone who had grown up doing manual labor, and lots of it. The hands said: What’s wrong with this picture?

      It was a raw night in the nation’s capital, and the wind howled outside the window, just a little bit. The old man stared out at the backdrop of the great urban sprawl and the lights of the city. Gerry knew that even after all these decades the country boy inside the old man was dazzled by city lights.

      “How goes the war?” Jefferson Monroe, President-elect of the United States, said in his soft Southern lilt.

      “Beautiful,” Gerry said, and he meant it. “She’s on the ropes and she doesn’t know what to do. Her statement today makes that clear. She’s not going to vacate the Presidency? It plays right into our hands. She’s isolating herself – public opinion is going to go our way. If we play it right, we might be able to get her out of there sooner rather than later. I think we want to ramp up the pressure – get her to hand over the Presidency early, long before any voter fraud investigation concludes. Then we cancel the investigation ourselves.”

      The old man turned from the tall window. “Is there any precedent for a President handing over power early?”

      Gerry the Shark shook his head. “No.”

      “Then how do we do it?”

      Now Gerry smiled. “I have a few ideas.”

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      6:47 p.m. Eastern Standard Time

      The Oval Office

      The White House, Washington DC

      She was alone when they showed Luke into the room.

      For a moment, he thought she might be asleep. She sat in the sitting area, slumped in one of the armchairs. She looked like a broken rag doll, or a high school kid showing contempt for the teacher by slouching.

      The new Resolute Desk loomed behind her. The heavy drapes were pulled, blocking the tall windows. On the floor, around the edge of the oval carpet, there was an inscription printed:

      The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself – Franklin Delano Roosevelt

      The words went all the way around the carpet, finishing right where they began.

      She wore blue slacks and a white dress shirt. Her jacket was hung on the back of one of the chairs. Her shoes were off and lying askew on the carpet.

      Despite her posture, her eyes were sharp and alive. They watched him.

      “Hi, Susan,” he said.

      “Did you watch my press conference?” she said.

      He shook his head. “I stopped watching TV over a year ago. I feel a lot better since I did. You should try it.”

      “I told the American people I’m not going to step down.”

      Luke nearly laughed. “I bet that’s going over well. What happened? You like the job so much you don’t want to give it up? I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.”

      A small smile appeared on her face. The smile, barely there, reminded him of why she had once been a supermodel. She was beautiful. Her smile could light up a room. It could light up the sky.

      “They stole the election.”

      “Of course they did,” he said. “Now you’re going to steal it back. That sounds like a plan.” He paused. Then he told her what he honestly thought. “Listen, I think you’re better off without this job. Now they won’t have Susan Hopkins to kick around anymore. Let them find out how bad it is without you. They’ll beg you to come back.”

      She shook her head, the smile growing brighter. “I don’t think it works like that.”

      “I don’t think so either,” he said.

      She shook her head. A long exhale escaped from her.

      “Where have you been, Luke Stone? You should have stuck around. We had a lot of fun in here, once the chaos died down a little. We did a lot of good. And you were going to teach me to shoot guns once upon a time. Remember?”

      He shrugged. “Yeah. You wanted to shoot the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. I remember. But I haven’t fired a gun in nine months. I was going to the range once in a while, trying to keep my skills up. Then I decided why bother? I don’t want to shoot anyone. And even if one day I have to, I feel pretty sure it’ll come back to me.”

      “Just like riding a bicycle?” she said.

      He smiled. “Or falling off of one.”

      She sat up and indicated the chair across from her. “You really don’t know what’s going on?”

      Luke settled down in the chair. It was an upright chair, neither comfortable nor uncomfortable. “I heard a few rumblings in the distance. The new guy is hard right. He doesn’t like the Chinese. He’s going to bring the manufacturing jobs back. Not sure how he’s going to do that – fire all the robots? Either way, if that’s what people want…”

      “Ignorance is bliss, I guess,” Susan said.

      “Not exactly bliss, but – ”

      “The man’s a fascist,” she said. “He’s a billionaire, a robber baron, who has funded white supremacist groups for decades, apparently even when he was in the Senate. He plans to go to war with China on his first day in office, possibly with tactical nuclear strikes, although I’m not sure how many people really believe that. He wants to build security fences and walls around Chinatowns in American cities. His remarks suggest hatred for minorities, gay people, disabled people, anyone who disagrees with him, as well as contempt for the independence of the judicial branch of government.”

      Luke wasn’t sure what to think about all that. He had been out of the loop for a long time. He trusted Susan, and he could tell that she believed what she was saying. But he had trouble believing it himself. He had served in the military under conservative СКАЧАТЬ