Primary Threat. Джек Марс

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      “Mr. President, your thoughts?”

      Clement Dixon was too old for this. That was his major thought.

      He sat at the head of the table, and all eyes were on him. Over a long career in politics, he had learned to read eyes, and facial expressions, with the best of them. And what his face reading told him was this: the high-powered people looking at the white-haired gentleman presiding over this emergency meeting had all reached the same conclusion as Dixon himself.

      He was too old.

      He had been a Freedom Rider since the very first ride, May 1961, risking his life to help desegregate the South. He had been one of the young speakers on the streets during the Chicago Police Riot of August 1968, and had been tear-gassed in the face. He had spent thirty-three years in the House of Representatives, first sent there by the good people of Connecticut in 1972. He had served as Speaker of the House twice, once during the 1980s, then again up until just a couple of months ago.

      Now, at the age of seventy-four, he suddenly found himself President of the United States. It was a role he had never wanted or imagined for himself. No, wait. Scratch that—when he was young, a teenager, early twenties, he had pictured himself one day as President.

      But the America he had imagined himself President of was not this America. This was a divided place, embroiled in two publicly acknowledged foreign wars, as well as half a dozen clandestine “black operations”—operations so black, apparently, that the people overseeing them were reluctant to describe them to their superiors.

      “Mr. President?”

      In his youth, he had never imagined himself President of an America still utterly dependent on fossil fuels for its energy needs, where twenty percent of the population lived in poverty, and another thirty percent teetered on the verge of it, where millions of children went hungry every night, and more than a million people had nowhere to live. A place where racism was still alive and well. A place where millions of people could not afford to get sick, and people often had to decide between taking their prescription medications and eating. This was not the America he had dreamed of leading.

      This was a nightmare America, and suddenly he was in charge of it. A man who had spent his whole life standing up for what he believed was right, and fighting for the highest ideals, now found himself crawling through the muck. This job offered nothing but trade-offs and gray areas, and Clement Dixon was right in the middle of it all.

      He had always been a religious man. And these days he found himself thinking of how Christ had asked God to let the cup pass him by. Unlike Christ, however, his place on this cross was not pre-ordained. A series of mishaps and bad decisions had brought Clement Dixon to this place.

      If President David Barrett, a good man whom Dixon had known for many years, hadn’t been murdered, then no one would have looked to Vice President Mark Baylor to take his place.

      And if Baylor hadn’t been implicated by a mountain of circumstantial evidence in that murder (not enough to charge him, but more than enough to see him disgraced and banished from public life), then he wouldn’t have resigned, leaving the Presidency to the Speaker of the House.

      And if Dixon himself hadn’t agreed last year to spend just one more term as Speaker, despite his advanced age…

      Then he wouldn’t have found himself in this position.

      Even if he’d just had the strength of will to turn the damn thing down… Just because the Line of Succession dictated that the Speaker assume the job, didn’t mean he had to accept the job. But too many people had fought for too long to see a man like Clement Dixon, the fiery standard bearer of classical liberal ideals, become President. As a practical matter, he could not walk away.

      So here he was—tired, old, limping through the hallways of the West Wing (yes, limping—the new President of the United States had arthritis in his knees and a pronounced limp), overwhelmed by the sheer weight of the thing entrusted to him, and compromising his ideals at every turn.

      “Mr. President? Sir?”

      President Dixon was sitting in the egg-shaped Situation Room. Somehow, the room reminded him of a TV show from the 1960s—the show was called Space: 1999. It was a silly Hollywood producer’s idea of what the future must look like. Stark, empty, inhuman, and designed for maximum use of space. Everything was sleek and sterile, and exuded zero charm.

      Large video screens were embedded in the walls, with a giant screen at the far end СКАЧАТЬ