Absolute Risk (14 page)

V
ice President Cooper Wallace fidgeted with a paperweight on his desk in the West Wing of the White House. He rubbed his thumb across the gold presidential seal, then tossed it onto his blotter. For a moment it seemed turdlike, hard and dried and petrified. He fantasized the president sneaking from office to office, dropping his pants, squatting, and leaving a marker behind, and the thought disgusted him. And the thought that he even had the thought disgusted him more.

Wallace recalled a psychology class he’d taken at the University of Kansas the year after he’d returned from his second tour in Vietnam. The professor was a left-wing freak, a former priest who’d left the Jesuit order to marry the soon-to-be ex-wife of a parishioner. And the class was nothing but a camouflaged attack on religion in general and Christianity in particular, which the professor portrayed as a contradictory mass of outward projections of internal repressions and delusions.

Wallace remembered walking into the lecture hall one morning, seeing quotes from Martin Luther that the professor had written in bold letters on the chalkboard:
I am like ripe shit and the world is a gigantic asshole. I have shit in the pants, and you can hang it around your neck and wipe your mouth with it.

He’d stopped in the descending aisle as he read the words, the acidic taste of bile rising in his throat. He’d swallowed hard, then dropped in the nearest seat and gritted his teeth and breathed in and out, steeling himself for what was to follow.

Then the professor launched off from the lines into a lecture about Freud and anality and the origins of Protestantism that Wallace didn’t hear—couldn’t hear—because all his senses had been obliterated by the sight of the words. He even had to feel for his legs after class was over so he could stand up, both his body and soul now too numbed even for rage.

That came later, during a night of wrenching, racing thoughts, at the end of which he resolved that someday, after he’d made his stake in Spectrum with his father, he’d enter politics and find a way to crush those lunatics and cleanse the universities.

But somehow that purpose had morphed over the following decades into something else. What that was, he now wasn’t certain, except it led him to the second most powerful office in the world—if he ignored the fact that it had no constitutional power at all. Even as president of the Senate he wasn’t his own man, for he had to follow the president’s orders.

Wallace glanced around at the blue couch and pale yellow chairs where he’d posed for photographs with the lesser leaders of the world.

Who the hell even knew where Comoros was? Or Burundi? Or Suriname? Or Tuvalu? Or whatever those piss-poor countries were called on the day their leaders came visiting. Collectively they had the gross national product of a Detroit pawnshop. Them coming to beg for money, putting their loyalty up for sale, first to the U.S., then to the Russians, then to the Chinese. Then to all three of the world powers at the same time.

He remembered staring at the wristwatch of one of their prime ministers, a crook who’d graduated from Missouri State, working his way through school handing out towels in the gym, then spending twenty years in his country’s civil service, and finally showing up in the White House wearing a hundred-thousand-dollar Rolex.

And the man kept glancing at it as if taunting Wallace, telling him that if the U.S. wanted to buy his country’s loyalty, it would have to make the down payment to him first.

But it didn’t work because they both knew that as China had done throughout Africa, the resources of his country could be bought for pocket change, just like Sudanese oil, and Zambian copper, and Nigerian natural gas.

A light knock on Wallace’s door pulled him from the reveries of the past and onto the obstacle course of the present and toward the president, who was standing by with the starter pistol.

Wallace could see the distant finish line, for it was always in the same place: Tuesday after the first Monday in November—but he hadn’t yet figured out how to get there.

President Thomas McCormack was sitting at his desk when Wallace walked into his study next to the Oval Office. He was alone, reaching for a sheet emerging from his printer. A briefing book lay open before him, the pages both tabbed with blue labels and tagged with yellow Post-it notes. As Wallace sat down on the couch next to the desk, he could see that the writing on the notes was the president’s. From that alone Wallace concluded that whatever course the president wanted him to run, he’d designed and constructed it himself, and wanted only two people on the field.

Wallace didn’t feel like waiting for the president to meander his way to the issue. Every substantive conversation between them traveled the same route, one that began with their six years serving together, the closeness of their wives, the perfecting of the right and right-center coalition among voters that had won them the White House twice. And ending with self-congratulations on their developing the center coalition in the House and Senate that got more of their own legislation through Congress than any president since Lyndon Johnson.

The president had spent his prepolitical career as a lawyer and never lost the urge or the talent to lay a foundation for the evidence he intended to offer, even if it was obvious.

“Mr. President—”

McCormack shook his head. “This isn’t a Mr. President moment. It’s personal. Me to you. It’s not your political soul that I’m concerned about. It’s something else.” He tapped the binder with his forefinger. “And I’ll shred this thing after we’re done.”

Wallace felt his body stiffen. He hadn’t a clue what was contained in those pages, but he already felt stripped naked, cold and shivering. His mind raced through every misstep and indiscretion in his career, from a fraternity party brawl when he was twenty to his wife’s recent second-guessing his appearance with Manton Roberts.

And the president’s promise to destroy whatever evidence was in those pages felt less like a guarantee of liberation, and more like a garrote around his balls.

McCormack had issued the most widespread records preservation order in the history of the office. There was no e-mail, no confidential memo, no scrap of paper that he hadn’t ordered preserved. The joke at the National Archives was that they still hadn’t figured out a method for storing his unarticulated thoughts.

“Is this about National Pledge Day?” Wallace asked.

“I didn’t know—”

“That’s the point. You should’ve known. You’ve lent the stature of your office—of this administration—to an event you couldn’t control.” McCormack threw up his hands. “Jesus Christ, man, you let them turn the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ into a marching anthem for intolerance.”

“I didn’t let—”

“Then you consented with your silence. It stands in American history as a symbol, an abolitionist song about liberty for everyone, not the liberty of a few to impose their religious beliefs on everyone else.”

McCormack pounded the desktop with his fist.

“Next to the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and ‘God Bless America,’ it’s the most important song in our history. And those sons of bitches have stolen it.”

“Mr. President, I think that overstates what happened.”

Ignoring Wallace’s defensive stab, McCormack reached for the sheet he’d removed from the printer as Wallace had entered the office.

“Which pledge do you suppose they intend to use,” McCormack asked. “This one?”

Wallace took it in his hands. It was marked, “Confidential. From the Desk of Rev. Manton Roberts,” and contained a single paragraph.

“Go ahead,” McCormack said, “read it.”

Wallace read the words to himself.

“No. Aloud.”

Wallace glanced around the room, eyes hesitating on the heat vent and the computer and clock on the desk.

“Don’t worry,” McCormack said. “The place isn’t bugged. Go ahead. Aloud.”

Wallace shook his head. “I can’t say this.”

“I didn’t think so, but you put yourself at the front of a crowd of seventy-five thousand people who did before you arrived.”

McCormack raised his chin toward a framed American flag on the wall above the printer.

“Have you even read what our party platform says about the flag?”

Wallace shrugged. He was surprised that McCormack had paid attention to the platform. In both elections, he’d neither run on it nor run from it. He’d just ignored it.

McCormack flipped to the front of his binder and turned it toward Wallace.

“This is our position. You don’t need to read it aloud.”

“Do you realize that our party wants people sent to the federal penitentiary for making a necktie out of the thing, and you let these traitors paint a goddamn black cross on it? ”

Wallace pushed the binder away.

“That’s different,” Wallace said. “Desecration means depriving something of its sacred character. This is a Christian nation. Adding the cross confirms it by combining two sacred symbols.”

“Don’t play word games.”

“Anyway it’s free speech.”

“Wrong again. Not according to the Supreme Court. Flag desecration isn’t speech at all. Rehnquist said that it’s no more than a grunt or a roar, no more protected by the First Amendment than a fart in an elevator.”

Wallace had no answer.

They sat in silence for a few moments, then McCormack leaned back in his chair and said, “I don’t understand what’s happening to you. If you’d run Spectrum with the lack of insight and consistency you’ve been displaying, you’d still be selling Bibles and Jesus dashboard ornaments out of your father’s garage.”

Wallace’s face flushed. “I didn’t come over here—”

McCormack held up his palm. “Save it. I’m not done.” He hunched forward, squared the binder in front of him, and turned toward the middle. “Have you read what Manton Roberts has been writing and preaching for the last twenty years? The guy is a goddamn fascist. Listen to this:

“At whatever the cost?” McCormack asked, now glaring at Wallace. “What the devil does that mean? And how many people are supposed to die for the revolution?”

Wallace shook his head. “That’s not what they’re saying. They’re not 1960s Marxist revolutionaries trying to take power by any means necessary.”

“Really? How about this:

“And who are those million? Remember what he said about 9/11 and Katrina: They were punishments for homosexuality and pornography and for barring prayer from the schools.”

Wallace nodded, for he couldn’t deny that those were the claims Roberts had made.

“How does that not make Roberts’s God a terrorist? Killing both the innocent and the guilty for the alleged sins of a few. How is Roberts’s God any different than a Sunni maniac who plants a bomb in a Baghdad market killing and maiming Sunni and Shia alike? ”

McCormack jabbed a finger at another quote. “And this is the hymn he uses to end every rally:

“Is there something about the words ‘battle,’ ‘enemies,’ ‘slain,’ and ‘glory’ that I’m missing? “ McCormack asked, his tone declaring a challenge, rather than posing a question.

“That’s just hyperbole,” Wallace said. “It’s all metaphorical.”

“There’s not a goddamn thing metaphorical about murder. This is outright treason.”

McCormack flipped to another page.

“And as far as the rest of the world is concerned? Open your ears to this one: ‘We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.’ A goddamn Christian jihad. That’s what they want.”

The president slammed the binder closed.

“You need to start listening to what these people are saying. This isn’t like the fine print in a mortgage, it’s right out there. You want to be president in two years, but something could happen to me, and you’d be sitting in this chair tomorrow. And the piper has to be paid. Manton Roberts could just as easily have a hundred million people stopping in their tracks and calling for your impeachment as saying the Pledge of Allegiance.”

Wallace felt himself swallow. An embarrassing, involuntary display … but of what? Weakness? Doubt? Fear?

“I’m going to leave you in here with this material,” McCormack said, rising to his feet. “You may not take what it says literally, but tens of millions do. At least know what he’s saying and who he’s appealing to. If there’s another terrorist attack or if unemployment spikes higher, despair will drive people to him in herds. Unthinking, instinct-driven herds.”

McCormack paused and bit his lip. Finally he said, “Have you been following what’s been happening in China since the earthquake?”

Wallace nodded.

“We’re not immune to that happening here.” McCormack looked away, brows furrowed. “And that’s what people like Manton Roberts are counting on—he’d even drive the country into the ground if he thought it would bring his Christian revolution closer.”

McCormack looked back at Wallace.

“Someone once said that revolutionaries don’t seize power, they just pick it up like a fumbled football lying on the field. We need to make sure it doesn’t slip out of the hands of the people elected to carry it—and that’s you and me.”