Directive 51 (50 page)

The only sound was Pendano’s labored breathing, and Graham Weisbrod saying, “Easy, easy, easy,” as he sat on the floor, cross-legged, holding his old student’s head in his hands. Scott Jevons cut Pendano’s shirt and pants away, finding the small wound in the front and the big one in the back, trying to find a way to stop the terrible flow of blood.

“Prof?”

“Yes, Roger.”

“I don’t feel good.”

“You’re hurt. We’re taking care of you.”

“It hurts.” Pendano’s body went limp.

The old professor and the young Secret Service agent were still sitting silently with the dead man when a voice from downstairs proclaimed, “This is Major Block, commanding the National Unity Guard. Surrender the former president or—”

“He’s dead,” Graham said loudly. “One of those rounds you were firing up through the floor got him. We won’t shoot if you come up.”

The National Unity Guard did not look military or even at all professional, to Graham’s eye, but there were certainly a lot of them; probably Shaunsen had promised them all good pay and fast promotions.
Probably hired more of them from the crowd they swept up during the riots—that would be Shaunsen, all over.

After a while, Shaunsen came in, squeezing through his guards, with several young aides in tow. The Acting President looked hard, once, at the body.

Then he told the NUG behind him, “Get the Chief Justice over here, right now. And Kowalski, too. And a doctor to confirm the death.”

Weisbrod said, “Sir, this is a crime scene. We don’t even know officially who fired the shot, or on whose orders, or—”

“That’ll be enough, Weisbrod. I’m going to fire you right after the swearing-in. Meanwhile, you might as well come along and be in your last Cabinet picture. Make any trouble, though, and you’re going straight to jail.”

They hauled Weisbrod to his feet. His shoes, socks, and trouser legs were soaked with the dead president’s blood, and he could still feel the warmth of Roger Pendano’s head where he had cradled it on his thigh.

Shaunsen was bellowing orders to go get the Chief Justice, go get the Speaker, wasn’t there a lawyer in the house who could swear him in, or did it have to be a judge? No matter, get him a damn judge this minute.

Weisbrod let them cuff him and hustle him awkwardly down the stairs and into a chair in the Secret Service break room, with a dozen or so captured Secret Service. They weren’t allowed to talk. He lost himself in trying to trace the patterns in the carpet.

He heard a great deal of running and whispering in the corridors, and occasional shouting, but he didn’t bother to sort out any words. Eventually six NUGs came in and let the Secret Service and Weisbrod have some water, and uncuffed each in turn long enough to go to the bathroom; the light from the windows suggested it was late afternoon, and his growling stomach agreed.
This is probably not the time to ask for a sandwich, all the same
. Weisbrod thought about how many reasons Shaunsen might have to keep him alive and came up with zero.
Probably they’ll wait till dark, but maybe not even that long.

Weisbrod started awake. He had no idea how he had fallen asleep. The NUG who had kicked his leg to wake him also gave him a drink and uncuffed him to piss, then recuffed him and led him down the hall and into the Oval Office. The Secretaries of State, Defense, and Treasury were bunched together in the corner, all looking embarrassed. The Attorney General stood apart from the others not meeting anyone’s eye. Chief Justice Lopez was quarreling loudly with three presidential aides, and it wasn’t clear whether she was a guest or a prisoner, but it was
very
clear that she thought she had been tricked into being there. There were more National Unity Guards than he could easily count.

Shaunsen looked around the room with a satisfied smile. “Now,” he said, “first of all, let’s establish that the President of the United States is dead. Dr. Brunner?”

The woman who stepped forward was small and square-built, with white hair and deep lines on her face. She shrugged as she read a statement out loud that she had examined the body, determined that it was Roger Pendano, and determined that he was indeed dead, the cause of death being a gunshot wound through the lower abdomen which had, among other things, torn the abdominal aorta, leading to an uncontrollable hemorrhage and death from loss of blood.

“Good,” Shaunsen said, “Now according to Amendment Twenty-five, U.S. Constitution, as well as Article II, and the Succession Act of 1947—”

Graham knew instantly by the authority in the voice. Handcuffed, all he could do was fall over on his side. He caught a glimpse of a man leaping over him. The White House echoed with gunfire and low whumps and thuds that Weisbrod assumed must be some other weapon; from Weisbrod’s perspective, the Oval Office filled up with the boots and camo pant legs of a swarm of soldiers.

Whatever was going on in the rest of the White House, it sounded like it was happening pretty fast.
The National Unity Guard were mostly street-kid activists and Democratic Party organizers deputized and given guns, probably their most seasoned fighters were some old gangbangers. It took more than a hundred of them to overrun about twenty Secret Service,
Weisbrod calculated,
and they had surprise
and
the Acting President on their side. They’re no match for these professionals—wonder where we got them?

“Your attention please,” a voice said. Everyone turned and stared at Speaker Kowalski, who stood in the doorway with Will Norcross. As Kowalski and Norcross came in, Heather O’Grainne popped out to flank them on one side and Cameron Nguyen-Peters on the other.

“As of 3:38 P.M. today,” Kowalski said, “Acting President Peter Shaunsen is under impeachment by a unanimous vote of the House of Representatives. I have a copy of the bill of impeachment with me to present to Chief Justice Lopez. And since both law and the Constitution prohibit anyone under impeachment from succeeding to the office of the President, he is not and cannot be the President.”

Will Norcross looked more like a confused junior clerk than ever; his voice was soft but firm. “Furthermore, as of 4:12 P.M. this afternoon, I have been elected President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and at the request and direction of the NCCC, acting under Directive 51 to locate and emplace the succeeding president of the United States—”

“If I have to,” Shaunsen said, “I will tie the whole government in knots for the next hundred years. I was not under impeachment at the time of the President’s death, I was still Acting President and had not resigned my position as Senate President Pro Tempore—”

Lopez cleared her throat. Her expression was surprisingly gentle but left no room for questioning, like a mother saying
absolutely not
to a recalcitrant child. “If I have anything to do with it, every case you bring will be dismissed out of hand and at once. As for grounds, you may refer to such doctrines as paramount national survival and the phrases ‘If the President is suspected’ to be found in Madison’s notes on impeachment. Less officially, the game is over.”

In ten minutes, Norcross was sworn in, and Heather had had the distinct pleasure of being the arresting officer for a former president (or acting president, at least). Shaunsen, demanding to speak to “the unbiased national media,” was taken to an FBI holding area; they uncuffed Graham and found him a chair, a cup of hot coffee, and a sandwich in a kitchen alcove. “Never mind feeding me,” he said to Heather and Cameron. “I can’t eat right now anyway.
That
was a photo finish. Where’d you get the troops from, and how’d you get them here so fast?”

“It’s the Old Guard,” Cameron said. “First Battalion, Third Infantry Regiment. The same outfit President Washington would have called for if he’d had a riot or a coup attempt to cope with. The battalion has a company at Fort McNair and the rest at Fort Myer. As soon as you and Heather started for the White House—since nowadays that’s a two-hour trip—I had our signalers sending to the semaphore station on top of the Pentagon, and they relayed to both McNair and Myer. Just a precaution at that point, because I thought we might need them, and it takes a while to start four companies of infantry moving, and even longer for them to walk as far as they did today.

“Meanwhile, like every really paranoid or crazed president we’ve had since World War II, Shaunsen had the White House bugged everywhere, as much as he could with the nanoswarm and biotes eating the bugs. Lenny had brought in some talent to hack the White House listening system, so we knew when you went in to see Pendano, and we heard Scott’s call to the Secret Service, and this guy Block, the National Unity Goon in Chief, yelling ‘Plan J
now
!’ ”

“What’s Plan J?” Heather asked.

“The National Unity Guard code message for ‘kill or capture all the Secret Service you see, and then go upstairs and kill President Pendano.’ ”

Heather shuddered. “That’s why the Secret Service got clobbered—they walked out into the halls to secure them and probably most of their deaths were in the first half minute, and by then they were down to a few guys trapped in rooms.”

“Surprise wins a lot of things,” Cameron said. “It did for us too. The National Unity Guard didn’t set much of a watch. I think they were all busy figuring out which ones of them would be getting which patronage plums for having been such good little thugs. We pretty much just walked openly to our assembly point on the GWU campus, put the intel we had together, sent a runner over to Congress, and we were ready to go as soon as Kowalski and Norcross were ready. All standard Army doctrine: pre-position overwhelming force and grab the whole show all at once.”

“So we have a functioning president again. Is it bone stupid or what that Kowalski couldn’t have been the president all along?”

Cam shrugged. “The Constitution was intended to be hard to change—and we’ve still done things as stupid as Prohibition. When it only rains every hundred years, it’s a miracle that any hole in the roof ever gets fixed. There’s at least twenty little bombs waiting to go off buried in our Constitution, and if I ran Congress, I’d appoint the equivalent of a bylaws committee, put through a Cleanup Amendment, and stump the states for it like a madman. But that’s my weird perspective; it’s my job to worry about all those little Constitutional bombs, and it’s the nature of things that they hardly ever go off. But since you asked, that’s what I’d do if it were up to me.”

“If anything
more
goes wrong,” Weisbrod pointed out, “it
might
be up to you.”

Cameron grimaced. “Don’t even
speak
of it. The NCCC office has just been as important as it ever needs to be, and Directive 51 is now safely back in the attic of history. They can dust it off sometime after 2200, if they’re too stupid to fix the Constitution before then.”

Graham nodded. “This is like watching the magician show you the trick bottom and saw slot in the box. I take it there was no problem explaining the matter to Kowalski.”

“In that briefcase he was actually carrying two sets of papers—one for if Pendano was alive and the other for if Pendano was dead. We had a runner ready to go back to the Senate; they were sitting there waiting to vote for cloture, and then convict Shaunsen without debate. We had him. It looked scary but nobody was getting sawed in half.”

Graham Weisbrod cupped his hands around his coffee and savored the warmth, the smell, and the last wonderful sips. “Nobody
vital
, you mean. You’d have gotten Norcross in and Shaunsen out, somehow, pretty soon. But speaking as the guy in the box . . . well, I still think that was a little close.”

Alpha Company was walking back to McNair that evening, which would be most of the way back to St. Elizabeth’s, so Heather, Graham, and Cameron traveled with them. At the Capitol Street bridge, five men volunteered to escort them the rest of the way.

On the bridge, looking out into the dark city with just a few flaring lights here and there, and the many campfires in the distance, Heather asked, “Graham, did you really think they’d kill you? I mean, I know they killed Roger Pendano, but that was a stray round—”

“Well. Um, well. Uh, for the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about early Imperial Rome. Isn’t that just like an old prof? But I have been. Just consider this: If you figure Roger Pendano was effectively President again as soon as he signed that note for you to take to Kowalski, then so far, today, we’ve had four presidents—Shaunsen, Pendano, Shaunsen again, and now Norcross.”

“That’s pretty Roman,” Cam agreed.

“Well,” Weisbrod said, “what used to happen to the people close to the emperors, during the power struggles?”

Cameron said, “Hunh. Yes, I see your point. And look right here and now. In the capital city that supposedly governs the continent, three of the key powers behind the throne—who just put the fourth leader of the day on the throne, I like that touch, Graham—can’t walk home at night without an escort of armed men.”

“Interesting,” Graham said. “I had that Roman thought, the first time I can remember having it, right here on this bridge. And look around you. Doesn’t it
look
like the Dark Ages?”

The wind picked up, and the handful of little flames in the darkness all danced and bobbed. They were glad to get off the bridge, and back to St. Elizabeth’s, but all of them lay awake that night.

Norcross had set the meeting for 11:00 A.M. and specifically ordered them all not to schedule anything before it. He’d said he’d make sure civilization didn’t fall apart while they caught up on sleep. It seemed like a very unfortunate phrasing.