The Race (22 page)

"What about Larkin?"

Ruskin waggled his head, smiling again. "Sam personifies how Christy's screwing Marotta in the South. Before Christy came in, Mississippi was in Rob's pocket—you never had the proverbial prayer. But Christy's brand of Jesus is hot down there, and that gives Sam an excuse to play the same waiting game as Blair and Costas." Rustin's smile broadened. "Sam's hopelessly corrupt, of course.
So
corrupt he'd even sell his votes to you for the chance to be your VP."

"Forget it," Corey said. "I don't want a vice president whose desk is jammed with bourbon bottles and hundred-dollar bills."

"Oh, Sam knows that—he's too gifted a crook to be a fool. But he's looking at all three of you, and thinking one of you will need him in the end.

"You've all got weaknesses. In
this
world, Christy's got no qualifications whatsoever to be president. Marotta's too calculating—he's been running for president since the womb. As for you ..."

Corey smiled. "Suspiciously irreligious, too unpredictable for comfort, morally unfit ..."

"Don't depress me. Let's say 'too independent' and leave it at that."

"So," Corey said, "why don't we divert the plane to Cabo San Lucas? I liked it there."

Corey lay his head back; even as he missed Lexie, he also worried about what might happen to her if the campaign become as brutal as it could. "A race like this," he said at last, "will test all three of us."

"A race like this," Rustin answered, "will
define
all three of you. Right now, Christy's God's candidate and Marotta's the establishment front-runner. That makes you the insurgent.

"Your job is to create excitement, goad Marotta into mistakes, and make Christy look like the vanity candidate he is." In a tone that commingled urgency and challenge, Rustin continued: "We're throwing you into one town meeting after another, without a script, answering any fucking question the voters want to ask. It'll be political guerrilla theater—Marotta wouldn't dare do that, and the mob back there in steerage will eat it up."

Corey stood. "Speaking of the mob," he said dryly, "I'm going back to hang with them. They'll 'eat up' town meetings to a point. But they are absolutely certain that the average citizen won't ask the probing questions
they
would. So here's what we're going to do.

"Put all the reporters on the bus with me—even the Rohr News guy. No off-the-record stuff: they can ask me anything they want, anytime they want, and I'll answer."

Rustin's eyes narrowed. "Let's not get carried away."

"You want coverage, Blake? With any luck, Marotta will start looking like a hostage in Magnus Price's soundproof bubble. What's he going to do if Al Qaeda comes around again? Call Magnus?" Corey smiled. "The press hates being handled—just like I do. They'll forgive me the occasional screwup before they'll forgive Marotta if it looks like he's hiding from them. That's when the image of him peeking around the door becomes indelible."

Rustin pursed his lips. "Just win New Hampshire."

Corey grinned. "Don't worry. When I become president and they write tomes about your inspired strategy, you'll be a hero, too."

BY THE FIFTH town meeting, both the crowds and the traveling press had swollen in size, and Corey's unscripted encounters had become political events.

Microphone in hand, he stood alone on the platform of a spired church in Freedom, New Hampshire—which, Corey learned to his amusement, had acquired its name not in the Revolutionary War, but when the town had seceded from Effingham Falls in the storied conflict between partial- and total-immersion baptism. "I'm completely unprincipled," Corey told them cheerfully. "In Effingham Falls, I'm partial. But in Freedom I'm totally underwater."

The audience laughed appreciatively. Though it was a weeknight and heavy snow was falling, the pews were crowded to overflowing, and latecomers stood at the side or rear, a few sitting cross-legged in the aisles. Corey looked at the faces—older couples, teenagers, parents who'd brought their kids out to see a prospective president—and saw a bracing combination of curiosity, flinty skepticism, and simple goodwill.

A stern-faced man stood and asked, "What's your position on the war in Iraq?"

"That it was a mistake," Corey answered bluntly. "I'm sorry to say this. But we invaded the wrong country, and the results have been tragic—lost American and Iraqi lives, and the erosion of our capacity to deal with crises far more pressing.

"We need more soldiers in Afghanistan. We need to keep dealing with North Korea, which now has nuclear weapons, and to deal with Iran, which may have them very soon." Pausing, Corey added pointedly, "Senator Marotta says that it's better to be respected than loved. In too many parts of the world, we're neither."

"So you don't support the president?"

Briefly, Corey considered his response. "I support his goal of making us safer. I know he firmly believed that invading Iraq would do so.

"But a mistake made in good faith is still a mistake. One measure of leadership is the ability to acknowledge and correct mistakes. I promise you that, as president, I will learn from mine."

At the rear, reporters scribbled furiously or held out tape recorders. A young man Rustin had identified as Magnus Price's spy captured Corey's answers on a videocam. "Reverend Christy," a plump, fortyish woman asked, "says that abstinence-only programs are the sole way to stop teen pregnancy. What do you think?"

At the corner of his eye, Corey saw Rustin frown with worry. "Abstinence is best," Corey said. "That's what we should teach our children. But if Bob Christy truly believes that abstinence alone will stop teen pregnancy and the spread of AIDS—not simply in Freedom, but all across America—then I hope he's praying overtime."

This elicited a few dry chuckles. "That brings me to abortion," Corey said briskly. "One way to lower the abortion rate is to stop unwanted pregnancies any way we can. I'm also for doing everything we can to encourage adoption—it's not enough to love children until they're born. But there aren't a lot of adoptive parents asking for drug-addicted babies born with HIV.

"That's the reality. While we work to make the world as we would like it to be, we have to deal with the world as it is."

This, to Corey's surprise, elicited brief but fervent applause. He pointed toward a somber-faced woman who had stood while others around her clapped. "Senator Marotta," she said, "is a family man who cares about family values. You're divorced. If you become president, will you marry Lexie Hart?"

Smiling, Corey shrugged and rolled his eyes, a pantomime of discomfiture that drew chuckles from those closest to the stage. "I'll have to get back to you," he said. "My people are still polling that one.

"Seriously," he said over the continued laughter, "that question's a little premature. Unless you know something I don't—that Ms. Hart would actually have me. After all, she's smart, compassionate, talented, deeply concerned for our country, and, speaking personally, not only the most beautiful woman I've ever met, but one of the best people I know. So if there's a reason not to marry her, I don't know what it is."

"Then you disagree with the Reverend Christy that your relationship sets a bad example?"

Corey saw that the audience, quite suddenly, was watching him even more closely. "Yes," he said calmly. "It's not easy finding the right person at any age. If voters want to take time out from Iraq, terrorism, the economy, global warming, and failing schools to think about Lexie and me, I hope it's to wish us well."

At the end of the evening, most people in the audience were on their feet, applauding.

After Corey and his staff boarded the bus, they and a growing pool of reporters sped down a newly plowed road. Kate McInerny of the
Washington Post,
rendered ever more cheeky by the rollicking mood of her peers, said, "Let's have it, Senator—what's your position on sex?"

Sitting beside Dana Harrison, Corey settled back in his seat. Smiling, he answered, "Missionary," and closed his eyes to sleep.

CAUCUS NIGHT IN IOWA BROUGHT BITTER COLD AND SEVEN INCHES OF snow, confining the Iowa Republicans who met in their neighbors' homes to a fiercely committed cadre who, more often than not, opened their meetings with a prayer. By ten o'clock, the Reverend Bob Christy had beaten Rob Marotta so decisively that CNN had labeled it "a stunning defeat that jeopardizes Marotta's status as the front-runner."

Standing with Mary Rose before a somber crowd of supporters in the ballroom of a Des Moines hotel, Marotta struggled to conceal his humiliation, mustering a smile that, he could only hope, was less synthetic than it felt. But when he expressed confidence in ultimate victory, the applause was tepid. Marotta read the doubt seeping into the face of Donald Brandt, the county chairman who had supported him and now clapped with mechanical enthusiasm, even as the same doubt brightened the collective expression of the traveling press. This tattered evening, the ashes of his anticipated victory celebration portended both a horse race and, quite possibly, his ultimate demise. "Dead man walking," Marotta heard someone mumble as he left the podium with a last smile and wave, cringing at how artificial he must look.

He asked Price for ten minutes in his room, alone. Sitting on the end of the bed, he felt Mary Rose rest her hand on his shoulder. "How are you, Robbie?"

"Empty." Staring at a stain on the carpet, Marotta did not look up. "Just completely hollowed out."

"It's only Iowa," Mary Rose admonished. "Not even an election, really."

"And I'm tired. I'll be better tomorrow, I know. But I'm having this premonition. Ever since I was a kid on the debate team, people told me I could realize my dreams—Father Frank, my coaches, the dean of my law school—everyone. That if I worked hard enough and never let up, I could go as far as I dared to imagine. Standing there tonight, I suddenly imagined the faces of everyone who believed in me, and what they're seeing now."

Mary Rose sat beside him. "You've never lost before. This is just a hiccup. You've overcome much worse."

"I know that. But I've started wondering if the chemistry of my life in politics changed the instant Grace decided to run across that corridor. Years of work, and"—Marotta snapped his fingers—"gone, at the moment he looked at me across that Arab's body, blood smeared on his face."

"Robbie," she interrupted with a touch of sternness. "You could have been killed. I could have been without a husband, the kids without a father. The meaning
I
take from that is that we were saved from tragedy by the grace of God.

"You're still alive. You still get to run for president. That picture of you and Corey Grace was the price you paid." Turning her face to his, she spoke more softly. "What scares
me,
sweetheart, is how you'll feel if you don't win. It's dangerous to want any one thing too much."

Marotta studied her perceptive blue eyes, the level gaze that mingled concern with a seemingly infinite patience for his ambition and his flaws. "It's hard to explain, M.R. You imagine yourself achieving something until it's the essence of who you are, more real than reality ..."

His voice drifted off. "Is that what you believe?" she asked. "That you'll only become yourself if you're elected president?"

To hear this said aloud both haunted him and filled him with resolve. In a different voice, cooler and clearer, Marotta said, "I can't think about that now. I have to talk with Magnus."

Mary Rose appraised him, her eyes betraying worry she chose not to express. Then she kissed his forehead. "I'll call to see how the kids are doing. It's an hour later back there, and my sister's probably tired."

MAROTTA FOUND PRICE scanning a computer run with fresh polling numbers as his campaign manager, Charlie Norman, called the governor of New Hampshire. On CNN, Christy spoke with a beneficent confidence. "Tonight, the voters of Iowa have sent a powerful message: to save America, we will make God's work our own ..."

Turning to Price, Norman said, "The governor says to turn on C-SPAN."

Clicking the remote, Price materialized Corey Grace, microphone in hand, at a town meeting in Center Ossipee, New Hampshire. "When you tackled that Arab terrorist," a Korean War veteran asked, "what went through your mind?"

Grace shook his head. "Nothing. If I'd had time to think, I probably wouldn't have done it.

"The hardest decisions are the ones where the choices aren't clear and the consequences are potentially momentous. Those are the kinds of decisions a president has to make. A split-second reaction has nothing to do with that."

"Yeah," Norman told the governor dourly, "we're watching. No one says America's hero doesn't have his role down pat."

Looking up at Marotta, Price inclined his head toward the bedroom.

Marotta followed. They stood at the end of Price's unmade bed. "I'm meeting with Christy tonight," Price said.

"To renew your old friendship?" Marotta inquired dubiously.

"To see if God's a realist." Price put a hand on Marotta's shoulder, peering into his eyes. "For that, we'll need to offer him something. More than you're going to like."

THE ONLY PRIVATE space in Christy's suite was a bathroom, last remodeled in the 1950s. Flipping down the toilet seat, Christy said in his avuncular tone, "Take a load off, Magnus. Been a long day, I know."

He was extracting his moment of retribution, Price thought; for a man of God, Christy stank of an all-too-human self-regard. Perched on the toilet lid, Price watched Christy rest his backside on the edge of the bathtub, the folds of his stomach straining his shirt, his fleshy arms exposed by rolled-up sleeves. "Grace's crowds are growing," Price said without preface. "He just might win New Hampshire."

Eyes opening in incredulity, Christy asked, "Now, why is that
my
problem, Magnus? You're the one who abandoned me to stake your reputation on Rob Marotta."

"For one simple reason," Price said flatly. "There's an absolute ceiling on a 'Christian candidate.' But not on one who makes 'Christian values' a central part of his appeal. Iowa's your apex, Bob. Sell high now, or crater down the road."