Directive 51 (23 page)

All the news feeds filled up with chattering commentators, and Jason said, “I think I can do better commentary than any of those guys. Sheesh. That’s a way I’ve never seen Norcross. Is that what everybody on your side talks about, that he’s real different in person than he is through the media filter?”

“Well, I didn’t see the screen, busy driving, but yeah, it sounded more like the two times I saw him in person and not like the usual chopped-up version on TV.”

“I guess I can see why people vote for him.”

After a little while, Zach said, “You know, I hope when everything settles out from Daybreak, and this, and all, we will still have a President. Having one is kind of comforting.”

“Like Pendano
would
be, if he’d just talk.”

“Yeah.”

After a while, because no more news was coming in, and it didn’t sound like the president would be making a statement soon, they put the laptop into news-warn mode and talked about family, and music, and how confusing and wonderful it was to deal with women. The lights reached out in the darkness, and Jason watched for more wildlife, but apparently that fox was going to be it for the night.

Graham Weisbrod arrived and went straight into a small conference room with Pendano. Though Weisbrod was twenty years his senior, the president hung on his arm. The silence in the ops room was even deeper and more awkward than it had been, until Cam said, “All right, everyone, break’s over, noses to the screens, let’s have some good options waiting when the President comes out.” People got back to work, but much too quietly.

Cameron coughed politely behind her. “Heather, I’d like to borrow Arnold Yang for a couple of minutes, because I need a public-opinion expert, and you, because I need a Weisbrod expert.”

“Better get Allison Sok Banh in on it too. She’s good at keeping Arnie focused, and she’s even more of a Weisbrod alum than I am.”

A minute later, the four of them huddled in a conference room. “Dr. Yang,” Cameron said, “I remember how useful you were with helping to prevent panic during Hurricane Gordon.”

Arnie nodded. “I had actual data and could monitor it in real time, then—I don’t know how useful I can be this time.”

“Noted. I know I will have to go on guesses, but it’s my guess that you will have a better guess than I will.” Cam adjusted his glasses as if he might need to read some complex, subtle message from Arnie’s face. “Here’s how I see it. Will Norcross just finished making a public statement, and we still haven’t heard from the President of the United States yet. And it’s bedtime on the East Coast. People will be staying up to see how the crisis comes out. Individually, they’re brave and reasonable. In small groups of neighbors, especially if they know each other well, and there’s something they can do right away, they are often downright heroic. But as an audience, powerless to do anything but watch, people spread their anxiety and sense of defeat around the Internet like a bad cold. So we don’t have a lot of time. Right?”

“That’s consistent with my experience and everything I know,” Arnie said. “And I have no idea what to do about it.”

They nodded, not sure where Cam was going. He turned his intense gaze on Heather and Allie. “Heather. Ms. Sok Banh. You’re both Weisbrod—um, whatever you call the former students who . . .”

“Disciples, if you want,” Allie offered.

“You won’t offend us,” Heather added.

“So Weisbrod is a good friend and a kind man and all that, but—what are the odds of having a reasonably confident, ready-to-make-hard-decisions, President of the United States come through that door in the next ten minutes?”

Heather sighed. “Pretty much zip.”

Allie nodded. “Graham can work miracles with some people, but not fast. Graham’s way is to get you to talk, then analyze, and wait for you to decide to buck up and do what needs to be done.”

“Exactly,” Heather said. “He saved my life after every divorce, but it takes
days
. And this is a
lot
bigger deal. And neither of us is Roger Pendano.”

“You can’t imagine how much I wish one of you were. So we have about twenty minutes to put the President on the air in a sane, coherent, grave-but-upbeat style. And probably we can’t. Dr. Yang, how bad is the panic going to be?”

Arnie waggled his hand, balancing the issues. “For a real answer, give me a week and a quarter million dollars. But my guess is free. I think it’s not going to be as bad as things got in Pensacola during Gordon. People won’t necessarily run outside and do anything at midnight on a cold fall night. And the Daybreak damage to the Internet and the phone system might work in our favor—people may be more scared individually, but it won’t be nearly so easy to spread fear and rumors. One-way open-access broadcast media like television, radio, and satellite radio are doing better because”—Heather and Allie both gave him a look—“of reasons too lengthy to explain right now. I’d make an announcement, right away, about Daybreak, and give people things they can do to help. Try to make everyone who won’t go to bed feel useful, have them buy into the recovery.”

Cameron nodded. “And what
can
people do?”

“I’ll call Jim Browder,” Allison said, “and extract three or four ideas.”

Heather nodded. “Get something from Edwards too. The FBI never misses a chance for favorable press. And it occurs to me that if citizens are watching for them, we could bust a lot of Daybreakers right now, while their behavior is still unusual and before people’s memories fade.”

“Good thoughts. All right, Ms. Sok Banh, get whatever Dr. Browder can give you. I’ll contact Edwards and Director Bly. Now I’ve got to run; based on what you tell me about our situation with Weisbrod and Pendano, I guess I have to think about a Twenty-fifth Amendment situation, and I’m the NCCC. Thanks for the quick answers.”

“Hope they were right,” Arnie said.

“Me too.” Cam was out the door like a flash of lightning.

Allie was already phoning Browder, so Arnie asked Heather, “Am I admitting to too much ignorance if I ask you, what’s the NCCC?”

“My god,” Heather said, “I didn’t realize what he’d said. Shit, it’s really that bad.”

“Now I’m really lost.”

“Being the NCCC is Cameron Nguyen-Peters’s other job, the one he never wants to think about, and nobody else does either. National Constitutional Continuity Coordinator. Which is defined as the person with the authority to give orders and run the government—briefly—in the event of a break in the national chain of command. ‘Break’ is the euphemism for ‘everyone in the line of succession is dead, disabled, captured, or crazy.’ So if things are that bad, Cam runs the government, as a temporary dictator, until the real government can be put back together. His job is to do whatever it takes to keep the country alive and free, and make the succession work out, or establish a new government if it can’t. He might have to locate the President’s successor, or direct the Army and Air Force to repel armed invaders, order the Coast Guard to search for survivors in DC, send the Marines to rescue the surviving cabinet from a hostage situation in the Capitol. So
if
everything goes totally, completely into the soup—Cam’s our emergency dictator. And he sure as hell doesn’t want to have to do that job—I know he thought about turning down being Chief of Staff at DHS exactly because that would put him in line to be the NCCC—so if he’s thinking about doing it, things really
are
that bad.”

Chris had just finished savoring the iced cola and the Myers’s Dark Rum, and was deciding between porn, sports, or an old movie, when the phone finally rang; a glance at caller ID showed it was Cletus (as expected), with Anne the producer (as sort of expected) and a bunch of “somewhere up the chain of command” names he vaguely recognized (hunh).

Considering just how far off his instructions he’d gone, maybe that wasn’t a big surprise either. Probably the corporate counsel had said they all needed to be in on firing him.

This was definitely the way to do it. One huge satisfying act of defiance, like every American journalist since John Peter Zenger dreamed of. Besides, if they fired you out in the field, they gave you some expense money to get home with. Chris could rent a car, spend a few pleasant days driving home and enjoying the fine fall in the plains, the Rockies, and the desert, and be in a good frame of mind to start looking for his next job.

He took his last sip of his rum and cola, then picked up the call a split second before it would have gone to voice mail. “Yes, Cletus.”

“Two things,” Cletus said. “First. I fucking hate your guts. Pendano
still
has not gone on the air, you made Norcross look like Winston fucking Churchill as filmed by Frank fucking Capra, and the lightning polls are saying that
four
states that were safe for Pendano are now up for grabs. That was one brilliant piece of propaganda, you fucking goddam evil Christ-y-boy Republican wingnut.”

“I was just trying to catch what it was like in the—”

“Fuck you. It’s not ‘like’
anything
, anywhere, at any time, till
we decide
what it’s like, and
you
were the one who decided to turn Norcross into presidential material when he couldn’t have done it for himself with a blender and a saw. So fuck you, asshole.”

“Am I fired?” Maybe Chris would have another rum and cola, and just get up whenever he felt like it, before starting his cross-country drive. Blow a little severance on getting a convertible, go more southerly, enjoy some sun. Since Cletus had mentioned Frank Capra, perhaps he’d watch an old Capra film tonight, toasting the master and celebrating.

The other side of the line was strangely quiet. A choking sound?
Cletus . . . crying?
“No,
you’re
not fired.
I’m
fired. They made me call you up to apologize, but I’m not apologizing, and they can’t make me—”

The line was dead just long enough for Chris to check to see if anyone was still on it; it looked like only Cletus had dropped.

Anne said, “Well, thank God
that’s
over with, Chris. Do you have any idea how
good
your work was tonight?
We
don’t think it could have happened by accident.”

“Till this happened to go out live, and Cletus threw a hissy fit, we hadn’t realized just how much of your superb work he’d been sitting on, but once we hit the archive files and saw it—well, my dear god, Chris, why didn’t you just
murder
Cletus, and figure any jury that saw your work would acquit? I mean oh my
god.
You know?

“We want you to stay out there and cover the Norcross campaign the way
you
want to cover it, and then, after that, we were thinking that if you’d like, after the election, we could do a documentary. Call it
The Norcross Factor
, just as a working title, and maybe you could take all your short pieces that Cletus spiked, and put them together with some longer interviews with key players, and it might make a nice ninety minutes, like serious journalism we could all be proud of. Serious stuff. You know?”

Chris took a deep breath. “This sounds like, um, you are asking me to make a network documentary. After giving me free rein with the coverage on the campaign. Is that right?”

“That’s right, and no, you are not hallucinating.” The smile in her voice was evident. Why hadn’t Chris ever noticed before what a pleasant person Anne could be? “Look,” she said, “this is only
partly
politics, all right? If you’d been doing routine, ordinary work, it wouldn’t have mattered. The thing is, oh my dear god, a lot of what you’ve been shooting is great,
really
great, video. You are
so
going places. Okay?”

“Totally okay.”
Sounds like Anne just barely managed to throw Cletus under the bus fast enough. Well, it couldn’t
possibly
have happened to a more deserving little turd with feet.
“I was always kind of hoping you’d take a more active hand.”

“Exactly. Oh my dear god, we’re going to do good work together, you know?”

“Yeah.”
Mmm,
Chris thought.
Ass. I love ass. Kiss it when you’re in a good position, and you’ll never be in a bad one.

“Cool,” Anne said. “Well, then, this was productive, but it’s late; any questions before I let you go?”

“Just keep my paycheck coming, and we’re good.”

“You got it, Chris!” Brilliantly decisive. Completely committed to him. “Till I hire a new editor, just send direct to me. Stay on it, and good night!”

“Thanks, Anne. Looking forward to it—good night!” Click off.
Hope I sounded like a brilliant guy giving his brilliant boss her props.

Chris stretched, considered another rum and cola to celebrate, and decided to just go straight to bed; no predicting what he’d have to do tomorrow or how soon it would start. Might as well be ready. In this weird world, you never knew what might be your lucky day.

To Heather, Bambi Castro sounded nervous on the phone. “Arnie’s friend Reynolds at FBI just called. The FBI office in San Diego expects delivery of Ysabel Roth from AFI—”

“AFI?”

“Mexican Federal police, the
federales
you hear about in movies. Good outfit. They’ll hand her over at the border tomorrow by ten, sooner if they can, and the FBI will take her straight to their office in San Diego. Reynolds was calling because he thought we ought to have someone there, but I guess he’s not in a position to issue the invitation, but if we asked—”

“Ask. Right away.” Heather’s biggest problem with Bambi Castro—and it wasn’t much of one—was that her chief field investigator, who seemed to have no fear and complete control in the field, was afraid of every minor bureaucratic hassle.