The Candidate (20 page)

* * *

MIKE STOOD in front of the White House surrounded by camera-toting tourists. The thought was surreal: could this campaign really end up here? This small building with its familiar ivory façade was what they fought for. Every speech, every dirty trick, every sacrifice of friend and family, aimed at finally getting inside this place. He could scarcely believe it. Then a nudge from a careless tourist angling for a better shot jolted him from his daydream.

He turned and walked back through Washington’s streets. He trekked down the cold sidewalks until he hit K Street, the heart of lobbying in the capital. It was a soulless boulevard flanked by mirror-faced office buildings and busy with traffic. But it was home to countless consultancies and PR firms that all fed at the trough of government. Mike walked through the door of one of them, an anonymous eight-storey edifice that sat on a busy intersection. A long list of corporate names ran down a board behind the head of a bored-looking security guard. Mike saw the name he was looking for: Andersen Security Solutions. It was founded and run by General Arnold Andersen, a name that he dug up from Hodges’ past as a fellow instructor at the School of the Americas and someone who was also posted throughout Central America in the 1980s. Dee then made the call and persuaded Andersen they were just collecting details for Hodges’ biography. The General turned security consultant was only too happy to have Mike come in for a talk.

Andersen Security was on the fourth floor and the elevator whooshed Mike soundlessly skywards with doors that opened directly into the firm’s plush lobby. He was barely out of the door when a tall, barrel-chested man in a dark blue suit hailed him from a side-office.

“Welcome! You must be Mike Sweeney!” he called and stepped forward to grab Mike’s hand in a grip so tight that Mike reflexively massaged his fingers afterwards.

“General Andersen?” Mike asked.

The man nodded and stepped aside to let Mike into his office. It was a huge open space in the corner of the building. For a moment the view took Mike’s breath away. With Washington’s low-level skyline, you could see across the rooftops of the city to the Washington Memorial sticking needle-like into the sky, puncturing the gray clouds above.

“Ain’t she something?” Andersen said, walking up behind Mike. “That view looks out over the most powerful square mile in the world. There ain’t nowhere that even comes close to it.”

Mike sat down and sank into a leather chair opposite Andersen’s enormous desk. On the wall behind the General were photos from all over the world. Most featured Andersen in numerous shades of camouflage or elaborate dress uniforms. For a moment Mike thought of a different room: a dark, musty place on the shores of the Caribbean, where another military career was held in a similar but more secretive regard.

“So what can I do for you?” Andersen asked. “Jack Hodges is an old friend of mine and I’m happy to help him out. Christ, the way things are going he’ll be coming down here to Washington as goddamn president.”

Mike fed Andersen the explanation that they were gathering biographic material as the campaign went on, looking to meet reporters’ demands for fresh stories, keep the focus on his military record and hammer home their advantage on national security.

Andersen nodded. “Jack Hodges knows what it’s like to fight for this country. Really fight. He’s shed blood for his flag. I was with him in Iraq, the first time around. Back in ‘92. I’ve seen that man under pressure and under fire and let me tell you, there’s no one you’d rather have with you in a fox hole.”

Andersen’s speech was emphatic and from the heart. Mike let him speak on. He and Hodges clearly went back decades, their careers zigzagged around each other as they rose through the ranks in an intricate game of tag. Andersen got out first and set up his consultancy in the wake of 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan. He worked from the lucrative sidelines as Hodges served two tough tours in Iraq and cemented his reputation as a man who got the job done. Mike listened patiently and prodded Andersen into one anecdote after another, dutifully taking notes, playing the role of a court stenographer to his testimony. Andersen, like many of his ilk, loved the sound of his own voice describing past glories. With such men it was always best to hear them out before striking. But eventually Mike needed to make his move. He waited for a lull in Andersen’s monologue and then casually tried to shift things back in time.

“When did you meet the Senator though? That was at the School of the Americas, right? You were both on the training staff there?”

The General nodded. “That’s right. Can hardly believe we were training people who were mostly older than us.”

“It gets some bad press though, that program,” Mike said. “Lots of people said it encouraged some pretty nasty practices in some of our allies.”

For the first time, the smile dropped off Andersen’s face. “That’s what some people say. People who know nothing about what we did there. We trained good men to fight some horrible, little wars. But we taught them to win and that’s what they did.”

“Then the Senator spent some time in Guatemala. Did you work with him there?” Mike asked. “We’re trying to flesh out that part of his story, it seems a little sparse. What was the nature of his work there?”

Andersen leaned back in his chair and regarded Mike with a studied look of disdain. “What are you getting at, young man?”

Mike was stunned. He didn’t think he had even begun to push Andersen’s buttons, but the General came out swinging. Mike did not need to feign surprise.

“Nothing at all. It just seems a blank in his CV.”

Andersen stood up. “We saved that country from communism. We stopped the goddamn Soviets and the Maoists and God knows what else from taking over that place. We did it for America and people seem to have forgotten that.”

The General walked to the door and opened it. “This interview is over,” he said.

Mike got up and smiled in as friendly a way as possible. “Thank you for your time,” he said. He knew Andersen thought it was a clever trick to shut down the conversation. But Andersen was an army man and thought killing something made it go away. Mike knew better. Andersen miscalculated. Mike now knew he was onto something. Again he thought of General Carillo, giving the same sort of speech, about fighting communists and saving a country. He also spouted words of duty and of honor. More linked these men than just words and sentiment. Mike was sure of it.

* * *

HODGES WAS furious again. There was no getting away from it as Dee sat in her office chair and endured the withering blast of his rage. He towered over her, his eyes wide with anger and his usually delicately combed hair suddenly disheveled.

“Where the hell is the coverage of my anti-poverty plan? Where is it?” he screamed. “Instead we have nothing but this bullshit!”

Hodges jabbed at the remote control in Dee’s office and turned up the volume on the television that was permanently tuned to CNN. As the words of a panel of talking heads leaked into the air it was clear they were still discussing the latest Stanton tape.

Dee said nothing. She knew Hodges needed to blow out his fury but at the same time she had no doubt at all that she did the right thing. The tape worked like a charm as soon as Lauren posted it up on her
Horse Race
blog. Drudge picked it up within ten minutes and Dee suspected Lauren herself had emailed in the link, which was useful, as Dee had been preparing to do just that when she saw it was already the headline. Then it spread over the rest of the web like wildfire. She watched it burn through the blogs and eventually onto Fox News and the rest of the cable TV universe. Tomorrow, she knew, it would be the front page of the newspapers. But there was no denying Hodges’ genuine fury. He leaned in close to her, like a General at a rebellious Private, looking at her with eyes set deep in a face that was now red, its veins pulsing with blood.

“I told you,” he said, the words grinding out through clenched jaws. “I did not want this sort of campaign. Where’s the coverage of my Second New Deal? Where are the headlines on that? I gave a goddamn press conference about it and no one seems to give a shit.”

Dee backed off slightly, staying seated but rolling away on her chair, gliding out of his zone of control.

“We’re putting it out there, Senator,” she said. “But we don’t dictate what the media does. They make their own story choices and they’re going with this instead.”

She chose her words carefully. She wanted him to calm down, but she also wanted control of her own emotions. She was not used to getting balled out like this. Not by anyone. One of her toughest fights was to keep her own temper in check as well as monitoring that of her candidate.

“It’s unfortunate that it’s been drowned out by this other thing,” she said.

Hodges gave a violent groan that seemed to well up from deep within him, wordless and full of anger. He stalked over to the other side of the room and his hands grasped at his tightly cut hair. Dee had never seen him like this. He cared about this campaign so much, she thought. More than any of them understood. She felt a little humbled. Other candidates exploded over losses, despaired over poor polls, but she had never seen one go off the deep end over a low blow at an opponent. Especially not a punch that landed so effectively.

“I did not want this,” he said again and flung himself into a chair, looking deflated, like a suddenly burst balloon.

Dee stood up and walked over to him. She put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed her fingers into the tightly knotted muscles. They felt like girders of tense steel.

“I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “But this is going to be worth two points to us. Four points if we get lucky. It’s a 48 hour story that will take us to the finishing post.”

Hodges did not react. Dee knelt down in front of him. She looked at him straight.

“Jack, you are in sight of winning New Hampshire. It won’t be like Iowa. We don’t have to come in second this time.”

CHAPTER 14

MIKE OPENED HIS eyes and waited for the world of his Washington hotel room to swim into focus. It was past 8:00 a.m. which was obscenely late after endless months of rising before the sun. The campaign trail scrambled his body clock, which now thought nothing of existing on four hours sleep. But deep within him a well of exhaustion sometimes bubbled to the surface. He rolled over and stared at the beeping alarm clock. It went off for perhaps an hour before it woke him. He reached out and whacked it with the flat of his hand and sent it skittering onto the floor, still squawking forlornly. With a grimace, Mike hauled himself out of bed and switched it off.

Perhaps it was his reaction to the meeting with General Andersen yesterday that triggered his exhaustion. He felt he got nothing out of it apart from a sense he was on the trail of something awful, something that dragged him further and further away from the campaign. Last night he phoned Ivan Tobar out in Garden City and asked him who in Washington might know something about Central America in the 1980s. He danced delicately around the reasons why he needed to know. Tobar provided the name and address of an immigrants’ rights group, The American Center for Latino Justice. Now Mike looked at the scribbled words on his hotel notepad and saw the address lay way outside the center of Washington, far out in the sprawling suburbs of northern Virginia. It would be good, he thought, to get away from K Street and Andersen’s gleaming office with its pictures of military parades.

* * *

THE DRIVE there took him on a painfully slow crawl through the traffic-clogged suburbs of Fairfax County that emerged from Washington’s downtown in a formless mass of malls and business parks. Only a few decades ago most of this area was rolling Virginia farmland but it was eaten up by the business of government. Now it stretched to the horizon as a tangled grid of roads and vehicles. Mike was in a daze as he pulled the car into a parking lot outside a non-descript business park by the side of a two-lane highway that roared with traffic. He checked the address and looked at the building’s black darkened windows, like a vast screen of unseeing eyes. The ACLJ was on the top floor. He trudged across the parking lot and went inside.

Tobar said to ask for a woman named Jenny Gusman, the group’s chief researcher, and she appeared quickly from a back office to shake Mike’s hand. She looked him up and down and asked where he was from.

“I’m a friend of Ivan Tobar,” he said. “I’m doing some research for an academic project. He said you guys were the people to speak to when it comes to U.S. policy in Guatemala in the 1980s.”

Mike deliberately kept his words vague and hoped her curiosity would not be too piqued. He looked around the tattered-looking suite of offices, full of young people dressed in jeans and T-shirts answering phones that never stopped ringing. It looked like a campaign office. Gusman, a pixie-ish woman and full of energy, smiled.

“Any friend of Ivan’s is a friend of ours. We mainly do work with immigrant associations in the Washington area, but we have a little human rights section that we keep updated,” she said and she beckoned Mike to follow her.

They went into a converted storeroom at the back. It was lined with shelves packed with thick files of papers. On the wall were black and white photographs of bodies lying in front of burnt-out huts or splayed out in fields. Gusman gestured at the mass of paperwork.