The Jefferson Allegiance (20 page)

“From the American Philosophical Society.”

Roosevelt stiffened, focusing on his daughter. “What do those old fools want?”

Alice almost twirled, the silk catching the light. She’d bought enough of it on the recent junket to Japan and China to make a thousand dresses. He did have to admit, though, that she had done well diplomatically, enchanting the Emperor of Japan and the Empress Dowager of China. Of course, she’d also jumped into the ocean liner’s swimming pool fully clothed along with some fool congressman. Wherever she went, scandal followed.

“They are not all old fools,” Alice said.

“Just tell me what they want so I can get back to the celebrations,” Roosevelt said, looking past her to the door leading to the election party.

“Ah, father,” Alice said, coming close and looking up at him with soulful eyes. She had inherited her mother’s beauty, and sometimes he wondered if that’s why he kept his distance from her—the memory was too sharp, the pain too deep. He averted his gaze.

“Yes?”

“I know this is your party, Father,” she said. “But really, you’d want to be the bride at every wedding, the corpse at every funeral, and the baby at every christening. You like the attention.”

“The old Philosophers,” he prodded, trying to get her back on task. Her tongue was as sharp as her wit, and he bore many a scar from both.

“As I said, and you did not hear, being occupied with your own thoughts as always, they are all not so old anymore. In fact, one is quite young. The youngest ever elected Chair.”

“What fool did they pick?”

“And not just the youngest,” Alice said, with a smile that lit up the room, “but also the first woman.”

Roosevelt felt an icy feeling grow in his gut, much as he had felt in Yellowstone the first time he faced a grizzly. “They didn’t.”

“They did.”

Roosevelt closed his eyes and sighed. This was the last thing he would have expected. Which is why, he knew, the guardians of the Allegiance had done it. “What do they—you-- want?” he demanded through gritted teeth.

Alice hopped up and sat on the lid of a grand piano, her legs dangling, exposing too much ankle. “We know you inherited the Spanish-American War after McKinley’s untimely departure from this mortal coil. We were not pleased with the ‘causus belli’ for that war. ‘Remember the Maine,’ indeed.” She peered at her father. “You were under-secretary of the Navy at the time. Perhaps you know something about that event you have not shared with your own daughter?”

“It was a Spanish mine,” Roosevelt snapped. “There is nothing more to it.”

“A most convenient mine,” Alice said. “We sense the long reach of the Cincinnatians.” She waved a hand, dismissing that topic. “The Allegiance has only been invoked once and even then, didn’t have to be used. Another President was warned. We see a dangerous trend, though. Jefferson, Polk and Lincoln all superseded their authority. Johnson did too, but he got impeached, simpleton that he was. The Cincinnatians have pushed this country into illegal and unjust war more than once in their desire for an American Empire. Much like the Romans did so long ago.”

Alice continued. “But you have to allow those three earlier Presidents their motives. Both Jefferson and Polk saw a threat to our country’s commerce: Jefferson not wanting to lose access to New Orleans, and ending up with much more than he could have ever dreamed of in territory; Polk wanting access to San Francisco, and also ending up with much than he too could have ever dreamed of. Lincoln’s motivation was to preserve the Union at any cost, although one might see an inherent paradox from the Founding Fathers in that. The Confederacy was, after all, exercising its states’ rights to separate from the Union. Something Jefferson would most likely have applauded.”

Roosevelt knew this was revenge. For all those years he’d shuttled her from relative to relative. He’d once tried to send her to a very proper school for girls in New York City, and she had sent back a letter promising: ‘If you send me, I will humiliate you. I will do something that that will shame you. I tell you I will.’

And now she had done something far, far worse.

“You’ve won four more years, Father,” Alice said. “Congratulations. But we know what you have done and what you want to do. The Philippines. Colombia. Honduras. The Dominican Republic. Cuba. The Canal you want to have built.” She laughed, a most pleasant sound, contrasting the words that came from her mouth. “’Speak softly and carry a big stick. You will go far’?”

“What do you want?” Roosevelt finally gave in, facing her directly.

“Jefferson wrote ‘Conquest is not in our principles. It is inconsistent with our government.’ You seem to take the opposite point of view, Father.”

“What do you want?”

“We know you are popular. We know confronting you with the Allegiance would be dangerous for the country. So we offer a compromise. You get four more years. But we want you to publicly promise tonight, this very evening, that you will not run for re-election in nineteen-oh-eight.”

Roosevelt took a step back, as if he’d been hit by a bullet. “You joke.”

“I’m afraid not, Father. We will confront you if you don’t make the promise. It will be a bloody mess, for both you and the country, if the military has to act after you are confronted. You can spend the next four years enjoying your Presidency or defending it.”

“A lot can happen in four years,” Roosevelt said.

Alice nodded and hopped off the piano. “I know, Father. But I also know you. I told the other Philosophers that if you gave your word, you would keep your word.”

A muscle rippled along the side of Roosevelt’s jaw.

Alice hooked her arm through his and propelled him toward the door. “Come. Let’s have you make the announcement, then join the party.” She paused just before the door and looked up at him. “After all, Father, four more years; certainly enough time for you to enjoy the Presidency. And then you can go back to civilian life and enjoy your family. Correct?”

With those last bitter words she shoved open the doors to the waiting crowd, that cheered upon seeing the newly elected President.

Chapter Eleven

Lieutenant General Atticus Parker (US Air Force, retired) checked his watch once more and drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. He glanced at the door to his office, then turned his head and looked out the window, where he could see the rear of Independence Hall, a view he found appropriate in the gray of early dawn. “Covering its six,” as they used to say when he flew fighters. He was seated in a room in Philosophical Hall on Fifth Street, on the same block as the more famous hall where the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution were all signed. A pretty powerful trifecta of documents. In Parker’s opinion, the greatest political writing in the world, albeit a considerable amount of it borrowed by the Founding Fathers from other earlier writers, truth be known.

Philosophical Hall was mostly ignored by tourists, even though it was the only other building besides Independence Hall on Independence Square. Most tourists saw the sign outside and thought it was some sort of place for old men to sit around and chat about esoteric subjects. It was so far off the radar, that for almost a century, the building had been closed to visitors, and no one had registered a complaint. A part of the building had only recently been opened to the public where they could view such wonders as the chair Thomas Jefferson sat in when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin’s clock and library chair, and an eclectic gathering of small exhibitions from the collection of the American Philosophical Society, for which the building had been the headquarters for over two centuries. Most tourists preferred to see a cracked bell further down the street.

Philosophical Hall was the only privately owned building on Independence Square, a little known fact that the Society preferred not be publicized, because it might raise questions that they would also prefer not to answer, as people would wonder where the money came from. Hiding in plain sight was a tactic the Society had adopted from the very beginning, putting its scientific and exploration exploits in the foreground and cloaking its true power in secrecy.

Parker sighed deeply and switched his gaze from the outside, to his watch, then to the visages staring down on him from the paintings that cluttered the walls of the office: Benjamin Franklin, of course, the founder of the APS in 1745; George Washington, a man who could straddle every fence; John Adams; Thomas Paine; James Madison; the Marquis de Lafayette; Charles Darwin; Robert Frost; Baron Von Steuben; Tadeusz Kosciousko; Thomas Edison; Louis Pasteur; Margaret Mead, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and others whose names reverberated through the annals of science and exploration. Two paintings were centered right next to each other as if paired for some special reason: Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.

The Jefferson painting had historical significance. It was one of only two copies that Thomas Sully, who had done the original, had painted based off that work. The original was at West Point, which had commissioned the full body portrait of the Founder of the Academy. The two copies were half that size, from the waist up. The twin to this one was in the Rotunda at the University of Virginia.

The portrait of Hamilton was not so well rendered. From the Society’s records, Parker knew that Hamilton had been extended an honorary membership by Thomas Jefferson as part of an attempt at conciliation. Hamilton had accepted, but since he was best known for initiating the National Debt, starting the National Bank, and founding the Federalist Party, his contributions to the Philosophical Society were negligible.

At least that’s what the records said.

Parker knew better. It was in this building, in this room, on opposite sides of this very desk, that President Jefferson and Hamilton had negotiated with each other to try to determine the direction the fledgling United States would continue to go in. Hamilton wanted a form that might almost be considered a monarchy without the hereditary king: he proposed that the President and Senators all be elected for life and that state governments be abolished. And he was the point man of the Society of Cincinnati, trying to gain power for that organization.

Jefferson believed in the people and wanted limits on the Federal government. He thought the government served the people, not the reverse.

The arguments must have been fierce and loud, Parker imagined. And resulted in a bitter compromise that only a handful of people throughout history had ever been aware of: The Jefferson Allegiance.

Above the two portraits was a pair of sayings:

Nullo Discrimine
. The motto of the APS, which meant: “We are open to all.”

Not exactly
, thought Parker.

And next to it, the motto of the defunct Military Philosophical Society:
Scientia in Bello Pax.
“Science in War is the Guarantee of Peace.”

It helps
, he thought.

Parker figured the two sayings said a lot about the schizophrenic nature of the secret inner circle of the Society.

Parker leaned back in the chair, the worn wood creaking. He felt as old as the chair, but he also felt vibrant and alive for the first time in a long while. The possibility of impending death had a tendency to do that, as he knew from his experiences in aerial combat. Once more he made a time check. She was late, which was most unusual.

McBride was dead. A successor had been activated.

General LaGrange was dead. As was his son, who had been the first successor. A new successor had picked up the mantle.

The report on Admiral Groves had just come in. Dead also. He’d written that his successor had also been killed, but that a replacement had been alerted.

And Parker’s own successor was late.

He looked at the flat-screen computer monitor on top of the old wooden desk that had been in this room since the founding of the Society. The email from Admiral Groves consisted of only five words: DON’T GIVE UP THE SHIP. Parker had spent no time in ships, but rather over thirty-five years in the cockpits of planes, becoming rated on more types of aircraft than anyone else in the Air Force, making him a mini-legend inside a closed circle of people who knew what such a feat meant.

“Damn Navy,” Parker groused as he stared at the words. Who the hell wanted to confine themselves to the two dimensions of the ocean surface when you could roam free in the three dimensions of the sky? Now submariners, Parker would allow, could move three ways, but so slowly, what was the point? And the very element they moved in could kill them. The air didn’t kill pilots. Other pilots or the ground did.

Slowly, Parker typed the saying on the keyboard. He accessed the first link that came up, having little patience with computers. June 1813. Captain James Lawrence, commander of the
USS Chesapeake
fought a British Frigate outside of Boston Harbor. And lost, Parker noted. “Goddamn Squids,” he muttered as he scrolled down. Apparently Lawrence was mortally wounded, and as he lay dying he gave his last command:
‘Tell the men to fire faster. Fight ‘til she sinks, boys. Don’t give up the ship.’