Worst Case Scenario (2 page)

“Thirty-three and one-third percent, that's correct,” he said then.

“Not guilty.”

“What a relief. You do understand the consequences?”

“No, I don't,” Michaelson said. “When that incident took place, the United States had lost its last war, it had just finished ransoming hostages from an Islamic country for the first time since Jefferson's administration, and the Soviet Union was a seemingly unshakable superpower. Things today have rather turned around. That little piece of diplomatic history you alluded to is about as relevant to Washington right now as the Battle of Actium.”

“Process, Richard, process,” Pilkington said, like a despairing Latin tutor whose student couldn't master the third declension. “The national pastime isn't baseball or football anymore, it's galloping paranoia. There's a morbid public obsession with government conspiracies, emphatically including medical conspiracies. Probably twenty million people in this country actually believe the AIDS virus was concocted by the CIA. Americans have been murdered in Guatemala over rumors about snatching children for organ transplants. Former French cabinet members are facing jail for letting AIDS-contaminated blood be used for hemophiliac transfusions. And so forth and so on and et bloody cetera. We already have a foreign policy that looks like a slow-motion train wreck. Pander to the ambient hysteria with another confected scandal and we can write off the next few years along with the last few.”

“There must be a much higher premium on imagination at the fudge factory these days than there was before my retirement,” Michaelson said, shaking his head. “But you can put your fevered mind at ease. I'm not telling tales to the scribblers, and I'm not going to.”

“Well, I believe you, of course,” Pilkington said. Coming from Pilkington, this conveyed something between studied agnosticism and utter disbelief.

“Glad to hear it,” Michaelson said.

“I do wish I could come up with some plausible explanation for the journalistic sniffing about that's suddenly gotten so hot and heavy in this area. I don't have a very high opinion of the trade myself. I've always said that working for a daily newspaper must be like producing pornography without the redeeming element of sexual gratification.”

“I think I have heard you commit that simile before, now that you mention it.”

“But I assume reporters aren't complete morons and that they have something to go on when they start down a trail.”

“Good luck,” Michaelson said. “I wish I could help you, but I can't.”

“Please do keep our little talk in mind, then,” Pilkington said. “They can't go on like this, you know. The White House, I mean. Regardless of how the next election comes out. Sooner or later they simply have to make some real changes, get someone who knows a hawk from a handsaw into the game. It would be a shame for you to deal yourself out just when your card's about to turn up.”

This was Michaelson's most vulnerable spot. In his early sixties, retired for several years from the foreign service, chaffing under a sinecure at Brookings, passed over a number of times for senior policy-making positions that he coveted, Michaelson made no attempt to conceal either his ambition or his disappointment at its frustration.

“Congratulations on not mixing your metaphors,” he said with cold gentility to Pilkington. “Have a pleasant afternoon.”

He walked out of Pilkington's room morally certain that no reporter in America gave two rips about secret medical treatment given to a rich Arab politician more than a decade ago. Pilkington's real worry was something else related in some conceptual way—some covert governmental action with foreign policy implications and involving medical care. How had he put it? “Something that sounds a lot like this.”

Whatever it was, he thought Michaelson knew something about it. Why did he think that? Because Michaelson had looked rather aggressively into Deborah Moodie's problem? Maybe. Michaelson's real reason for doing that wouldn't make sense to Pilkington, who'd assume that Michaelson was pursuing some personal agenda. Pilkington wanted Michaelson to earn the bribe (or avoid the threat) implicit in his heavy-handed sermon by telling what he knew. He expected Michaelson to clear himself of suspicion by saying
No, silly, those reporters aren't after the Amahdi story, they're looking into something else altogether. Now listen carefully
.

That much was reasonably clear. Less apparent was why Pilkington had gone out of his way to let Michaelson know that Jeffrey Quentin was here. That Jeffrey Quentin had suddenly acquired a foreign policy title. And that Pilkington didn't like Jeffrey Quentin. That Pilkington wanted Michaelson to reveal something was obvious. What Michaelson couldn't figure out was why he wanted Michaelson to disclose it to Jeffrey Quentin instead of to Pilkington himself.

Chapter Two

“How do you square your criticism of administration policy with your support of U.S. forces deployed pursuant to that very policy?”

“Once American troops are on the ground,” Wendy Gardner said, “ties go to the president.”

All right, she thought as she rose from her seat on the dais and shook hands with the five other hopefuls who'd shared it with her, so it isn't Edmund Burke. These aren't the sheriffs of Bristol, either. And don't forget, Burke
lost
that election.

She didn't intend to lose hers. That was why she was here, auditioning for people who controlled soft money and rich contributors and party resources that could make the difference in a tight race. That was why she'd asked Michaelson to come, to lend the heft of his foreign service reputation and Brookings affiliation to the credentials of a candidate barely over the minimum constitutional age for the office she was seeking.

Among other things, the CPD Conference was a cattle call, open casting, pick your metaphor. Show time for wannabes who thought they could knock off an opposition incumbent or, like Wendy, outrun an anointed heir apparent for an open seat. Sort of a low-rent, legislative-branch version of the famous Renaissance Weekend in North Carolina, but scruffier, dispensing with intellectual pretension, pure politics.

Wendy made her way through the milling crowd, offering eye contact and a smiling nod in response to murmured compliments, some perfunctory and some with real meaning. Then, as she reached the last row of seats, a woman approached her more aggressively.

“That was great,” she said, reaching out and tentatively touching Wendy's arm. “You give good sound bite.”

“Thank you.”

“I'm Sharon Bedford. I sent you my résumé a few weeks ago. I was hoping to meet you here this weekend, so I brought another copy.”

“I appreciate that,” Wendy said. She glanced at the two proffered pages long enough to see National Security Council staff, then slipped them into a thin briefcase she was carrying. “I
will
look at this the minute I have time. I know how important good staffers are, and I make all staffing decisions myself. It's months away and miles to go, but if I win, I'm going to want to hit the ground running.”

“That's actually something I was hoping to talk to you about if you could give me two minutes,” Bedford said. Her eyes shone with quiet intensity, and a tone of controlled urgency colored her voice. “I know you need to blitz the hospitality suites and network some more, but if you were planning on hearing Dr. Marciniak, he's in this room in less than twenty minutes. We could talk here a little while we wait.”

Wendy checked her initial impulse to brush Bedford off. For one thing, Bedford was right: Wendy had circled Marciniak's presentation on her program, and in the few minutes before it began she couldn't see running around like a sorority pledge during rush week.

On top of that, Wendy found Bedford's eagerness engaging. Wendy knew how hard it was for Bedford to walk up to her cold, risking a coffin-plate smile and a world-class blow-off. The CPD was brimming with twenty-three-year-old cynics, precocious Washington veterans with hard eyes and downy cheeks. Bedford wasn't one of them. Whatever Bedford was after, she really wanted it and she wasn't afraid to show how important to her it was.

“Sure,” Wendy said. “Let's talk.”

They sat down in the back row.

Bedford looked like she was in her early thirties. She had striking chestnut hair, somewhat curly, as if it had been permed, say, a month ago. She was within an inch or so of Wendy's height. In California she'd have been ten pounds overweight, but she'd be just about right in the Midwest, where boys like their girls with a little meat on their bones. Her nails were short and uncolored, and Wendy suspected that she spent a lot of time at a keyboard. Her manner suggested someone who planned things carefully. Wendy would have bet, for example, that she'd spent forty minutes in front of the mirror deciding what she'd wear today.

“Two things,” Bedford said. “First, I guess I think what looks like a weakness on my résumé is really a strength.”

“Would you like to explain that?” Wendy asked.

“The job changes, the instability. After I left the National Security Council staff—”

“Did you quit or were you fired?”

“Oh, I was fired,” Bedford said, her tone suggesting surprise at the notion of leaving the NSC staff any other way. “Change of administrations, new guys come in, vertical stroke.”

“Sure. I'm sorry, I interrupted you. You were saying after you left the staff.”

“Right. I had two jobs where I lasted a little over a year. They were good jobs, too, and I knew I should've been grateful for them. It was just that neither of them could give me the kind of feeling I had about the NSC.”

“Do you think sorting constituent mail and troubleshooting lost Social Security checks could measure up to the White House basement?”

“Yes. I was an administrative aide at the NSC. Glorified clerk. It wasn't that I was doing anything all that challenging. It's just that I was part of something that mattered, and I want to be again.”

“I want the same thing,” Wendy said. She smiled encouragingly, found herself pleased when this coaxed a blushing smile from Bedford. “You said there were two things. What's the second?”

“Are you a baseball fan?”

“I'm running for office in the Midwest. I have to be.”

“You know what they always say about those muscular outfielders that the contenders trade for in June? ‘He can help the team right away'?”

“Sure,” Wendy said.

“That's what I can do. I can get you some serious face-time. Separate you from the crowd. I can give you something that'll get the attention of the right people at the right time.”

I have a trump card
, Wendy translated mentally,
and I want this job enough to play it
. The tease was blatant enough, but Wendy couldn't ignore it. Roughly a hundred million Americans would like to be in Congress, and only five hundred and thirty-five of them can be.

“If you have something that hot, shouldn't you trade it for something more exalted than the staff of a potential House freshman?”

The question was a test and Bedford passed.

“I won't lie to you,” she said. “I'd like an offer closer to a real power center, and if I get one I'll take it. But I give you my word: if you say yes first, the auction's over and your bid wins.”

“Could you be a little more specific about what I'm bidding for?” Wendy asked.

“Not here. But maybe later, if you're interested after you've thought it over? I'm in the room on the second floor next to the political software company's hospitality suite.”

“Okay,” Wendy said. “I'll give it some thought and I'll try to stop by. But if I can't, don't hesitate to follow up.”

“Don't worry,” Bedford said, her smile now broad and warm, “I'm not the least bit shy.”

***

A stone-faced, shiny-headed man introduced Jerry Marciniak, M.D., Ph.D., known to Beltway initiates as Dr. Marc. The stone-face reminded the audience, quite unnecessarily, that Marciniak was both a doctor of medicine and a research scientist holding a doctorate in cellular biology. He had served in an array of obscure public health outposts, including a stint in the late eighties and early nineties as director of the National Medical Records Compilation, Data Collection and Privacy Concerns Bureau, which he often said was every bit as exciting as its name suggested. He'd gone on to become assistant chief of the applied research staff at the National Institutes of Health and then, quickly and unexpectedly, had moved up to head the policy and planning directorate at the National Health Research Agency.

Wendy wasn't sure what she was expecting, based on that introduction. Marcus Welby in a lab coat maybe. Whatever it was, she didn't get it. Marciniak strode in wearing a kelly green cardigan sweater over a plaid shirt and khaki slacks. He took off a New York Mets baseball cap as he turned to face the audience and, seeing no place convenient to put the headgear, hung it by its adjustment strap from the microphone post. A spare six feet with Brillo-colored hair, he looked the audience over with lively green eyes before he launched into his talk.

Along with most of the people in the well-filled room, Wendy assumed he was going to talk about health-care reform: the eight-hundred-pound gorilla that no politician could ignore, the delicate question of having the government take over a piece of the economy ten times larger than the automobile industry without raising anybody's taxes.

She was wrong. He had come to talk about politics and science. Dr. Marc was here to preach the gospel. He spoke in a fast, catchy New York City dialect, his voice just this side of gravelly, referring to the audience as “boys and girls” with a smile and wink that made it all right. But he spoke with prophetic passion, and as he hammered the passages out, his eyes gleamed with Pentecostal flame.

Politics corrupted science. Politics had been corrupting science since before some impatient soldier cut Archimedes' throat, and it hadn't stopped. Labs and basic research outfits published articles every year based on data faked fourteen ways from Sunday. When the universities weren't cranking out cheap, Madison Avenue publicity for experiments that turned out not to be replicable, they were getting nailed right, left, and sideways for lying about what they were doing with grant money. And the nonacademic public sector was the worst of all. When AIDS was threatening the United States with its first fatal pandemic since the influenza scourge just after World War I, “our
best
scientists spent five
blessed
years arguing about who gets credit for isolating the virus.”

Brief pause. Disgusted, cap-shaking slap at the podium.

“Science isn't about getting credit for isolating a virus,” he boomed then. “Science is about finding a way to kill the damn thing.”

Punctuated with a fist slam. Applause, scattered but enthusiastic. Some of the boys and girls were buying it. Wendy wasn't ready to swallow his argument whole, but Marciniak's sense of absolute conviction stirred her. In a weekend strewn with people who believed in nothing, she'd stumbled on a man who believed in something.

Why was this happening? Marciniak continued. The politics of money. The politics of greed. The politics of the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules.

Are things getting better? No, things are getting worse. Every day they get worse faster than they did the day before. We're not talking arithmetically, he insisted, we're not talking geometrically, we're talking exponentially. We have to find an answer. We have to protect science, insulate it from pressure groups, special interests, venal politicians.

There is absolutely nothing inevitable about progress, he concluded solemnly, nothing inevitable about the triumph of knowledge or reason or truth. The seventh century was a lot worse than the fourth, not a lot better, and at the end of the day the twenty-first might be just that much worse than the nineteenth. The choice was stark and simple: sweat now or bleed later.

Questions? No, no one had any questions. (If they asked questions, he might answer them.) The crowd gave him a respectable hand, then bolted for the door.

“He believes what he says,” Wendy heard someone say on the way out of the room.

“Yeah,” the stone-face who'd introduced him answered. “Thank God he's not in charge of anything important.”