Divide and Conquer

FIFTY-TWO

Paul Hood returned to the Cabinet Room and shut the door. He took a calming breath. The room smelled of coffee. He was glad. It covered the stink of treason. Then he took out his Palm Pilot, looked up a number, and went to the phone to enter it. This was not something that Hood wanted to do. It was something he had to do. It was the only way he could think of to prevent what was effectively shaping up as a coup d’état

The phone was answered right after the second ring. “Hello?” said the voice on the other end.

“Megan, it’s Paul Hood.”

“Paul, where are you?” asked the First Lady. “I’ve been worried—”

“I’m in the Cabinet Room,” he said. “Megan, listen. Fenwick is definitely involved in a conspiracy of some kind. My feeling is that he, Gable, and whoever else is in this have been trying to gaslight the president.”

“Why would anyone want to make my husband think he’s lost his mind?” she asked.

“Because they’ve also set in motion a confrontation with Iran and Russia in the Caspian Sea,” Hood told her. “If they can convince the president or the public that he’s not equipped to handle the showdown, he’ll have to resign. Then the new president will either escalate the war or, more likely, he’ll end it. That will win him points with the people and with Iran. Maybe then we’ll all divide up the oil wells that used to belong to Azerbaijan.”

“Paul, that’s monstrous,” Megan said. “Is the vice president involved with this?”

“Possibly,” Hood said.

“And they expect to get away with it?”

“Megan, they are very close to getting away with it,” Hood informed her. “The Caspian situation is revving up, and they’ve moved the strategy sessions from the Oval Office to the Situation Room. I don’t have security clearance to go down there.”

“I’ll phone Michael on the private number and ask him to see you,” Megan told him.

“That won’t be enough,” Hood said. “I need you to do something else.”

Megan asked him what that was. Hood told her.

“I’ll do it,” she said when he was finished. “Give me five minutes.”

Hood thanked her and hung up.

What Hood had proposed was a potentially dangerous tactic for him and for the First Lady. And under the best of circumstances, it was not going to be pleasant. But it was necessary.

Hood looked around the room.

This was not like rescuing his daughter. That had been instinctive. He had to act if she were to survive. There had been no choice.

This was different.

Hood tried to imagine the decisions that had been made in this room over the centuries. Decisions about war, about depressions, about human rights, about foreign policy. Every one of them had affected history in some way, large or small. But more important than that, whether they were right or wrong, all of them had required a commitment. Someone had to believe they were making the proper decision. They had to risk anything from a career or national security to the lives of millions on that belief.

Hood was about to do that. He was about to do both, in fact. But there was a proverb that used to hang in the high school classroom where Hood’s father taught civics. It was appropriate now:

“The first faults are theirs that commit them. The second theirs that permit them.”

As Hood turned and left the Cabinet Room, he did not feel the weight of the decision he made. Nor did he feel the danger it represented.

He felt only the privilege of being able to serve his country.