Sixty Days and Counting

-

Tuberculosis progressed in Thoreau until it was clear he was dying. He was forty-four, and just beginning to become a well-known writer. In the bold if morbid style of the time, people dropped by to visit him on his deathbed. It became a kind of tourist destination for the New England intelligentsia. Stories were told to illustrate his flinty character. God knows what he thought of it. He played his part. A few weeks before he died, a family friend asked him “how he stood affected toward Christ.” Thoreau answered, as reported later in the Christian Examiner, that “A snowstorm was more to him than Christ.”

His Aunt Louisa asked him if he had made his peace with God, and he replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”

Parker Pillsbury, an abolitionist and family friend, dropped by near the end, and said to him, “You seem so near the brink of the dark river, that I almost wonder how the opposite shore may appear to you.”

Thoreau said, “One world at a time.”

Then he died, and for Emerson it was yet another in the series of catastrophic premature deaths that had struck his loved ones. Wife, child, friend. In reading Emerson’s essay on Thoreau, Frank could sense the intense care the old man had taken to give a fair and full portrait. “In reading Henry Thoreau’s journal, I am very sensible of the vigor of his constitution. That oaken strength which I noted whenever he walked, or worked, or surveyed wood-lots, Henry shows in his literary task. He has muscles, and ventures on and performs feats which I am forced to decline. In reading him, I find the same thought, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond, and illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generality. ’Tis as if I went into a gymnasium, and saw youths leap, climb, and swing with a force unapproachable—though their feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings and jumps.”

Emerson went on, “He knew the country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. He thought that, if waked up from a trance, in this swamp, he could tell by the plants what time of year it was within two days.

“To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws.”

In short, a scientist.

But Emerson’s grief also had an edge to it, a kind of anger at fate which spilled over into frustration even with Thoreau himself:

“I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party.”

Whoah. Pretty harsh, that. And Frank saw reason to believe that this was not the first time Emerson had used the phrase—and that the first time it had been said right to Thoreau’s face. They had argued a lot, and about things they both thought mattered, like how to live in a nation where slavery was legal. And in Thoreau’s journal, whenever he was grumbling about the terrible inadequacies of friendship, it was pretty clear that he was usually complaining about Emerson. This was particularly true whenever he wrote about The Friend. It made sense, given the way they were; Emerson had a huge range of acquaintances, and spread himself thin, while Thoreau had what Frank thought would now be called social anxieties, so that he relied heavily on a few people close to him. It would not have been easy for any friend to live up to his standards. Emerson said, “I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society.”

In any case they clashed, two strong thinkers with their own ideas, and so they saw less of each other, and Emerson disapproved of Thoreau’s withdrawal, and his endless botanizing.

Only in the privacy of his journal did Thoreau make his rebuttal to Emerson’s waspish accusation; this was why Frank thought Emerson had made it directly—perhaps even shouted it: he imagined the two men out in Emerson’s yard, Thoreau having dropped by without warning, withdrawn and contrary, headed into the woods, and the lonely old gabster hurt by this, and frustrated to see the potential great voice of the age go missing in the swamps—“You could be engineering for all America, and yet off you go to be captain of a huckleberry-party!”

Thoreau wrote: “To such a pass our civilization and division of labor has come, that A, a professional huckleberry-picker, has hired B’s field; C, a professed cook, is superintending the cooking of a pudding made of the berries; while Professor D, for which the pudding is intended, sits in his library writing a book. That book, which should be the ultimate fruit of the huckleberry field, will be worthless. There will be none of the spirit of the huckleberry in it. The reading of it will be a weariness to the flesh. I believe in a different kind of division of labor, and that Professor D should divide himself between the library and the huckleberry-field.”

Four days later, still nursing this riposte, he wrote:

“We dwellers in the huckleberry pastures are slow to adopt the notions of large towns and cities and may perchance be nicknamed huckleberry people.”

In the end, despite these spats, the two men were friends. They both knew that a twist of fate had thrown them into the same time and place together, and they both treasured the contact. Thoreau wrote of his employer, teacher, mentor, friend:

“Emerson has special talents unequalled. The divine in man has had no more easy, methodically distinct expression. His personal influence upon young persons greater than any man’s. In his world every man would be a poet, Love would reign, Beauty would take place, Man and Nature would harmonize.”

Interesting how even here Thoreau alluded to that source of conflict between them, the question of how to make an impact on the time. Meanwhile, Emerson thought Thoreau had disappeared into the woods and failed to live up to his promise; he could not foresee how widely Thoreau would eventually be read. It took many decades before Thoreau’s journals were transcribed, and only then was his full accomplishment revealed, a very rare thing: the transcription of a mind onto the page, so that it was as if the reader became telepathic and could hear someone else thinking at last; and what thoughts! Of how to be an American, and how to see the land and the animals, and how to live up to the new world and become native to this place. His Walden was a kind of glorious distillate of the journal, and this book grew and grew in the American consciousness, became a living monument and a challenge to each generation in turn. Could America live up to Walden? Could America live up to Emerson? It was a still an open question! And every day a new answer came. Frank, reading them in awe, having found the true sociobiology at last, a reading of the species that could be put to use, that helped one to live, looked around him at all the ferals he lived amongst, at the polyglot conclave of all the peoples in the city; and he watched the animals coming back to the forest, and thought about how it could be; and he saw that it could happen: that they might learn how to live on this world properly, and all become huckleberry people at last.

Emerson, meanwhile, lived on. He carried the burden of grief and love, and his tribute to his young friend ended with the love and not the reproach, as always. “The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, not in the least part, how great a son it has lost. It seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task which none else can finish. But wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”

Frank tried to make one of those homes. He read Emerson and Thoreau to learn about himself. He forwarded the link to Emersonfortheday in all his e-mails, and passed on their news. And he posted printouts of various passages for the ferals to enjoy at the potlucks, and he read passages aloud to Edgardo and Anna; and eventually a lot of his friends were also reading and enjoying Emersonfortheday.com. Diane was a big fan, and she had gotten Phil Chase interested as well.

Phil’s hunt for America’s past, and an exemplary figure to give him inspiration and hope, was still focused on FDR, for obvious reasons; but he was capable of appreciating the New England pair as well, especially when Diane shoved a passage in front of his face at breakfast. It had become a part of their morning routine. One day he laughed, beating her to the punch: “By God he was a radical! Here it is 1846, and he’s talking about what comes after they defeat slavery. Listen to this:

“Amazing,” Diane said. “And now we’re here.”

Phil nodded as he sipped his coffee. “You gotta love it.”

Diane looked at him over the tops of her glasses. A middle-aged couple at breakfast, reading their laptops.

“You’ve got to do it,” she corrected.

Phil grinned. “We’re trying, dear. We’re doing our best.”

Diane nodded absently, back to reading; she was, like Emerson, already focused on the next set of problems.

As Phil himself focused, every day, day after day; his waking life was scheduled by the quarter hour. And some things got done; and despite all the chaos and disorder in America and the world, in the violent weather swings both climatic and political, the Chase administration was trying everything it could think to try, attempting that “course of bold and persistent experimentation” that FDR had called for in his time; and as a result, they were actually making some real progress. Phil Chase was fighting the good fight. And so naturally someone shot him.

-

IT WAS A “LONE ASSASSIN,” AS THEY SAY, and luckily one of the deranged ones, so that he fired wildly from a crowd and only got Phil once in the neck before bystanders dragged him to the ground and subdued him. Phil was carried back into his car and rushed to Bethesda Naval Hospital, his people working on him all the way, and they got him into intensive care alive. After that the doctors and nurses went at him. The news outside the ICU was uncertain, and rumors flew.

By then it was around eight in the evening. Phil had been on his way to the Washington Hilton for the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, also known as the Colbert Hour, at which Phil had been expected to shine. After the shooting many of the attendees stayed, standing around in quiet groups, waiting grimly to hear the news, reminding each other this had happened before, and reminiscing about the previous times.

All the Quiblers were at home. When Roy called with the news they were having dinner. Charlie jumped over to switch on the TV, and then they were confronted with the usual images, repeated over and over like a nightmare you could never escape: reporters outside the hospital, administration spokespeople, including Andrea, looking pinched and white-faced and speaking as calmly as she could. And, of course, jostled and bouncing images of the shooting itself, caught mostly in the immediate aftermath, looking like something from an art film or reality TV.

Charlie and Anna sat on the couch before the TV holding hands, Anna squeezing so hard that Charlie had to squeeze back to protect his bones. Nick sat with his face right before the screen, big-eyed and solemn; Joe didn’t understand what the fuss was about, and so began to get angry. Very soon he would begin to demand his proper spot in the limelight. Anna started to cry, bolted up and went into the kitchen, cursing viciously under her breath. She had never shown any great regard for Phil Chase or for politicians in general, as Charlie well knew, but now she was crying in the kitchen, banging the teapot onto the stove as if crushing something vile.

“He’s not dead yet,” Nick called out to the kitchen. His chin was trembling; Anna’s despair was infecting him.

Charlie clung to hope. That was what he had at that moment. Anna, he knew, hated to hope. It was to her a desperate and furious emotion, a last gesture.

Now she stormed past them to the front door, yanked her coat blindly out of the closet. “God damn this country,” she said. “I can’t stand it. I’m going for a walk.”

“Take your phone!” Charlie cried as the door slammed behind her.

The Quibler boys stared at each other.

“It’s all right,” Charlie said, swallowing hard. “She’ll be right back. She just needed to get away from—from all that,” waving at the screen.

Already all the channels were deep into the tabloid mode that was the only thing the American media knew anymore. Phil’s struggle for life was now that beat that came right before the commercials, that moment when they were left hanging, on the edge of their seats, until the show returned and the story was resolved one way or the other. It was all perfectly familiar, rehearsed a million times, ER meets West Wing. Charlie watched it feeling sick with fear, but also increasingly with disgust, feeling that all those TV shows somehow brought things like this into being, life imitating art but always only the worst art. His stomach was a fist clenched inside him.

For him, as for all the older viewers, there were other reasons than TV shows to feel this sick familiarity: not just the big assassinations of the sixties, not just 9/11, but also the attempt on Ford, the attempt on Reagan. It happened all the time. It was a part of America. In reaction to it they would all mouth the same platitudes they had said before. The lone assassin would turn out to be a nonentity, hardly noticed by anyone before; and no one would point out that the constant spew of hatred against Phil in the right-wing media had created the conditions for such madmen, perhaps had even directly inspired this one, just as no one had said it about the Oklahoma City bomber back in the interregnum between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, when for lack of anything better to hate the hatred had been directed at the federal government. Their culture was a petri dish in which hatred and murder were bred on purpose by people who intended to make money from it. And so it had happened again, and yet the people who had filled the madman’s addled mind with ideas, and filled his hand with the gun, and even now were sneering in the commentaries that Chase had risked it after all, daring so much, flouting so much, the only surprise was that it hadn’t happened sooner—these people would never acknowledge or even fully understand their complicity.

These dismal thoughts ricocheted around Charlie’s mind as he quivered with the shock of the news and of Anna’s sudden revulsion and exit. He was trembling, curled over his stomach. He sat beside Nick, swept Joe up into his arms, then let him struggle free. But for once Joe didn’t go too far away, and Nick leaned into him, crouched in his enfolding arm. They watched the reporters breathlessly reporting what they had already reported, waiting right there on camera for more news. Charlie turned down the sound and tried to call Roy, but Roy’s cell phone was now busy, and he didn’t pick up call waiting. Probably he was deluged with calls. The fact that he had called Charlie at all was a reflexive gesture, a reach for an anchor. Roy needed Charlie to know what he knew. But by now he was no doubt overwhelmed. Nothing to do but wait. “Come on, Phil,” Charlie prayed in a mutter. But it didn’t feel good to say that. “Hang in there. The longer it goes on,” he said to Nick, “the better the chances are that he’ll be all right. They can do amazing things in intensive care these days.”

Nick nodded, round-eyed. Phrases splintered in Charlie’s mind as he watched his boys and tried to think. He wanted to curse, mindlessly and repetitively, but for the boys’ sake he didn’t. Joe knew he was upset, and so occupied himself in the way he usually did when that happened, getting absorbed in his blocks and dinosaurs. Nick was leaning back against him as if to shore him up. Charlie felt a surge of love for them, then fear. What would become of them in such a fucked-up world?

“What’s so wrong?” Joe asked, looking at Charlie curiously.

“Someone tried to hurt Phil.”

“A guy shot him,” Nick said.

Joe’s eyes went round. “Well,” he said, looking back and forth at their faces. “At least he didn’t shoot the whole world.”

“That’s true,” Nick said.

“You get what you get,” Joe reminded them.

Anna barged back in the door. “Sorry guys, I just had to get away for a second.”

“That’s okay,” they all told her.

“Any news?” she asked fearfully.

“No news.”

“He’s still alive,” Nick pointed out. Then: “We should call Frank. Do you think he’s heard?”

“I don’t know. It depends where he is. Word will have spread fast.”

“I can call his FOG phone.”

“Sure, give it a try.”

Anna came over and plumped down heavily on the couch. “What, you have the sound off?”

“I couldn’t stand it.”

She nodded, the corners of her mouth locked tight. She put her arm around his shoulders. “You poor guy. He’s your friend.”

“I think he’s going to be all right,” Charlie declared.

“I hope so.”

But Charlie knew what that meant. Hope is a wish that we doubt will come true, she had once said to him, on a rare occasion when she had been willing to discuss it; she had been quoting some philosopher she had read in a class, maybe Spinoza, Charlie couldn’t remember, and wasn’t about to ask now. He found it a chilling definition. There was more to hope than that. For him it was a rather common emotion, indeed a kind of default mode, or state of being; he was always hoping for something. Hoping for the best. There was something important in that, some principle that was more than just a wish that you doubted would come true, some essential component of dealing with life. The tug of the future. The reason you tried. You had to hope for things, didn’t you? Life hoped to live and then tried to live. “He’s going to be all right,” Charlie insisted, as if contradicting someone, and he got up to go to the kitchen, his throat suddenly clenching. “If he was going to die he would have already,” he shouted back into the living room. “Once they get someone into intensive care they hardly ever die.”

This was not true, and he knew it. On TV it was true; in real life, not. He slung the refrigerator door open and looked in it for a while before realizing there was nothing in there he wanted. He had not eaten dinner but his appetite was gone. “God damn it,” he muttered, shutting the door and going to the window. In the wall of the apartment wrapping the back of their house, almost every window flickered with the blue light of people watching their TVs. Everyone caught in the same drama. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

He went back out and joined the family.

-

PHIL SURVIVED. It turned out as Charlie had hoped, which was mere luck; but once they got him into intensive care, they gave him transfusions and sewed up the damage, which luckily was not as bad as it could have been—stabilized him, as they said, and got him through the crisis hours, and after that he was “resting comfortably,” although from what Roy told Charlie, in a call at five the next morning, neither of them even thinking yet of sleep, still deep in the horrible hours, it was not comfortable at all. The bullet had ticked the edge of his kevlar vest and then run up through his neck, tearing through flesh but missing the carotid, the jugular, the vocal cords. A lucky shot. But he was in considerable pain, Roy said, despite the sedation. The vice president was nominally in charge, but obviously Roy and Andrea and the rest of the staff were doing a lot of the work.

By the time Charlie got to see Phil, over a week later, they had moved him back to the White House. When Charlie’s time came he was sitting up in a hospital-style bed located in the Oval Office, with a mass of paperwork strewn on his lap and a phone headset on his head. It seemed possible he was trying deliberately to look like FDR, headset mouthpiece resembling in its cocked angle FDR’s cigarette holder, but maybe it was just a coincidence.

“It’s good to see you,” Charlie said, shaking his hand gingerly.

“Good to see you too Charlie. Can you believe this?”

“Not really.”

“It’s been surreal, I’ll tell you.”

“How much of it do you remember?”

“All of it! They had to knock me out to operate on me. I hate being knocked out.”

“Me too.”

Phil regarded him. It seemed to Charlie that for a second Phil was remembering who Charlie was. Well, fair enough; he had gone on a long journey.

Now he said, “It always seems like there’s a chance you won’t wake up.”

“I know,” Charlie said. “Believe me. But you woke up.”

“Yes.”

There was a tightness to Phil’s mouth which looked new to Charlie, and reminded him of Anna. Also his face was pale. His hair was as clean as usual; nurses must be washing it for him.

“But enough of that.” Phil sat up farther. “Have you had any ideas about how we can use this to really take over Congress at the midterm elections?”

Charlie laughed. “Isn’t it a bit early for that?”

“No.”

“I guess. Well, how about handgun regulation? You could call for it with this Congress, then use their lack of response to beat on them during the campaign.”

“We would need poll numbers on that. As I recall it’s not a winning issue.”

Charlie laughed at Phil’s bravura, his everything-is-politics pose. He knew Phil didn’t really believe in that kind of style—but then again, Phil was looking serious. It occurred to Charlie that he was looking at a different person.

“I’m not so sure about that,” Charlie said. “The NRA wants us to think that, but I can’t believe most Americans are in favor of handguns, can you?”

Phil gave him a look. “Actually I can.”

“Point taken,” Charlie conceded, “but still. I wonder about it. I don’t believe it. It doesn’t match with what I see.”

“People want to know they can defend themselves.”

“The defense doesn’t come from guns. It comes from the rule of law. Most people know that.”

Phil gave him the over-the-glasses look. “You have a lot of faith in the American electorate, Charlie.”

“Well, so do you.”

“That’s true.” Phil nodded and then winced. He took off the phone headset with his right arm, keeping his head as still as possible. He sighed. “It’s good to remind me. All this has left me a bit shaken.”

“Jesus, I’ll bet.”

“All he had to do was shoot a little higher and I would have been a goner. He was only about thirty feet from me. I saw something out of the corner of my eye and looked over. That’s probably what saved me. I can still see him. He didn’t look that crazy.”

“He was, though. He’s spent some time in institutions, they say, and a lot more living at his mom’s, listening to talk radio.”

“Ah yeah. So, like the guy who shot Reagan.”

“That’s right.”

“Same place and all—it’s like a goddam rerun. ‘Hi honey, I forgot to duck!’”

“That’s right. He also said to his surgeons, ‘I hope none of you are Democrats.’”

Phil laughed so hard he had to rein himself in. “That poor guy didn’t know whether he was in a movie or not. It was all a movie to him.”

“That’s true.”

“At least he thought he was playing the good guy. He was a cloth-head, but he thought he was doing good.”

“A fitting epitaph.”

Phil looked around the office. “I’ve been thinking that JFK was really unlucky. A lot of these people are so crazy they’re incompetent, but his guy was an expert marksman. Amazingly expert, when you think about it. Long shot, moving target—I’ve been thinking that maybe the conspiracy folks are right about that one. That it was too good a shot to be real.”

Whatever, Charlie didn’t say. Instead he said, “Maybe so.”

It was a gruesome topic. But natural enough for Phil to be interested in it right now. Indeed, he went methodically down through the list: Lincoln had been shot point-blank, Garfield and McKinley likewise; and Reagan too; while the woman who took a potshot at Ford, and the guy who had tried to fly a small plane into the White House, could hardly even be said to have tried. “And a guy shot at FDR too, did you know that? He missed Roosevelt, and Roosevelt got a good night’s sleep that night and never mentioned the matter again. But the mayor of Chicago was hit and later on he died.”

“Like John Connally in reverse.”

“Yeah.” Phil shook his head. “FDR was a strange man. I mean, I love him and honor him, but he’s not like Lincoln. Lincoln you can understand. You can read him like a book. It’s not that he wasn’t complex, because he was, but complex in a way you can see and think about. FDR is just plain mysterious. After he had his polio he put on a mask. He played a part as much as Reagan. He never let anyone inside that mask. They even called him the Sphinx, and he loved that.” He paused, thinking it over. “I’m going to be like that,” he said suddenly, glancing at Charlie.

“Hard to believe,” Charlie said.

Phil smiled the ghost of his famous smile, and Charlie wondered if they would ever see the full version again.

Then there was a knock on the door, and Diane Chang came in.

“Hi honey,” Phil said, “I forgot to duck!” And there was the full smile.

“Please,” Diane said severely. “Quit it.” She explained to Charlie: “He says that every time I come in.” To Phil: “So stop. How do you feel?”

“Better, now that you’re here.”

“Are you still doing Reagan or are you just happy to see me?”

The men laughed, and again Phil winced. “I need my meds,” he said. “President on drugs!”

“Rush Limbaugh is outraged about it.”

They laughed again, but Phil really did seem to be hurting.

“I should let you go,” Charlie said.

Phil nodded. “Okay. But look, Charlie.”

Now he had a look Charlie had never seen before. Intent—some kind of contained anger—it would make sense—but Phil had always been so mellow. Hyperactive but mellow. Or seemingly mellow. Maybe before the shooting was when Phil had worn the mask, Charlie thought suddenly; maybe now they would be seeing more of him rather than less.

“I want to put this to use,” Phil said. “We’ve gotten a good start on the climate problem, but there are other problems just as bad. So I want to push the process, and I’m willing to try all kinds of things to make it happen.”

“Okay,” Charlie said. “I’ll think about some things to try.” By God I will!

He watched Phil squeeze Diane’s hand. Test the limits, make an experiment in politics, in history itself. Just how far would Phil go? And how far could he get?

-

EVERYONE WAS A LITTLE SHAKEN in those first few days after Phil got shot, although as it became clear he would recover, people tended to return from out of that briefly glimpsed bad alternative history to default mode, to the world they had inhabited before, without any lingering sense that things could be different. Because they weren’t different, and it was too hard to imagine what things would be like without Phil Chase there. So it was just something that had almost happened and on they went.

But not everyone. To Frank’s surprise, one of those who seemed to have been shaken the most was Edgardo. In the immediate aftermath his saturnine face had been set in a murderous expression all the time, and the first time they went out for a run afterward, with Kenzo and a couple of guys from the OMB they had met in the White House men’s locker room, he had run around the Mall twice without saying anything at all, a thing of such rarity that Kenzo and Frank looked at each other, uneasy, even a little frightened.

“What’s up Edgardo?” Kenzo finally said. “Cat got your tongue?”

“You people are idiots. You are always killing your best leaders. You might as well be some banana republic in Latin America! You’re just as bad as all the juntas you set up down there, I suppose it has to be that way. The good ones you kill and the bad ones you give all your money to. Call them good and kiss their ass.”

“Geez. Remember, this time the guy only wounded him. And it was a crazy guy.”

“It always is. They are easy to find here. Pick anyone.”

“Well, gee. Maybe we should change the subject. Have you thought of a new bestseller to write?”

For a long time Edgardo had entertained them on their runs with accounts of the nonfiction books he would write for the bestseller list, popularizing recent findings in the sciences. “Come on,” Kenzo encouraged him, “what was that last one? Why We Fuck Up?”

“That would be too long to write,” Edgardo said. “That is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, at the least.”

The OMB guys floated back within earshot. “Edgardo, are you talking politics again?”

“Am I talking politics? What kind of a redundancy is that, when are any of us not talking politics? When you talk, you’re talking politics.”

“I didn’t know that. I don’t think of it that way.”

“It makes no difference what you think. It’s all politics. You people in this country don’t even know how good you’ve had it, to be able to just talk politics all this time rather than shoot it. So you do these kinds of things and don’t even notice how dangerous it is. Someday you will unleash the furies of la violencia down on your idiot heads, and only then will you know what you have lost.”

Phil started sending to Congress a new volley of legislation, all kinds of bills that pressured members of Congress to either vote for his programs or be revealed as obstacles, which would then initiate high-profile midterm election campaigns to remove them from office. It was not that the public would necessarily notice but that the party pols would and then they would direct the attack on obstacle representatives. So there was a lot of leverage there and the balance of the parties in the House of Representatives was close enough that Phil was already getting a lot of things through. If these got any momentum and results then by the time the midterm elections came it might be possible to build a solid majority and then accelerate even further. So: judicial appointments, executive actions, all were intensified and coordinated in a single larger campaign, coordinated by Roy and the brain trust. Fuel-mileage efficiency standards of seventy and eighty miles a gallon. A doubling of the gas tax. A return to progressive tax rates. An end to all corporate loopholes and offshoring of profits. Heavy financial support for the World Health Organization’s population stabilization efforts. AIDS and malaria eradication funds. Gun control legislation to give the NRA nightmares. It became clear that his team had taken over the tactic called, ironically enough, flooding, which had been used to such effect by the criminals who had hijacked the presidency at the start of the century. It was like a flurry in boxing, the hits just kept on coming, at a pace of three or four a week, so that in the scramble the opposition could not react adequately, not to any individual slaps nor to the general deluge. Right-wing pundits were wondering if Chase had arranged to get shot to gain this advantage, why had the gunman used a twenty-two, where was the evidence he had actually been shot anyway, could they stick a minicam down the hole? No? Wasn’t that suspicious?

But in the committees and on the floor of Congress the hammering went on. Roy said to Charlie, “The media is to legislation as professional wrestling is to Olympic wrestling. The real moves are hard to see. We’ve got them on the run, so come on what’s your latest?” The need for a constant stream of good initiatives was getting such that Roy was now hectoring the brain trust to think faster.

“This is just a start,” Phil would say at the end of his press conferences, waving away any questions that implied he had suddenly become more radical. “All this had to be done. No one denies that, except for special interests with some kind of horrid financial stake in things staying the same. We the people intend to overturn those destructive tendencies, so grab this tiger by the tail and hold on tight!”

-

A FEW SATURDAYS LATER, the three kayakers went out on the Potomac again, putting in just downstream from Great Falls.

The overflow channels on the Maryland side had been so torn by cavitation in the great flood that things had been forever changed there, and one new channel of the falls dropped down stepped layers in the gneiss in a very regular way. This channel had been diverted and a few adjustments made with concrete and dynamite to make it even more regular, leaving it stepped so that kayakers could with a hard push paddle up it, one level at a time, catching a rest on the flats before ascending the drops. “Some people make it all the way up to above the falls, and then ride the big drops back down again.”

“Some people,” Charlie said, looking over at Drepung and rolling his eyes. “Don’t you do that, Frank?”

“I don’t,” Frank said. “I can’t get to the top of the Fish Ladder. It’s hard. I’ve gotten around two-thirds of the way up it, so far.”

They rounded the bend leading into Mather Gorge, and the falls came in sight. The air was filled with an immediate low roar, and with clouds of mist. The surface of the river hissed with breaking bubbles.

The lowest rung of the Fish Ladder by itself turned out to be more than Charlie and Drepung wanted to attempt, but Frank shot at the bottom drop at full speed, hit the white flow and fought up to the first flat, then waved at them to give it a try. They did, but found themselves stalling and then sliding backwards down the white-water rapids, plunging in and struggling to stay upright.

Frank shot down the first drop and paddled over to them.

“You have to accelerate up the drop,” he explained.

“By just paddling faster?” asked Drepung.

“Yes, very fast and sharp. You have to dig hard.”

“Okay. And if it catches you and throws you back anyway, do you try to go backwards, or turn sideways on the way down?”

“I turn sideways, for sure.”

“Okay.”

Drepung and Charlie gave the lowest flume a few more tries, learning to turn as they stalled, which was in itself quite a trick; and near the end of an hour they both made it up to the first level patch of water, there to hoot loudly against the roar, turn, gulp, and take the fast slide back down to the foamy sheet of fizzing brown water. Yow! While they were doing this, Frank ascended six of the ten rungs of the chute, then turned and bounced down drop by drop, rejoining them red-faced and sweating.

After that they floated back downstream toward their put-in, looking over at the Virginia side to spot climbers on the dark walls of Mather Gorge. Frank got interested in a woman climbing solo on Juliet’s Balcony, and led them over to watch her climb for a while. Charlie and Drepung reminisced about their one climbing lesson on these walls as if it had been an expedition to Denali or Everest.

While paddling lazily back across the river, Frank said, “Hey, Drepung, I’ve got a question I’ve been meaning to ask you—that day at the MCI Center, what was that with you putting a scarf around the Dalai Lama’s neck, before he gave his talk?”

“Yeah, what was that about?” Charlie chimed in.

Drepung paddled on for a while.

“Well, you know,” he said at last, looking away from the other two, so that he was squinting into the sunlight squiggling over the river. “Everyone needs someone to bless them, even the Dalai Lama. And Khembalung is a very important place in Tibetan Buddhism.”

Frank and Charlie gave each other a look. “We knew that, but like just how important?” Charlie asked.

“Well, it is one of the power spots, for sure. Like the Potala, in Lhasa.”

“So the Potala has the Dalai Lama, and Khembalung has you?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“So how does the Panchen Lama fit into that?” Charlie asked. “What’s his power spot?”

“Beijing,” Frank said.

Charlie laughed. “It was somewhere down in Amda, right?”

Drepung said, “No, not always.”

Charlie said, “But he’s the one who was said to be on somewhat equal terms with the Dalai Lama, right? I read that—that the two of them represented the two main sects, and helped to pick each other when they were finding new ones. Kind of a back-and-forth thing.”

“Yes,” Drepung said.

“And so, but there’s a third one? I mean is that what you’re saying?”

“No. There are only the two of us.”

Drepung looked over at them.

Charlie and Frank stared back at him, mouths hanging open. They glanced at each other to confirm they were both getting the same message.

“So!” Charlie said. “You are the Panchen Lama, that’s what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

“But—but…”

“I thought the new Panchen Lama was kidnapped by the Chinese,” Frank said.

“Yes.”

“But what are you saying!” Charlie cried. “You escaped?”

“I was rescued.”

Frank and Charlie paddled themselves into positions on either side of Drepung’s kayak, both facing him from close quarters. They laid their paddles over the kayaks to secure themselves as a loose raft, and as they slowly drifted downstream together, Drepung told them his story.

“Do you remember what I told you, Charlie, about the death of the Panchen Lama in 1986?”

Charlie nodded, and Drepung quickly recapped for Frank:

“The last Panchen Lama was a collaborator with the Chinese for most of his life. He lived in Beijing and was a part of Mao’s government, and he approved the conquest of Tibet. But this meant that the Tibetan people lost their feeling for him. While to the Chinese he was always just a tool. Eventually, their treatment of Tibet became so harsh that the Panchen Lama also protested, privately and then publicly, and so he spent his last years under house arrest.

“So, when he died, the world heard of it, and the Chinese told the monastery at Tashilhunpo to locate the new Panchen Lama, which they did. But they secretly contacted the Dalai Lama, to get his help with the final identification. At that point the Dalai Lama publicly identified one of the children, living near Tashilhunpo, thinking that because this boy lived under Chinese control, the Chinese would accept the designation. That way the Panchen Lama, although under Chinese control, would continue to be chosen in part by the Dalai Lama, as had always been true.”

“And that was you,” Charlie said.

“Yes. That was me. But the Chinese were not happy at this situation, and I was taken away by them. And another boy was identified by them as the true Panchen Lama.”

Drepung shook his head as he thought of this other boy, then went on: “Both of us were taken into custody, and raised in secrecy. No one knew where we were kept.”

“You weren’t with the other boy?”

“No. I was with my parents, though. We all lived in a big house together, with a garden. But then when I was eight, my parents were taken away. I never saw them again. I was brought up by Chinese teachers. It was lonely. It’s a hard time to remember. But then, when I was ten, one night I was awakened from sleep by some men in gas masks. One had his hand over my mouth as they woke me, to be sure I would not cry out. They looked like insects, but one spoke to me in Tibetan, and told me they were there to rescue me. That was Sucandra.”

“Sucandra!”

“Yes. Padma also was there, and some other men you have seen at the embassy house. Most of them had been prisoners of the Chinese at earlier times, so they knew the Chinese routines, and helped plan the rescue.”

“But how did they find you in the first place?” Frank said.

“Tibet has had spies in Beijing for a long time. There is a military element in Tibet, people who keep a low profile because of the Dalai Lama’s insistence on nonviolence. Not everyone agrees with that. And so, there were people who started the hunt for me right after I was taken by the Chinese, and eventually they found an informant and discovered where I was being held.”

“And then they did some kind of…?”

“Yes. There are still Tibetan men who took part in the rebellion that your CIA backed, before Nixon went to China. They have experience in entering China to perform operations, and they were happy to have another opportunity, and to train a new generation. There are those who say that the Dalai Lama’s ban on violence only allows the world to forget us. They want to fight, and they think it would bring more attention to our cause. So the chance to do something was precious. When these old commandos told me about my rescue, which they did many times, they were very pleased with themselves. Apparently they watched the place, and spied on it to learn the routines, and rented a house nearby, and dug a tunnel into our compound. On the night of my rescue they came up from below and filled the air of the house with that gas that the Russians used during that hostage crisis in a theater, applying the correct amount, as the Russians did not, Sucandra said. So when they rescued me they looked like insects, but they spoke Tibetan, which I had not heard since my parents were taken away. So I trusted them. Really I understood right away what was happening, and I wanted to escape. I put on a mask and led them out of there! They had to slow me down!”

He chuckled briefly, but with the same shadowed expression as before—grim, or pained. Anna had spoken from the very start of a look she had seen on Drepung’s face that pierced her, but Charlie had not seen it until now.

“So,” he said, “you are the Panchen Lama. Holy shit.”

“Yes.”

“So that’s why you’ve been laying low in the embassy and all. Office boy or receptionist or whatnot.”

“Yes, that’s right. And indeed you must not tell anyone.”

“Oh no, we won’t.”

“So your real name is…”

“Gedhun Choekyi Nyima.”

“And Drepung?”

“Drepung is the name of one of the big monasteries in Tibet. It is not actually a person’s name. But I like it.”

They drifted downriver for a while.

“So let me get this straight!” Charlie said. “Everything you guys told us when you came here was wrong! You, the office boy, are actually the head man. Your supposed head man turned out to have been a minor servant, like a press secretary. And your monk regents are some kind of a gay couple.”

“Well, that’s about right,” Drepung said. “Although I don’t think of Padma and Sucandra as a gay couple.”

Frank said, “I don’t mean to stereotype anyone, but I lived in the room next to them for a few months, and, you know, they are definitely what-have-you. Companions.”

“Yes, of course. They shared a prison cell for ten years. They are very close. But…” Drepung shrugged. He was thinking about other things. Again the tightened mouth, with its undercurrent of anger. And of course it would be there—how could it not? Once Drepung had said to Charlie that his parents were no longer living; presumably, then, he had reason to believe that the Chinese had killed them. Perhaps the search for him had made this clear. Charlie didn’t want to ask about it.

“What about the other Panchen Lama?” he said. “The boy that the Chinese selected?”

Drepung shrugged. “We are not sure he is still alive. Our informants have not been able to find him in the way they found me. So he is missing. Someone said, if he is alive, they will bring him up stupid.”

Charlie shook his head. It was ugly stuff. Not that it didn’t fit right in with centuries of bitter Chinese-Tibetan intrigue, ranging from propaganda attacks to full-on war—and now, for the previous half century, a kind of slow-motion genocide, as the Tibetans were both killed outright, and overwhelmed in their own land by millions of Han colonials. The amazing thing was that the Tibetan response had been as nonviolent as it had been. Maybe a full-on terrorist campaign or an insurrection would indeed have gotten them farther. But the means really were the ends for these guys. That was actually kind of an amazing thought, Charlie found. He supposed it was because of the Dalai Lama, or because of their Buddhist culture, if that wasn’t saying the same thing; they had enough of a shared belief system that they could agree that going the route of violence would have meant losing even if they had won. They would get there on their own terms, if they could. And so Drepung had been snatched out of captivity with a kind of Israeli or Mission Impossible deftness, and now here he was, out in the world. Taking the stage in front of 13,000 people with the Dalai Lama himself. How many there had known what they were seeing?

“But Drepung, don’t the Chinese know who you are?”

“Yes. It is pretty clear they do.”

“But you’re not in danger?”

“I don’t think so. They’ve known for a while now. I am a kind of topic in the ongoing negotiations with the Chinese leadership. It’s a new leadership, and they are looking for a solution on this issue. The Dalai Lama is talking to them, and I have been involved too. And now Phil Chase has been made aware of my identity, and certain assurances have been given. I have a kind of diplomatic immunity.”

“I see. And so—what now? Now that the Dalai Lama has been here, and Phil has endorsed his cause too?”

“We go on from that. Parts of the Chinese government are angry now, at us and at Phil Chase. Parts would like the problem to be over. So it is an unstable moment. Negotiations continue.”

“Wow, Drepung.”

Frank said, “Is it okay if we keep calling you that?”

“No, you must call me Your High Holiness.” Drepung grinned at them, slapped a paddle to spray them. Charlie saw that he was happy to be alive, happy to be free. There were problems, there were dangers, but here he was, out on the Potomac. They spread back out and paddled in to shore.

-

FRANK SPENT SUNDAY AFTERNOON WITH NICK and the FOG people, manning a blind north of Fort de Russey. It overlooked a deer trail, and sightings of deer predators as well as other big mammals were common: bear, wolf, coyote, lynx, aurochs, fox, tapir, armadillo, and then the one that had brought them there, reported a few days back, but as a questionable: jaguar?

Yes, there were still some sightings of the big cat. They were there at de Russey, in fact, to see if they too could spot it.

It didn’t happen that evening. There was much talk of how the jaguar might have survived the winters, whether it had inhabited one of the caves in the sandstone walls of the ravine, and eaten the deer in their winter laybys, or whether it had found a hole in an abandoned building and then gone dumpster diving like the rest of the city’s ferals. All kinds of excited speculation was bandied about (Frank stayed quiet when they discussed the feral life), but no sighting.

Nick was getting a ride home with his friend Max, and so Frank walked south, down the ravine toward the zoo. And there it was, crouching on the overlook, staring down at the now-empty salt lick. Frank froze as smoothly as he could.

It was black, but its short fur had a sheen of brown. Its body was long and sleek, its head squarish, and big in proportion to the body. Gulp. Frank slipped his hand in his pocket, grasped the hand axe and pulled it out, his fingers automatically turning it until it nestled in its best throwing position. Only then did he begin to back up, one slow step at a time. He was downwind. One of the cat’s ears twitched back and presented in his direction; he froze again. What he needed was some other animal to wander by and provide a distraction. Certainly the jaguar must have become extremely skittish in the time since the flood had freed it. Frank had assumed it had died and become just a story. But here it lay in the dusk of the evening. Frank’s blood had already rushed through him in a hot flood: big predator in the dusk, total adrenal awareness. You could see well in the dark if you had to. After his tiptoed retreat gained him a few more yards, Frank turned and ran like a deer, west toward the ridge trail.

He came out on Broad Branch and jogged out to Connecticut. Everything was pulsing a little bit. He made the call to Nancy and gave her the news of the sighting.

After that he walked up and down Connecticut for a while, exulting in the memory of the sighting, reliving it, fixing it. Eventually he found he was hungry. A Spanish restaurant on T Street had proven excellent in the past, and so Frank went to it and sat at one of its porch tables, next to the rail, looking at the passersby on the sidewalk. He was reading his laptop when suddenly Caroline’s ex sat down across from him. Edward Cooper, there in the flesh, big and glowering.

Frank, startled, recovered himself. He glared at the man. “What?” he said sharply.

The man stared back at him. “You know what,” he said. His voice was a rich baritone, like a radio DJ. “I want to talk to Caroline.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Frank said.

The blond man made a sour face. Aggrieved; tired of being patient. “Don’t,” he said. “I know who you are, and you know who I am.”

Frank saved, shut down, closed the lid of his laptop. This was strange; possibly dangerous; although the encounter with the jaguar put that in a different perspective, because it didn’t feel as dangerous as that. “Then why would I tell you anything about anybody at all?”

He could feel his pulse jumping in his neck and wrists. Probably he was red-faced. He put his laptop in his daypack on the floor by his chair, sat back. Without planning to, he reached in his jacket pocket and grasped the hand axe, turned it over in his hand until he had it in its proper heft. He met the man’s gaze.

Cooper continued to stare him in the eye. He crossed his arms over his chest, leaned back in his chair. “Maybe you don’t understand. If you don’t tell me how to get in touch with her, then I’ll have to find her using ways she won’t want me to use.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“But she will.”

Frank studied him. It was rare to see someone display aggravation for an extended period of time. The world did not live up to this man’s standards, that was clear in the set of his mouth, of his whole face. He was sure he was right. Right to be aggrieved. It was a little bit of a shock to see that Caroline had married a man who could not be fully intelligent.

“What do you want?” Frank said.

Cooper gestured that aside. “What makes you think you can barge into a situation like this and know what’s going on?” he asked. “Why do you even think you know what’s going on here?”

“You’re making it clear,” Frank said.

The man waved that away too. “I know she’s fed you a line about us. That’s what she does. Do you really think you’re the first one she’s done this kind of thing with?”

“What kind of thing?”

“Wrapped you around her little finger! Used you to get what she wants! Only this time she’s gotten in over her head. She’s broken the National Security Act, her loyalty oath, her contract, federal election law—it’s quite a list. She could get thirty years with that list. If she doesn’t turn herself in, if she’s caught, it’s likely to happen.”

Frank said, “I can see why she would stay away from you.”

“Look. Tampering with a federal election is a serious crime.”

“Yes it is.”

The man smiled, as if Frank had given something away. “You could be charged as an accessory, you know. That’s a felony too. We have her computers, and they’re full of the evidence we need to convict. She’s the only one who had the program that turned the vote in Oregon.”

Frank shrugged. Talk talk talk.

“What, you don’t care? You don’t care that you’re involved in a felony?”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Because I don’t have any reason to lie to you. Unlike her. What I don’t understand is why you’d keep covering for her. She’s lied to you all along. She’s using you.”

Frank stared at him. He was squeezing the hand axe hard, and now he started tapping it lightly against his thigh.

Finally he said, “Just by the way you’re babbling I can tell you’re full of shit.”

The man’s cheeks reddened. Frank pressed on: “If I knew a woman like that, I wouldn’t cheat on her, or spy on her, or try to get her arrested for things that I did.”

“She’s got you hoodwinked, I see.”

This was pointless; and yet Frank wasn’t sure how to get away. Possibly the man was armed. But there they were in a public restaurant, out on the sidewalk. Surely he could not be contemplating anything too drastic.

“Why are you bothering me?” Frank said. “What’s she to you? Do you know her? Do you know anything about her? Do you love her?”

Cooper was taken aback; his face reddened further. Thin-skinned people, Frank thought, were so often thin-skinned. “Come off it,” he muttered.

“No, I mean it,” Frank insisted. “Do you love her? Do you? Because I love her.”

“For Christ’s sake,” the man said, affronted. “That’s the way she always does it. She could charm the eyes off a snake. You’re just her latest mark. But the fact remains, she’s in big trouble.”

“You’re in big trouble,” Frank said, and stood. He was still squeezing the hand axe in his jacket pocket. Whatever happened, he was at least ready.

Cooper shifted in his chair. “What the fuck,” he complained, feeling the threat. “Sit down, we’re not done here.”

Frank leaned over and picked up his daypack. “You’re done,” he said.

Frank’s waiter approached. “Hi,” he said to Cooper, “can I get you anything?”

“No.” Caroline’s ex stood abruptly, lurching a little toward Frank as he did. “Actually, you can get me away from this guy,” and he gestured contemptuously at Frank and walked out of the restaurant.

Frank sat back down. “A glass of the house red, please.”

But that was only bravado. He was distracted, even from time to time afraid. His appetite was gone. Before the waiter returned for his order he downed the glass, put a ten under it and left the restaurant. After checking out the street in both directions, he headed back into the park.

He was not chipped, as far as he could tell by the wand Edgardo had given him. He did not see anyone tailing him. He had not let any of the White House security people see which direction he went after he left the compound and crossed the street. He had not used his FOG phone. He had not eaten with the fregans for a while.

Still, Cooper had known where he was.

So the next day he called Edgardo, and they made a run date for lunch. From the 17th Street security gate they ran south, past the Ellipse and out onto the Mall. Once there they headed toward the Lincoln Memorial.

Edgardo took a wand from his fanny pack and ran it over Frank, and then Frank ran it over him. “All clear. What’s up.”

Frank told him what had happened.

Edgardo ran for a time silently. “So you don’t know how he located you.”

“No.”

Edgardo puffed as he ran for a while, as if singing under his breath, “Too-too-too-too-too, too-too-too-too-too. That’s bad.”

“Also, even though I’ve seen her twice, I still don’t have a way to get hold of her. She’s only used the dead drop that once.” For which, thank you forever.

Edgardo nodded. “Like I said. She’s got to be somewhere else.”

They ran on for a long time. Past the Vietnam Memorial, past Lincoln; turn left at the Korean War memorial, east toward the Washington Monument.

Finally Edgardo said, “I think this might mean we can’t wait any longer. Also, if he is trying to force you to act, then if you do something that looks rash, there will be a reason for why you would do it…. So that may make it a good time. I want to get you together with my friend Umberto again. He knows more about your friend, and I want him to tell you. She’s out of town, as I suggested to you.”

“Okay, sure. I’d like to talk to him.”

Edgardo pulled a cell phone out of his fanny pack and squeezed one button to make a call. A quick exchange in Spanish, followed by “Okay, see you there.” He put the cell phone away and said, “Let’s cross and go back. He’ll meet us down by the Kennedy Center.”

“Okay.”

So when they passed the Vietnam Memorial this time, they continued west until they reached the Potomac, then headed north on the riverside walk. As they approached one of the little bartizans obtruding from the river wall, they came on Umberto in a black suit, putting a big ID tag away in his inner pocket. Frank wondered if he was just coming down from the State Department at 23rd and C.

In any case, he walked with Frank and Edgardo upstream, until they could stop at a section of railing they had to themselves, within the shadow and rumble of the Roosevelt Bridge. Umberto wanded them, and Edgardo wanded Umberto, and then they spoke in Spanish for a while, and then Umberto turned to Frank.

“Your friend Caroline has been away from here, working on the problem of the election tampering from a distance. We have reason to worry for her safety, and recently we’ve also been concerned that the people we’re trying to deal with might have had something to do with the attempt on the president’s life. So in the process, we have contacted another unit that can help to deal with problems like this.”

“Which one?” Frank asked. That list of intelligence agencies, going on and on…

“They’re an executive task force. A part of the Secret Service that is working together with the Government Accountability Office.”

“The GAO?”

“It’s a unit of theirs that stays out of sight and works on the black programs.”

“You’re getting your help from the GAO?”

“Yes, but we are stovepiped to the president. The Secret Service reports to him, and he is overseeing all this work now.”

“Well good.” Frank shook his head, trying to take it all in. “So what’s happening with Caroline?”

“Lots. As you may or may not know, before she disappeared, she was in charge of a Homeland Security surveillance program that combined with the unit we are worrying about, the so-called Advanced Research Development Prime. Then she came to us, or we found each other, when she got the election disks to you, and through you and Edgardo, to us.”

“So you’ve been working with her since then, is that it?”

“Yes. But we haven’t had much more contact with her than you have, from what Edgardo tells me. She’s been very concerned to be sure she is working with people she can trust, and understandably so, given what’s happened. So we’ve had to do things her way, to show her she can trust us. She’s been doing some work on her own that she’s gotten to us, some data mining and even some physical surveillance of some of the problem people, so we can make the case against them stick. And now we feel we are ready to do a root canal on these guys, or I hope we can. In any case this confrontation with you may force our hand.”

“Good,” Frank said.

Umberto glanced at Edgardo, then said, “The problem is, they’ve gone inactive since the assassination attempt. I think that wasn’t their idea, but it scared them. Now they are very quiet. But still a threat, obviously. So, we know who they are, but they’ve been clever about distancing themselves from their activities, and they aren’t doing anything now that we can stick them with. So, we think your friend is dealing with this same problem, from her side. She doesn’t have anything to use, and she wants to stay away from her husband.”

Umberto stopped then, and looked at Frank as if it were Frank’s turn to say something.

Frank said, “He came right up to me in a restaurant and asked me where she was.”

“So Edgardo said.”

“And, well, she’s not leaving anything at our dead drop.”

“Yes. But—I can get a message to her.”

Frank nodded briefly. This he knew. It was irritating that she was contacting them but not him—that he needed the black wing of the GAO to contact his girlfriend for him. And she was part of that world. “And say what to her?” he asked.

“We were thinking that, since this group wants to find her, that might be the means to pull them out of their quiet mode.”

“Make her the bait in a trap, you mean?”

“Yes. Both of you, actually. We would plan something with the two of you, because you are under their surveillance, while they seem to have lost her. So, we would arrange something in which it looked like you were contacting each other, and trying to be secret, but accidentally revealing to her husband where you are going to meet. Then if they responded to that, and tried to kidnap her, or both of you—”

“Or kill us?”

“Well, we would hope it would not start with that, because they would not want to risk such a thing, or really to draw any attention to her until they have her. We think they want to frame her for the tampering, so they don’t have that out there and hanging over them. In any case, we would have people in place such that they would be apprehended the moment they showed up. The exposure would be minimal.”

“Can’t you just arrest them and charge them with what they’ve done? Election tampering, illegal surveillance?”

Umberto hesitated. “The surveillance may be legal,” he said finally. “And as for the election tampering, the truth is, it seems as though they have succeeded in framing your friend pretty thoroughly. As far as we can tell from what we see, it all came from her office and her computer.”

“But she’s the one who gave it to you!”

“We know that, and that’s why we’re going with her. But the evidence we have implicates her and not them. And ARDA Prime is a real group, working legitimately under the NSC umbrella. So we have to have something substantial to go on.”

Frank tried to remember if Caroline had mentioned taking the vote-tilting program out of her own computer or not.

Disturbed, he said, “Edgardo? If I’m going to go along with something like this, I have to be sure it’s for real, and that it’s going to work.” He remembered the SWAT team they had run into in the park, busting the bros with overwhelming force. “That it’s being done by professionals.”

Edgardo nodded. “They can brief you. You can judge for yourself. And she’ll be judging it too. She’ll be in on the planning. It’s not like you will be deciding for her.”

“I should hope not.”

“We would also have to study the situation very thoroughly, until we understood how they have been tracking you, so we can deal with that and put it to use.”

“Good.”

“Stay late tonight at work,” Umberto said. “I’ll try to get you a confirmation.”

“Confirmation?”

“Yes. I can’t guarantee it for tonight, but I’ll try. Just stay late. So we can get you the assurances you require.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s get back to the office,” Edgardo suggested. “This has been a long run.”

“Okay.”

On the way back, after a long silence, Frank said, “Edgardo, what’s this about it all coming from her computers?”

“That’s what they’re finding.”

“Could they have set her up like that?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“But, on the other hand, could she have done the whole thing herself? Written the tampering program, I mean, and then leaked that to us, so we would counteract it ourselves, and thus tip the election to Chase?”

Edgardo glanced at him, surprised perhaps that such a thing would occur to him. “I don’t know. Is she a programmer?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, then. That would be a very tricky program to write.”

“But all the tampering comes from her computer.”

“Yes, but it could have been done elsewhere and then downloaded into her computer, so that this is all we can see now. Part of a frame job. I think her husband set her up from the start.”

“Hmmm.” Frank wasn’t sure now whether he could trust what Edgardo was saying or not; because Edgardo was his friend.

So Frank went back to his office, and tried to think about work, but it was no good; he couldn’t. Diane came by with news that the Netherlands had teamed with the four big reinsurance companies to fund a massive expansion of the Antarctic pumping project, with SCAR’s blessing. The new consortium was also willing to team with any country that wanted to create salt water lakes to take on some of the ocean excess, providing financing, equipment, and diking expertise.

Frank found it hard to concentrate on what Diane was saying. He nodded, but Diane stared at him with her head cocked to the side, and said suddenly, “Why don’t we go out and get lunch. You look like you could use a break.”

“Okay,” Frank said.

When they were in one of the loud little lunch delis on G Street he found he could focus better on Diane, and even on their work. They talked about Kenzo’s modeling for a while, his attempt to judge the effect of the new lakes, and Diane said, “Sometimes it feels so strange to me, these big landscape engineering projects. I mean, every one of these lakes is going to be an environmental problem for as long as it exists. We’re taking steps now that commit humanity to like a thousand years of planetary homeostasis.”

“We already took those steps,” Frank said. “Now we’re just trying to keep from falling.”

“We probably shouldn’t have taken the steps in the first place.”

“No one knew.”

“I guess that’s right. Well, I’ll talk with Phil about this Nevada business. Nevada could turn into quite a different place if we proceeded with all the proposals. It could be like Minnesota, if it weren’t for all the atomic bomb sites.”

“A radioactive Minnesota. Somehow I don’t think so. Does the state government like the idea?”

“Of course not. That’s why I need to talk to Phil. It’s mostly federal land, so the Nevadans are not the only ones who get to decide, to say the least.”

“I see,” Frank said. And then: “You and Phil are doing well?”

“Oh yes.” Now she was looking at her food. She glanced up at him: “We’re thinking that we’ll get married.”

“Holy moly!” Frank had jerked upright. “That’s doing well, all right!”

She smiled. “Yes.”

Frank said, “I thought you two would get along.”

“Yes.”

She did not show any awareness that his opinion had had any bearing on the matter. Frank looked aside, took another bite of his sandwich.

“We have a fair bit in common,” Diane said. “Anyway, we’ve been sneaking around a little, because of the media, you know. It probably would be possible to keep doing it that way, but, you know—if we get caught then they will make a big deal, and there’s no reason for it. We’re both old, our kids are grown up. It shouldn’t be that big a deal.”

“Being First Lady?” Frank said. “Not a big deal?”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be. I’ll keep on being the science advisor, and no one pays any attention to them.”

“Not before, they didn’t! But you already made it a high-profile job. Now with this it will be a big deal. They’ll accuse you of what do you call it.”

“Maybe. But maybe that would be good. We’ll see.”

“Well—whatever!” Frank put his hand on hers, squeezed it. “That’s not what matters, anyway! Congratulations! I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks. I think it will be okay. I hope so.”

“Oh sure. Heck, the main thing is to be happy. The other stuff will take care of itself.”

She laughed. “That’s what I say. I hope so. And I am happy.”

“Good.”

She gave him a searching look. “What about you, Frank?”

“I’m working on it.” Frank smiled briefly, changed the subject back to the salt lakes and the work at hand.

And he went back to work, and stayed late. And around eleven, as he was falling asleep at his desk, there was a knock at his door, and it was Umberto and Phil Chase himself, and a tall black man Frank had never seen before, whom they introduced: Richard Wallace, GAO.

They sat down and discussed the situation for most of an hour. Chase let the others do most of the talking; he seemed tired, and looked like he was in a bit of pain. His neck was still bandaged in front. Not once did he smile or crack one of the jokes that Charlie had said were constant with him.

“We need to clean this up,” he said to Frank in concluding the meeting. “Our intelligence agencies are a total mess right now, and that’s dangerous. Some of them are going to have to be sorted out confidentially, that’s just the nature of the beast. These are my guys for improving that situation, they report directly to me, so I’d appreciate it if you’d do what you can to help them.”

“I will,” Frank promised. They shook hands as they left, and Chase gave him a somber look and a nod. He also had no idea that Frank might have played any part in him getting together with Diane. There was something satisfying in that.

-

ONE AFTERNOON WHEN CHARLIE WENT down to the White House’s daycare center to pick up Joe, the whole staff of the place came over to meet with him.

“Uh oh,” Charlie said as he saw them converging. Joe was meanwhile looking studiously out the glass doors into the playground.

Charlie said, “What’s he done now?”

What a pleasure it was to say that. He knew that the part of him that was pleased was not to be revealed for the moment, and suppressed it. The result was probably a certain defensiveness, but that would be natural no matter what he was feeling; and in truth his feelings were mixed.

The young woman in charge that day, an assistant to the director, listed Joe’s infractions in a calm, no-nonsense tone: knocking down a three-year-old girl; throwing toys; throwing food; roaring through naptime; cursing.

“Cursing?” Charlie said. “What do you mean?”

A young black woman had the grace to smile. “When we were trying to get him to quiet down he kept saying, ‘You suck.’”

“Except some of us heard it differently,” the assistant director added.

“Wow,” Charlie said. “I don’t know where he would have heard that. His brother doesn’t use that kind of language.”

“Uh huh. Well anyway, that was not the main problem.”

“Of course.”

“The thing is,” the young woman said, “we’ve got twenty-five kids in here that we have to give a good experience. Their parents all expect that they’ll be safe and comfortable while they’re here with us.”

“Of course.”

The quartet of young women all looked at him.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Charlie promised.

Then Joe crashed into him and wrapped himself around his right leg. “Da! Da! Da! Da!”

“Hi Joe. I’m hearing that you weren’t very nice today.”

Joe stuck out his lower lip. “Don’t like this place.”

“Joe, be polite.”

“DON’T LIKE THIS PLACE!”

Charlie looked at the women beseechingly. “He seems kind of tired. I don’t think he slept very well last night.”

“He seems changed to me,” one of the other women observed. “He used to be a lot more relaxed here.”

“I don’t know if I’d ever describe Joe as being what you’d call relaxed,” Charlie said.

But it was no time for quibbling. In fact it was time to extricate the Quiblers from the scene of the crime ASAP. Charlie went into diplomatic mode and made the exit, apologizing and promising that it would go better in the future. Agreeing to a meeting time for a strategy session, as the assistant director called it.

On the Metro home Charlie sat with Joe trapped between him and the window of the car. Joe stood on his seat and held the bar on the back of the seat before him, rocking forward and back, and sideways when the train turned, into Charlie or the window. “Watch out, Da! Watch out!”

“I’m watching out, monkey. Hey, watch out yourself. Sorry,” this to the man in the seat ahead. “Joe, quit that. Be careful.”

Charlie was both happy and unhappy. This was the Joe that he knew and loved, back full force. Underneath everything else, Charlie felt a profound sense of relief and love. His Joe was back. The important thing was to be gung ho, to tear into life. Charlie loved to see that. He wanted to learn from that, he wanted to be more like that himself.

But it was also a problem. It had to be dealt with. And in the long run, thinking ahead, this Joe, his beloved wild man, was going to have to learn to get along. If he didn’t, it would be bad for him. Over time people had their edges and rough spots smoothed and rounded by their interactions with each other, until they were like stream boulders in the Sierra, all rounded by years of banging. At two years old, at three, you saw people’s real characters; then life started the rounding process. Days of sitting in classes—following instructions—Charlie plunged into a despair as he saw it all at once: what they did to kids so that they would get by. Education as behavioral conditioning. A brainwashing that they called socialization. Like something done to tame wild horses. Put the hobbles on until they learn to walk with them; get the bit in the mouth so they’ll go the direction you want. They called it breaking horses. Suddenly it all seemed horrible. The original Joe was better than that.

“You know, Joe,” Charlie said uncertainly, “you’re going to have to chill out there at daycare. People don’t like it when you knock them over.”

“No?”

“No.”

“I knock you over, ha.”

“Yes, but we’re family. We can wrestle because we know we’re doing it. There’s a time and a place for it. But just the other kids at daycare, you know—no. They don’t know how tough you are.”

“Rough and tough!”

“That’s right. But some kids don’t like that. And no one likes to be surprised by that kind of stuff. Remember when you punched me in the stomach and I wasn’t expecting it?”

“Da go owee, big owee.”

“That’s right. It can hurt people when you do that. You have to only do that with me, or with Nick if he feels like it.”

“Not Momma?”

“Well, if you can get her to. I don’t know though. It might not be a good habit, or…I don’t know. I don’t think so. You can ask her and see. But you have to ask. You have to ask everybody about that kind of stuff. Because usually rough-housing is just for dads. That’s the thing about dads, you can beat on them and test your muscles and all.”

“When we get home?”

“Yeah, sure. When we get home.” Charlie smiled ruefully at his younger son. “You get what you get, remember?”

“You get what you get and you don’t throw a fit!”

“That’s right. So don’t throw any fits. We’ll make it work, right Joe?”

Joe patted him on the shoulder solicitously. “Good Da.”

But this was only one of many such occurrences. Charlie began to dread the trip down to the daycare center to pick Joe up; what would he have perpetrated this time? Fitting a Play-Doh hat to a sleeping girl; climbing the fence and setting off the security alarm; plugging the sink with Play-Doh and climbing in the little “bath” that resulted…he was very creative with Play-Doh, as a sympathetic young black woman named Desiree noted, trying to reduce the tension in one of these postmortem sessions.

But reducing the tension was getting harder to do. The woman in charge asked Charlie to take Joe in to their staff doctor for an evaluation, and that led to an evaluation by a child psychiatrist, which led to a sequence of unilluminating tests; which led, finally, to a suggestion that they consider trying one of the very successful ameliorating drug therapy regimens, among them the paradoxical-sounding but clinically proven Ritalin.

“No,” Charlie said, politely but firmly. “He’s not even three years old. A lot of people are like this at his age. I was probably like this then. It isn’t appropriate.”

“Okay,” the doctors and daycare people said, their faces carefully expressionless.

Charlie was afraid to hear what Anna thought about it. Being a scientist, she might be in favor of it.

But it turned out that, being a scientist, she was deeply suspicious that the treatment had been studied rigorously enough. The fact that they didn’t know the mechanism by which these stimulants calmed certain kids made her coldly contemptuous, in her usual style. Indeed, Charlie had seldom seen her so disdainful of other scientific work. No drug therapies, she said. My Lord. Not when they don’t even have a suspected mechanism. The flash-freeze of her disrespect—it made Charlie grin. How he loved his scientist.

“Look,” Charlie said to the daycare director one time, “ I like the way he is.”

“Maybe you should be the one taking care of him, then,” she said. Which he thought was pretty bold, but she met his eye; she had her center to consider. And she had seen what she had seen.

“Maybe I should.”

On the Metro ride home, Charlie watched Joe as the boy stared out the window. “Joe, do you like daycare?”

“Sure, Da.”

“Do you like it as much as going to the park?”

“Let’s go to the park!”

“When we get home.”

-

THE THREE KAYAKERS WERE OUT at Great Falls again, testing the Fish Ladder. Charlie and Drepung were getting better at it; they could rush up three or four drops before they tired and turned and rode the drops back down. Frank was getting almost all the way to the top.

When they were done, and just riding the current downstream to their put-in, they discussed all that was happening, first the new stuff Phil Chase had introduced, and then the latest in the ongoing negotiations between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government. Drepung was excited about the possibilities opening up.

As they closed on shore, Frank said, “So, Drepung, do you, you know—believe in all the reincarnation stuff?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think you are the reincarnation of that last Panchen Lama, and all the ones before?”

Even as Frank was saying it, Charlie was seeing a bit of physical resemblance between the youth and photos he had seen of the previous Panchen Lama, despite how obese the previous one had gotten (although Drepung worked hard to hold down his weight). It was a look in the eye—somewhat like the look on Drepung’s face when Frank had given them climbing lessons. A wary, worried look—even a repressed fear—and sharp concentration. Of course it made sense. The Chinese government considered itself to be the master of the Panchen Lama.

“So are you part of these negotiations with the Chinese?” Charlie said.

“Yes.”

“But could you get, you know, remanded to them?”

“No, that won’t happen. The people and the Dalai Lama are behind me.”

“Shouldn’t you be announcing who you are, as a safeguard?”

“That’s one of the bargaining chips still out there, of course.”

“You wouldn’t want to be too late with that!”

“No.”

Charlie thought it over. “My Lord. What a world this is.”

“Yes.”

“So,” Frank persisted, “have you ever had any, like, memories of your previous incarnations?”

“No.”

Frank nodded. “That’s what the Dalai Lama said too, in the paper. He said he was an ordinary human being.”

“I am even more ordinary, as you know.”

“So why should you continue to believe you are the reincarnation of some previous person?”

“We are all such. You know—one’s parents.”

“Yes, but you’re talking about something else. Some wandering spirit, moving from body to body.”

“We all have those too.”

“But identifiable, from life to life?”

Drepung paused, then said, “I myself think that this is a heuristic device only.”

Charlie laughed. “A teaching device? A metaphor?”

“That’s what I think.”

Charlie began to think about that in the context of what had been happening to Joe.

“And what does it teach us?” Frank asked.

“Well, that you really do go through different incarnations, in effect. That in any life your body changes, and where you live changes—the people in your life, your work, your habits. All that changes, so much that in effect you pass through several incarnations in any one biological span. And what I think is, if you consider it that way, it helps you not to have too much attachment. You go from life to life. Each day is a new thing.”

“That’s good,” Frank said. “I like that. The theory of this particular Wednesday.”

Charlie was still thinking about Joe.

A few weeks later, by dint of some major begging, Charlie got Roy to give him ten minutes of Phil’s morning time. Dawn patrol, as it turned out, because it was not only the best time to fit something in, as Phil himself remarked, it was also the traditional time for him and Charlie to meet. On this occasion, however, a Sunday morning.

Charlie showed up at the White House having slept very little the night before. Phil met him in a car at the security gates, and they were driven down Constitution and past the front of the Lincoln Memorial. “Let’s walk from here,” Phil suggested. “I need the exercise.”

So they got out and were followed by Phil’s Secret Service team through the Korean War Memorial. It was a foggy morning, and still so early that the sun was not yet up. The pewter statues of the patrol hiked uphill through a wet mist, forever frozen in their awful moment of tension and dread. A long black wall on the Potomac side of the statues was filled with little white faces peering out from what seemed to be different depths within the stone, all bearing witness to the horrors of war. At the top of the memorial a small stone basin was backed by a retaining wall, on which was carved the message “FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.”

Phil stood for a while staring at it. Charlie left him to his thoughts and walked over to the apex of the statues. We here honor our sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they did not know and a people they never met.

Then Phil was beside him again. “It’s strange, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“So many wars. So many people died.”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if we can make it all worth it.”

“Sure we will,” Charlie said. “You’re leading the way.”

“Can anyone do that?”

“Sure. People like being part of a cause. And Americans like to like the president.”

“Or hate him.”

“Sure, but they’d prefer to like him. As with you. Your numbers are really high right now.”

“Any time you get shot your numbers go up.”

“I suppose that’s so. But there you are.”

Phil shook his head. “Doesn’t it seem like these memorials are getting better and better? This place is a heartbreaker.”

“They found a really good sculptor.”

“Let’s walk down and see FDR. He always cheers me up.”

“Me too.”

It took several minutes to walk from the Korean to the FDR Memorial, skirting the north bank of the Tidal Basin and heading for the knot of trees around it. On first arrival it looked unprepossessing; one felt that FDR had been shortchanged compared to the rest. It was a kind of walled park or gallery, open to the sky, with the walls made of rough-hewn red granite. Little pools and waterfalls were visible farther ahead, but it was all very unobtrusive, like a kids’ playground in some suburban Midwestern park.

But then they came to the first statue of the man—in bronze, almost lifesized, sitting on a strange little wheelchair, staring forward blindly through round bronze spectacles. He looked so human, Charlie thought, compared to the monumental gravity of the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial. This, the statue said very obviously, had been another ordinary human being. Behind the statue on a smoothed strip of the granite were words from Eleanor Roosevelt that underscored this impression:

“Franklin’s illness gave him strength and courage he had not had before. He had to think out the fundamentals of living and learn the greatest of all lessons—infinite patience and never-ending persistence.”

“Yes,” Phil murmured as he scanned the words. “To think out the fundamentals of living. He was forty when the polio hit him, did you know that? He had had a full life as a normal person, I mean, unimpeded. He had to adapt.”

“Yes,” Charlie said, and thought of what Drepung had said on the river. “It was a new incarnation for him.”

“And then he got so much done. There were five separate New Deals, did you know that?”

“Yes, you’ve told me about that.”

“Five sets of major reforms. Diane has done a complete analysis of each.”

“He had huge majorities in Congress,” Charlie pointed out.

“Yeah, but still. That doesn’t guarantee anything. You still have to think of things to try for. People have had big majorities in Congress and totally blown it.”

“That’s true.”

“What would he do now?” Phil asked. “I find myself wondering that. He was a pretty creative guy. The fourth and the fifth New Deals were pretty much his own ideas.”

“That’s what you’ve said.”

Phil was standing before the statue now, leaning a bit forward so that he could stare right into the stoical, blind-seeming face. The current president, looking for guidance from Franklin Delano Roosevelt; what a photo op! And yet here were only Charlie and the Secret Service guys to witness it, as well as a runner who passed through with a startled expression, but did not stop. No real witness but Charlie; and Charlie was about to jump ship.

He was feeling too guilty to let the walk go on any further without reference to this. So as they moved to the next room of the open gallery he tried to change the subject to his own situation, but Phil was absorbed in the Depression statues, which Charlie found less compelling despite their inherent pathos: Americans standing in a bread line, a man sitting listening to a fireside chat on a radio. “I see a nation one-third ill fed, ill housed, ill clothed.”

“It’s almost like the problem is the reverse now,” Phil observed. “I see a nation one-third too fat, too clothed, too McMansioned, while the third that is ill fed and ill housed still exists.”

“And they’re all in debt, either way.”

“Right, but what do you do about that? How do you talk about it?”

“Maybe just like you are now. These days, Phil, I think you get to say what you want. Like on your goddam blog.”

“You think?”

“Yes. But look—Phil. I asked for some time today so I could talk to you about my job. I want to quit.”

“What?” Phil stared at him. “Did you say quit?”

“Well, not quit exactly. What I want is to go back to working at home, like I was before.”

As Phil continued to stare at him, he tried to explain. “I want to take care of Joe again. He’s having some problems getting along at the daycare center. It’s not their fault at all, but it just isn’t working very well. I think it would be better if we just stayed home for another year or so, until he gets to the normal preschool age. It would be better for him, and the truth is I think it would be better for me, too. I like spending time with him, and I seem to do better with him than most people. And it won’t last long, you know? I already saw it with Nick. It just flashes right by. A couple of years from now everything will be different, and I’ll feel better about leaving him all day.”

“These are critical years,” Phil pointed out.

“I know. But maybe they all are.”

In the memorial they were moving from the Depression to the Second World War, as if to illustrate this thought. In this open room there was a different statue of FDR, bigger and in the old style, draped in the dramatic sweep of a naval cape, free of glasses and looking off heroically into the distance.

“I don’t want to stop helping you out,” Charlie said, “not at all, but the thing is, most of what I’m doing I could do over the phone, like I did before. I thought I was doing okay then, and you’ve got all the technical advice you could ever want, so all I’m doing is political advice.”

“That’s important stuff,” Phil said. “We’ve got to get these changes enacted.”

“Sure, but I’m convinced I can do it over the phone. I’ll work online, and I’ll work nights after Anna gets home.”

“Maybe,” Phil said. He was not pleased, Charlie could tell. He approached the big second statue, which included, off to one side, a statue of the Roosevelts’ dog, a Scottie. Phil scolded it: “And your little dog too!”

The bronze had gone green on this version of FDR, everywhere except for the forefinger of the hand stretched out toward viewers. So many people had touched it that it was polished until it looked golden.

Phil touched it too, then Charlie.

“The magic touch,” Phil said. “How touching. Every person that touches this finger still believes in America the beautiful. They believe in government and justice. It’s a kind of religious feeling. Do you think any Republicans touch it?”

“I don’t think they even come here,” Charlie said, suddenly gloomy. He recalled reading that FDR had been pretty ruthless with aides who no longer served his purposes. They had disappeared from the administration, and from history, as if falling through trapdoors. “We’re two countries now I guess.”

“But that won’t work,” Phil said, holding on to the statue’s gleaming finger. “May the spirit of FDR bring us together,” he pretended to pray, “or at least provide me with a solid working majority.”

“Ha ha.” Again Charlie marveled at the photo ops being missed. “You should bring the press corps down here with you, and invoke all this specifically. Why is this not the great moment in American history? You should say it is—up until now, anyway. Give people a tour of FDRness, and a look into your thinking. Into what you admire about Roosevelt, and America in those years. Remember the time we were at the Lincoln Memorial with Joe, and that TV crew was there for some other reason? It could be like that. For that matter you could do Lincoln again. Do them both. Take people around all the memorials, and talk about what matters to you in each of them. Give people some history lessons, and some insights into your own thinking about where we are now. Keep calling these years now another rendezvous with destiny. Call for a new New Deal. These are the times that try men’s souls, and so forth.”

“I don’t think there are any monuments to Thomas Paine in this town,” Phil said, smiling at the thought.

“Maybe there should be. Maybe you can arrange for that.”

“In my copious spare time.”

“Yes.”

Phil slapped hands with FDR and moved on. They went around a corner into the final room of the gallery, where an amazingly lifelike statue of Eleanor Roosevelt stared out from an alcove embossed with the emblem of the United Nations.

“The UN was his idea, not hers,” Phil objected. “She worked for it after it was established, but he had the idea from even before the war. World peace, the rule of law, and the end of all the empires. It was amazing how hard he tweaked Churchill and de Gaulle on that. He wouldn’t lift a finger to help them keep their old empires after the war. They thought he was just being a lightweight, or some kind of a card, but he was serious. He just didn’t want to come off as all holier-than-thou about it. Like his lovely wife here used to.”

“But he was holier-than-thou, compared to Churchill and de Gaulle.”

“No, de Gaulle was the holy one in that crowd. Roosevelt was an operator. And everyone was holier than Churchill.”

“This is what you should be saying. So—what do you say?”

“About becoming a memorial tour guide?”

“No, about whether I can do my job from home again.”

“Well, Charlie, I think you’re doing good work. We need to get to sustainability as fast as we can, as you know. There’s a lot riding on it. But, heck. If your kid needs you, then you’ve got to do it.”

“I think he does. Him and me both.”

“Well, there you are.”

“I can still do the daily phone thing with Roy, and come in with Joe like I used to. And we’ll get a big majority in Congress at the midterms, and then you’ll get re-elected—”

“You think so?”

“I’m sure of it. And by then Joe will be in kindergarten and beyond, and this phase will have passed. I’ll be really anxious to get back to work then, so I don’t want you to hold this against me and drop me, you know? That’s what FDR did to his aides.”

“I’m not as tough as he was.”

“I don’t know about that. But I’ll want to come back.”

“We’ll see when the time comes,” Phil said. “You never know what’ll happen.”

“True.”

Charlie felt disappointed, even worried; what would he do for work, if he couldn’t work on Phil’s staff? He had been doing it for twelve years now.

But he had wanted to stay with Joe. Actually, he wanted it all. But no one got to have it all. He was lucky he had as much as he had. He would have to keep working hard to stay innovative from home, over the phone. It could be done; he had done it before.

Phil gestured to his guys, following them at a not-so-discreet distance, and a car came to pick them up less than a minute later. Back to the White House; back to work; back to the world; back home. Phil was silent on the drive and appeared to be thinking of other things, and Charlie didn’t know what he felt.

-

ONE STRANGELY BALMY WINTER DAY Frank got the word from Edgardo during their run. It was time to go. They had everything staked out and rehearsed, the time was now. Good. But between lunch and dinner the thunderheads had grown, and big news had arrived from China: there had been some kind of crisis declared, ordinary law and all the normal actitivities there had been suspended. The American nuclear submarine fleet had turned up en masse in Chinese harbors, along with several aircraft carriers; but this was by Chinese invitation, apparently, and the fleet had immediately plugged into the Chinese electrical grid and taken over generating electricity for essential services in certain areas; the rest of the country’s grid had been shut down. And Phil Chase had landed in Beijing, apparently to consult with the Chinese leadership. The secretary-general of the UN and dignitaries and representatives from other countries had also flown in. From the sound of it, the Chinese appeared to be attempting a kind of near-instantaneous transformation of their infrastructure—the Great Leap Forward At Last, as one of the news strips at the bottom of the TV screens put it—but only to escape falling into a bottomless pit. And so the attention of the world was transfixed.

All that was very interesting; and maybe good, maybe bad, as far as any potential impact on their own operation was concerned. But there was no mechanism for bailing that Frank knew of, and all he could do was grit his teeth and wait for the time to arrive.

Finally the hour came. He was in his office, his door was closed; he knew just how his FOG phone was bugged, and by whom. Time to play his part. He picked up the phone, dialed the number he had been given.

Caroline picked up.

“Hey,” Frank said.

“Oh hey! What’s up? Why are you—”

“I’ve got to see you, I’ve got the proof you wanted. Meet me down where we met before, by the river, about nine.”

“Okay,” she said, and hung up.

He stood. Took the Kevlar vest from his desktop and put it on. Kevlar. This was what Phil Chase had to deal with all the time. The feeling of being a potential target. Of having been shot and then going out there again.

He left the White House compound, aware of just which one of the security guys at the gate had been tacking a new kind of chip on him. It had taken them a while to figure it out and get up to speed. The guard hadn’t been there all the time, but he had been there a lot, and they had made sure he was there now: thin face, impassive look, didn’t meet the eye quite. Do it again, asshole. This time they needed it.

Once out on the sidewalk he put the earbuds of his iPod lookalike in his ears. “Did he do it?”

“Yes,” he heard in his right ear.

He walked west on G Street to the Watergate, then across the Rock Creek Parkway, through the Thompson boat club parking lot, where his VW van was parked; then past the van, over the little bridge crossing the creek, and onto the Georgetown waterfront. It was about eight-thirty.

Then the city lost power. “Shit,” Frank said. The waterfront was now dark, and people were calling out and wandering in the sudden gloom.

“This is bad,” he said.

The voice in his right ear said, “—proceed for now. She says she can make it over no problem.”

Frank went down to the water’s edge and watched the cars’ headlights make an uneven line on the Virginia side. George Washington Parkway, Arlington streets above. Generators were bringing light back here and there across the city, on both sides of the river.

In this partial light Caroline appeared, looking flushed and intent. They met and hugged, then spoke like amateur actors, their voices extra-expressive—at times almost cutting each other off in their eagerness to say their lines. They rolled their eyes at each other, tried to pace themselves better. Two bad actors in the dark. He could see she was wearing the vest under her blouse, and thought her ex might be able to too. He handed her a little key-chain zip drive.

Awkwardly he put his arm around her shoulder, and they rested at the river rail for a moment, itching at the unfelt transference of the new type of surveillance tick that had been lofted onto him by the security guard—a thing of plastic and quartz, pinging at a frequency the wands didn’t cover. A programmable mobile chip, programmed to jump on first contact and then stay put: a nano-event neither of them could feel except in the set of their muscles, a kind of itch on the inside of the skull.

Together they hiked back over the little bridge, and stopped by Frank’s van. They embraced and drew apart, looking helplessly at each other, just barely visible to each other, and that only by the light of the passing cars on the parkway. This was a dark part of town even when the power was turned on. Frank let go of her hand and watched her walk away.

Now she was walking in a crowd of Umberto and Wallace’s people, disguised as ordinary citizens and as tourists, which explained their daypacks and camera gear, their iPod earbuds, their aimless gawking and walking. It was a very professional team, far more expert than an ordinary SWAT team. Special ops—

And yet.

Frank hopped up in his van’s driver’s seat, prepared to be carjacked or shot; the presence of Umberto’s guys quietly sitting in the back of the van was little comfort. The blackout was a factor they had not planned on, it was dark out there and blackouts always induced a little chaos. Caroline was headed for the Watergate and then to the Kennedy Center. The special ops teams were going to follow her for as long as it took. They knew Cooper’s group had overheard the call from Frank, they knew Frank had been followed. Because they numbered almost everyone in the area, they were confident they would spot anyone approaching her with intent long before they neared her. At that point they would close in, and act in the same moment as any approach.

Frank’s part in the cover story had had him passing along vital information, indeed proof of a crime, so he sat there uncomforted by his guards in back, expecting to be shot or blown up, but of course the van and the area were fully secured, and now one of the guards was wanding him with a bigger device than any he had seen before. Still a nanochip there on the back of his jacket. A tick, smaller than a tick. They would never find it in the fabric.

“I’m going to leave that here and follow her,” Frank said.

The man frowned.

“Is there anyone following me?” Frank asked.

“No,” the one in back said. “It looks like they’re just going for her.”

“I’m going over there,” he said, and snatched the hand axe out of his jacket pocket and jumped back out into the dusk.

“Stay out of the way.”

He was still hearing the team comms in his right ear. Someone said her tick was now taking pings. Source not yet IDed. These devices had to be pinged from within a couple hundred yards. Frank started to run, dashing across Rock Creek Parkway during a too-small gap in the traffic, then racing across the black grass to Virginia Avenue, so much darker than usual, it was normally a very well-lit street. The headlights of passing vehicles destroyed night vision without illuminating much outside the road; they made things worse. Another voice complained that dense ping traffic in the area was making it difficult to identify sources; possibly there were decoys. Frank felt a stab of fear and ran harder still. Decoys? Had Caroline’s ex seen this ambush coming, and taken steps to circumvent it?

It was hard to tell who was saying what. A police car with siren screaming zoomed through the momentarily still traffic. Some of the buildings with generators were lighting up. Frank said, “Can you patch me into her wire?”

“Yeah.” There was a click, and then he could hear her whisper: “I’m going past the Watergate. I’m not sure what to do. It’s well-lit here.”

“Stick to the plan,” someone said.

“I just saw them,” she said. “I’m going to step into this espresso shop on the southeast side of the Watergate, they’ve got a generator going.”

“Okay. Stay cool now. They won’t want any fuss.”

Someone else said, “We have visual.”

“On her or the tail?”

“Both!”

By now Frank was running as hard as he could around the northeastern curve of the Watergate complex, hand axe at the ready, thinking that a man hit by tasers might spasm so violently as to pull a trigger, or might shoot for the head on sight—

Caroline was being escorted out the shop door by two men, one on each side of her, both holding her by the arm. Their backs were to him; Frank drew up short as he would have in the woods. Cooper was to her right, looking down at her, saying something though his jaw was set. Frank hefted the hand axe, grasped it like a skipping stone. “Come on guys,” he whispered.

Then Cooper stopped and looked around, and began to pull something from his jacket. Figures leaped from the dark as Frank threw the stone over-hand. It was a perfect throw, but by the time it had flashed through the night to its target, Cooper had been flattened to the ground; the stone flew over him and his tacklers and hit one of the SWAT guys square in his flak-jacketed chest. The man’s rifle came up and pointed right at Frank, and three or four others did as well. For a moment everything froze; Frank found his hands were up over his head, palms out.

No one shot him. Then fifty yards down the road a brief scrum erupted. Some of the rifles got redirected that way. Off to the side another sudden group coalesced out of the dark, men holding guns trained on a pair of other men. Finally everything went still.

Caroline was stepping back gingerly from their own rescuers. She looked around, eyes wide; saw Frank. He came to her side and briefly they clasped hands, squeezed hard. She was white-faced, her gaze fixed on her trussed and prone ex as if on a beast that might still break free and leap at her.

Umberto appeared before them, rotund in his flak jacket. “Into the Watergate,” he said. “We have one of the condos, and they’ve got their generator going.”

-

NEAR THE END OF THEIR DEBRIEFING, with Cooper and his crew long gone, and Umberto and his people absorbed in the progress of other parts of the root canal, Frank and Caroline realized they were no longer needed. Umberto noticed them standing there and waved them away. The operation was going well, he indicated. There would be no one left to bother them.

As they were leaving, the man Frank had hit with his hand ax gave it back to him, frowning heavily as he thumped it into Frank’s palm. “You could hurt somebody,” he said. “Maybe leave it on your mantelpiece.”

“On my dashboard,” Frank promised.

They found themselves alone, standing outside the Watergate’s old hotel lobby entrance. The blackout was ongoing, although generators now lit many buildings in this part of town. Sirens in the distance sawed away at the night.

“So you threw your rock at him again.”

“Yes. I corrected for my release and almost got him.”

“You could have wrecked everything.”

“I know, but we’d gone off the plan. I didn’t want him to shoot you or get tasered and spaz out and shoot you by accident. I just did it.”

“I know, but that guy was right. You should put it away.”

“I’ll put it in my glove compartment,” Frank said. “It’ll be like my home defense system.”

“Good.”

Frank said, “You know, your ex kept saying that you tweaked the election all by yourself.”

She stared at him. “I’m sure he did! That’s how he tried to set it up, too. But I’ve got the evidence of how he framed me along with everything else. And now these guys have it.”

“Well good. But why didn’t you tell me from the start that you were working with these guys?” Frank gestured in the direction of the mouth of Rock Creek. “You could have told me back in the summer, or even up in Maine.”

“It’s best never to say any more than necessary in situations like that. I was trying to keep you out of it.”

“I was already in it! You should have told me!”

“I didn’t think it would help! So quit about that. It’s been tough. It’s been over a year since I had to go under, do you realize that?”

“Yes, of course. It feels like it’s been about ten.” Frank put up a hand. Clearly time for limited discussion. Gingerly he reached for her, palm out. Her hand met his, and their fingers intertwined. “Okay,” he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been scared.”

“Me too.”

They walked down the driveway under the awning to Virginia Avenue. They could see the cars’ lights on the Key Bridge. Their cold hands were having their own quick conversation. For a long time they just stood on the sidewalk there, looking around.

“Do you think it’s really over?” she asked in a low voice.

“I think maybe so.”

She took a deep breath, shuddered as she let it out. “I can’t even tell anymore. The group he was part of was pretty extensive. I don’t know if I’m going to feel comfortable, just—you know. Coming back out into the open.”

“Maybe you don’t have to. They’ll help you set something new up, like in the witness protection thing. I asked them about it.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“I want to show you San Diego.”

She looked hard at him, eyes searching his face, trying to read something. Their hands were still squeezed hard together. Things were not normal between them, he saw. Perhaps she was still angry at him for asking about the election stuff. For wanting to know what was going on. “Okay,” she said. “Show me.”