Ultimatum (5 page)

The magnitude of what he was facing left Benton groping for something, anything, to get a handle on it.

“I’m sorry to dump this in your lap, Joe. Truly I am.”

Benton didn’t reply. Whatever Gartner said, Benton knew that the chance of cutting a secret deal and announcing it just before the election would have been to the fore in his mind.

“Mr. President,” said Eales, “can you tell us what the current status of the talks with the Chinese government is?”

“At the moment we have no talks, Mr. Eales. The latest word out of Beijing is they see no point continuing negotiations with my administration since it’s effectively no longer in power.”

“Who was in your team?” asked Eales.

“Art here. Art was the team. No one outside this room even knows we were talking with them.”

Eales turned to Riedl. “You’ll give me a full briefing?”

Riedl nodded.

“Joe,” said the president, “I’m convinced now the Chinese never intended to cut a deal. They were stringing me along. They’re conniving, deceitful bastards, and you can’t trust them further than you can throw ‘em.”

A perfect match, thought Benton.

“They figured they’d buy time by letting me think they’d cut a deal before the election. But we had nothing back from them, all right? I want you to understand that. I’m telling you the truth here. Nothing.”

Benton knew what that meant. Gartner had given the Chinese a proposal for the cuts he had outlined without receiving even a counterproposal in return, so chances were the Chinese would hold on to anything they considered favorable in Gartner’s proposal and demand that as a starting position in further talks.

“I don’t know how you’re going to play it, Joe. I’m stepping back. I’ve got nine weeks left. I’ll go along with whatever way you want to do it.”

“Do you think they’ll restart talks now?”

“With you?”

Benton nodded.

“Maybe,” said Gartner, “but they’ll be playing for time. They’ll see if they can get anything out of you. If you ask for anything back, they’ll say you’re not in power yet.”

Joe Benton thought that was probably right. “What about our allies internationally? Do any of them know about this?”

Gartner’s lip curled. “Let me give you a word of warning, Joe. Whenever the Europeans say they’ll do something, halve it. That’s how much you’ll get. And you’ll get it about half as fast as they promise it. You want to act quick, you’ve got to go it alone. That’s why we did it like we did. I want you to believe that, Joe. I can only tell you again, you can take this into Kyoto, but that would be a disaster for our country.”

“Anything else?” said Benton.

“Isn’t that enough?”

“More than enough.”

“Then we’re done,” said the president. “Art’ll give Mr. Eales the details. We can talk again if you want after that. Just let me know. Anything else happens, I’ll keep you informed.” He stood up.

Benton stood as well.

“We have a meeting in a couple of weeks with our staffs. Pretty pictures. I guess you can understand now why I wanted to do this one a little more quietly.”

~ * ~

Outside, a cold fog had descended with the dusk. The limo headed off past bare, sticklike trees.

Joe Benton thought over what he had been told. “Usually the Republicans just tell you the budget deficit’s going to be twice what they said in the campaign,” he murmured. “But you’ve got to hand it to Mike Gartner. He always goes one better.”

“He’s been president for four years and vice president for eight,” said Eales. “And he’s got the nerve to tell us now, after the election, that everything’s five times as fucked-up as he admitted. He was vice president when the Ronne Ice Shelf collapsed! What the fuck did he try to do differently afterwards?” Eales turned and looked back. The house where they had met the president had long disappeared from view. “What a piece of shit.”

Benton didn’t disagree.

“He never had a chance with the Chinese,” said Eales in the same disgusted tone. “They would have played him like a cat with a mouse. But that’s Mike Gartner for you. Hold the whole country to ransom for seven months just to try to keep his sick butt in the White House.”

Benton nodded. That was exactly what he thought. That was exactly why Gartner had kept everything secret.

They rode on in silence.

Or was it? Benton saw the image of Mike Gartner thrusting out his hand toward him, the same hand with which he had signed the Kyoto 3 treaty in Santiago. He heard him saying that it was easy to talk from the sidelines, when you didn’t have to get things done. And Art Riedl, explaining their strategy. It
was
a strategy, Benton had to give them that. And he could almost have believed their reasoning if everything in their past didn’t show they were as much a pair of lying, deceitful, conniving bastards as anyone they could possibly have come up against on the Chinese side.

No, it was a strategy that just happened to fit the unilateralist prejudices of Mike Gartner and his entire administration. And one which conveniently might have allowed him to pull off a miracle win in an election he had all but lost.

“Get the details,” said Benton.

Eales nodded. “I’ll get with Riedl for a briefing. I want to see exactly what they offered.”

“And talk to the navy woman as well. Directly. Don’t trust Riedl.”

There was silence again. Joe Benton tried to come to grips with the numbers he had heard, what it would mean for his presidency. Most of the damage was inevitable, even if rapid cuts in emissions could be negotiated. Gartner had mentioned a fivefold increase in the impact. If Benton had thought he was facing a challenge with the scale of relocation he had known about, now that looked almost easy.

What would this do to his plans? Day one, behind the desk in the Oval Office, what should he do about it?

Eales’s thoughts had gone in the same direction. “Do you want to bring Angela in on this?”

Benton thought for a moment. “No. I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway. Not before I figure out where this is going.”

“I agree,” said Eales. “And we keep Jodie away from it.”

That hardly needed an answer. The last person Joe Benton wanted involved at this point was his communications director.

Day one wasn’t far away. This would affect everything, his legislative program, the economy, his foreign policy. Benton knew that he urgently needed to start thinking through the implications. But he didn’t have a team on board yet, not one to which he could confide information of this sensitivity.

Yet of the people who could help him, there were two, at least, who had already agreed to join his administration.

~ * ~

Thursday, November 18

Georgetown, Washington, D.C.

Jackie Rubin and Alan Ball came in by the front door. The senator wasn’t too worried if they were seen arriving at his Georgetown home by press who were watching the street. Although he hadn’t made any announcements yet, Rubin had agreed to leave the House of Representatives to become director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Alan Ball was slated to be the national security advisor. They arrived at eleven p.m. The Bentons had just returned from a dinner for the Health Advocacy Forum, an activist organization they had supported for years.

Heather showed Ball and Rubin in. The senator was taking a call from Hugo Montera, a New Jersey lawyer he wanted as his Secretary of Labor. When the call was finished he joined them.

Rubin was in her forties, with an earnest, expressive face and short dark hair. Ball was a small, dapper man with a head that seemed too large in proportion to the rest of him. He was currently professor of international relations at the Kennedy School, prior to which he had been chair of the UN commission on viral pandemics and global avoidance. Further back he had served six years as an assistant director of national security.

John Eales joined the group as well. Benton gave a short introduction, stressing that no one outside this group, and an equally small number of people in the Gartner White House, knew what they were about to discuss. Then he asked Eales to give a briefing. Eales had spent a half day with Art Riedl getting full coverage of the negotiations with the Chinese, and another half day with Dr. Richards. He summed up concisely.

“What I want to do tonight,” said Benton when Eales had finished, “is get the thinking going on this. I’m not looking for decisions yet, obviously. Let’s get some first thoughts on what you see as the implications, any ideas for how we take this forward, and then we can all go away and think about it a little more. Let’s start with your initial reactions. First of all, from each of your perspectives, then we can loop back to the bigger picture.”

Alan and Jackie looked at each other.

“Go ahead,” said Ball.

“Gee, thanks, Alan.”

There were smiles for a moment. Then a serious frown came over Jackie’s face.

“Speaking off the top of my head . . . The first thing that occurs to me is, I’m not sure where we go with our domestic programs if we have to absorb a hit like this. We’ve agreed all along that we ought to expect a deficit at least half as big again as the deficit the administration projected in the campaign, but this is a whole nother issue. If we’re really looking at thirty or forty trillion more over the next ten years, that’s almost...we’re talking about numbers that are getting up towards half our total budget. Proportionately, that’s probably more than we’ve ever spent even in a war situation.” Rubin paused. “I’ll check that. Maybe we’re going to need to think of ourselves as kind of a war economy. There’s going to be a massive transfer of productivity from consumption to capital investment just to replace infrastructure.”

“We already anticipated that,” said Eales.

“But not on this scale. Without seeing the figures, I’m guessing this is so big you can’t expect to manage it within the economy as usual and there’s going to have to be a significant restructuring of the allocation of resources. In other words some kind of central involvement in the allocation.”

“In the allocation only, or in the investment?” Benton asked.

“I’m guessing both.” Rubin frowned. “I have to think about this. And I need to get the numbers and have some work done on them.”

Benton nodded. “Anything else?”

“I’m worried about what this does to our programs in the short term. Health and education in particular. If we’re looking at something on this scale, are we going to be able to do better than just pick people up and move them and put them in a trailer somewhere like Gartner was proposing?”

“We have to do better than that,” said Benton.

Jackie nodded. The frown on her face deepened.

Benton turned to Ball. “Alan?”

“If you’re asking from my perspective as potentially a national security advisor, I guess my first thoughts are, Gartner went bilateral to try to deal with this with China, and that’s not our style. I don’t think anyone here is going to say we shouldn’t be putting this into the Kyoto process like you said we’d be doing all through the campaign.”

Benton gazed at him. “Go on.”

“Even if we had any doubts, what Gartner’s told us just demonstrates why that approach won’t work.”

“Because the Chinese didn’t cut a deal?”

“Exactly.”

“Why is that, do you think?” asked Benton. “They face the same problems as us. John has just said, the projections show swaths of their southern coast becoming uninhabitable because of inundation and storm activity, and they’ll have a considerably greater problem than us with desertification in their central provinces.”