White: A Novel (26 page)

No one reacted at first. Beechum caught the eye of a Christopher Columbus bust that had been commandeered from a Spanish cruiser after the Battle of Santiago in 1898. The decorative bronze figure stared back at her with the same posed intransigence she saw in Havelock and Chase.

“What about the White House physician?” Oshinski asked after a long moment. “Perhaps he could prescribe a sedative—something to give David the rest he needs.”

“Good idea,” Havelock said. “David got caught off-guard by all of this. He’s only had this job for three frigging weeks. Who can blame him for trying to keep up with everything?”

“This isn’t about blame; it’s about responsibility,” Beechum pointed out. “I think the general has an excellent idea.”

“What does the Constitution say about that?” the general asked. The finger on the trigger always struck him as a crucial consideration. “We have to remember that any sedative will render him ineffectual as commander in chief. Do you inherit the wind, so to speak, Elizabeth?”

Attorney General Hellier turned to the vice president, who pulled a copy of the Constitution from her case. She had studied it well but wanted text to read for effect.

“Twenty-fifth Amendment, section four: ‘Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.’”

She looked around the room.

“We’ve got to put this in writing?” Havelock asked.

“Not so easy to talk about now, is it?” the attorney general reminded everyone. “This is action in extremis we’re discussing. I know of no precedent.”

“This will pale in comparison with what might happen if we don’t,” Beechum said. “No one in this room has more to lose politically than I do; we might as well get that out in the open. This discussion alone could give me the shortest tenure of any vice president in history—you all know that. And yet I accept that risk because I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and try to explain to the American people that we let a growingly psychotic man play church music because no one wanted to hurt his feelings.”

“It will leak out,” Chase said.

“We have to assume so,” Beechum said. “Unless . . .”

“Unless we don’t tell Congress.” Andrea Chase beat her to the punch. “I mean all presidents sleep, right? Who is going to know whether or not he had a little pharmaceutical help?”

“I’m not sure I want to hear this,” the attorney general said. “We’re talking about drugging the president of the United States! As top law enforcement official, I have to warn you that this is very . . .”

“The Constitution mandates that if we go to Congress with a no-confidence vote, the president will have to argue in writing that he deserves to get his job back,” Beechum noted. “Do any of you want to explain that to the president when he wakes up?”

Uneasy smiles rippled around the table for the first time.

“I think we owe it to David,” the chairman of the joint chiefs said. “I mean, we gave him coffee to keep him up. Why can’t we get the White House doc to slip him a little something to help him sleep? He’ll wake up tomorrow night a new man, and no one will be the wiser.”

“We’re talking twenty-four hours,” Chase reminded them. “What about the radioactive materials that were just stolen? We’ve already faced two attacks, and . . .”

“And the alternative?” Oshinski asked. “Do we wait until somebody actually uses them? I don’t want to think about what that man might do after another sleepless night.”

Beechum stood. The woman had never shied from tough calls.

“I think we have no choice here,” the vice president announced. “The president’s current mental state poses a clear and present threat to the security of this country. Unless you all take action to stop me, I plan to speak with Dr. Hernandez immediately.”

No one objected.

“General, you make sure we’re covered at the Pentagon,” she continued. “Andrea, you handle inquiries from the staff. We run tomorrow’s press gaggle as scheduled, but we cancel the two-o’clock briefing due to security concerns . . . leak a story that we’ve got something positive cooking. Hellier, we need you to talk with your counsel—discreetly—to make sure we don’t have any legal problems here. I’ll take the political heat, but I’ve already had one brush with jail, and I didn’t like it.”

There were no objections.

“Twenty-four hours,” Oshinski said. “We’ve got our work cut out for us.”

“It’s one day,” Havelock chirped. Beechum’s resolve had buoyed his optimism. “How much could go wrong in that?”

JIMMY BREEDLOVE SAT
at a desktop computer terminal in the middle of a perfectly round 15,000-square-foot bunker. A 160-foot-long, 12-foot-high video mosaic map board circled him, flashing information across 230,076 Lucite tiles. From where he sat in the California Independent System Operator, or Cal-ISO, Folsom Control Center, he could monitor every electron moving through the United States western power grid.

“Hey, Bo, we got a load indicator caution in Santa Barbara,” he called out to one of his fellow operators. It was a routine alert, a sampling of more than four thousand locations every four seconds. Nothing to consider troubling.

“Must be Oprah Winfrey firing up the cotton candy machine,” Bo called out. A couple other staffers started to laugh.

“Nah,
People
magazine says she’s on a diet again. Must be the treadmill sucking wind!”

Breedlove laughed along with them. He truly enjoyed his job as a staff engineer at the Folsom Control Center. He considered himself an integral part of a power grid that delivered 200 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year to more than 30 million Californians.

Working here at Cal-ISO’s supersecret control center placed him on the forefront of America’s infrastructure protection system. Like the guards, management, and other engineers, Breedlove had received training from state and federal crisis planners. In fact, the FBI had scheduled a scenario-based readiness exercise for the following week. He hoped the recent terror attacks would push it back a month so he could take that vacation his boss had just canceled.

“Hey, Bo, what position are you playing tonight?” Breedlove asked. They had a softball game after work, and the wife had given him the night to go out with the boys. It would be great to catch a couple brews down at Mulligan’s.

“Second base,” Bo answered. “Hey, anybody heard from San Onofre?”

The San Diego county nuclear power plant had scheduled to power down its reactor for routing maintenance later that night. The plant manager was supposed to call in with particulars.

“I hear the waves are breaking to the right on bitchin’ three-foot swells with an offshore wind.” Breedlove laughed. “They say it’s
the kind.
”

Bo and Breedlove—both Orange County natives—had grown up surfing the shoreline between Richard Nixon’s old home in San Clemente and the controversial San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. The beach break there was known among locals as Trestles.

“You’re a wiseass,” Bo called back. He checked his monitors again and allowed himself a moment to reminisce about the old days. Southern California had been a very different place in the sixties, before the traffic and congestion got so ridiculous. The move to Folsom—a beautiful city of fifty-two thousand located halfway between San Francisco and Lake Tahoe—had given his kids the kind of youth he looked back on with such fondness.

And who could argue with the job? Bo worked as a high-tech traffic controller of sorts, monitoring a critical section of the Western Interconnect: 25,526 electrical circuit miles over 124,000 square miles of real estate, representing 40 percent of the Western Systems Coordinating Council’s overall demand.

The tools Cal-ISO gave him made it all seem effortless. Bo sat in a command post any movie producer would have admired. In addition to the giant tracking board, four Electrohome video-projection screens displayed transmission data in sixteen interconnected western states. Televisions monitored cable and network news.

And anyone who thought about compromising the system had better think again. Armed guards patrolled the grounds topside, rivaling the nearby Folsom Prison for security. Palm readers and keypads prevented unauthorized access to the bunker, and its nondescript surroundings stifled inquiry. Most employees joked that anonymity was their best defense.

“Hey, boys and girls, it’s Miller time!” a voice called out as Bo checked his computer screen.

He and his partner looked up to see the overnight shift filing in through an open door. One of the operators, a face they hadn’t seen before, looked around with a little too much enthusiasm.

“How’s the grid?” the man asked.

How’s the grid?
Breedlove thought. Who was this new kid?

“Did we hire somebody I don’t know about?” Breedlove asked.

“Must have filled Sharon’s spot.” Bo shrugged. One of their coworkers had just landed a promotion to Sacramento.

“Must be. Who else would look so happy working the graveyard tour?”

Then something happened that changed both their minds. The new guy tossed his knapsack onto the half-moon-shaped console in the middle of the room and ran.

“What the hell?” Bo asked. But it was too late. He and his surfing buddy from the beach breaks of Orange County saw a steel cylinder roll out of the backpack and fall to the floor.

So much for softball,
Breedlove sighed to himself.
So much for anything.

A CRESCENT MOON
hung just off the northern horizon, offering little light to spoil a cloudless sky of stars. Jeremy walked slowly alongside the colonel’s last single daughter, wondering how in hell he was going to get himself out of this mess.

“So, you like Shakespeare?” Heidi asked.

The beautiful blonde wore a light-blue Navaho roper’s jacket and a straw Stetson. She kept both hands in her pockets and kicked stones as she walked him down a gravel cow path.

“What I know about him, I guess,” Jeremy said. He’d read the standards in high school—
Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth.
A girlfriend had played Rosalind in
As You Like It
during college.

“I thought you worked for a Shakespeare company?”

“I’m a stagehand,” Jeremy explained. She smelled clean and warm in the thickening air. “I don’t do any acting.”

“But you hear the plays every night. Don’t the words sink in? They’re so pretty.”

Heidi didn’t say anything for a minute. They walked along through the quiet night, wondering what to make of each other’s intentions.

“I played Juliet, one time, in high school. It was just a scene we did for senior English, but I liked it. Still remember my lines, want to hear?”

She jumped a couple steps ahead of him and yanked her hands out of her pockets. Jeremy had to smile at her instant and childlike enthusiasm. Her smile literally glowed in the still, crisp air.

“‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet; so Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title. Romeo, doff thy name; and for that name, which is no part of thee, take all myself . . .’”

She waited as if for a prompter.

“That’s your line.”

“My line? I don’t know it!”

“You say ‘I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I’ll be new baptiz’d; henceforth I never will be Romeo.’”

She stepped closer now, lost in fond recollection of words that had once taken her to a gentler place. Heidi reached out with both hands and gently cupped his face.

“I think that is the sweetest thing I ever heard. Don’t you?”

Her words softened; then she leaned forward just enough to lay her lips against his. The kiss felt as natural as the scene around them, but he didn’t return it. He was a prop in a play at this point. Nothing more.

“How cam’st thou hither, tell me, and wherefore? The orchard walls are high and hard to climb, and the place death, considering who thou art, if any of my kinsmen find thee here.”

Heidi took Jeremy in her eyes for a long breath, and he wondered how much play there had been in her acting, after all.

“I’m a stagehand,” he said. “Never been much good at acting.”

Heidi leaned in and kissed him again. This time, the sentiment came not from some long-dead playwright, but from a young woman grown lonely in a soldier’s life.

“Darn—you would have to be a good kisser, wouldn’t you?” she asked. Heidi stepped back and crossed her arms. She thought it beautiful how the desert framed him at night.

“I’m not much of a ladies’ man,” Jeremy said. It was the truth, and she knew it.

“That’s the best kind,” she said.

Gunfire erupted behind them, out near the fifty-yard ranges. Then an explosion.

“What’s that?” Jeremy asked. She shrugged her shoulders and kept staring.

“You think I’m too forward, don’t you?”

“I think you’re a beautiful woman trapped in the middle of nowhere.” Jeremy smiled. He looked off behind her, trying to concentrate on anything besides her face. Then, when he knew there was nothing but this moment, he turned back. “Why else would you have any interest in walking around with the likes of me?”

Heidi moved back toward him—close enough to feel his warmth—her arms still crossed.

“The likes of you?” she purred. “Judgment is the Lord’s, but I think ‘cute’ is my call to make. The likes of you suit me fine.”

Heidi pushed herself up on the toes of her boots and kissed him again. This time she tested him with the tip of her tongue. Her lips touched his ever so lightly, timid but curious too.

Jeremy froze in the tumult of a grand misgiving.

You’re married!
a voice screamed in his head.
You can’t be kissing this woman!

But there was another voice, countering that he’d been sent here for a reason. People with more information than he believed Colonel Ellis responsible for attacks that had already killed thousands of people. If the best way inside his circle of Phineas priests was through his daughter’s affections, who was Jeremy to deny her?