Explain Dead. Evan sat quietly on the
visiting side of the desk designated for the President. He was deep in the bunker
where they’d placed him after the bombing in the White House. He hadn’t
heard any news. With everyone scattered to the four winds, there was nothing
to be done until someone either claimed responsibility or placed the blame.
He
couldn’t stop staring at the chair on the opposite side of the desk. As
far as he knew Hillary had never had occasion to sit at that desk, but her presence permeated the thing—like she had
been here, like she had always been here. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe he’d gotten so used to her, so wrapped up in her, that he’d started to carry her with
him wherever he went. He supposed it was possible. In the coming weeks, he guessed it could be a gift, if the worst was true.
It could also be a curse. He’d never forget her, the very same way
she could never forget Bill.
There
in his chest, he could feel his heart beating wildly. It hadn’t stopped
on the helicopter, it hadn’t stopped on the helipad, it hadn’t stopped on the journey underground, and it still
refused to rest. The terror and dread was constant and it wouldn’t let
up. He needed to know.
The
door opened softly behind him. His senses were heightened to a pinhead and he spun to see who had come. It was Chelsea and
Dorothy. All of his selfish need for answers was shoved to the back of his need
to care for friends. Susan and his boys were safe in another area of the bunker;
had been since the incident happened. They hadn’t seen the coverage or the last moments’ footage of the events. He’d been watching when it happened, what he’d seen would be seared into
his memory until his dying day. It wasn’t hard to see that the same was
true for Chelsea and Dorothy.
The
older woman looked like her entire existence had been proved a lie. He reached
for her and hugged her as tight as he dared. She’d never been a dainty woman but he didn’t believe for a moment
that she’d be standing if Chelsea wasn’t beside her.
He
opened his arms to Chelsea and she launched into them like a child out of a nightmare.
He rocked her slightly side to side, as he would have his boys, and stroked her hair.
He wished for his old friend at this moment. This was his family, his
little girl who needed him. He had never missed Bill as badly as he did now.
The
three of them sat on the like-new couch for hours together. Once he saw Susan
stick her head in, but she only looked for a second before withdrawing. He couldn’t
go after her; he had to stay with these two. He had Hillary’s back, always
would.
It
was probably noon of another day by the time a slack-faced agent stepped into the room.
Dorothy had stopped sleeping some time ago. Evan thought she might have
been having the same terrors he was. Chelsea was curled up in a ball between
them. She had been pretending for a while now, he determined.
The
agent was none of the things an agent usually was. He was rumpled, unshaven, and he didn’t have his emotions in check.
Exhaustion hung fog-like over his head. His eyes were red and there was tangible
grief etched on his face. At that moment, Evan determined that he was wrong earlier,
he didn’t want to know.
“We
found out how they got in with the bomb.”
Evan
sat upright, keeping a protective arm around Chelsea, who trembled at the mention of the weapon that had likely ended her
mother’s life. She didn’t make a move to leave. Neither did Dorothy. Like, Evan, they had to know. “How?”
“An
aide from the OEOB—he let ‘em in with his pass.”
Blood
drained from the presumptive President’s face as he realized that—that it was someone from his office who had
facilitated this, someone he had worked with.
“Why?”
At
this, the agent’s expression twisted into a look of disgust. “The
paper wanted access and they promised he’d be paid for his trouble.”
“Paper,”
Evan asked in some confusion. “This was a reporter?” Sure, the press had always hated Hillary, but he never believed…
The
agent shook his head in the negative. “Nah, that was a cover. This kid got taken in and he let them right into the White House.
This was a terrorist. We’re still trying to determine origin but
we don’t have much to work with. He isn’t on any of the seating charts because he wasn’t supposed to be
there. We’re working from eyewitness reports and none of them are worth
a damn right now. Everyone who’s alive is shaken up, if they’re even conscious.”
“What
about—what about my daughter?” Hillary was a child first, in Dorothy’s
eyes, President last of all.
The
agent seemed to shrink in front of Dorothy. He didn’t want her to ask questions like that. Evan didn’t even want her to ask questions like that. Hurt
too much, that look in the agent’s eyes.
“We
found her.” That was all he seemed able to say.
“And,”
Evan pressed. He didn’t want to know. He needed to know.
“Uh,
she’s, more or less, alive.” He folded his thick hands in front of
him like a chastened school child.
“More
or less?” Chelsea spoke up for the first time. It was her Senate voice. She didn’t accept equivocal answers. She
hated half-hearted truths. “Is my mother alive or isn’t she?”
“She’s
alive, but badly injured, Senator.” He’d forgotten whose daughter
he was talking to for a while. If Chelsea was anything, she was a living tribute
to the greatness in her blood. He prayed she wouldn’t be the only tribute.
“Then
you should’ve said that as soon as you got here. With all due respect, Evan, I could be with my mother right now, instead
of listening to a briefing that doesn’t concern me.” She turned back
to the much older, but much more junior agent before her. “Can we see her?”
“Yes,
ma’am. There’s a chopper waiting for you aboveground. Follow me.” Chelsea untangled herself from Evan and
helped her grandmother up from the plush sofa. Evan stood up to follow, but the
agent held him back. “You have to stay here. Right now, you are the President
and there is still a threat.”
“Then,
I need to be where I can find out more about this threat. I’ll be at the
command center.” There was nothing keeping him from there now. He watched the agent lead Chelsea and Dorothy to where he’d rather be until they disappeared from
sight. He descended deeper into the bowels of the bunker to find where they’d
stashed the Joint Chiefs, stopping only briefly to check in on his family. The
boys continued to sleep and Susan was settling, though the unease in her eyes had done nothing for his hummingbird heart.
When
he got there, they were fighting like children. He was shocked and awed to see
how upset they were. Then, he remembered, a lot of these people were old friends
of Hillary’s. They wanted to know as much as anyone did how she was doing. At least he’d come to the right meeting.
He
picked up an abandoned coffee mug and slammed it twice on the conference tabletop. “Does anybody know anything?” A resounding nothing was the response. “Okay,
we’ll take this a step at a time. Does anyone know which aide from my office
allowed the unauthorized ‘reporter’ to enter to the Roosevelt Room this morning?” Time was relative underground.
National
Security Advisor, Joseph Wilson, stood up by habit to present what little he knew. “Some
kid by the name of L. Ralph Hughes. He was a new one, not more than a couple
of months in the internship program.”
Evan
hovered behind the chair at the head of the table, before deciding not to sit. He’d
been sitting for hours. It might do him some good to stand. “Why would
he let this person in, knowing how volatile these talks have been for President Clinton?”
Valerie
Plame Wilson, another advisor, rose at that. “From what I’ve had
time to gather—and I admit that I haven’t had much—he did it for the money.
There was apparently some story to be had and the aide was selling it.”
Evan
narrowed his eyes just thinking of that kid. He knew him, if only in passing
recognition. He hadn’t seemed bad, just eager to learn. Maybe that eagerness had soured. “Do we know what story
he was trying to sell?”
Another
of the people that Evan was just not familiar enough with spoke. “It seems
like it was some kind of continuation of the current front-pager. Executive Lovers on the Outs. He claimed to have seen the President
react negatively to something last night in regards to you. He didn’t wait
an hour to get on the phone with whoever he could. Sources tell me that he contacted anyone and everyone about the story,
but only one would bite. That’s our unidentified subject.”
Evan linked his hands over the headrest of the executive chair. “Why
is he still unidentified?” He had no intention of reacting to the rest
of the news. It was all too astonishingly ordinary. Somebody else had tried to
make a buck off of him and his President. Nothing different than ever except
this time more than dignity had been lost.
“Because the only one who knows what he looks like is dead,” Joe supplied.
“Hughes stuck around to help his buyer get his story. Apparently,
he wasn’t only interested in whatever happens between the President and you. He was interested in the closing talks
and getting as close as possible.”
The Vice-President—and he prayed, never President—of the United States was at a loss. He felt like he’d left half his mind at the White House, with all of his good sense. “What can I do from here, right now to help? Name it and it’s yours.”
“Frankly,” the unrecognized advisor admitted, “there’s nothing any of us can do until we know
more. There’s a manhunt on, but we have no suspects. The perpetrator is dead. His accomplice, however unwitting, is
dead. We have a dead Iranian President, which I don’t know how we’re
going to explain. The Israeli Prime Minister is badly injured. As for our President, sir, I don’t know if she’ll
survive till evening. This was a great idea, a roaring success, but it ended
in tragedy and there is nothing that can be done to fix that.”
“Yeah,” Evan sighed, resigned to this being the worse day of his life, “I had a feeling you’d
say something like that.”
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