Randy puffed out his cheeks contemplatively. “If I were to perform this…act of mercy, there would hardly be any point in doing it quietly.”

Terry closed his laptop and grinned. “You know what I like about you, Senator?”

“My checkbook?”

“No. With most clients, I have to explain. Never with you.”

“That’s”-Senator Randy smiled-“because I went to Gratin. You do understand that we could all go down in flames if this thing turns on us? But I do believe it would be the most gorgeous fire.”

The next day, on the floor of the U.S. Senate with three other senators present, one of them asleep and the other two twiddling with their BlackBerrys, Randolph K. Jepperson stood at his desk and in his best senatorial voice said, “Mr. President, I rise to protest an outrageous wrong, perpetuated upon our children, and our children’s children, from this very chamber, in the heart of what was once a country with a heart.…”

Terry didn’t want to be observed sitting in the Senate gallery, so he watched his words being uttered on TV, back at the office.

One of his friends, a lobbyist for the insecticide industry, called. “I’m watching your boy He’s-No-Jefferson on C-SPAN yapping about some Social Security ‘reparations’ bill he’s sponsoring? What’s that about?”

“Some notion he’s got,” Terry said matter-of-factly. “I like it. Idea is that kids are getting fucked on Social Security, so he’s proposing a moratorium. No one under thirty has to pay in. The second part is Congress has to permanently fix the system, make it solvent, make it pay for itself, instead of this fucking Ponzi scheme we’ve got, where the debt just gets handed on to the next generation. If Congress doesn’t, then the moratorium continues. I like it. And I think it’s going to be hotter than a chili pepper in the presidential.”

“Oh, sure,” his friend snorted, “that’s got a real good chance.”

“It’s the fate of many propositions,” Terry said, “to begin as heresies and end as truths. I read that somewhere, anyway.”

“Yeah, well, you send me a postcard when it becomes a truth. Say, listen, we gotta do a PSA on this mesothamalide-7 thing because we’re getting clobbered by the fucking bird huggers.”

“I told you,” Terry said, “you gotta rename that shit. It sounds like something they use in concentration camps. Call it…I don’t know, something like poly…poly-pepto…perfumo-honeysuckle-number nine. Something harmless. Look up what they put in ice cream and call it that.”

“It’s chemicals, Terry. We can’t rename chemicals.”

“Then brand it. Call it ‘Bug-Away’ or ‘Bug-a-Boo’ or-I got it-‘ Bug-a-Bye.’ Something cute. I gotta go, Larry. My guy’s on the floor here, making a major policy statement. Doesn’t happen every day. Call you later.”

Randy’s speech might as well have been a pebble dropped into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for all the coverage it got. But it set the stage for what Terry called “the gathering storm.”

The next day, Randy showed up outside the Alexandria Detention Center and held an “impromptu” press conference-prearranged by Terry-in which he called on the government to release Cassandra Devine, pending her trial.

“The whole world is watching,” he intoned gravely. It was a bit of an exaggeration. But a lot of people had gathered outside the detention center, several hundred of Cass’s supporters. One person who was watching on TV was Bucky Trumble, chief political counselor to the president of the United States, and he was having a bad day. The secretary of the Treasury had just informed him that the Bank of China had declined the new issue of U.S. Treasury bills.

Seeing Randy on CNN, wagging his finger in the general direction of the White House, he thought, What the hell is he doing getting involved in this?

Chapter 11

Randy’s speech, delivered outside the detention center, was a reprise of his Senate speech the day before, only, as one pundit observed, “smothered in hot sauce.” The crowd cheered and roared, made V-signs, and shouted for Cass to be released. Even Terry was impressed, and those of the PR persuasion are not, easily.

“I thought you were going to take off your leg and shake it at the feds,” he said when they were back in the van that served as the mobile headquarters for the Free Cassandra campaign.

“You know,” Randy said, swigging bottled water like a prizefighter between rounds, “the thought actually crossed my mind.”

“Do me a favor and don’t, if it crosses again. You’re doing just fine. I wonder if she was watching.”

On the other side of the walls of the detention center, Cass was playing hearts with a reporter for The New York Times. The reporter was a fellow inmate. There were quite a few reporters “on the inside” these days, so many of them that they’d formed their own prison gang. They called themselves “Pulitzer Nation” and sported henna tattoos and do-rags made from expensive hosiery. Cass’s card-playing partner was a Times reporter who had revealed in her “Letter from Washington” that the CIA had planted a chef inside the French embassy in Washington-no mean feat-who was putting edible listening devices in the torchons de foie gras at state dinners. She was refusing to reveal her source.

“Yo, bitch, Devine,” shouted one of the reporter’s colleagues, an op-ed columnist who had declined to testify before a grand jury that had been impaneled twenty years ago to investigate whether a member of the cabinet (now deceased) had asked a waitress (now living in Argentina) at a restaurant (defunct) for her phone number (since disconnected). “Check it out.”

She pointed to the TV monitor bolted to the wall of the so-called playroom. Cass looked up. There was Senator Randolph K. Jepperson, giving a speech to a crowd holding up signs with her name.

“Looks like someone’s got herself a white knight on the outside,” said the op-ed columnist. “Isn’t he the one you did whuppety-do with back in Bosnia?”

“Define whuppety-do,” said Cass.

“He just called you the conscience of your generation.”

“Damnit girl, knew you had the queen.”

“Wish someone would call me the conscience of my generation,” said a society reporter for The Washington Post who was serving three-to-five for not revealing her source. “You sleep with him?”

“Please. What a question.”

“Prisoners are supposed to share confidences. We’re all in here together.”

“No. I didn’t. But the earth did move.”

“He’s cute-in a scary sort of way. Didn’t he date what’s-er-name, the Tegucigalpa Tamale?”

Cass watched Randy on TV as she shuffled the deck. Had to be Terry’s handiwork.

By nightfall, the footage of Randy’s speech had caused the crowd to swell to thousands. Terry orchestrated the chanting from the van by radio.

“Just like the sixties,” he said, looking out the van’s one-way windows, “only cleaner. Where are you going?” he said to Randy, who was opening the door.

“To mingle,” he said, “with my people.”

“Don’t get yourself overexposed.”

“Overexposed?” Randy chuckled. “Don’t know the meaning of the word.”

The moment Randy emerged from the van, he was swallowed up in an admiring scrum of twenty-somethings carrying signs.

Terry watched him get swallowed up in the throng until he was only a head illuminated by bright TV lights. There were three TV monitors inside the van, so he could watch him be interviewed live.

A reporter from the Fox network thrust a microphone at Randy.

“Senator, one of your colleagues, Senator Meltinghausen, says you’re a, quote, craven opportunist. Isn’t that harsh language for such a normally collegial body like the Senate?”