“I don’t know about craven.” Randy smiled. “Certainly I crave justice. And if by ‘opportunist,’ my very good friend from the great state of Virginia means that I believe in seizing every opportunity to repair our broken government, then yes, put me down as an opportunist. By all means. But the important thing here, Chris-if I may-is to…”
Terry sat back with the satisfaction of a mentor who has seen a pupil come fully into his own. Always a bittersweet feeling. He reminded himself sternly that this was no time for nostalgia or its evil stepsister, complacency. If anything, it was the moment of maximum danger, the moment when the client thinks he can do it all by himself. Washington was littered with the bleached bones of many who had succumbed to that form of hubris.
“What are you saying? We just let her go?”
President Riley Peacham was in no good temper. The economic situation had the government in crisis mode. No one was getting much sleep. “It’ll look like we’re caving.”
“We are caving,” said his chief political counselor, Bucky Trumble. “That’s exactly what we’re doing.”
The president stared expressionlessly across the expanse of his desk, made from recovered planks from the USS Maine, sunk in Havana harbor. In retrospect, it was perhaps an inapt desk to have chosen from the government’s attic.
“What am I missing here?” he said.
“The e-mail is running nine to one against us on this.”
“She’s advising people not to pay their taxes. For God’s sake. We’re having enough trouble raising revenue as it is.”
Bucky Trumble explained that the attorney general was not confident of convicting Cass in the event she mounted a vigorous defense on First Amendment grounds.
“Then how will it look? We’ll have invested our prestige-what’s left of it-on throwing the book at some twenty-something blogger chick. Who’ll probably walk out of court giving us the finger. Ask yourself, Do you really want that douchebag Randy Jepperson in our face? I’d rather eat caterpillars off a hot sidewalk. Now look at him-Pied Piper to the just-out-of-diapers generation. He’s milking this thing like a Jersey cow. His PR guy, Tucker, has his fingerprints all over the udder. The girl, Devine-she works for him. This thing’s more incestuous than an Arkansas family reunion. I say get out the ten-foot pole and don’t touch it. We’re going to have a hard enough reelection campaign as it is.”
“What’s motivating this woman? Why’s she got her panties in such a damn knot, anyway?”
“She was the one who was with Jepperson in Bosnia when he lost his leg. I talked to someone in the Joint Chiefs shop. Word is they were doing it in a Humvee in the middle of a minefield. She took an early discharge rather than a court-martial.”
“Women in uniform,” the president snorted. “God save us.”
“Well, now she’s out of uniform and raising hell. So. What do you want to do? Make a martyr out of her?”
The president hesitated, to give the impression that he hadn’t yet made up his mind.
“All right,” he finally said, affecting a Solomonic aura. “Tell Killebrew to make it go away.”
“Good call, chief.” Bucky Trumble always complimented the president for taking his advice.
Early the next evening, after a terse nolle prosequi-Latin for “We think we’d lose the case, so we’re dropping it”-announcement from the Justice Department at four forty-five p.m., Cass was released from detention. A thousand people cheered her with V-signs as she drove off. Pulitzer Nation gave her a going-away do-rag from Victoria ’s Secret.
“Should we try to lose them?” Cass said. They were being followed by at least four, possibly more, cars full of news photographers. She’d just gotten off the phone with her weepy mother.
“Ix-nay,” Terry said. “Just what we need, a high-speed car chase. We’ll do an availability when we get to Randy’s. They’ll go away after that. I think.”
“Why do we have to go to Randy’s? I want to go home.”
“Because he wants us to. And because he’s the reason your ass is not still back there.”
“You had to involve him?”
Terry rolled his eyes. “He’s a United States senator. If you’ve got any others willing to stand up and shout on your behalf, by all means send ’em to me.”
“Now I owe him.”
“Count your blessings, Miss Life Without Parole. And smile for the cameras. Say a few words. We’re looking for a twenty-second bite on how good it is to be out, how good it is your message is getting out-”
“Are you telling me how to do a press availability?”
“Your lawyer, a decent guy, by the way, is on Prozac because of you. I’ll be standing behind you with a gun pointed at your back. So stick with the script.”
“I have friends in the Pulitzer Nation.”
Randy lived in a large Federal-style mansion in Georgetown that in its day had been home to a future president of the United States, two distinguished ambassadors, Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state, and a famous Georgetown hostess who conducted simultaneous affairs with a king of England, the Count of Paris, Haile Selassie, and Josephine Baker. She died, it was said, of exhaustion.
Randy greeted Cass and Terry on the front steps. There was already a horde of media gathered around, a mounted policeman to keep order.
“I’m not going to kiss him,” Cass said to Terry in the car before getting out.
“No one is asking you to kiss him.”
Randy extended a hand. She shook it, formally.
“I’d like to make a brief statement,” Randy said. “First, I want to welcome Ms. Devine back to freedom.” There was applause from the well-wishers. “Second, I’d like to congratulate her for her sacrifice on behalf of what she believes in and stands for. Third, I would like to congratulate the president of the United States for doing the right thing. For once.” Laughter, applause. “Fourth and lastly, I’d like to say that I’m proud to be a foot soldier in this woman’s army. And I look forward to being at her side in the battles to come.” Applause.
Cass looked at him. He looked older than the young congressman she’d met at the airport at Turdje years ago. She had no idea where all this was going, and a thousand misgivings about him, yet she found herself oddly glad to have him at her side.
Chapter 12
Randy, Terry, and Cass plunged in. They formed a grassroots coalition, always a good thing to have. They also formed a political action committee and a 527, another good thing to have, since it gives the impression that everyone is behaving legally in the matter of raising soft money. Evincing sincerity while raising “hard money” is harder.
Cass went on TV and wrote endless thoughtful op-ed pieces and gave a blizzard of speeches to any group that would listen. Randy made thunderous orations from the Senate floor, usually to empty seats. In time the media, as is their wont, moved on.
One day, a month after her release from jail, Cass said to Terry, “Is it me, or do I sense a certain…ennui out there?”
“I wouldn’t call it ennui,” Terry said. “I’d call it boredom. Social Security reform, entitlement reform, deficits-face it, it’s dry stuff. The beast is averse to dry stuff. It needs red meat. Pictures, not charts showing ‘out-year revenue shortfalls.’ It was more interesting when the people-as you like to call them-were ripping up golf courses and chucking Molotov cocktails at the cops. Speaking of which, Allen called. You’re being sued by another gated community. It’s called Pine Haven.”
Cass looked depressed.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Terry said. “You gave it a good shot. A great shot. You moved it right to the top of the agenda there for a bit. And now, kiddo, it’s time to move on. I need your help on the insecticide account. Larry’s driving me nuts.”
Bucky Trumble was one of very few White House staffers who had “walk-in” privileges in the Oval Office. He did, however, knock before walking in.