Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

“Nice.”

Later, as Frank walked her back up through Georgetown to her car, she said, “I was wondering if you’d be interested in joining my advisory staff. It would be an extension of the work you’ve been doing at NSF. I mean, I know you’re planning to go back to San Diego, but until then, you know…I could use your help.”

Frank had stopped walking. Diane turned and glanced up at him, shyly it seemed, and then looked away, down M Street. The stretch they could see looked to Frank like the Platonic form of a Midwestern main street, totally unlike the rest of D.C.

“Sure,” Frank heard himself say. He realized that in some sense he had to accept her offer. He had no choice; he was only in D.C. now because of her previous invitation to work on the climate problem, and he had been doing that for a year now. And they were friends, they were colleagues; they were…“I mean, I’ll have to check with my department and all first, to make sure it will all be okay at UCSD. But I think it could be really interesting.”

“Oh good. Good. I was hoping you’d say yes.”

The next morning, at work his doorway darkened, and he swung his chair around, expecting to see Diane, there to discuss their move to the Presidential Science Advisor’s offices—

“Oh! Edgardo!”

“Hi, Frank. Hey, are you up for getting a bite at the Food Factory?” Waggling his eyebrows Groucho-istically.

“Sure,” Frank said, trying to sound natural. It was hard not to look around his office as he saved and shut the file he was working on.

On the way to the Food Factory, Edgardo surreptitiously ran a wand over Frank, and gave it to Frank, who did the same for him. Then they went in and stood at a bar, noisily eating chips and salsa.

“What is it?”

“A friend of mine has tracked down your friend and her husband.”

“Ah ha! And?”

“They work for a unit of a black agency called Advanced Research and Development Agency Prime. The man’s name is Edward Cooper, and hers is Caroline Churchland. They ran a big data-mining effort, which was a combination of the Total Information Awareness project and some other black programs in Homeland Security.”

“Wait—she didn’t work for him?”

“No. My friend says it was more like the other way around. She headed the program, but he was brought in to help when some surveillance issues cropped up. He came from Homeland Security, and before that CIA, where he was on the Afghanistan detail. My friend says the program got a lot more serious when he arrived.”

“Serious?”

“Some surveillance issues. My friend didn’t know what that meant. And then this attempt on the election that she tipped us to.”

“But he worked for her ?”

“Yes.”

“And when did they get married?”

“About two years before he joined her project.”

“And he worked for her.”

“That’s what I was told. Also, my friend thinks he probably knows where she’s gone.”

“What!”

“That’s what he told me. On the night she disappeared, you see, there was a call from a pay phone she had used before, a call to the Khembali embassy. I take it that was to you?”

“She left a message,” Frank muttered, more and more worried. “But so?”

“Well, there was another call from that pay phone, to a number in Maine. My friend found the address for that number, and it’s the number of your friend’s college roommate. And that roommate has a vacation home on an island up there. And the power has just been turned on for that vacation home. So he thinks that’s where she may have gone, and, as I’m sure you can see, he furthermore thinks that if he can track her that well, at his remove, then her husband is likely to be even faster at it.”

“Shit.” Frank’s feet were cold.

“Shit indeed. Possibly you should warn her. I mean, if she thinks she’s hidden herself—”

“Yeah, sure,” Frank said, thinking furiously. “But another thing—if her ex could find her, couldn’t he find me too?”

“Maybe so.”

They regarded each other.

“We have to neutralize this guy somehow,” Frank said.

Edgardo shook his head. “Do not say that, my friend.”

“Why not?”

“Neutralize?” He dragged out the word, his expression suddenly black. “Eliminate? Remove? Equalize? Disable? DX? Disappear? Liquidate?”

“I don’t mean any of those,” Frank explained. “I just meant neutralize. As in, unable to affect us. Made neutral to us.”

“Hard to do,” Edgardo said. “I mean, get a restraining order? You don’t want to go there. It doesn’t work even if you can get them.”

“Well?”

“You may just have to live with it.”

“ Live with it? With what ?”

Edgardo shrugged. “Hard to say right now.”

“I can’t live with it if he’s trying to harm her, and there’s a good chance of him finding her.”

“I know.”

“I’ll have to go find her first.”

Edgardo nodded, looking at him with an evaluative expression. “Maybe so.”

AT THE QUIBLERS’ HOUSE IN BETHESDAthis unsettled winter, things were busier than ever. This was mainly because of Phil Chase’s election, which of course had galvanized his Senatorial office, turning his staff into one part of a much larger transition team.

A presidential transition was a major thing, and there were famous cases of failed transitions by earlier administrations that were enough to put a spur to their rears, reminding them of the dire consequences that ineptitude in this area could have on the subsequent fates of the presidents involved. It was important to make a good running start, to craft the kind of “first hundred days” that had energized the incoming administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933, setting the model for most presidents since to try to emulate. Critical appointments had to be made, bold new programs turned into law.

Phil was well aware of this challenge and its history, and was determined to meet it successfully. “We’ll call it the First Sixty Days,” he said to his staff. “Because there’s no time to lose!” He had not slowed down after the election; indeed it seemed to Charlie Quibler that he had even stepped up the pace, if that was possible. Ignoring the claim of irregularities in the Oregon vote—claims which had become standard in any case ever since the tainted elections at the beginning of the century—and secure in the knowledge that the American public did not like to think about troubling news of this sort no matter who won, Phil was free to forge ahead with a nonstop schedule of meetings, meetings from dawn till midnight, and often long past it. He was lucky he was one of those people who only needed a few hours of sleep a day to get by.

Not so Charlie, who was jolted out of sleep far too often by calls from his colleague Roy Anastophoulus, Phil’s new chief of staff, asking him to come down to the office and pitch in.

“Roy, I can’t,” Charlie would say. “I’ve got Joe here, Anna’s off to work already, and we’ve got Gymboree.”

“Gymboree? Am I hearing this? Charlie which is more important to the fate of the Republic, advising the president or going to Gymboree?”

“False choice,” Charlie would snap. “Although Gymboree is far more important if we want Joe to sleep well at night, which we do. You’re talking to me now, right? That’s what telephones are for. How would this change in any way if I were down there?”

“Yeah yeah yeah yeah, hey Chucker I gotta go now, but listen you have to come in from the cold, this is no time to be baby-sitting, we’ve got the fate of the world in the balance and we need you in the office and taking one of these crucial jobs that no one else can fill as well as you can. Joe is around two right? So you can put him in the daycare down here at the White House, or anywhere else in the greater metropolitan region for that matter, but you have to be here or else you will have missed the train, Phil isn’t going to stand for someone phoning home like E.T., lost somewhere in Bethesda when the world is sinking and freezing and drowning and burning up and everything else all at once.”