John Barnes - Directive 51

Cameron coughed politely behind her. “Heather, I’d like to borrow Arnold Yang for a couple of minutes, because I need a public-opinion expert, and you, because I need a Weisbrod expert.”

“Better get Allison Sok Banh in on it too. She’s good at keeping Arnie focused, and she’s even more of a Weisbrod alum than I am.”

A minute later, the four of them huddled in a conference room. “Dr. Yang,” Cameron said, “I remember how useful you were with helping to prevent panic during Hurricane Gordon.”

Arnie nodded. “I had actual data and could monitor it in real time, then—I don’t know how useful I can be this time.”

“Noted. I know I will have to go on guesses, but it’s my guess that you will have a better guess than I will.” Cam adjusted his glasses as if he might need to read some complex, subtle message from Arnie’s face. “Here’s how I see it. Will Norcross just finished making a public statement, and we still haven’t heard from the President of the United States yet. And it’s bedtime on the East Coast. People will be staying up to see how the crisis comes out. Individually, they’re brave and reasonable. In small groups of neighbors, especially if they know each other well, and there’s something they can do right away, they are often downright heroic. But as an audience, powerless to do anything but watch, people spread their anxiety and sense of defeat around the Internet like a bad cold. So we don’t have a lot of time. Right?”

“That’s consistent with my experience and everything I know,” Arnie said. “And I have no idea what to do about it.”

They nodded, not sure where Cam was going. He turned his intense gaze on Heather and Allie. “Heather. Ms. Sok Banh. You’re both Weisbrod—um, whatever you call the former students who…”

“Disciples, if you want,” Allie offered.

“You won’t offend us,” Heather added.

“So Weisbrod is a good friend and a kind man and all that, but—what are the odds of having a reasonably confident, ready-to-make-hard-decisions, President of the United States come through that door in the next ten minutes?”

Heather sighed. “Pretty much zip.”

Allie nodded. “Graham can work miracles with some people, but not fast. Graham’s way is to get you to talk, then analyze, and wait for you to decide to buck up and do what needs to be done.”

“Exactly,” Heather said. “He saved my life after every divorce, but it takes days . And this is a lot bigger deal. And neither of us is Roger Pendano.”

“You can’t imagine how much I wish one of you were. So we have about twenty minutes to put the President on the air in a sane, coherent, grave-but-upbeat style. And probably we can’t. Dr. Yang, how bad is the panic going to be?”

Arnie waggled his hand, balancing the issues. “For a real answer, give me a week and a quarter million dollars. But my guess is free. I think it’s not going to be as bad as things got in Pensacola during Gordon. People won’t necessarily run outside and do anything at midnight on a cold fall night. And the Daybreak damage to the Internet and the phone system might work in our favor—people may be more scared individually, but it won’t be nearly so easy to spread fear and rumors. One-way open-access broadcast media like television, radio, and satellite radio are doing better because”—Heather and Allie both gave him a look—“of reasons too lengthy to explain right now. I’d make an announcement, right away, about Daybreak, and give people things they can do to help. Try to make everyone who won’t go to bed feel useful, have them buy into the recovery.”

Cameron nodded. “And what can people do?”

“I’ll call Jim Browder,” Allison said, “and extract three or four ideas.”

Heather nodded. “Get something from Edwards too. The FBI never misses a chance for favorable press. And it occurs to me that if citizens are watching for them, we could bust a lot of Daybreakers right now, while their behavior is still unusual and before people’s memories fade.”

“Good thoughts. All right, Ms. Sok Banh, get whatever Dr. Browder can give you. I’ll contact Edwards and Director Bly. Now I’ve got to run; based on what you tell me about our situation with Weisbrod and Pendano, I guess I have to think about a Twenty-fifth Amendment situation, and I’m the NCCC. Thanks for the quick answers.”

“Hope they were right,” Arnie said.

“Me too.” Cam was out the door like a flash of lightning.

Allie was already phoning Browder, so Arnie asked Heather, “Am I admitting to too much ignorance if I ask you, what’s the NCCC?”

“My god,” Heather said, “I didn’t realize what he’d said. Shit, it’s really that bad.”

“Now I’m really lost.”

“Being the NCCC is Cameron Nguyen-Peters’s other job, the one he never wants to think about, and nobody else does either. National Constitutional Continuity Coordinator. Which is defined as the person with the authority to give orders and run the government—briefly—in the event of a break in the national chain of command. ‘Break’ is the euphemism for ‘everyone in the line of succession is dead, disabled, captured, or crazy.’ So if things are that bad, Cam runs the government, as a temporary dictator, until the real government can be put back together. His job is to do whatever it takes to keep the country alive and free, and make the succession work out, or establish a new government if it can’t. He might have to locate the President’s successor, or direct the Army and Air Force to repel armed invaders, order the Coast Guard to search for survivors in DC, send the Marines to rescue the surviving cabinet from a hostage situation in the Capitol. So if everything goes totally, completely into the soup—Cam’s our emergency dictator. And he sure as hell doesn’t want to have to do that job—I know he thought about turning down being Chief of Staff at DHS exactly because that would put him in line to be the NCCC—so if he’s thinking about doing it, things really are that bad.”

Chris had just finished savoring the iced cola and the Myers’s Dark Rum, and was deciding between porn, sports, or an old movie, when the phone finally rang; a glance at caller ID showed it was Cletus (as expected), with Anne the producer (as sort of expected) and a bunch of “somewhere up the chain of command” names he vaguely recognized (hunh).

Considering just how far off his instructions he’d gone, maybe that wasn’t a big surprise either. Probably the corporate counsel had said they all needed to be in on firing him.

This was definitely the way to do it. One huge satisfying act of defiance, like every American journalist since John Peter Zenger dreamed of. Besides, if they fired you out in the field, they gave you some expense money to get home with. Chris could rent a car, spend a few pleasant days driving home and enjoying the fine fall in the plains, the Rockies, and the desert, and be in a good frame of mind to start looking for his next job.

He took his last sip of his rum and cola, then picked up the call a split second before it would have gone to voice mail. “Yes, Cletus.”

“Two things,” Cletus said. “First. I fucking hate your guts. Pendano still has not gone on the air, you made Norcross look like Winston fucking Churchill as filmed by Frank fucking Capra, and the lightning polls are saying that four states that were safe for Pendano are now up for grabs. That was one brilliant piece of propaganda, you fucking goddam evil Christ-y-boy Republican wingnut.”

“I was just trying to catch what it was like in the—”