John Barnes - Directive 51

“Rhode Island’s pretty small,” he pointed out.

“They had results half an hour after the polls closed. Do you think anyone can even cross Providence in less than half a day, right now?” The governor stared at him; her old-fashioned black horn-rimmed glasses glinted. “What do you want me to say? ”

“Nothing,” he said. “I want you to say nothing. I suppose I’ve been around long enough to want to be able to say truthfully that I’d told you, and you’d said nothing. I’ll radio these in right now.”

“The poor old West Coast isn’t going to matter any more after Daybreak than it did before.” Manckiewicz looked at the whiteboard on which one of the reporters had sketched an awkward map of the United States that afternoon. They had the generator running so there was light, and in an abandoned drugstore someone had found a few calculators whose packaging had not yet rotted.

The signal chimed; he pulled on his headset. “Okay, KP-1, this is Chris, and count me in.”

The engineer in Pittsburgh said, “Five, four”—Chris drew a deep breath—“one, go.”

Chris began. “Hello, this is Chris Manckiewicz, of the Washington Advertiser-Gazette , with a special report for KP-1 News. Latest figures indicate an unprecedented landslide for Norcross. We’re ready to call Ohio and Missouri, again for Norcross, which means he needs only a dozen more electoral votes to become—”

The note in front of him had been sitting there for a while, and he knew what was on it, but he thought a population too long trained to drama would like it better this way. “Wait just a moment, I’ve just been handed a note—all right, then. It’s… all… over! ” (Corny, sure, but corn lifts spirits, and now’s the time for it, if ever.) “Illinois, Nebraska, and Colorado have all tipped over for Norcross. Will Norcross is the next president of the United States.”

He recapped the whole story from the beginning, then signed off and turned to the staff. “Vern, are we preset with the ‘Norcross Wins’ headline?”

“Have been since yesterday. And I’ve been setting in the numbers as they came. Do we do an extra for tonight, or just go with a full story tomorrow? You never did settle on that.”

Chris leaned back. God, I wish Rusty could have seen this. “You know,” he said, “there probably hasn’t been an extra at any American paper in, I don’t know, twenty years? There haven’t been very many paper papers since the big bust in 2012. And an extra just sounds kind of… I don’t know, romantic. Besides, if we wait till morning, Shaunsen’s goons may be back here to smash our press. And there’re a few thousand people milling around on the Mall; I don’t know whether all of them will have canned goods, but there are quite a few living out of their backpacks. If we do half a print run on the extra, how soon can we get it out?”

“Forty minutes, if you’ve got any newsies to carry it.”

“We have five of them pretending to sleep downstairs right this minute, remember? So what the hell. It’s romantic, Rusty would have loved it, and I’ll be damned if we’re going to give those bastards a chance to stop our reporting. Be sure to re-run all the stuff about Rusty’s murder in there, too, and all the Shaunsen corruption stories. Let’s make it hot for the son of a bitch.”

The breakfast meeting for that day was set an hour earlier, to give everyone a chance to eat before whatever might come. There had been no word from the White House after the election had been called for Norcross the night before; not even when Manckiewicz had walked up to the White House gates at three A.M. and asked if a concession speech was forthcoming.

The phone from the White House rang. Cameron looked at the clock. “Five minutes early. This won’t be good.” He signaled the transcriptionist standing by to get on the other headset, and picked it up. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“What kind of a stunt do you call that?”

Cameron kept his voice even. “I beg your pardon?”

“More than half those radio links to state Secretary of State offices were military,” Shaunsen said. “And a bunch of the ones that weren’t military were Republican. And nobody reported on any congressional or Senate races, just on the presidential race. And more than that, they’ve been telling me for days that they can’t get a message anywhere faster than a man can go on foot, yet somehow they all had counts within hours of when the polls closed. This is the biggest voter fraud and stolen election there’s ever been. This makes W Chimpface Shrub look like an amateur. And I don’t know any way they could do this without your being in on it. And who the fucking cunting hell’s idea was it to route everything direct to the news media?”

“If you mean the Advertiser-Gazette , sir, and KP-1, the election results were broadcast in clear—per your instructions—and they just listened in like anyone else could do and put the numbers together.”

“Eat shit.”

“Sir, have you been drinking?”

“That’s none of your business!” The phone slammed down.

Cameron looked over at Weisbrod. “Did you get that?”

“I could hear him through your head,” Weisbrod said. “The question is, does he realize we’ve got him beaten, or does he drag it out even further? ”

“He wouldn’t be able to drag it out if we could just take some Twenty-fifth Amendment action. What’s the situation with the Secretary of State?”

Weisbrod shook his head. “I have all but three Cabinet votes lined up your way, but Randolph is not one of them, and without him, there’s no Twenty-fifth Amendment case. He won’t budge. He doesn’t want to make history, he doesn’t want to be part of a coup. He doesn’t want to do anything, actually, other than try to get home to Mississippi. He’s worried about his family.”

It had stymied them for more than a day. The problem was that the Twenty-fifth Amendment requires both the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet to certify that the President is unfit. Their little cabal of responsible people at St. Elizabeth’s was already on shaky ground, for there was no actual Vice President and Congress had never provided for the position of Acting Vice President; the Secretary of State was the next eligible person in the line of succession, which might or might not count as the same thing as “the Vice President,” depending on what Chief Justice Lopez thought.

“Maybe if the Secretary of State resigns,” Weisbrod said. “And if—”

The presidential line rang again, and Nguyen-Peters gestured to the transcriptionist, who slipped on his phones and bent to his work.

The gist of the tirade was that Cameron Nguyen-Peters had been fired, both as Chief of Staff for the Department of Homeland Security and as NCCC. As Shaunsen ran down, Cameron said, very quietly, “Sir, that is not a lawful order.”

“I’m the damn president !”

“ Acting President, sir. You can order my boss to fire me, though he won’t. You can fire him and try to make his successors fire me; they won’t. You can’t call me up and dismiss me directly.

“Furthermore, as NCCC, it is my job to ensure that the acting presidency is in competent and legally qualified hands, and I don’t feel I can say that with you in office; to leave now would be to desert my post during a crisis, and the President can’t lawfully order a Federal official to neglect or act contrary to his duty. So I’m not fired, sir. Thank you.” And he hung up. He turned to Weisbrod. “Graham, if you have one good idea right now, you are my hero.”