John Barnes - Directive 51

Whatever was going on in the rest of the White House, it sounded like it was happening pretty fast. The National Unity Guard were mostly street-kid activists and Democratic Party organizers deputized and given guns, probably their most seasoned fighters were some old gangbangers. It took more than a hundred of them to overrun about twenty Secret Service, Weisbrod calculated, and they had surprise and the Acting President on their side. They’re no match for these professionals—wonder where we got them?

“Your attention please,” a voice said. Everyone turned and stared at Speaker Kowalski, who stood in the doorway with Will Norcross. As Kowalski and Norcross came in, Heather O’Grainne popped out to flank them on one side and Cameron Nguyen-Peters on the other.

“As of 3:38 P.M. today,” Kowalski said, “Acting President Peter Shaunsen is under impeachment by a unanimous vote of the House of Representatives. I have a copy of the bill of impeachment with me to present to Chief Justice Lopez. And since both law and the Constitution prohibit anyone under impeachment from succeeding to the office of the President, he is not and cannot be the President.”

Will Norcross looked more like a confused junior clerk than ever; his voice was soft but firm. “Furthermore, as of 4:12 P.M. this afternoon, I have been elected President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and at the request and direction of the NCCC, acting under Directive 51 to locate and emplace the succeeding president of the United States—”

“If I have to,” Shaunsen said, “I will tie the whole government in knots for the next hundred years. I was not under impeachment at the time of the President’s death, I was still Acting President and had not resigned my position as Senate President Pro Tempore—”

Lopez cleared her throat. Her expression was surprisingly gentle but left no room for questioning, like a mother saying absolutely not to a recalcitrant child. “If I have anything to do with it, every case you bring will be dismissed out of hand and at once. As for grounds, you may refer to such doctrines as paramount national survival and the phrases ‘If the President is suspected’ to be found in Madison’s notes on impeachment. Less officially, the game is over.”

In ten minutes, Norcross was sworn in, and Heather had had the distinct pleasure of being the arresting officer for a former president (or acting president, at least). Shaunsen, demanding to speak to “the unbiased national media,” was taken to an FBI holding area; they uncuffed Graham and found him a chair, a cup of hot coffee, and a sandwich in a kitchen alcove. “Never mind feeding me,” he said to Heather and Cameron. “I can’t eat right now anyway. That was a photo finish. Where’d you get the troops from, and how’d you get them here so fast?”

“It’s the Old Guard,” Cameron said. “First Battalion, Third Infantry Regiment. The same outfit President Washington would have called for if he’d had a riot or a coup attempt to cope with. The battalion has a company at Fort McNair and the rest at Fort Myer. As soon as you and Heather started for the White House—since nowadays that’s a two-hour trip—I had our signalers sending to the semaphore station on top of the Pentagon, and they relayed to both McNair and Myer. Just a precaution at that point, because I thought we might need them, and it takes a while to start four companies of infantry moving, and even longer for them to walk as far as they did today.

“Meanwhile, like every really paranoid or crazed president we’ve had since World War II, Shaunsen had the White House bugged everywhere, as much as he could with the nanoswarm and biotes eating the bugs. Lenny had brought in some talent to hack the White House listening system, so we knew when you went in to see Pendano, and we heard Scott’s call to the Secret Service, and this guy Block, the National Unity Goon in Chief, yelling ‘Plan J now !’”

“What’s Plan J?” Heather asked.

“The National Unity Guard code message for ‘kill or capture all the Secret Service you see, and then go upstairs and kill President Pendano.’”

Heather shuddered. “That’s why the Secret Service got clobbered—they walked out into the halls to secure them and probably most of their deaths were in the first half minute, and by then they were down to a few guys trapped in rooms.”

“Surprise wins a lot of things,” Cameron said. “It did for us too. The National Unity Guard didn’t set much of a watch. I think they were all busy figuring out which ones of them would be getting which patronage plums for having been such good little thugs. We pretty much just walked openly to our assembly point on the GWU campus, put the intel we had together, sent a runner over to Congress, and we were ready to go as soon as Kowalski and Norcross were ready. All standard Army doctrine: pre-position overwhelming force and grab the whole show all at once.”

“So we have a functioning president again. Is it bone stupid or what that Kowalski couldn’t have been the president all along?”

Cam shrugged. “The Constitution was intended to be hard to change—and we’ve still done things as stupid as Prohibition. When it only rains every hundred years, it’s a miracle that any hole in the roof ever gets fixed. There’s at least twenty little bombs waiting to go off buried in our Constitution, and if I ran Congress, I’d appoint the equivalent of a bylaws committee, put through a Cleanup Amendment, and stump the states for it like a madman. But that’s my weird perspective; it’s my job to worry about all those little Constitutional bombs, and it’s the nature of things that they hardly ever go off. But since you asked, that’s what I’d do if it were up to me.”

“If anything more goes wrong,” Weisbrod pointed out, “it might be up to you.”

Cameron grimaced. “Don’t even speak of it. The NCCC office has just been as important as it ever needs to be, and Directive 51 is now safely back in the attic of history. They can dust it off sometime after 2200, if they’re too stupid to fix the Constitution before then.”

Graham nodded. “This is like watching the magician show you the trick bottom and saw slot in the box. I take it there was no problem explaining the matter to Kowalski.”

“In that briefcase he was actually carrying two sets of papers—one for if Pendano was alive and the other for if Pendano was dead. We had a runner ready to go back to the Senate; they were sitting there waiting to vote for cloture, and then convict Shaunsen without debate. We had him. It looked scary but nobody was getting sawed in half.”

Graham Weisbrod cupped his hands around his coffee and savored the warmth, the smell, and the last wonderful sips. “Nobody vital , you mean. You’d have gotten Norcross in and Shaunsen out, somehow, pretty soon. But speaking as the guy in the box… well, I still think that was a little close.”

Alpha Company was walking back to McNair that evening, which would be most of the way back to St. Elizabeth’s, so Heather, Graham, and Cameron traveled with them. At the Capitol Street bridge, five men volunteered to escort them the rest of the way.

On the bridge, looking out into the dark city with just a few flaring lights here and there, and the many campfires in the distance, Heather asked, “Graham, did you really think they’d kill you? I mean, I know they killed Roger Pendano, but that was a stray round—”

“Well. Um, well. Uh, for the last few days I’ve been thinking a lot about early Imperial Rome. Isn’t that just like an old prof? But I have been. Just consider this: If you figure Roger Pendano was effectively President again as soon as he signed that note for you to take to Kowalski, then so far, today, we’ve had four presidents—Shaunsen, Pendano, Shaunsen again, and now Norcross.”