Christopher Buckley - Boomsday

Seeing Randy on CNN, wagging his finger in the general direction of the White House, he thought, What the hell is he doing getting involved in this?

Randy’s speech, delivered outside the detention center, was a reprise of his Senate speech the day before, only, as one pundit observed, “smothered in hot sauce.” The crowd cheered and roared, made V-signs, and shouted for Cass to be released. Even Terry was impressed, and those of the PR persuasion are not, easily.

“I thought you were going to take off your leg and shake it at the feds,” he said when they were back in the van that served as the mobile headquarters for the Free Cassandra campaign.

“You know,” Randy said, swigging bottled water like a prizefighter between rounds, “the thought actually crossed my mind.”

“Do me a favor and don’t, if it crosses again. You’re doing just fine. I wonder if she was watching.”

On the other side of the walls of the detention center, Cass was playing hearts with a reporter for The New York Times . The reporter was a fellow inmate. There were quite a few reporters “on the inside” these days, so many of them that they’d formed their own prison gang. They called themselves “Pulitzer Nation” and sported henna tattoos and do-rags made from expensive hosiery. Cass’s card-playing partner was a Times reporter who had revealed in her “Letter from Washington” that the CIA had planted a chef inside the French embassy in Washington-no mean feat-who was putting edible listening devices in the torchons de foie gras at state dinners. She was refusing to reveal her source.

“Yo, bitch, Devine,” shouted one of the reporter’s colleagues, an op-ed columnist who had declined to testify before a grand jury that had been impaneled twenty years ago to investigate whether a member of the cabinet (now deceased) had asked a waitress (now living in Argentina) at a restaurant (defunct) for her phone number (since disconnected). “Check it out .”

She pointed to the TV monitor bolted to the wall of the so-called playroom. Cass looked up. There was Senator Randolph K. Jepperson, giving a speech to a crowd holding up signs with her name.

“Looks like someone’s got herself a white knight on the outside,” said the op-ed columnist. “Isn’t he the one you did whuppety-do with back in Bosnia?”

“Define whuppety-do,” said Cass.

“He just called you the conscience of your generation.”

“Damnit girl, knew you had the queen.”

“Wish someone would call me the conscience of my generation,” said a society reporter for The Washington Post who was serving three-to-five for not revealing her source. “You sleep with him?”

“Please. What a question.”

“Prisoners are supposed to share confidences. We’re all in here together.”

“No. I didn’t. But the earth did move.”

“He’s cute-in a scary sort of way. Didn’t he date what’s-er-name, the Tegucigalpa Tamale?”

Cass watched Randy on TV as she shuffled the deck. Had to be Terry’s handiwork.

By nightfall, the footage of Randy’s speech had caused the crowd to swell to thousands. Terry orchestrated the chanting from the van by radio.

“Just like the sixties,” he said, looking out the van’s one-way windows, “only cleaner. Where are you going?” he said to Randy, who was opening the door.

“To mingle,” he said, “with my people.”

“Don’t get yourself overexposed.”

“Overexposed?” Randy chuckled. “Don’t know the meaning of the word.”

The moment Randy emerged from the van, he was swallowed up in an admiring scrum of twenty-somethings carrying signs.

FREE CASS!

HELL, NO, WE WON’T PAY!

BOOMSDAY NOW!

CASS WAS RIGHT!

IT’S THE DEFICIT, STUPID!

SOCIAL SECURITY = DEATH

Terry watched him get swallowed up in the throng until he was only a head illuminated by bright TV lights. There were three TV monitors inside the van, so he could watch him be interviewed live.

A reporter from the Fox network thrust a microphone at Randy.

“Senator, one of your colleagues, Senator Meltinghausen, says you’re a, quote, craven opportunist. Isn’t that harsh language for such a normally collegial body like the Senate?”

“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.