Jeffrey Archer - Sons of Fortune

‘Do you believe I can do the job?’ asked Julia quietly.

‘No,’ said Tom, ‘you have to be born in America before you can stand for president.’

I didn’t mean president, you idiot, but chairman of Fairchild’s.’

I knew that the day we met,’ said Tom. ‘My only fear was that you wouldn’t consider I was good enough to be your husband.’

‘Oh, men are so slow on the uptake,’ said Julia. I made up my mind that I was going to marry you the night we met at Su Ling and Nat’s dinner party.’ Tom’s mouth opened and then closed.

‘How different my life would have been if the other Julia Kirkbridge had come to the same conclusion,’ she added.

‘Not to mention mine,’ said Tom.

Fletcher stared down at the cheering crowd and waved enthusiastically back at them. He had made seven speeches in Madison that day — on street corners, in market places, outside a library — but even he had been surprised by his reception at the final meeting in the town hall that night.

Come and hear the winner was printed in bold red and blue letters on a massive banner that stretched from one side of the stage to the other. Fletcher had smiled when the local chairman told him that Paul Holbourn, the independent mayor of Madison, had left the banner in place after Nat had spoken at the town hall earlier that week. Holbourn had been the mayor for fourteen years, and didn’t keep getting re-elected because he squandered the tax payers’ money.

When Fletcher sat down at the end of his speech, he could feel the adrenalin pumping through his body, and the standing ovation that followed was not the usual stage-managed affair, where a bunch of well-placed party hacks leap up the moment the candidate has delivered his last line. On this occasion, the public were on their feet at the same time as the hacks. He only wished Annie could have been there to witness it.

When the chairman held up Fletcher’s hand and shouted into the microphone, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the next governor of Connecticut,’ Fletcher believed it for the first time. Clinton was neck and neck with Bush in the national polls and Perot’s independent candidacy was further chipping away at the Republican’s support. It was creating a knock-on effect for Fletcher. He only hoped that four weeks was enough time to make up the four-point deficit in the polls.

It was another half hour before the hall was cleared, and by then Fletcher had shaken every proffered hand. A satisfied chairman accompanied him back to the parking lot.

‘You don’t have a driver?’ he said, sounding a little surprised.

‘Lucy took the night off to see My Cousin Vinny, Annie’s attending some charity meeting, Jimmy’s chairing a fund raiser, and as it was less than fifty miles, I felt I could just about manage that by myself,’ explained Fletcher as he jumped behind the wheel.

He drove away from the town hall on a high, and began to relax for the first time that day. But he’d only driven a few hundred yards before his thoughts returned to Lucy, as they had done whenever he was alone. He faced a considerable dilemma. Should he should tell Annie that their daughter was pregnant?

Nat was having a private dinner with four local industrialists that night. Between them they were in a position to make a significant contribution to the campaign coffers, so he didn’t hurry them. During the evening they had left him in no doubt what they expected from a Republican governor, and although they didn’t always go along with some of Nat’s more liberal ideas, a Democrat wasn’t moving into the governor’s mansion if they had anything to do with it.

It was well past midnight when Ed Chambers of Chambers Foods suggested that perhaps the candidate should be allowed to go home and get a good night’s sleep. Nat couldn’t remember when he’d last had one of those.

This was the usual cue for Tom to stand up, agree with whoever had made the suggestion, and then go off in search of Nat’s coat. Nat would then look as if he was being dragged away, shaking hands with his hosts before telling them that he couldn’t hope to win the election without their support. Flattering though the sentiment might sound, on this occasion it also had the merit of being true,

All four men accompanied Nat back to his car, and as Tom drove down the long winding drive from Ed Chambers’s home, Nat tuned into the late news. Fletcher’s speech to the citizens of Madison was the fourth item, and the local reporter was highlighting some of the points he’d made about neighbourhood watch schemes, an idea Nat had been promoting for months. Nat began to grumble about such blatant plagiarism until Tom reminded him that he’d also stolen some of Fletcher’s innovations on education reform.

Nat switched off the news when the weather forecaster returned to warn them about patchy ice on the roads. Within minutes Nat had fallen asleep, a trick Tom had often wished he could emulate, because the moment Nat woke, he was always back firing on all cylinders. Tom was also looking forward to a decent night’s sleep. They didn’t have any official function before ten the following morning, when they would attend the first of seven religious services, ending the day with evensong at St Joseph’s Cathedral.

He knew that Fletcher Davenport would be covering roughly the same circuit in another part of the state. By the end of the campaign, there wouldn’t be a religious gathering where they hadn’t knelt down, taken off their shoes, or covered their heads in order to prove that they were both God-fearing citizens. Even if it wasn’t necessarily their own particular God being revered, they had at least demonstrated willingness to stand, sit and kneel in His presence.

Tom decided not to switch on the one o’clock news, as he could see no purpose in waking Nat only to hear a regurgitation of what they had listened to thirty minutes before.

They both missed the newsflash,

An ambulance was on the scene within minutes, and the first thing the paramedics did was to call in the fire department. The driver was pinned against the steering wheel, they reported, and there was no way of prying open his door without the use of an acetylene torch. They would have to work quickly if they hoped to get the injured man out of the wreck alive.

It wasn’t until the police had checked the licence plate on their computer back at headquarters that they realized who it was trapped behind the wheel. As they felt it was unlikely that the senator had been drinking, they assumed he must have fallen asleep. There were no skid marks on the road and no other vehicles involved.

The paramedics radioed ahead to the hospital, and when they learnt the identity of the victim the duty physician decided to page Ben Renwick. Remembering his seniority, Renwick didn’t expect to be woken if there was another surgeon available to do the job.

‘How many other people in the car?’ was Dr Renwick’s first question.

‘Only the senator,’ came back the immediate reply.

What the hell was he doing driving himself at that time of night?’ muttered Renwick rhetorically. ‘What’s the extent of his injuries?’

‘Several broken bones, including at least three ribs and the left ankle,’ said the duty physician, ‘but I’m more worried about the loss of blood. It took the fire boys nearly an hour to cut him out of the wreck.’

‘OK, make sure my team is scrubbed up and ready by the time I arrive. I’ll call Mrs Davenport.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘Come to think of it,’ he said, ‘I’ll call both Mrs Davenports.’

Annie was standing in the biting wind by the hospital emergency entrance when she saw the ambulance speeding towards her. It was the accompanying police outriders that made her think that it had to be her husband. Although Fletcher was still unconscious, they allowed her to clutch on to his limp hand as they wheeled him through to the operating room. When Annie first saw the condition Fletcher was in, she didn’t believe anyone could save him.