Eric Lustbader - Last Snow

“We recruited Brandt some time ago,” Benson said helpfully.

“Three years, more or less,” Thomson leapt back in. “Midway along in the second term. We saw the handwriting on the wall. The president and his other senior advisors were hell-bent on continuing down the same path we’d all started down when he was first elected.”

“It wasn’t working anymore,” Benson said. “The commanders were telling us that privately, and the troops were worn down. The stop-loss program, though increasingly necessary, was, in practical terms, a disaster, plus it was a PR nightmare.”

“Just the fact that we needed stop-loss should have sent a signal to the president’s advisors, but they ignored it, just like they ignored every news event or incident that contradicted their vision.”

Paull was familiar with stop-loss. It was a program instituted by the military, who, running short on recruits, abrogated the rights of its members to be rotated out of service. Stop-loss kept them in and fighting on the front lines in Felluja or Kabul, or wherever the power that be deigned to send them.

“How does this information tie in with General Brandt?” Paull said.

Again an expression of discomfort briefly crossed Thomson’s face. “In the waning days of the administration we found ourselves without power, or nearly so. The fact is we’d been effectively blocked from the president.”

“By whom?” Paull said, wondering if they’d divulge this secret, a yardstick by which he might judge both their sincerity and their veracity.

“Dick England,” Thomson said at once. England had been the director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, a unit set up by Carson’s predecessor and now, happily, dismantled.

“England hated our guts,” Benson said with some venom. “He was a power freak, he formed an alliance with the secretary of defense, on whom the president relied for much of his foreign policy.”

“The war,” Thomson said heavily, “was the secretary’s idea and he pushed hard for it.”

“I thought the war was your idea,” Paull said, “and Benson’s.”

“Even to the point of fabricating evidence of WMDs,” Benson said, with the stoic intonation of the seasoned warrior.

“He couldn’t have done that without the connivance of the director of the CIA,” Paull said.

Benson’s smile was bleak and far from friendly. “He couldn’t and he didn’t.”

“Though we tried hard, the three of them proved too much for us,” Thomson said, “and we were shut out.”

“It was time to abandon ship,” Benson continued, picking up the thread of the original conversation, “so we decided to cast our net into the private sector. Eventually, we decided on Alizarin Global.”

“Which is where General Brandt comes in.” Thomson sighed as he poured more coffee for Paull and for himself. “We didn’t particularly like him, but because of his ties with President Yukin we needed him to help us fast-track a deal with Gazprom, crucial to Alizarin, before a competitor could sew it up. Bottom line, we thought we could trust him.”

“We were wrong.” Benson stood up and walked to the piano, stood staring at it for some time, as if hearing an oft-played melody—possibly a martial air—in his head. Or perhaps he was fantasizing the methods by which he’d murder Brandt. He turned back abruptly, his face tense and grim. “And now he’s left us hanging by the short hairs. This is something neither we nor President Carson can permit nor withstand.”

Thomson put down his cup. “This is why we brought you here, Mr. Secretary. We had neither the time nor the means to engage you in any other way.”

Paull found he had no more taste for coffee, or for any of the food, for that matter. “What is it you think I can do?”

“Wait,” Thomson said. “You haven’t heard the worst part.”

EDWARD CARSON sat alone in temporary seclusion, as much as any American president can be alone. He sat in his suite at the hotel across Red Square from the Kremlin, a generous pour of single-malt scotch at his elbow. Peering out the window he could see that it had begun to snow again this late in the season, as if he were in Wyoming or Montana. Astonishing, really. He watched with a kind of detached interest as the snowflakes swirled and spent themselves like moths against the windowpane.

Then he pulled out his cell phone and called Jack.

“Jack, where the hell are you?” Carson said. “More to the point, where the hell is my daughter? Lyn tells me that she bundled Alli off on you. I could be pissed off at her but, frankly, it’s easier to yell at you. Did you think about what a security risk this poses?”

“It’s never left my mind, Edward. I argued against taking her, but I don’t have to tell you what Mrs. Carson is like when she makes her mind up about something.”

“What was she thinking?”

“She was terrified that Alli would slip her handlers and take off for parts unknown in a city she scarcely knows, a city, I might add, that’s far more dangerous than the aircraft she and I took to Kiev.”

“I take it she’s not still in the aircraft,” the president said.

Jack’s long relationship with Carson allowed him to shrug off the sarcasm. “It’s a long story.”

“Well, spill it. How’s my daughter?”

“The Ukrainian air has done her a world of good, she’s much improved.”

This welcome news instantly deflated Carson’s anger. “Well, dammit, it’s about time. Lyn will be relieved, let me tell you.” He grunted. “She’s not getting in your way, is she?”

“On the contrary, she’s proved extremely helpful.”

“Well, that’s a surprise. But look here, Jack, I don’t want her put in harm’s way. I think you should ship her back here.”

“She’s not a package, and anyway there’s isn’t a chance in hell that she’ll come.”

“She listens to you. If you insist—”

“Edward, listen to me, this may not be the safest place for her, but what is, the rehab facility she was in? You already know she won’t talk to anyone there, but she’s talking to me. Whatever she went through has to come out, it’s eating her alive.”

Carson was silent for a moment. “All right, dammit. If she’s making progress to being normal again that’s the important thing.” Not knowing how else to respond, he tackled a topic he could handle: “Now, have you found out whether Lloyd Berns’s death was accidental or premeditated murder?”

“I’m making significant headway, but I don’t yet have the shape of the situation.”

Jack’s voice seemed thin and attenuated, as if it was coming from the dark side of the moon, but the president began to absorb the details of Jack’s journey through Ukraine, and what he had uncovered to this point.

“You’ve made good progress, Jack,” he said with a sigh. “Keep me informed. And, Jack, give Alli my love.”

“Will do.”

Carson disconnected and put away his cell. It was times like this, he reflected, weighed down by events, realizing that he was a constituency of one, when he fell back on his beloved Shakespeare. He’d always been drawn to the kings, even as a college student. And no Shakespearean monarch had captivated him more than Henry V, a humane ruler who understood what it meant to be isolated by his royal blood. But, cannily, he also knew that royalty was differentiated from the common man merely by pomp and circumstance, or, as Shakespeare put it, ceremony. This was never made more clear to the reader, or viewer, than when Henry disguised himself in a cloak and hood and sat among his troops on the eve of battle, talking with them, sharing stories, arguing with them as if he were one of them. Nothing would better prepare him for the coming deathly morning than trading barbs with his troops, treading the same ground, muddying his boots in the same muck, having them reach him with their lewd and tumultuous voices.