"You asked to see me, sir?"
I smiled. "Colin, I think when we're alone, you can call me Carl. Twenty years ago I would have been calling you sir, not the other way around, and I would have been doing it at attention."
He chuckled at that. "Carl, I would hate to be that presumptuous. I wouldn't want to take the chance somebody might consider me disrespectful."
"Do you consider it likely that somebody will consider you disrespectful of the President, whoever he is?", I said, smiling.
"No, sir, I don't."
"Okay, let's get down to business. You want to be the Vice President?", I asked.
Secretary Powell was quick to answer, with a shake of his head. "No, sir, I would not."
I shrugged. "Didn't think so, but I had to ask. You'd do it well. If something were to happen to me, I'd die knowing the country was in good hands."
"I've talked to Alma about it and I just can't do it to my family.", he replied.
"I'm not surprised. Okay, want to be the Secretary of State?" Colin Powell looked at me sharply at that but didn't say anything. "Oh, don't give me that look! You know I can't keep working with the man. He thinks he should have had this job, not me. I don't trust him and neither do you. It's not a question of whether he leaves, but when and how. I need a Secretary of State I can work with and that I can trust not to get me into a war I don't want."
Powell sighed. "Are you sure about this?"
"Colin, last Tuesday changed our nation, our world, in ways that will take years to figure out. For the last twenty years old enemies have been dying out and new enemies have been arising. Now we have to figure out ways of dealing with a wholly new world. I cannot do this by myself. I need help! Help me!", I asked.
"Who do we put in as Secretary of Defense?"
I shrugged but smiled. "I don't know yet, but we can figure it out. Does that mean you'll switch to State?"
"When do you want to do this?", he asked.
"I'll take that as a yes.", I replied, smiling. Powell didn't gainsay me. "Soon. We'll be responding to this in the next few weeks. As it stands, I can't trust what I am being told. If I leave it up to Cheney and the other neocons, we'll end up invading some damn place that has nothing to do with this. They have an agenda that has nothing to do with what really happened."
"The question still stands. When do you plan to do this?"
"I can see a response by the end of the month, or maybe the first week of October. Once that is done, he's gone. If I fire him first, I have no idea what he will do in response. He might just spout off and say something, all with the best of motives, of course, that will screw something up. In the meantime, you need to get your bomber crews dialed up and the other assets in place. I want to have some options to discuss early next week."
"Al Qaeda?", he asked.
"And the Taliban. And I don't need to attack the other billion Muslims around the world while we're doing this."
"Who do we put in Defense? And CIA, for that matter? And the Vice Presidency?"
I gave a minor shrug at that. "I've got an idea or two for the CIA, but I'm not sure yet on Defense, and I will be more than happy to listen to suggestions. I'm thinking about the VP slot, too. If you can come up with a name or two for Defense, I'll sort out the Vice President slot and CIA. We need to completely rebuild our intelligence capabilities. Go back to the Pentagon and see what your sources are up to."
"Yes, sir. Understood."
I stood up, and Powell stood with me. I reached out to shake his hand. "General, I appreciate the assistance. Thank you, sir."
I was also able to meet with several foreign leaders on an individual basis. For these we had to have interpreters and the Secretary of State was present. Some leaders were happy to see me, others quite wary. The neocons had been getting more and more bellicose as the year had worn on, and Vladimir Putin was not amused, among others. Most of all, everyone wanted to meet the new boy President. I was 45 years, 10 months, and 6 days old when I was named Acting President, the third youngest President in American history. I told Cheney we would need to make a foreign trip before the end of the year. I received a sneer in response.
Fine by me. I'd hang him out to dry before then.
Chapter 142: Intelligence
Monday, September 24, 2001
The funeral was finished by Thursday afternoon. Laura and the girls officially moved out on Friday. I needed to take a few days off myself. Marilyn and I flew back to Hereford on Thursday for a long weekend. In the meantime, the White House Chief Usher, the head of the residence staff, would coordinate getting the Bush's belongings out of the place and out of Camp David, and getting our stuff moved over from the Naval Observatory. We would officially move in Monday morning.
When I was elected as Vice President, we had moved our clothing and my office from the house on 30th over to the Naval Observatory, though we left the furniture. I had debated putting the home on the market, but quickly realized that it might be useful to keep it around as a backup residence. If I had somebody visiting that I either couldn't put up in an official residence, or didn't want to, or didn't have the room for, I could let them stay there. It wasn't like I had to sell it to pay the new mortgage.
We were both exhausted by the time we got back to the house, but there was no rest for the weary. Almost immediately I was asked where I wanted the commo bunker installed. "Excuse me?", I asked the Secret Service agent.
"The communications trailers. There are actually two of them, plus antennas. We didn't think you wanted them out on the front lawn, so to speak."
I looked at my wife and muttered, "Good grief!" She looked distressed so I dragged the fellow outside and pointed to a place out in the field on the other side of the landing pad. Then I looked in the other direction, and saw a clearing in the woods I owned on the other side of the street, a clearing that hadn't been there before. "What's going over there?"
"A security trailer."
"Just how permanent are you making these things?", I asked.
He shook his head and said, "Not too crazy. No basements or anything. They'll be self contained units on slab foundations. The day you leave the White House, we can just unbolt everything and haul it away."
Leaving me with new concrete lawn ornaments. I sighed in acceptance. "I assume you'll be doing this at Hougomont, too?"
"Where's that? I know we have to do it in the Bahamas."
"Hougomont is the name of our place in the Bahamas.", I told him.
"Oh. Yes, sir, there too. That's a different team, though."
"God help the Bahamas! They'll probably declare me an undesirable by the time this is done!" I wandered back inside and told Marilyn what was going on.
To be fair, they kept the disruption to a minimum. Ever since that first day after the election, when I managed to get a really obnoxious and arrogant agent packed off to Nome, Alaska, or somewhere north of there, the Secret Service was generally a lot politer to me. Okay, there had been the asshole on Air Force Two, but that was a pretty odd day to begin with. Some of the changes we were getting were simply upgrades of various things that had been put in when I became the Vice President. They had replaced our phone system and Internet/cable connections then, and increased security also. Now, as the President, I just got more.
I couldn't wait until they brought in the anti-aircraft missiles! That was no joke, either. I heard somebody mentioning an I-HAWK battery, but they couldn't figure out how to camouflage it, and were debating using Stingers instead. Joy!