Full Cabinet meetings were scheduled as frequently, but Jed programmed them to run two weeks out from the small meetings. It meant he had to endure constant grumbling from the other Cabinet secretaries, who felt themselves locked out of the more important decision-making group, but bottom line, this was a much more efficient arrangement. They had everybody at the table - in this case a coffee table - whom Jed thought necessary to deal with the most pressing problems and rolling crises.
When everybody had found their places, settled themselves into chairs, and in most cases poured themselves a coffee and grabbed a cookie - peanut butter and chocolate chip, a specialty of the First Lady - Chief of Staff Culver got the meeting under way.
‘Thanks, everyone. It’s not much fun travelling through this weather, I know. And I know you’re all up to your eyeballs in work. You’ll have seen on your agenda papers that we have just a couple of things to get through today, but it’d be good to shake these out before we take them to the Cabinet in a fortnight. The President’s not looking to lock down a caucus position today. But we’ve been kicking some of these issues around for a couple of months now, and the time is coming to deal with them so we can move on to our next end-of-the-world crisis. Mr President?’
‘Thanks, Jed,’ said Kipper, examining his fingernails. The presidency had not entirely removed the calluses or the stains of engineering work from his hands. He had a single sheet of paper with the meeting agenda sitting in front of him, held down by a mug of coffee and covered in crumbs from one of his wife’s cookies. ‘What Jed said … Miserable weather, and it’s only getting worse. Gonna be a snowed-in Christmas, I reckon.’
Kipper brushed the crumbs away, folded his arms to hide his hands, and leaned forward over the large teak desk, looking like a student worrying over a term paper.
‘So, let’s get it done. Two items today are related, I think. The budget deficit and Texas. So I think we should deal with the other item first - the prisoners from New York.’
Jed could see Paul McAuley consciously subdivide his attention, the Treasury man listening closely enough to be able to follow any discussion about the captured enemy aliens in Manhattan, while leaving most of his thoughts swirling madly around the Gordian knot of the budget deficit. Sarah Humboldt, naturally, sat forward, putting aside her coffee and fetching a sheaf of documents from the tote bag she had carried into the room with her. The National Security Advisor nodded slowly, but his expression remained masked.
‘Jed tells me we have just under four-and-a-half thousand people in detention on the East Coast,’ the President continued. ‘Most of them women and children, relatives of the jihadists who fought for that asshole Baumer.’
‘I believe his formal title is “the Emir”,’ deadpanned Barney Tench.
‘Okay, that asshole the Emir … Anyway, we have thousands of displaced people, and about three hundred of his former soldiers, or fighters, or whatever you want to call them.’
‘“Assholes” works for me,’ said Tench.
Because of Kipper’s almost pathological informality, anybody in the room could probably get away with talking like that. But only Barney, his oldest living friend, felt comfortable enough to do so. The President answered his interruption with a lopsided grin, before carrying on.
‘Question is, as it’s always been, what are we going to do with them? I don’t want to force repatriations on women and kids, when we’d be sending most of them back to a radiated wasteland. Thank you, Israel. On the other hand, having tried to take something by force, these people shouldn’t be rewarded by being given what they tried to take. In this case, the right to settle. So, suggestions?’
Jed had one, but it involved putting them all on a garbage scow and towing it out into the mid Atlantic at the height of hurricane season. Perhaps if he’d been working for Mad Jack Blackstone he’d have put it forward, but having tried a few times in this forum, he knew it wouldn’t float. So to speak. Instead, he picked a few pieces of lint from the cuffs of his trousers.
The silence in the room ballooned into significance. Sarah Humboldt, as the ICE boss, had responsibility for the matter, but Sarah was a lifelong bureaucrat, more comfortable implementing policy than developing it. Nonetheless, she obviously felt the weight of expectation fall upon her. Clearing her throat, she began to sort through the stack of papers she was carrying. If she was looking for something specific, it remained lost in there and she grew flustered at her inability to find it. Kip interrupted her embarrassment with a gentle question.
‘Sarah, why don’t you just tell me what you think? Don’t give me options. I don’t need to run through every scenario your guys have come up with. You’ve been working this area your whole life, so just tell me what you think.’
Secretary Humboldt looked horrified. But with an observable effort of will, she put aside the briefing notes. ‘Well, sir …’
That was as far as she progressed for a few seconds, as she groped wordlessly for the right thing to say.
‘Come on, Sarah,’ urged Kip. ‘You’ve been out to the detention camps. You sat in on a lot of interviews. What’s your gut feeling?’
Humboldt frowned. All of her training, all of her professional experience, had taught her to divorce her feelings from her judgment.
‘Mr President, most of them are just little people. They’ve been carried along by events. This is the women and children I’m talking about. Most of them have lost their men in the fighting. They’re alone in the world except for each other. If you’re asking could they be integrated, I believe the answer is yes.’
Culver kept his face neutral, concentrating on taking handwritten notes as Humboldt spoke. Kip had made it clear that he didn’t care for his Chief of Staff monstering the Cabinet secretaries. When Jed spoke, he did so in such a way that Ms Humboldt could not have known he thought she was a fucking mad woman.
‘Madam Secretary, would it be the case that you would differentiate between the women and children and the captured fighters?’
Everyone in the room was interested in the answer. The President waited on her eagerly. Admiral Ritchie bored into her with his unwavering gaze. Even Secretary McAuley gave the impression of concentrating wholly on what she said next, deficits at least set aside for now. It didn’t ease Humboldt’s discomfort.
‘All of the enemy combatants were initially debriefed by the military. I don’t have access to the raw transcripts or interview recordings, just executive summaries. Some of the prisoners, the surviving leadership cadre, as I understand it, have been separated out and remain under military control. The lower ranks - if that’s an appropriate description - can probably be roughly sorted into two groups. True believers and, well, soldiers of fortune, I suppose. Opportunists. Like the pirate bands they were fighting with, but nominally motivated by religious conviction. Most of the second group, I believe, were less interested in Baumer’s jihad than they were in securing land and life for themselves and their families. They’re not true believers. If we were serious about taking them up into the broader migration program’ - she said that very carefully, watching to see if Culver would react - ‘I would recommend that only this latter cohort, the opportunists if you will, those without strong ideological attachment to Baumer, be accepted, and then with certain caveats.’