There was a burst of static. Silence followed. Clarissa heard someone say, “No, that was the only command we could raise on shortwave. The subsea line to Oahu was cut. We can’t raise 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force headquarters at Pearl.”
Admiral Thornton informed the president that, “We are redeploying our submarines to Bremerton, Washington. I’m afraid Hawaii is going to fall, sir.”
A few moments later, Clarissa noticed that the room was beginning to clear. In ones and twos, the Oval Office was emptying. She searched for Art Dodd, but found Frank Adams, Baker’s chief of staff, who caught her eye again on passing, smiled, and winked. What the hell does that mean? she wondered. The president stood behind his desk, his back turned, staring out the window into the darkness.
Clarissa hesitated and looked at the lonely man, then turned to leave, but Frank Adams shut the door behind him. She had been left alone with the president of the United States, who didn’t seem to know that anyone was there. He just stared out the window unmoving. Clarissa tried to clear her dry throat but it didn’t need clearing, and the effort didn’t produce the desired noise. She opened her mouth but couldn’t speak. She couldn’t imagine what she should say.
“Mist-Mister President…”
Baker turned, and Clarissa was stunned. He was crying. He quickly returned to his watch at the window.
It was an epiphany for Clarissa. Everything she had thought changed in that moment… or had it? She sailed into a dense fog of uncertainty. She laid the files she had brought on his desk and tried desperately to think of something to say. To sort her scattering thoughts and her even more disorderly feelings, which sprung powerfully from out of nowhere. The raw, unsorted feelings all around as she edged her way along the desk to the president’s chair. “I…” she began, but she had nothing to say.
He turned. Drying streams ran down his now composed face over which he ran the back of his hand. His eyes never rose from the floor. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Forgive me.” Her head began a jerky shake too late to object that no apology was owed her. “Sometimes,” he tried to explain from the depths of an agony Clarissa had never seen, “I can’t help thinking that this is the end. That it all stops here. That everything… everything I love, I always lose. And that soon — in the end — I’m going to lose this country.”
“Oh-h…” she moaned, aching to her joints from the pain he radiated. She reached out and rested her hand lightly on his shoulder. His warm cheek descended to her hand. With his eyes closed, he nuzzled her skin at once innocently and in a desperate display of need. His lips grazing her fingertips. She had been wrong about him, so wrong… or had she?
Her choices were now clear. A half step away from him and she could sail into open water, find her bearings, and set a course for return to the world of black and white answers. But a half step toward him led to a tumultuous sea of churning gray conflicts where waves were topped with white caps and troughs parted to expose black rock.
In the end, she made no choice at all. She merely drifted… closer. So close that she stood under Bill Baker’s chin. So close that the lengths of their bodies touched. She could feel his breath. She lay her cheek softly against his chest. Her eyes closed to better be absorbed in the moment. For the sea, she found, was electric. The air freshened. The sting of spray sent ripples along her skin. And when his arms enveloped her, the storms no longer mattered. He breathed her hair and savored her neck as if it were a delicacy.
Clarissa was in free fall. No effort was required, and none could alter her trajectory. She tumbled into the unknown.
“Nothing is ever black and white,” Clarissa said to her father. “You know?”
Tom Leffler was devouring his food and looked up only to acknowledge greetings from passing Congressmen. He was more animated than he had seemed since… since her mom died, actually. “You’re telling me!” he replied with a full mouth. “You can’t trust anybody. Everybody has an angle. An agenda. They may not be doing what even they think is right, but somebody’s gotten to them, and they think they have no choice.”
“Well, that’s not exactly what I meant.” She looked down at her lunch, which she hadn’t touched. Her stomach fluttered. She wasn’t really hungry. A committee chairman dropped by to exchange inane pleasantries at which Clarissa smiled and the speaker of the house loosed howls of laughter. As soon as they were alone again in the room filled with Congressmen and lobbyists, she leaned over and whispered, “I mean… sometimes life takes funny turns. You end up in situations — doing things you never thought…”
Her father stopped eating — knife and fork in hand — and looked up at her. She had struck a chord. He was nodding. “That’s true,” he said, lost deep in thought. He resumed his meal at a more deliberate pace, his mind draining the resources he had previously devoted to eating. “But let’s say,” he continued, “at some critical juncture, you know what’s right. And only you are in position to take an action that would at less critical times violate every principle by which you’ve lived.” He was now so consumed by the mental effort that all other activity came to a halt. “But at that moment — in the context of that time — the act you know you have to take is right. Just. It’s not moral relativism or hypocrisy, it’s your duty. What would you do?”
“What?” Clarissa asked in exasperation. She was angered by her father’s confusion. “What are you talking about?” One possible answer presented itself. She leaned forward and whispered, “Does this have to do with the coup?”
His knife had been sawing a piece of chicken breast, but when she uttered the word “coup” it fell idle. His fork remained planted to the plate where it stabbed the uneaten morsel. He didn’t look up with his face, but with his eyes, and not all the way. His gaze stopped at Clarissa’s blazer and flitted about. Clarissa found herself checking her attire. “What?” she asked defensively.
He continued his sawing, but with slow, deliberate motions and carefully lifted the next bite to his mouth. His chewing seemed to buy time for him to ponder her remark. After he had swallowed, he looked straight at Clarissa. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he replied.
The television cameras followed Han’s every move. These pictures weren’t for broadcast in occupied America. They were being made for the Chinese television audience that now spanned three quarters of the globe.
“How are conditions here?” Han asked, kneeling before a typical American family. The vacant mother clutched an attentive, thumb-sucking girl. The overweight father sat stoically braced with hands on knees and arms stiff. The pimple-faced boy showed braces in what would’ve been a defiant sneer were it not so comic.
The mother glanced up at the slender boom mike over her head. Its tiny, foam-covered tip hovered above the scene just out of the cameras’ fields of view. “Well… I dunno,” she opined.
Han grabbed his chin and nodded as if pondering her insights. He snapped his finger and pointed at her. “I have an idea! Your home was destroyed, so you’re living in a high school gymnasium. But there are empty houses all around this city of Greenville, South Carolina — right?”
She shrugged.
“So why don’t you to move into the empty houses?” He marveled at the simplicity of his spur-of-the-moment plan, which had been worked out months earlier. “And in return for free housing, say, maybe, you go back to your jobs! That would be a fair trade don’t you think?”