The same reporter had a follow-up question. “I know I’m the one who asked you about our plans — and thank you for answering, Mr. President — but don’t you think the Chinese might learn something militarily useful from your reply?”
“Only if they believe I answered your question truthfully,” Baker said with a twinkle in his eye.
Clarissa — and the reporters crowding the White House briefing room — laughed.
It was the only light moment in an increasingly dark, accusatory confrontation. “Is it true that you have written off the West Coast to concentrate on saving the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard?” and “Is it true that we have suffered over a quarter million U.S. troops killed?” were two typical questions that Bill flatly denied. He grew less congenial, shorter in his replies, and even began to ignore questions he didn’t like by simply pointing at the next reporter. He was angry by the end, and even though he had just said, “I’ll take two or three more questions,” he stormed out on hearing the first.
“As I’m sure you heard, Mr. President, earlier tonight on CNN your ex-wife suggested that you are keeping your daughter in a combat unit so that you can fade the political heat from American parents whose own children are also in the army. Mrs. Roberts asserted that, so long as your daughter remains in combat — or if, God forbid, she is seriously wounded, killed, or captured — you are immunized against charges that you are insensitive to the plight of…”
Bill turned and left the podium mid-sentence to a torrent of shouts of, “Mr. President! Mr. President!”
“That bitch!” Clarissa cried out when Bill entered. He had come straight from the briefing room. His face was still coated with pancake makeup. He tore his jacket off and yanked at his tie. Clarissa tried to massage his shoulders from behind, but he recoiled from her contact. She said, trying to sound soothing, “I don’t know how they can ask questions like that.”
“Did you know?” Bill asked accusingly. “About Rachel’s interview on CNN?”
Clarissa shrugged. “It was all over the news. Do you mean nobody told you?”
“No! And I’m starting to wonder what other things people aren’t telling me!”
Clarissa was instantly on guard. “Like what?” she asked with growing trepidation.
But it was nothing more than anger, fatigue, and paranoia talking. She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him, then led him easily to the bed. There, she was in charge. He followed her gentle commands and forgot, for a moment, the worries and strains that consumed his life.
When Clarissa fell asleep, Bill rose, dressed in jeans, and roamed the halls of the White House. Even in the early hours of the morning, people worked. He stuck his head inside offices just long enough to disrupt everything, then moved on, ending up in the empty Oval Office. A locked drawer in his desk contained unread reports. He hadn’t reviewed any of the day’s mounting pile, which he laid on his blotter pad, but his computer screen lit when he sat. He always carried the remote in his pocket at the Secret Service’s request. They — and only they — knew where he was, and they knew all the time.
He had only one message that his personal computer thought he should read. The computer’s program had been written by Dr. Richard Fielding, a brilliant artificial intelligence professor from MIT and now Director of the CIA. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that the program had decided that it was Fielding’s message that he should read.
Bill had been so impressed with Fielding’s broad-ranging intellect that he had appointed him the head of his intelligence agency. It was only over time that Fielding had become the man Bill trusted most.
The computer screen flashed, “Call Holding.” The ID showed that the call was from Fielding. Bill said, “Answer,” and Fielding appeared. “Up late again, are we?” the CIA director asked from Bill’s computer monitor.
“There’s a good movie on,” Bill replied.
The smile Fielding flashed faded quickly. “I’d like to talk to you, Mr. President,” he said.
Bill shrugged. “I’m all ears.”
“I mean in person.”
The president arched his brow. “I’ll be here,” he responded.
“I’m on the way,” Fielding said, and the screen went black.
Bill noticed a pile of documents that required action. He initialed, initialed, and initialed, then was asked to sign something. On careful reading he found that his signature would purportedly authorize the quartering of troops in private homes. Isn’t there something in the constitution about that? he thought. He searched the Constitution on the computer. It was Article III in the Bill of Rights. “No soldier shall, in time of peace, be quartered in any house without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war but in a manner to be prescribed by law.”
He was no lawyer, but this was clearly “in time of war,” and there was no law passed by Congress of which he was aware. He scrawled across the top of the document, “UNCONSTITUTIONAL.”
Bill then began to scan the accumulated reports. They ranged in importance from the trivial to the monumental. Fears of an imminent poultry shortage in one thirty-page memo gave way to a dry, three-line report that Chinese scouts had been checking beach gradients in New Brunswick Province, Canada, just north of the undefended Maine border. Doing paperwork for Bill was like the old adage about flying: hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror.
Distribution of food. Relocation inland of plant and equipment. Protests by Virginians about the demolition of towns and cities when the Chinese were still in South Carolina. Dwindling war stocks in the Atlantic States, bulging depots in untouched Louisiana and Texas, and the key to their efficient redistribution: holding I-40, which split Tennessee west-to-east.
Richard Fielding gently shook the president awake. Bill swung his feet to the floor as if caught sleeping on the job. He looked to the window to confirm that it was still dark. Several times, he had spent the night in his chair.
“You’re not getting enough sleep,” Fielding advised.
“I was just taking one of those power naps you swear by,” Bill replied, still trying to collect his thoughts.
The CIA director pulled a chair around Bill’s desk and slumped into it. He bore no files, photos, or papers of any kind. He crossed one leg over the other one and wrapped his hands around his knee.
“Bill,” Fielding said paternally, “what I’m about to tell you is going to make you very angry. But you’ve got to hold that anger in and not let anybody see it, because what I’m about to say you cannot legally know.” Bill was already angry in anticipation, but he nodded. Fielding glanced at the door, which he had closed after entering, and cleared his throat. “The FBI has photos of Clarissa Leffler romantically cavorting with a Chinese fellow about a decade ago while she was a graduate student in Beijing.”
Bill’s anger flared white hot. “They have absolutely no…!”
“He was a colonel in Chinese army intelligence,” Fielding interrupted. “A ‘recruiter,’ in the parlance. A recruiter of foreign agents.”
The news hurt Bill, because it would be used to hurt Clarissa. He felt deflated. “What a crock of shit. The fact that some sleaze seduced a twenty-five-year-old graduate student who was ten thousand miles from home doesn’t make her a traitor!”
Fielding shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. But the sad fact of life is, in these times, I wouldn’t clear her to work at Langley in any job whatsoever. Not in a million years. It would be too risky. And it looks doubly bad because it was Art Dodd who hired her. He’s under a cloud of suspicion of his own ever since his meeting in Geneva with the Chinese minister of trade — Han Zhemin’s father — two years ago.”