President Francis “Frank” Chandler swiveled his chair a few degrees to the left and stared out the window across the White House grounds. It was really coming down out there tonight, the rain driving across the manicured lawn in torrents. Occasionally the wind would manage to whip a burst of raindrops far enough under the edge of the colonnade to splatter on the marble flagstones of the covered walkway. But even those violent bursts fell well short of the windows.
Some small part of him wished that the wind would pick up enough to drive the rain against his windows. He loved the sound of rain on glass; it conjured up memories of boyhood summers in Iowa cornfields and of the clatter of a good spring rain on a corrugated tin roof. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have been able to hear it anyway; the windows were triple-paned bulletproof glass.
He watched for a few seconds in silent fascination. There was something strange about seeing the rain without hearing it; something vaguely disconnected: a little like the feeling that came from watching television with the sound turned down.
He leaned a little farther back, rested his elbows on the padded leather arms of the chair, and wondered for the thousandth time at the strange chain of events that had led him to the Oval Office. The thought, as always, brought an odd half-smile to his lips. There were men — powerful and influential men — who spent their entire lives fighting for a chance to sit in this office. Struggling one rung at a time up the twin ladders of politics and public opinion — waiting for a chance to sit in this chair, behind this desk. But the job had very nearly fallen into Frank’s lap. He sure as hell hadn’t planned his life around it, anyway.
He was a latecomer to politics, and he had entered the political arena by the back door. (Some of his more vocal critics preferred to say he had tunneled under the back fence.)
The son of an Iowa corn farmer, he had inherited three major things from his father: a passion for the land, an iron-hard work ethic, and the shambling big-boned frame of a farmhand. Six foot four and broad shouldered, he had a roughness about him that spoke more of flannel shirts and work-scuffed blue jeans than of suits and neckties.
His love of the land had not led him to the farm, as it had his father and grandfather before him, but to the laboratories of the University of Iowa.
Armed with a master’s degree in organic chemistry, he had climbed through the ranks of the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship, where his fierce determination to improve the lot of the American farmer had eventually earned him an appointment as the state secretary of agriculture.
With the appointment had come the realization that the future of the farmer was being decided not in the fields or in the laboratory, but in the boardrooms and on the floors of the legislature. Frank had decided to throw his hat into the political ring. After an extremely successful term as the state secretary of agriculture, he had made a dark-horse bid for governor of Iowa. He’d never really expected to win. At best, he had hoped to drag the plight of the farmer into the forefront of Iowa’s political system. To raise important issues in the hopes that more viable gubernatorial candidates would have to deal with them.
But his plain-talking grassroots campaign had resonated with the voters of Iowa, and they had surprised him (and everyone else in the state political machine) by electing him governor.
Four years later, he had entered the race for the presidency, running a distant second to Martin Bridgewater: an archly conservative senator and the fair-haired boy of the Republican Party. Bridgewater was a charismatic speaker and a political heavyweight. The cameras loved him, and so did the crowds. He had started with a thirty-point lead over Frank in the CNN, USA Today, and Gallup polls, and had widened it quickly.
Frank had been poised to lose the election by the widest margin in history, when fate dropped another surprise in his lap. Martin Bridgewater’s pregnant nineteen-year-old mistress had decided to take her story to the media. Bridgewater had lost twenty polling points in the first forty-eight hours. Even so, he might well have weathered the storm. After the predictable outcry, his supporters had settled down pretty quickly.
They seemed prepared to forgive him for his transgressions. Other powerful men had succumbed to the temptations of the flesh, after all.
Some of them had even been presidents.
But Bridgewater’s girlfriend had sold six cassette tapes to one of the more sensational cable news programs. The young woman had recorded many of her private phone conversations with Bridgewater. The news anchors had apparently delighted in playing sound bytes of the more lurid parts, bleeping out questionable choices of language in a manner that made the tapes seem even more sordid than they actually were. At the climax of the exposé had come the most damning revelation of alclass="underline" Senator Bridgewater — a rabid pro-lifer — had tried to convince his mistress to have an abortion. He had offered the girl a quiet cash settlement to get rid of the baby and disappear into the woodwork.
Bridgewater’s campaign had disintegrated in a matter of days. The resulting backlash of public opinion had hurled Frank Chandler, the hayseed candidate, into the highest office in the land.
President Chandler’s eyes were still locked on the rain falling soundlessly outside the bulletproof windows. His odd little smile faded slowly. He’d been sitting in the big chair for thirty-nine months and sixteen days, and he still couldn’t believe he was here. In the few quiet moments that the job afforded him, the surreal quality of the entire situation filtered back to the surface of his mind, leaving him with a disjointed feeling. Disconnected. Like the strangely silent rain.
He sighed and, for a brief second, entertained the notion of opening one of the French doors that led to the columned walkway. That way, at least he’d be able to hear the occasional spatters of rain on the flagstones.
“Mr. President?” The voice belonged to the White House chief of staff, Veronica Doyle.
The president snapped his mind back to attention and swung his chair around. “Yes?”
“They’re ready for you, sir.”
“Good,” the president said. He rubbed his eyes and blinked several times. “Where is the ambassador?”
“In a holding pattern in the West Wing lobby.”
The president nodded. “Show our people in. We’ll give them a minute to get settled before we call for the ambassador.”
Doyle nodded to the Secret Service agent standing by the door to the office of the president’s secretary. The agent opened the door, and the team for the China meeting began to filter into the Oval Office.
The president beckoned them into the room and waved them toward the rectangle of couches and chairs at the end of the room opposite his desk.
“Have a seat in the bullpen. Make yourselves comfortable, I’ll be with you in a couple of seconds.”
He turned back to his chief of staff. “What else have we got tonight?”
The chief of staff flipped open the lid of her palm-top computer and scanned the small LCD screen. “At nine-thirty, you’ve got a phone conference with the assistant secretary of state for Eastern European affairs. The Russians are asking for increased wheat subsidies. Assistant Secretary Chernja thinks it’s a bad idea, but she wants your permission before she shuts the door on this one. You also promised the vice president you would sit down with him and look at his numbers on the handgun bill.”
The president nodded. “Move the vice president up to nine-thirty and bump Assistant Secretary Chernja to tomorrow morning. The Russian thing isn’t going to self-destruct any time soon, and I’d much rather hit it when my brain is fresh.”