He nodded. “Yes, sir. I was able to corral some of them and they promised to get hold of other people. It’s at the Capitol, though. Should I have them brought over?”
“That will be fine. Let’s get a car and go. You, me…” I looked around and eyed Ari. “Ari, you want to go? Carter’s been my press guy, but that’s not a big job for the VP. Do you want to take him on as your deputy?”
“We can see how it works out, Mister President,” he answered, noncommittally.
“Carter, if Deputy Press Secretary doesn’t work out, we’ll fit you in somewhere.” I looked over at the nearest Secret Service agent. “Five minutes. We’re going to need a car. We’ll be just going over to the Capitol, so set it up, please.” He immediately began speaking into a microphone on his sleeve.
I stood and stretched a bit. It had been a long day and I was feeling tired and creaky. I grabbed my cane. “After I meet with the people over on the Hill, I am going home. I’ll keep living at the Naval Observatory until this plays out. Everybody, you all need to go home and get some sleep at some point. Tomorrow might be even crazier. We’ve got a major meeting in the morning, and if President Bush, the former President Bush, calls, I want to meet him tomorrow as well. Regardless, go home and get some rest.” To my traveling party, I said, “Let’s get this on the road.” With a Secret Service agent leading us, we headed down to a car. A few minutes later we were at the Capitol.
There were a bunch of people in the Speaker’s office, some sitting, but they all stood and faced me when I came in the door. From the Senate we had Trent Lott, Tom Daschle, Harry Reid, Robert Byrd, and Don Nickles; the House was represented by Tom DeLay, Denny Hastert, John Boehner, and Dave Bonior. The only major leader missing was Dick Gephardt, and I knew he was out of town. “Gentlemen, thank you for meeting with me,” I said.
Denny Hastert said, “We all watched your speech from in here, Carl. We all thought it went well. Not too long, but it got the point across.”
“How are you doing, Carl?” asked my old friend John Boehner. “You look tired.”
I smiled and shook his hand. “I’m beat, but I’ll make it. I started out early this morning in Tampa. Good to see you again.”
At that, I went around the room, shaking hands with everybody. These were the men I was going to have to work with for the foreseeable future, the Majority and Minority Leaders and Whips, the Speaker, and the Senate President Pro Tempore. Some of them were friends and some were enemies, but all of them had a personal agenda that did not necessarily involve cooperating with one Carling Parker Buckman II.
First steps first. “Denny, Senator Byrd, I apologize for not meeting with you this afternoon, but it just got crazy. Did the Attorney General talk to you? Are you satisfied that everything was done in a proper form?” I didn’t need somebody getting a bug up his ass about my ‘usurping’ power.
Both men nodded. Denny Hastert said, “It was fine, Carl. How long do you think it will last? Or do you think it will be permanent?”
I was feeling a bit tired, so I hoisted myself up and sat on his desk, and faced everyone else. “Right now, Denny, I just don’t know, but I have a really bad feeling about this. Those buildings were a thousand feet tall. How many millions of tons of concrete and steel was that? I can’t imagine how anybody could get out of that.” There, it was out in the open. We needed to consider that the President was dead.
“If that is the case, why didn’t you get sworn in as President?” asked Harry Reid in an accusing tone.
“Harry… Senator Reid, if I was to go out there and declare myself President, then I am saying that George Bush is dead, and that means everybody else in those buildings is dead. I don’t think people are ready for that. We’ll all know better in a few days time. How long do you think I should wait, sir?” I responded. There, dump it in their laps for a bit, see how they liked it! They couldn’t complain about not being informed if I asked them in a group session.
I wasn’t given a break on that. These guys were too savvy for a rookie stunt. Dave Bonior immediately asked, “Carl, what did you have in mind?”
I held my hands up in a questioning gesture. “Today’s too soon. On the other hand, we are going to need a permanent President sooner or later, and probably sooner. We can’t have me be the Acting President until 2004.” I looked around the room daring anybody to counter that. A couple of faces looked thoughtful, but nobody argued with me. “Now, let’s be blunt. I need to be cleaner than Caesar’s wife on this. I cannot be seen to be delaying or denying any form of assistance to the rescue efforts. I ordered all the Cabinet departments to assist. Here are my thoughts. We wait three days. By Friday morning it should be pretty obvious if anybody is going to make it out of there. By lunchtime Friday, I call another Cabinet meeting, and this time I bring in the leaders of Congress — you guys — and we take another vote. In the meantime, why don’t you send two people to New York to provide some oversight?”
Tom Daschle commented, “You’ve given this some thought.”
I shook my head in the negative. “Senator, I am making this up as I go along. John Ashcroft was telling us earlier that the idea behind Section Four of the amendment was to handle what would happen if the President had a stroke, like Wilson did. It was never designed to handle the President… disappearing!”
I wanted to tell them to send one Senator and one Representative, and make one a Republican and the other a Democrat, but resisted the temptation to meddle and influence them. After ten minutes of wrangling they decided to send Harry Reid, a Democratic Senator, and John Boehner, a Republican Congressman. I turned to Josh and told him to get the 89th warmed up for a morning flight, and also to track down Dick Gephardt and get him here, as well, and he stepped out of the room to make a call.
Denny Hastert then asked the question on everybody’s mind. “Carl, who did this!? Who was behind it?”
I sighed. “All we know for sure is Islamic terrorists. We have some pretty strong theories, but we won’t know for absolutely sure for a few days.”
“You’re going to need to do better than that, son,” commented Senator Byrd.
“No, sir, I don’t. Even if I knew the names and addresses of the people involved — which I don’t — I wouldn’t divulge the information until we had disposed of them. When the time is right, I will inform you and the American public, but not until then.”
Several of them recoiled at that, with angry looks on their faces. How dare I imply they couldn’t keep a secret?! The reality was that they couldn’t keep anything secret. In Washington information is currency to be traded for power. Any number of Congressmen and Senators could be guaranteed to tell somebody, probably a reporter, in order to demonstrate how much they were trusted by the President and to show how much power they had! Afterwards, if it came out, they would have plenty of well intentioned reasons to say why they had to divulge the information. There were several murmurs and whispers around the circle facing me.
“What happens, then, Mister President?” asked Tom DeLay. He was the first not to call me by my name, and a couple of eyebrows went up at that. “What do you plan to do when you have that information?”
I smiled and got off the desk. “Well, that part is simple. We’re going to kill them.”
“What about taking them prisoner and bringing them back here to trial?” asked Daschle.
I gave him a big grin. “Tom, you remember what Bill Clinton claimed I do to prisoners, don’t you? Nah, I don’t think we’ll have too much of a problem with prisoners.” Nobody knew what to say to that. I decided to wrap it up. “Fellows, it has been a long day. I am going home and getting some sleep. John, Harry, you should go home and pack for your trip. I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Good night.”