“Pretty interesting, don’t you think?”
Meredith jumped at the voice floating through the darkness behind her. She found herself ten feet further into the room.
“You scared the hell out of me!” she said sharply to Hellerman.
“Well, now, Meredith, God might thank me for that.” He smiled, emerging from the darkness, his face a theater mask that was half smiling, half frowning.
“My heart’s racing a mile a minute,” she said, leaning against a table and placing her hand on her chest.
“I usually have that effect on you, don’t I?” he whispered in a low voice, sliding toward her and firmly grasping her hand.
“Of course, but I have to pull my stomach out of my throat first,” she said, surprised at the firmness of his grip. She followed him out of the room into the darkness of the basement. He stopped and locked the hasp on the door.
“How long have you been here?” he asked.
“About thirty minutes,” she replied.
“Down here, thirty minutes?” he asked tersely.
“No. No. I was only down here a couple of minutes,” she said. “I waited for you upstairs for about a half an hour. Remember, I’m supposed to brief you in the mansion tonight?” She leaned forward and kissed him on the lips gently, trying to take the edge off him.
He responded to the kiss as he always did. She felt him relax considerably in her arms.
“Yes, right. So what do you think of my tracking center?” he asked, pulling her away and heading up the stairs.
“I think it’s great. What do you do, just sit down there, think about what’s going on, and anticipate the terrorist’s next move?” She glanced over her shoulder at the small enclave. Something was not quite right. Something had registered in her mind as not fitting, not being precisely in place, but he had startled her to the point that the thought escaped her, perhaps forever.
“Exactly,” he said, smiling. “That’s exactly what I do.”
They climbed the steps, and she held his hand the entire way, trying to calm him back down the way she had learned to do. They sat comfortably on the sofa in the great room, facing the fireplace. He poured them each a glass of Chianti.
“Meredith, as you know, these bombings have taken a terrible toll on the nation and, in particular, on the administration. But the Rebuild America Program has oddly benefited from these tragedies.”
Meredith studied Hellerman. He was holding his glass of wine with his arm cocked on the back of the pillow of the leather sofa.
“I’ve been thinking about that. When you were in my office the other day, you said, ‘It’s all coming together like we planned.’ You seemed so excited by what was happening. It kind of scared me.”
“I know. It was more the adrenaline. We’ve been so close to Ballantine, and I thought we had him. I really thought we had him,” he said, his voice trailing off as he looked away.
“Our plan, Trip, is still achievable,” she said. “Reuniting this country is a worthy and noble cause. It will be even more important on the heels of this crisis.”
Meredith had a brief flashback to the day that the vice president entered her office and shut the door nearly eight months ago. Last summer, he had sat on one of her blue sofas in her White House office and told her to sit down. He didn’t ask her, she recalled, he directed her. She had been struck by his command presence, especially because she almost instinctively obeyed.
“I’ve been tossing around a concept,” he had said. His summer tan back then contrasted with his flashy white teeth. “I think the country is clearly split into two halves, and we need to find a way to bring them together. Rostow’s spiritual stagnation has set in. Hell, no one even knows we’re fighting two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Everyone just drives on with their business, riding around in their Lexuses and Beamers.”
Most of her friends certainly felt that way, she knew. But how would he do it? How do you reunite a country of 280 million people?
“People don’t see the real threat to our nation,” he had said, jokingly, she thought. “We have to make them understand, so I’m pulling together a team to work on some ideas for how to bridge the gap. You look at these national elections we’re having, and everything is split right down the middle. You’ve got those trying to hold on to some core American values, and you’ve got those that are convinced that changing into a new image is the right way to go. Only no one knows what that image should look like, only that it should be different. The Republicans are on one side of the issues and the Democrats on the other. It doesn’t matter who is right; it’s all party politics. If we cut through the chaff, we can get at what everyone wants: a better, more unified country.”
“What is the unifying mechanism?” she asked.
“That’s why I’m pulling all you braniacs together,” he said.
Hellerman’s light stroking on her arm pulled Meredith back to reality. Over those eight months, she had left Matt and begun an affair of the heart and mind with this man. Generally a very conservative woman, she had surprised herself when she decided to follow Hellerman’s path. It had started rather slowly with the weekly brainstorming session in the basement of the Old Executive Office Building, but then gradually it had progressed to private office visits with him and finally secret rendezvous at his Middleburg estate.
The sex had begun one night after a bottle of champagne. No doubt, she was attracted to him. Then, about four months ago, sliding off her dress, she noticed her slip catch on her engagement ring. The pangs of guilt had rippled through her, and the very next weekend she told Matt they needed to take a break.
They really had not accomplished much in the eight months. More ideas than substance. Everyone seemed to have a good handle on the problem but no real solutions. She was initially most impressed by Hellerman’s driven conviction to solving the problem. His unbridled passion was, in her mind, his most attractive feature. He was seductive, and she was drawn to him like an eager student to a wise professor.
“Trip, I hate to admit it, but it almost seems like these things that are happening are tailor-made for what we have been talking about. I mean, the country is horrified, searching for leadership. Now is your time.”
“You’re right, Meredith. Now is the time to capitalize on what is happening. In my view, we have an opportunity here to bring the nation together, to achieve a common purpose and establish a new national identity that can serve as a foundation for the next two hundred years,” Hellerman said.
She could see the intensity in his eyes.
“I agree, Trip. In a sense, if we could seize this opportunity, these deaths might somehow mean something. I’d hate to see so many people die in vain,” she said.
“Me too, Meredith. So while the president goes about his plan, I’ve been asking the group to begin pulling together a few ideas. We will develop an internal protection team to take volunteers around the country to do basic security work. Naturally, we’ll have to train them for a few weeks to give them the basic skills, so we intend to use the National Guard to put literally hundreds of thousands of civilians through a ‘boot camp’ of some sort. Right there we start the foundations of a shared experience.
“Next, we’ll activate every stateside Army division and mobilize them to secure key and essential targets around the country. They guard churches in Kosovo. Why can’t they protect important facilities here? As we do this, we make sure that we’ve cut across all the socioeconomic lines so that we build the bonds between people necessary to propel us into the future on common ground.”
“These are all things we’ve talked about in the past, Trip, and it seems to make sense that we go forward now. The real question is how much the president should know and how much we should just keep to ourselves.”