Amy was afraid, but she wasn’t going to admit it. She wouldn’t slow him down. It looked like he was the only one who could stop them. She gathered all of her strength, wiped away the tears on her face and nodded again.
“Go,” she said as calmly as she could muster. “I’ll cut the bastards’ juice from here.”
Chapter 11
Senator John Penn was, if nothing else, a creature of habit.
It didn’t matter if he was in Rhode Island or in DC or on the campaign trail in some small town somewhere in the middle of the country. Good weather or bad, five days a week, he was up at 5:45 a.m. and out of the house or hotel or anywhere else he was staying by 6:15 a.m. for his morning run. Half a mile of walking and stretching, two miles of running, another mile of cool down walking as he began to conduct business with one of his aide.
The exercise was a wuss workout compared to the standards of a lot of his colleagues, but at fifty-four years old, John Penn loved the routine. It kept his weight down, his stomach reasonably flat, and his cholesterol numbers within a healthy range without medication. And that was good enough.
Over the past year and a half of political campaigning, there’d been an additional advantage to the morning exercise routine. Acting on a suggestion from his campaign manager, Penn always invited one or sometimes two members of the media to join him on his exercise route. His aides called it a ‘casual chat’ with the senator, as opposed to a formal interview. But the end result was the same, good publicity from a cadre of increasingly friendly reporters.
Before running for president, John Penn had always been extremely protective of his family’s privacy. Even as a U.S. senator, he’d taken the position that his service to the nation did not make his family members celebrities. All of that had changed, however, the moment he’d put in his bid for the highest political office in the country. He and his family had agreed to make the sacrifice.
Oddly enough, he found he enjoyed the relationships that he was developing with members of the media. In creating a casual rapport, Penn found that the way the reporters dealt with his family was very positive. Many of the questions that came up during these jogs had to do with the melting pot that best described his family. Whether it was his nineteen year old son, Owen, who’d become a paraplegic after a car accident three years ago, or his gay, twenty-four-year-old daughter, Aileen, who was pursuing a career in the movie business, or his free-spirited and outspoken red-haired Irish-American wife, Anna, who didn’t believe in or practice any specific religion, or the fact that Penn was African American, the media had — for the most part — portrayed them with respect.
To the surprise of many political gurus, his family’s diverseness had actually helped him in the opinion polls. They were unique, and the American public seemed to accept that. He and his family seemed to provide a refreshing change to the lack of humanity that characterized the sitting president’s administration.
The best part of it all, John Penn found, was that in making himself accessible to the public through the media, he’d finally become truly comfortable with who he was and what he stood for. Smart, black, born and raised in a project in the Bronx, he brought to the table his vision of a government that he believed matched the qualities of the people of America — a government that was better, fairer, more compassionate, and less belligerent than that of President Will Hawkins.
Greg Moore, one of his aides, was waiting in the kitchen of John Penn’s small mansion in Newport. The young man’s tee shirt and shorts were a contrast to his own long sleeve, foul-weather jogging suit. But the senator figured their age difference was enough to explain Greg’s tolerance for the weather. If Rush Limbaugh was standing at the end of the drive in a tee shirt, though, John was going to be annoyed.
Greg told him about the weather and ran down the day’s schedule that had been faxed to the house an hour earlier. The young aide never mentioned the election tomorrow. John had reached the saturation point after a dinner speech in California the previous night. He’d made a decision. No eleventh hour campaigning, he’d told his team. They were to cancel everything on his schedule. There would be no two-dozen stops on the way home. He was going to spend today quietly in Newport, and that was that.
“Who do we have jogging with us today?”
“Two reporters. We decided to go with local connections for this final… uh, today.” He told him the names of the reporters from the Boston Globe and the Providence Journal.
The senator knotted the laces on his sneakers as Greg rattled off the reporters’ names and their recent work. Both papers had vigorously endorsed him. Penn’s campaign manager had made sure they’d invited younger reporters, since their surveys showed that — as strong as he was in every demographic — nearly eighty percent of the under-fifty age group were Penn supporters.
“And where are they meeting us?”
“Considering the bad weather, we recommended that they join us along Ocean Drive by the start of the Cliff Walk. This way, you’re done with most of your run, and they won’t be too wet or pooped to want to talk.”
Senator Penn trusted his staff’s judgment for these types of decisions. He drank the glass of orange juice already poured for him by the housekeeper, did his routine stretches, and glanced quickly at the headlines of the three newspapers sitting on the counter. His name and face were on the top half of each of the front pages.
Everything looked good. Too good, Penn thought apprehensively.
One more day. He took a deep breath, stretched again and nodded to Greg. By the door, two members of the Secret Service, also dressed in running clothes, joined them.
“Let’s get this show on the road.”
At the end of the winding driveway, by the gates of the mansion, the real show was already waiting for him. News vans blocked the street as a dozen or more reporters with microphones and cameramen in tow surged toward the gates past the line of additional Secret Service agents and state police. Some of his neighbors were even out on the sidewalks, raincoats on over their pajamas.
“What the hell is going on?” Penn asked his aide.
“I don’t know, sir.”
The reporters started screaming all at once as soon as John Penn walked within earshot.
“Has something come up that you guys forgot to tell me?” he asked quietly.
Greg put a hand on the senator’s arm, motioning for him to stop as he reached for his cell phone. Senator Penn, putting on his best campaign smile, decided to continue on, though. Whatever it was, he wasn’t about to turn tail now. After the craziness of this past six months, there was no question that he couldn’t answer. There was no topic that stumped him. He was confident and ready for anything.
John motioned to one of the state police officers to open the wrought iron pedestrian gate. John Penn waved back the secret service and stepped into what looked to be a feeding frenzy.
“Senator Penn,” a reporter shouted. “Do you have any comment about what’s happened at Electric Boat?”
“Who do you believe is behind it?” another one called out.
“Shouldn’t there be an emergency broadcast?” a woman shouted from the back.
“Do you advise people to stay indoors?”
John Penn glanced over his shoulder, searching for Greg. He wasn’t going to admit to this throng that he had no clue what was going on.
“Senator… Senator!” A female reporter shoved a microphone into his face. “What do the events of this morning do to your promise of bringing our troops home from the Middle East?”