“The president and his aides will be along shortly,” the attendant said again, a nice young guy whose very demeanor proved that he had no knowledge as to whether the presidential retinue would appear or not.
Debra Levin, political appointee, had, at the last minute, declined to attend. Of course. The NASA administrator was a no-show, though she’d been appointed to the post by the president himself. Gibraltar felt certain that the president and his appointee had agreed on the approach ahead of time, had gone over the agenda, and Levin, who’d set foot in Rio Blanco for forty-five minutes two days ago, before jetting off to her son’s college graduation in Qatar, had already begun to remark, variously, in public and private, that the Mars mission antedated her role at the agency and that she would not be judged by its results. Gibraltar’s queries as to the invitation list for the presidential meeting had turned up names from the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control, Interpol, and the United Nations, and a couple of congressional types who chaired the relevant committees and subcommittees. There was also a midlevel diplomatic representative from the Sino-Indian Economic Compact, offering to help in any way necessary.
Of these, one Lane Beauforte showed up a few minutes after Vance, and the two of them, Gibraltar and Beauforte, made joint attempts at small talk about the weather and the unspoiled beauty of West Virginia. There was only so much of this Gibraltar could take. He had an almost neurological reaction, something in the Parkinsonian family, when it came to small talk. Disgust with the human niceties expressed as tremor and the forming of excess spittle, cold sweat on the small of his back. It wasn’t long before he started blurting out how much he despised meetings. He and Beauforte, he went on, since they were the only ones who were going to show up on time, might as well just solve all the problems. The latecomers would only arrive and gum up the proposal.
“I don’t want to second-guess the chief here,” Beauforte replied, plucking a couple of vitamins from the oaken dish in which they were proffered, “and so I don’t want to get into any specific recommendation at this time.”
“You practicing that line? And do you honestly think that the president is going to show up for this meeting?”
“Don’t know if he is or he isn’t, but I like to feel I am prepared, because that is in my job description.” Beauforte didn’t exactly intimate what kind of job his job was, nor whether or not he was licensed to commit politics in the line of duty, regardless of collateral megatonnage.
“I’ve lived my entire goddamned political life in spite of the commander in chief, not through his beneficence, and I’d recommend the same.”
“Noted,” said Beauforte. The two lapsed into silence, and Beauforte appeared to stare out the window into the expanses of carbon-dioxide-enhanced sod, as though the sod had some secret to impart to him. A Secret Service agent crossed this exterior scene with an aggressive-looking guard dog, and the two, agent and dog, waited as the hindquarters of the German shepherd trembled and deposited some solid matter there, which the agent, setting down the leash and stamping upon it, plucked up with a black plastic glove. This Beauforte watched, and Gibraltar watched him watching it, the machinations of history construed as fecal production, until a third man entered, a man who from the cut of suit and the fixative in hair, as well as by reason of surgically repaired cleft palate, could only have been, from Gibraltar’s point of view, a Department of Defense middle manager.
This executive stood, despite an invitation from a retreating footman to sit, and the three of them gaped at one another, while outdoors the humidity still shimmered as though it could decorate all of West Virginia in a sequence of obfuscatory waves.
“Is the man attending?” Gibraltar demanded to know.
“Who’s that?” said the Department of Defense.
“Commander in chief,” said Beauforte.
“No one knows,” Gibraltar said. “No one wants to discuss. Is he just sending people without authorization to do or to decide? I have people on the ground in—”
“Never fear,” said an entering young woman, eager, loyal, untrustworthy, with lip gloss in a hue favored by preschool art classes. An official-type scheduling flunky, no doubt, whose salary remunerated her for attempting to describe the velocity of the president, or the likelihood of his appearing at a certain place, but never his actual location. “Politics is, in the end, patience, gentlemen, and it’s in the waiting for the negotiation to begin that we are given the chance to rethink who we are, who we represent, and why we are gathered here in the name of the political process. The president advises that we relax, enjoy one another’s company, and feel free to address the news of the day. If the subject under discussion comes up, why then it comes up, and thus the period of waiting for the meeting to begin is, in fact, a meeting of a sort, and perhaps this spontaneously occurring roundtable will in some way be preferable to the meeting that might have been, or might yet be, or the meeting after the meeting, in which the meeting and its contents are reconfigured for general presentation and its areas of progress are chipped away until nothing much remains.”
“Does that suggest—” Beauforte began.
“He’s not even—” Gibraltar added.
Just then: a very nervous older man in a burlap sack of a double-breasted suit. No need to go into the facial scabbing.
“The president,” said the scheduling aide, Leona, whose name now fell into common usage, “is upstairs, working on a couple of urgent calls to foreign heads of state, concerning matters of national import—”
“More national import than—”
“We very nearly have a quorum now,” Leona interrupted, “and given that there is a quorum, you may begin organizing your remarks among yourselves, if that will aid you in your presentations. I assume some of you have statistical modeling and graphics interfaces that you will need to configure so that you can make remarks to one another. Think of this time as the time in which you make sure that the audiovisual modules here in the meeting room are adequate to your needs. An associate will be along any minute in order to help.”
Leona hastened off.
“He’s not coming,” Gibraltar said.
“I think you’re right,” the nervous gentleman from the medical establishment added. The one with the mange and the burlap. Perhaps they would have pursued their outrage at this point, if lunch had not been wheeled into the room in order to prevent conversation. The bowl of Satisfactor tablets on the table was two-thirds empty now, the remaining doses probably covered with bacteria of a hardy constitution. Gibraltar couldn’t tell who had pocketed the meds, as now the room was full of seven or eight sweating, imminently unemployed federal agents, many of them already drinking heavily, as if the international health emergency located in the American Southwest could be prevented by a highball.
Lunch consisted of specialties from the president’s childhood that had lately, through the vagaries of culinary fashion, become high-class entrées, viz., the open-faced turkey sandwich, served here with creamed corn, black-eyed peas, and a side of beta-blockers and diuretics, this given to the attendees in order to help them void the nonnutritive portions of the meal as quickly as possible. On the reverse side of the menu card there was text hinting that the president had himself dispatched the turkey in question. The birds were becoming nuisances, ever since they’d been taken off the endangered species list. It was not difficult to run one over in West Virginia. Probably easier than shooting one, because the way the species had evolved, toward a mitigated aeronautics, the turkeys could barely loft themselves above the traffic on the county road. Occasionally the president, Leona conceded, when she looked in again on them, did take one of the armored vehicles of his escort out onto the grounds of the weekend retreat, where he would attempt to run down a turkey. It was just a way of letting off steam, you understand. Naturally, this didn’t conflict with one of the great pleasures of the presidency, according to Leona, which was the annual sparing of a turkey for the Thanksgiving dinner. In fact, that ritual had more meaning to the president than to others. “As you can see, the luncheon certainly has all the trimmings, and we have spared no expense for all of you, some of you having come so far—”