Power Failure Read online

  Jake settled himself in the handsome bottle-green leather chair next to O’Donnell. As diplomatically as he could, he said, “The staff isn’t enthusiastic about the idea.”

  Still grinning, the senator leaned back in his padded swivel chair. “I seem to remember that when Abraham Lincoln asked his cabinet to vote on his Emancipation Proclamation they all—each and every one of them—were against it.”

  Jake knew what was coming, and a sidelong glance at O’Donnell told him that Kevin knew the tale too.

  But Tomlinson plowed ahead. “So Lincoln says, ‘Twelve against, one in favor. The ayes have it.’”

  O’Donnell’s expression remained stony.

  Jake said, “And we won the Civil War.”

  His face going dead serious, Tomlinson said, “Because Lincoln transformed the war from a political battle over states’ rights to a moral crusade about slavery. That’s what won the war.”

  “That and Ulysses S. Grant,” O’Donnell muttered.

  “Leadership,” said Tomlinson. “Leaders have got to lead, not just follow the safest course of action.”

  O’Donnell sighed and allowed himself a minimal smile. “Okay, Frank,” he said as he squirmed unhappily in the chair next to Jake. “You’ve made your point. If you want to run for president, your staff will back you one hundred percent.”

  “Thank you, Kevin.”

  But the tension in the room was still there; Jake could feel it, like the sullen heat of an August day.

  The awkward silence seemed to stretch endlessly. At last Jake said, “We’ve got to work out our position on the stem cell debate that’s coming up.”

  O’Donnell seemed to stir himself. “There’s still a lot of religious opposition to stem cell work.”

  “But they’re not using fetal cells anymore,” Jake pointed out. “Haven’t been for years.”

  “But the religious right is still opposed.”

  Tomlinson visibly relaxed also. “The same sort of mind-set that opposed Galileo.”

  “The Church apologized for that,” O’Donnell said.

  “Four hundred years later,” Tomlinson said, with a mischievous smile.

  “There’s still opposition out there to Darwin and evolution,” Jake said. “They’re still trying to rewrite the biology textbooks.”

  “Fanatics,” said the senator.

  O’Donnell countered, “You’re talking about their basic beliefs, Frank. They have a right to their fundamental beliefs.”

  “Yes,” said Jake, feeling the heat rising in him, “but they want to force their beliefs on everybody else.”

  “And you want to force your beliefs on them!” O’Donnell insisted.

  “Whoa!” Tomlinson raised both hands in a Halt! gesture. “Let’s keep it civil. If you two guys start yelling at each other, you can see how sensitive the subject is.”

  Jake realized that the senator was right. Give the other fellow the benefit of the doubt. Don’t demonize the opposition, that just makes everybody dig in their heels and harden their positions.

  Still smiling, Senator Tomlinson said, “You know, I had a poly sci professor back at Harvard who told us, ‘Politics is the art of getting free people to work together.’”

  Jake nodded and saw that O’Donnell was nodding too.

  “Okay,” the staff chief said. “We’ll work out a position statement about stem cell research for you.”

  “I’ll draw up the first draft,” said Jake.

  “Good,” Tomlinson said. “Now—about my campaign for the nomination.”

  “You’ll need a good campaign manager. A damned good one,” said O’Donnell.

  “The first thing I’m going to need is money,” Tomlinson said, his smile dwindling. “Can’t run without money.”

  “You need to set up a PAC,” Jake realized.

  “A super PAC,” O’Donnell corrected. “They can raise more money without legislative restraints.”

  Tomlinson nodded.

  “Frank,” said O’Donnell, “this will be a national campaign. It’s going to be a lot different from the state campaigns for the Senate, you know.”

  “I know. I know.” Turning to Jake again, the senator said, “Jake, it was your energy plan that got me elected to the Senate. Now I need another good idea, something that will get me noticed by the national media and bring in the votes I need.”

  “And the money,” O’Donnell added.

  “And the money,” Tomlinson agreed. “We’re going to need a lot of money.”

  Inspiration

  “What’s the matter?” Tami asked.

  Jake looked up from his plate of pasta primavera. “Huh? Oh, nothing.”

  The two of them were having dinner at Ristorante Dino, two blocks down Connecticut Avenue from their condo building. It was one of their favorite hangouts: the food was reliably good, the service charming, and the wine list decently priced.

  Tami said, “You’ve been pushing your food around your plate instead of eating it. What’s bothering you?”

  He looked across the table at her. Tami gave him her tell me your troubles expression.

  “Oh, it’s Frank.”

  “He wants to run for president.”

  Nodding, Jake replied, “And he wants me to come up with an issue that can get him noticed, get the media to pay attention to him, win him votes.”

  “Like the energy plan.”

  “Yeah. As if ideas sprout out of my head like popcorn popping.”

  With a teasing smile, Tami asked, “Well, don’t they?”

  “Hell no,” Jake protested. Thinking back on it, he added, “Even the energy plan was really Lev’s idea.”

  “Really?”

  “Lev set it up for me, got me interested in it.”

  “But you did all the real work,” Tami said. “You put it all together.”

  Jake nodded glumly and reached for his wineglass.

  “So now you need to come up with an idea on your own.”

  “Yeah.”

  She took up her own glass and clinked with his. “You’ll get there, Jake. You’ll find it.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Of course you will.”

  Tami watched as he drained his glass, then refilled it. At last he returned his attention to his dinner. The restaurant was doing well, almost every table filled. Local customers, Jake thought. This is a neighborhood restaurant, not some glitzy joint that depends on tourists and visiting VIPs. Winter and summer, Dino does okay.

  It was late spring. In a few weeks the summer heat and humidity would turn Washington into a steam bath. Congress would adjourn for the summer. The city would be abandoned to the tourists.

  Jake remembered last summer, when Tami’s family had come for a weeklong visit. One afternoon while Tami showed her parents, aunt, and uncle where she worked, Jake had volunteered to take care of her two young nephews. Tami had called it a suicide mission: keeping a pair of preteen boys occupied. But Jake had solved the problem easily by taking them to the National Air and Space Museum. The boys were fascinated with the airplanes and rockets and spacecraft on display, close enough to touch.

  As he coiled a few strands of linguini around his fork, Jake recalled the boys’ wide-eyed interest. The anniversary of the first Moon landing is coming up in a couple of months, he said to himself. Sometime in July. Let’s see, that was in 1969—more than fifty years ago.

  Tami broke into his thoughts. “So do you think that Franklin can win the Republican nomination?”

  It took an effort for Jake to focus his attention on her. Is she just making conversation or is she really interested?

  Jake replied, “He’d be a dark horse.”

  “Dark horses have won before,” she countered. “Eisenhower, Carter, even Obama was just a first-term senator when he ran. And won.”

  Jake nodded. “It’s possible, I guess.”

  To her surprise, Jake ordered after-dinner drinks: Sambuca, dry and anise-flavored. Tami toyed with hers while Jake knocked his
back in two gulps.

  He could see that the drinking bothered her. Jake paid the check, then got to his feet.

  “See?” he said, holding out his hands to her. “Stone-cold sober.”

  Despite her concern, Tami giggled.

  As they walked slowly along the traffic-clogged avenue back to their condo, Jake looked up and saw a nearly full Moon grinning lopsidedly at him.

  Pointing a wavering arm at it, Jake said to Tami, “You know, there are boot prints on that sucker.”

  “American boot prints,” she said.

  “And we haven’t gone back there in more than fifty years.”

  “The Chinese are planning to land people on the Moon, aren’t they?”

  Jake nodded. She knows damned well the Chinese plan a lunar program. She’s a damned good newswoman, even though she’s out of the news media now.

  “We haven’t been farther out in space than a few hundred miles since the Apollo program was stopped,” he said aloud. “Up to the International Space Station. Far as we go. No farther.”

  “Why not?”

  “Politics, mostly. There’s no big voting bloc pushing for it.”

  “Why don’t some of the private rocket companies go to the Moon?” Tami asked.

  “Good question,” said Jake. “Damned good question.”

  Then he looked up at the Moon again and muttered, “Boot prints.”

  Perspiration

  The next morning Jake got to his office early, as usual. He had learned that he could get almost a full day’s work done before the rest of the staff arrived and started pestering him with their questions and problems.

  He booted up his desktop computer and started looking up the private companies that were ferrying cargo and people to the aged International Space Station and offering tourists rides into orbit.

  Some of them professed to be working on establishing private tourist hotels in orbit, others claimed they had plans for landing people on the Moon. But the most popular goal seemed to be to send people to Mars.

  All talk, Jake saw as he scanned one company’s glitzy prospectus after another. They’re trying to raise money. Looking at their financial pages, he saw that the only companies making steady profits were those with NASA contracts to fly resupply missions to the ISS.

  By nine a.m., when one of the front office kids popped her head into his office with an offer of coffee, Jake was leaning back in his desk chair, thinking hard.

  His phone buzzed. Kevin O’Donnell’s executive assistant asked him to come to the staff chief’s office, “as soon as you can.”

  Jake recognized a summons when he heard one. He shut down his computer and headed for O’Donnell’s office.

  Earl Reynolds intercepted him halfway there.

  “Heard the news?” the media relations man asked, with a canary-fed cat’s smile.

  Without breaking stride, Jake asked, “About the bombing in Bogotá?”

  “No.” Reynolds shook his head, as if the undeclared war in Colombia was unimportant. “The Boss wants to announce his candidacy.”

  “Now?”

  “Soon as we can get a campaign manager signed up.”

  Jake let out a theatrical sigh. “Fasten your seat belt.”

  Reynolds’s fleshy face broke into a grin. “Damn the torpedoes. Full steam ahead.”

  Jake thought that was a great way to get sunk. But he said nothing and resolutely wound his way through the sea of desks toward O’Donnell’s office.

  The chief of staff was on his feet, at the window that looked out on the dome of the Capitol building.

  “Good morning, Kevin,” Jake said as he stepped through the open office doorway.

  Turning, O’Donnell said, “Close the door.”

  Jake shut the door softly while O’Donnell went to his desk and sat down.

  “He wants to announce that he’s going to run.”

  Jake took one of the padded chairs in front of the desk. With a nod he replied, “Yeah. Earl told me a minute ago.”

  O’Donnell’s face clouded over. “I told him to keep this under his hat.”

  “Well, you called me in here to tell me, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, but if Earl’s blabbing the news out in the goddamned hallways the whole goddamned world’s going to know it in the next ten minutes.”

  Jake said nothing. He had no desire to get involved in a screaming match between O’Donnell and Reynolds. But as he sat there and studied O’Donnell’s lean, tense face, Jake realized that Kevin was genuinely upset with the senator’s desire to go public with his decision.

  “We don’t have a campaign manager, we don’t have a team for him, and we don’t have a penny in the bank,” O’Donnell complained.

  “Frank’s got his own money,” Jake said.

  O’Donnell glared at him. “God save us from amateurs,” he grumbled. Before Jake could say a word, he went on, “First, you use as little of your own money as possible. Second, the amount of money you raise is an indication of how much support you have. Try funding a campaign on your own and the pros will laugh you out of town.”

  “Oh? What about Trump?”

  O’Donnell glared at Jake. “I want Frank to wait until we get some money in the bank and a decent campaign manager,” O’Donnell went on. “But, oh no! He’s hell-bent on plowing ahead.”

  “There’s only a little more than a year between now and the nominating convention,” Jake said.

  As if he hadn’t heard Jake, O’Donnell muttered, “If he’s going to run around like a loose cannon I might as well hand in my resignation right now and be done with it.”

  Jake felt a pang of alarm. “But he needs you, Kevin! He depends on you.”

  “Then why doesn’t he take my advice? Dammit, he’s going to slit his own throat.”

  “Have you talked with him about this?”

  “Last night, until two in the fucking morning. It was like talking to a stone wall.”

  “He’s made up his mind, Kevin.”

  “Yes, yes, I know. But he’s charging ahead blindly. He’s got to listen to advice, goddammit!”

  “I wish there was something I could do.”

  “There is.”

  Jake blinked.

  Leaning tensely over his desk, O’Donnell said, “You’ve known him longer than anybody else in the office here. You were with him when he first ran for the Senate.”

  “He was a political unknown then,” Jake said, adding to himself, An unknown from one of the wealthiest families in the state.

  “Would you talk to him? Try to drum some sense into his head? He won’t listen to me about this.” O’Donnell was almost pleading.

  “I don’t know if it’ll do any good.”

  “Will you try?”

  Jake nodded. “Sure. I’ll try.”

  Tomlinson Residence

  Senator B. Franklin Tomlinson and his wife lived on a quiet, tree-shaded street in the northwest corner of the District of Columbia, in a handsome twelve-room redbrick Georgian house set well back on a perfectly clipped lawn decorated with flowering shrubbery.

  When Jake had asked the senator for a private little chat, Tomlinson had suggested having cocktails together at his home, after the working day ended.

  So Jake drove his new silver Dodge Dart GT from the Hart office building garage up Tomlinson’s bricked driveway and parked it behind the azalea bushes that screened the parking area from the street. He still missed his battered old Mustang, but Tami had finally convinced him that a senator’s science advisor shouldn’t be seen in public driving such a disreputable-looking old heap.

  The soft-voiced butler guided Jake to the library, where Tomlinson and Amy were sitting in comfortable armchairs by the window that looked out onto the swimming pool set into the back lawn. Tomlinson was in his shirtsleeves; Amy wore a short-sleeved, flowered knee-length dress.

  The senator got to his feet, smiling. “Hi, Jake. What are you drinking?”

  Glancing at the cart in the corner of the
book-lined room that served as a rolling bar, Jake answered, “White wine, please.”

  Tomlinson already had a tumbler in his hand. Scotch, Jake guessed.

  Amy stood up and headed for the bar. “I’ll pour,” she said. Jake wondered if Tomlinson knew about their brief affair, all those years ago. Probably not, he thought, but the possibility always made him slightly uneasy.

  “So,” Tomlinson said, gesturing toward the sofa near the empty fireplace, “have you come up with a surefire science policy issue for me?”

  “I’m working on it,” Jake said as he sat down. Amy brought a glass of wine, smiling her cheerleader’s smile at him, and placed it on the glass coffee table in front of the sofa.

  Easing himself onto the wingchair at one end of the coffee table, Tomlinson said, “So this is about Kevin, then, isn’t it?”

  Jake nodded. “He’s really worried.”

  Sitting on the sofa beside Jake, Amy said, “Kevin’s always worried,” her smile vanishing.

  “I think he’s right,” Jake heard himself say.

  Tomlinson didn’t look the least bit surprised. “Really?”

  Hunching forward slightly, Jake said, “Look, you hired Kevin to be your chief of staff because he knows the ropes, he’s a Beltway insider, he’s experienced—”

  “And he wants me to go slow about my nomination campaign.”

  Amy added, “He doesn’t want you to run at all.”

  Jake looked from her to her husband. Amy looked grim, almost angry. Tomlinson seemed almost amused.

  “I think he’s right,” Jake said. “I mean, you hired him for his expertise. So listen to what he’s telling you.”

  “You think I should go slow.”

  “I think you should get some campaign contributions in your hands and take on a top-flight campaign manager.”

  “Jake, I want to get started now. I’ve only got a year until the party’s nominating convention. I’ve got to make my name known. Now!”

  Amy nodded vigorously.

  So she’s behind this, Jake thought. Amy wants Frank to be president and she wants him up and running right away.

  Carefully, Jake said, “A couple of weeks won’t make much difference, Frank. When you pick a campaign manager, that’ll make headlines. When you get a couple of fat cats to hand you contributions, that’ll make even more headlines. Just announcing you’re running, with nothing in place, no staff, no money, you’ll look like an amateur. The news media will laugh at you.”