To be truthful, Bert completely understood Ed’s anger and confusion—what rational person wouldn’t?—but according to Isabel, there were things Ed didn’t know and shouldn’t know. Neither Bert nor Attorney General Marcus Bentley knew them either and she certainly wasn’t telling either of them, so Robinson was forced to accept that pragmatism was the only sensible course of action for now, no matter how awkward.
But the fact that Isabel was hiding the truth, whatever it was, from her husband as well impressed Robinson, certainly dismissing for him all those bitchy snipes during the campaign about Ed being the one pulling her strings. The woman had cojones, that was for sure, and after everything she’d just been through, Robinson couldn’t help but be awed.
Inside the room, Isabel was still hooked up to monitors, but the drips were no longer connected, and the morphine had been replaced with more standard painkillers plus her own adrenaline and single focus. If she was suffering any trauma or residual shock, she wasn’t letting anyone see it. She was plumped up in bed with pillows, her face stitched, plastered and bruised, her arm in a sling and every time she winced, Bert Robinson felt a sympathetic twinge himself. He couldn’t see the bandages beneath the sheets, but Dr Cisco had explained in detail about the hypothermia, the ripped skin and leg muscle. She’d been a lucky woman to survive, let alone to be as on top of everything as she most clearly was.
Chief Franklin was whispering something to her while Attorney General Bentley was at the window surveying the security circus outside.
“Ah, Bert, you’re back,” she said acknowledging the Secretary. “Marcus, let’s run through it again, okay?”
When the Attorney finished, Chief Franklin said, “Just to make it clear, if anything gets in the way of the President delivering his State of the Union Address, we will be 100-percent ready to swear in Madam Speaker instantly.”
Plan B still rankled the two Cabinet members, and Robinson couldn’t wait for his own call with Foster, not just so he could hear it all directly, but so he could have the comfort of hearing his friend’s own voice.
“If people out there,” Isabel looked at them each pointedly, “want to believe President Foster is dead, so be it. In any case, if I am going to be sworn in as President, it’ll be when the two Houses of Congress are sitting together tomorrow night, not a moment sooner, not unless there’s an emergency.”
“Isn’t this an emergency?” Marcus whispered to Bert as they left her room.
72
AFTER SECRETARY BERT Robinson’s mobile phone battery died, the hour he spent drumming his fingers in Tom Cisco’s office waiting for his call from Bobby Foster bled into a second and then into a third. His mounting stress that as the senior-most Cabinet member, he still hadn’t made personal contact with the President almost made him puke. And this after he’d been on the head table at Foster’s wedding and later godfather to one of his kids. Despite repeated calls to Chief Franklin, even to the First Lady, he couldn’t access either.
But he persisted, both in the national interest and as a frantically worried friend, and eventually Franklin, who he viewed as a brick wall physically and who was certainly behaving like one, called him from one of the secure lines on the plane they’d flown down on after returning to the operations room he had temporarily set up there.
Robinson was praying that Franklin’s call was to put the President through to him.
“I’ve checked with the President,” said Franklin. “Yes, personally. And he apologises, but he can’t speak to you till later today. Remember, he’ll call you. Bye.”
Secretary Robinson blinked. He didn’t know what to say, even though Franklin was no longer on the line to hear it if he did. He simply stared into the phone still in his hand contemplating an explanation that, up to now, he had been reluctant to accept.
He slammed down the phone, and sprinted from Cisco’s office back toward Isabel’s room. The agent let him pass and he pushed her door open without knocking. Both she and the Attorney General looked up with stunned expressions. “Sorry, I…,” said Robinson, recovering his own composure, “Marcus, I need you… Outside, please.”
Once the two Cabinet members were in the corridor, Bert held his hand up and said, “Not here.” He led the Attorney by the elbow back to Cisco’s office.
Marcus Bentley listened carefully. Neither man had met Ed Loane before today, nor was either hoping for a repeat performance with him but, even so, both were now convincing themselves that Ed’s suspicions simply had to be correct.
That the President, their friend, might truly be dead was shocking, a tragedy of vast proportions, personally and politically, but a conspiracy to conceal it would be even more alarming. What absolutely petrified them was the chill of not knowing who was exercising the President’s authority… or why.